Recently was the time of Hajj, and one of the central themes of the Hajj is the Prophet Abraham. The Hajj is a repetition of things that the Prophet Muhammad, Sallahu alaihi wa salaam, did on his return to Mecca. But what he did, much of it, was in remembrance of Abraham. The Kabba was rebuilt by Abraham and his son Ishmael, and the final ritual of Hajj is the throwing of the stones at Satan in recognition of the temptation by Satan of Abraham from the directive by Allah to kill Ishmael. God said to Abraham, “Kill me your son.” Satan came to Abraham and said this is not normative…this is insane…this is a hallucination. Abraham would not be swayed and insisted that God had told him to do this and since God had told him to do this, he was in fact going to do it. And Satan tried three times to sway him, but Abraham rebuked Satan. And the ritual at the Hajj is that you throw stones three times at Satan and that ends the Hajj. And it’s a ritualistic redoing of Abraham telling Satan he wasn’t going to listen to him.
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