Sha’air of God (Symbols of God

of the sacred Ka‘bah, they fulfil this longing. A person wishes to run for the pleasure of God; running between Safa and Marwah provides that satisfaction. In this way, all the rituals of Hajj fulfil the hidden emotional needs of a person, serving as a means to establish a tangible connection with their Lord. The instinct to worship a deity is deeply ingrained in human nature. However, diverting this impulse away from the worship of the one true God—such as engaging in idol worship or attributing divine status to anyone or anything other than God—constitutes a misuse of this natural inclination. The belief in monotheism directs this natural impulse in the right direction. This is the essence of the rituals of Hajj. Hajj, in one sense, corrects a human error. It prevents a person’s desire from being misguided and instead directs it towards the right path. Hajj provides the correct form of satisfaction for the same longing that a person seeks to fulfil through incorrect means. A person desires to see God and to engage in acts of worship before Him after physically perceiving Him. To fulfil this desire, humans have made visible images of the unseen God and started worshipping these self-created images as representations of God. However, in the words of the Quran, this is “Ilhad” (deviation). The true response to this natural impulse, which humans wrongly seek in man-made idols, can be found more correctly in the divine signs, Sha’air of God. Creating an idol of God is akin to making a statue of a person. A statue is made by someone who has seen the