Ay Qawme Ba Haj Rafta

This ghazal is one of Rumi's most direct provocations. The Hajj — the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of Islam's five pillars — is here treated as a category error: you have gone to find God in the wrong place. 'Your beloved is a neighbor, wall to wall with you / You wander bewildered in the desert — what are you thinking of?'

The Sufi argument behind the poem is consistent with the entire tradition: the exterior practice (pilgrimage, mosque, ritual) is only meaningful if it reflects an interior condition. If the heart is not already aligned with the divine, the journey to Mecca is simply tourism.

Ahmad Zahir's setting of this in a pop arrangement brought Rumi's critique of organized religion to a general audience. In the Kabul of the 1960s and 1970s, where religion and modernity existed in complicated negotiation, the song's argument had particular resonance.