Mina & the Jamarat

Where the knife was stopped and the ram descended; the pilgrims' tent city of dhikr, eating, and stoning the old whisperer.

The whole account

The account

East of Makkah, the valley of Mina holds the oldest completed test in the Codex: here, by the dominant reading, Ibrahim laid his son down, and here the ransom descended, "We ransomed him with a great sacrifice" (37:107). Every Eid al-Adha since is this valley's anniversary, wherever the believer's sacrifice is made.

The tradition maps the whisperer onto the geography: at these stations Shaytan appeared to Ibrahim urging him to fail the test, and at each the Friend of Allah drove him off with stones; the three Jamarat pillars mark the campaign, and every pilgrim re-enacts the contempt, seven pebbles at a time, takbir with each throw. The Prophet ﷺ spent the days of Tashriq here and defined them: "days of eating, drinking, and remembrance of Allah" (Muslim 1141); from here the sermon of the days of Tashriq declared no Arab above a non-Arab except by taqwa. A tent city with no permanent resident, assembled for obedience and folded away: Mina is the Codex's architecture lesson that some places exist purely as verbs.

The facts

The testThe sacrifice, ransomed
JamaratThree stations of refusal
Days of TashriqEating, drinking, dhikr
NatureA city that exists as a verb

The Qur'an on it

وَفَدَيْنَاهُ بِذِبْحٍ عَظِيمٍ

And We ransomed him with a great sacrifice.

Qur'an 37:107

Read beside it

The words

Lights that name it

Mina is a city of tents empty fifty weeks a yearMina, near Makkah

On the Path

Places

Makkah · Umm al-QuraMother of cities · Sanctuary since the heavensمكة المكرمة

BeforeThe Plain of Arafat

On the Places page The Path