Zamzam for Everyone
Sharing Water at Hajj
My nine-year-old son finished this book with the words “I want to do hajj,” which is the best endorsement an author and illustrator can hope for—genuine interest from a child and the intent to act upon it.
While it may be expected for Muslim children to hold this aspiration, the story touched upon several interests my son has been developing in Grade 3 this year, namely his love of geography and world languages. For the past few months, I’ve been bombarded with questions about what people eat in Uzbekistan, for example. Or, did I ever hear about Tuvalu, an island country in Oceania? Or, what’s next to Zimbabwe? What’s next to Egypt? What’s next to China. In class, they play a game online called Globle, in which there’s a mystery country and you have to guess it by indications of proximity. It’s a lot of fun, so this story about hajj naturally captured his interest with its representation of global Muslim culture.
In Zamzam for Everyone, Mariam meets Muslims from around the world as she performs hajj with her parents. She shares water from the well of zamzam with the people she meets, and they share cultural foods and expressions of thanks from their languages. The text does not explicitly mention where Mariam travelled from to reach Makkah, although there are some clues. The author left it as a slight mystery, easy to decode with a bit of language sleuthing (“lollies”) and some attention to Razeena Omar Gutta’s author note.
Illustrator Bassent Dawoud did a fabulous job depicting the foods and fashions of the families making hajj each year. The plethora of patterned hijabs (sorry for the anglicized plural of this word…what’s the Arabic…hiwajab? Hijabaat?) infuses the monolithic crowd with individual personality and charm, especially the fashions worn by elderly ladies. The characters appear very warm and huggable.
The book comes with some downloadable resources, which will be great to increase excitement for Eid next week. I’ve attached them below.
On a personal note, I have never performed hajj. May this sneak peek into the act of worship be provision from Allah, preparing my heart or the hearts of my children for the experience. I already know that I’m not the best pilgrim, having had the blessed experience of going to Al Aqsa multiple times but always with a heart full of pettiness over the arduousness of getting there through check points and apartheid barriers, the lack of washrooms and conveniences, the pushiness of crowds, and the cinderella-like necessity to get back to the West Bank in a hurry for fear of leaving oneself open to the whims and caprices of the occupation.
I often wonder why Allah saw fit to place his houses of worship under the authority of tyrants in this age. Will I travel to Saudi Arabia, a tyrannous entity engineered by the same political architects of the occupation? I’m not sure. It would be the same as travelling to occupied Palestine to worship. I’d have to swallow a lot of disrespect and humiliation to undertake the worship, leaving my heart in poor condition for the experience. May Allah give us the power to overcome those that place themselves above humanity, restricting our connection to him and each other.