you have a fair point.
i have always maintained ( and said a few times on pdf ) that going on hajj does not imbue the pilgrim with magic and automatic safety... hajj is more a remembrance and personal journey than worship to be performed among astounding masses... over the centuries and especially in the last 40 years ( with more usage of airplanes ), it has become a hurried and impatient and massive ritualist picnic where many people take selfies to prove to others than they have been on hajj and when the hajis return, their relatives visit them and say salaams in a wonderous way and try to extract some "magic" out of the hajis... this behavior becomes idolatry and not the intent of the orginal hajj... this is especially true among modern indian muslims ( of the last 25 years ), among whom there is another phenomenon of going on three hajj's in seven or eight years and this is especially done so by the neo-middlle-income muslims.
i find this behaviour obscene and non-islamic.
i will copy here part of reply to another member months ago...
"my concept about god is closest to the islami thought of the formless presence who begets not, nor was he born ( from a creature )... this presence is not affected by worship or human hope.
the nepal earthquake demolished the prayer houses of buddhists,hindus, muslims, christians... and some of these had stood for centuries and been visited by countless daily worshipers and pilgrims... all those idols and accepted shapes of the prayer houses and their special establishment rituals were of no help.
what was this earthquake that destroyed in seconds the human imaginings of "the divine"... the earthquake was nature... perhaps nature is god and god is nature... immovable, undefeatable, existent.
in 2013, russia saw a passage in its skies of a meteor from space... it arrived without much warning and didn't even have to touch the ground to indirectly injure 7000+ people and damage 1000+ buildings... this world hangs delicate in the vastness of space and in space no understanding of human religion can make effect... i see space as the outer nature, the real nature.
what if a mad-man with the capabilities of elon musk were to go out into the "asteroid belt" ( between mars and jupiter ) and put rocket engines onto three 1-km wide asteroids, push them towards earth and smash them into riyadh, varanasi and vatican... would these three centers of extreme belief in religious mysticism survive the impacts??
the mad-man can claim that he is doing the work of nature, of god... and his belief will stand supreme to the belief of every religious believer on this world."
indeed, when chengiz khan rampaged through the muslim lands, defeating them, he told them collectively that it must be so that they had gone away from the path of god and committed sins and he was the punishment god ordained for them.
