Place · Islamic holy city · Saudi Arabia
Mecca
The city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia — the destination of Guru Nanak's westward udasi (c.1518-1521), one of the most-told stories of his journeys in the Sikh Janamsakhi tradition. According to the tradition, Nanak arrived at Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage, slept with his feet pointing toward the Ka'ba, and was reprimanded by the imams for the disrespect. Nanak's response — 'Turn my feet in a direction where God is not' — produced the Ka'ba's miraculous rotation in whichever direction the imams tried to move his feet, demonstrating that God is omnipresent. The incident is central to Sikh theology's rejection of geographical sacredness in favour of omnipresent divinity. The 1521 Guru Granth Sahib references support the Mecca visit. No independent Arabic record exists. The modern Saudi state restricts non-Muslim access to Mecca; Sikh pilgrims cannot visit the Mecca sites associated with Nanak.
- Date
- 1500–1524
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Tradition
- Janamsakhi tradition (Puratan, Bhai Bala, Miharban)
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — Traditional / narrative attribution — janamsakhi, not independently attested
- Location
- 21.422, 39.826
Disputed. The janamsakhis place Nanak here; no independent record of the visit survives, and scholarship treats the janamsakhi travel accounts as hagiography rather than itinerary. Mapped as what the tradition claims, not as an established fact.
Connections (4)
- Life routeGuru Nanak
The Mecca story — feet toward the Kaaba, and the reply that the questioner should point them where God is not — is the most quoted thing in the janamsākhis. No Middle Eastern source records the visit. The story is an argument about omnipresence and works whether or not the journey happened.
- Route adjacencyMedina
Medina is named alongside Mecca in the janamsākhi accounts of the western journey and given no story of its own. The fourth udāsi is at once the most famous of the five and the least corroborated, and Medina is the point at which that gap is widest — a place-name with nothing attached.
- Mythic sequenceCheraman Juma Masjid, Kodungallur
Tradition holds that Cheraman Perumal, the last Chera king of Kodungallur, witnessed the splitting of the moon from his palace and later learned from visiting Arab merchants that it was a miracle associated with Prophet Muhammad. He travelled to Mecca, met the Prophet, embraced Islam and took the name Tajuddin, dying either on the return journey or in Yemen. The Qissat Shakarwati Farmad (10-century Arab chronicle) records that his companions returned to Kodungallur and founded the Cheraman Juma Masjid around 629 CE — which would make it the oldest mosque in India. The legend remains historically disputed but is central to Malabar Muslim community identity and the Kerala-Arabia maritime tradition.
- Life routeMuʿīnuddīn Chishtī
Chishti tradition holds that Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti performed the Hajj at Mecca during his travels in the 1180s, after his years of study and discipleship in Khorasan and Central Asia. At Mecca he is said to have received direct spiritual direction from the Prophet Muhammad in a mystical vision to travel toward Hindustan, where he was to establish the Chishti silsila. The Mecca-direction tradition is central to the Chishti self-understanding of their Indian mission as divinely sanctioned, and the subsequent Chishti travel to Medina reinforced this spiritual mandate for the journey to Ajmer.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Mecca”. The Janamsākhī tradition; W.H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion (1968).
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