In the Land of Invisible Women (15 page)

“You are welcome,” she responded, beaming with pride at her English. This was Rashida, supervisor of the other maids. She recognized I was not Saudi. Perhaps she had heard Randa and me speaking English earlier. Rashida had sparkling brown eyes made large with joy, and her scarf framed a substantial, defiant double chin. I liked her immediately. Though she was big, she moved quickly and tirelessly, bending down to serve food on the floor where we ate (there was no furniture in the hall) and rising again to serve others. Then she returned with an ice box full of sodas, dragging the entire box alone. I looked at my Coca-Cola. “The Real Thing” had reached even Mecca.

Along with other markers of time I found even appetite was lost. Forcing myself to eat, I took a small portion of rice, unable to face the meat. By the end of Hajj I would lose ten percent of my body weight. Randa had finished eating already. She came to me with an invitation. “Qanta, my husband Sherief and I are going to make our Tawafs at the Ka'aba. Perhaps you would like to accompany us? If we hurry, we can be there to pray Isha.”

I leapt to my feet and followed Randa into the evening. We were going to the Ka'aba!

INTO THE LIGHT

R
ANDA AND SHERIEF HURRIED THROUGH the streets of Mecca, leading me to the Ka'aba. I kept pace immediately behind. We scurried through the loose crowds that were swirling in narrow streets. We strained to see ahead, pitched into deep shadow by outcrops of buildings rising high above our heads. No two buildings were alike, each a higgledy mass of extensions that toppled dangerously close to each other, almost closing out the sky. Some were still partway under construction yet already inhabited—a town planner's nightmare. Everywhere I looked, pilgrims were in progress: robed at the wheel of cars; riding shotgun on motorcycles; perched on cycles; piled high on roof racks. Most, however, were now on foot, having left vehicles far behind them, or perhaps having arrived by sea. I was reminded of the famous verse in the Quran speaking about Hajj:

They will come to thee on foot and (mounted) on every kind of camel,
lean on account of journeys through deep and distant mountain
highways… (Quran 22:27)

Sherief led our trio steadily into the surging eddies of belief. We hurried. We wanted to reach the Masjid al-Haram by Isha, the nighttime prayer.

We spilled into a curved plaza, joining a crowd of a hundred thousand. We had reached the edges of the Masjid al-Haram. Crests of humanity dissolved into surf, rolling first to the marble forecourt that surrounded the mosque and then, in the far distance, surging into it through innumerable gateways like a gaining tide. Dusk was falling, above the sky was clear, the heat of the day was finally dissipating and a gentle breeze tugged at the edges of my scarf. Randa and Sherief pressed forward, pulling me out of my stupefaction. As we crossed a final road cleared of traffic which separated us from the marble forecourt of the immense oval al-Haram Mosque at the center of Hajj, the Azan rang out. All motion began to slow. We had to answer the call of prayer.

At once Randa turned. “Let's pray here,” she said and stopped exactly where we were standing. She stood next to Sherief, shoulder to shoulder, and I stood next to Randa. We removed our shoes, placing them in plastic bags we were carrying, and set them between us. I looked at my feet. We were immediately adjacent to the curb of the road. We would be praying on tarmac, yet the ground was clean, not even a single wrapper or piece of litter. We began symbolically patting the dusty ground around us and went through the motions of our ablutions, using dust in place of water, allowed precisely for the traveling Muslim who cannot reach water before prayer.

Around us the mass of a hundred thousand had silently arranged itself identically. Where once a tumultuous crowd had surged, a peaceful, patient congregation now gathered, perfectly aligned in every direction. To my right and left, ahead of me, behind me, I found I had become part of a massive circular crowd, every pilgrim abreast of another, the sides of our feet touching, planted a little astride. Like a magic organism forming out of ether, the Hajj crowds had become a parish. After prayer, we would again dissolve into the Hajj ocean, leaving no trace of an assembly.

To the rhythms of familiar prayer, we bowed our heads, kneeled, and finally prostrated in unison. The holy ground radiated warmth, pulsing with absorbed heat. Something lived here. Mid-prostration my veiled head grazed against the inches-high concrete curb. A smell of carbon, petroleum, and heated dust rose into my nostrils, yet I remained unsoiled. Completing both rakats (each rakat consists of two prostrations in Islamic prayer) of the prescribed pilgrims' abbreviated prayer, I expected to leave, but the invisible Muezzin called onward. There seemed to be more prayers due. These were unfamiliar, and the particular choreography not in my repertoire. I constantly muddled the correct order, exposing myself as a novice Muslim. I struggled to copy the veteran worshippers around me. As the prayers ended and the rows began their magic dissolution, I turned to Randa, “What were those final prayers? I did them all wrong.”

“That was the funeral prayer, Qanta. Every prayer in Mecca during Hajj ends with the Janaaza prayer for the dead. We have to remember all the pilgrims who have died since the last prayer time. People die here all the time. We have to pray for them. You'll see, the funeral prayers are held at every prayer time while Hajj continues.”

This was why they were unrecognizable. I had prayed at only one funeral, at the age of twelve. I had relied on mimicry then, as I did now. Death walked among us and with it followed a sense of both time and scale. Some spiritual lives would end at Hajj while others, like mine, would begin. Many came here at the end of their lives and some would die in the process; not as a result of trauma or disease, but because to die at Hajj was their destiny. Some pilgrims actually hoped for death during Hajj, and the salvation which would follow. Pilgrims know that the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had said that should a pilgrim die during Hajj, he would be rewarded like a pilgrim who had successfully completed Hajj, absolved of all sin, tantamount to the day of his birth and spend his afterlife in Heaven until the Day of Judgment. Many pilgrims therefore preserve their Hajj robes to be used again at the end of this life, as a burial shroud, so that when resurrected on the Day of Judgment (when Muslims believe all souls will stand before the Maker) they could appear in the same white ihram clothing again. I realized I was at the nexus of mortality and divinity.

We continued forward directly to the threshold of a marble gate, one of 129 on the circumference of the oval mosque. Now as the crowds condensed around these bottlenecks, I was especially glad not to be on an escalator handling my long, deadly abbayah. One misstep and a fall could result in others stumbling and, quickly, a stampede. Gradually, in the dense mass of people, we edged forward, Randa, Sherief, and I; sometimes in single file, sometimes swinging out into a horizontal formation, molding ourselves according to the forces of the crowds around us. Always we remained connected by handhold.

At the threshold of the gateway, under a towering arch, black-clad Saudi women stood as posted sentries, taming the human tsunami. These were the so-called female Mutawaeen. I had never seen them in Riyadh. Rather than state appointed, they were self-appointed arbiters of orthodoxy. Veiled totally, a short black specter gestured toward me, seeking inspection of my plastic bag. Her gold-rimmed glasses, eyeless, clung onto the side of her veiled head, almost outlining her veiled nose. After waving me on, the anonymous black-gloved hands searched Randa's purse. This force of women searched every bag carried by every woman pilgrim, quietly and quickly returning the items to us. Men were searched by Wahabi clerics, dressed like the Mutawaeen which patrolled Riyadh. Perhaps these women were their wives, I wondered, or maybe their sisters. The sentries, whatever their relationships, searched for weapons or other suspicious items, protecting the House of God and its guests. No one wanted a repeat of 1979. We had entered the Sanctuary.

The Masjid al-Haram (haram literally means “sanctuary”) is historically delineated a zone free of bloodshed. No creature can be hunted, no animal kill made, and any violence is forbidden from defiling this holy place and its environs. It was and remains sacrosanct.

Before Islam, the Ka'aba had been a site of worship and focus of pagan rites. Warring Bedouin tribes agreed on a truce to their enmity while performing their religious rites centuries earlier, and peace had been mandated ever since.

In a way, Hajj itself is a sanctuary to all conflicts between Muslims. Hajj is a symbol of how the Islamic ideal of coexistence and tolerance should be practiced in wider society. Islam forbids any destruction of life at Hajj; no animals can be hunted or blood sports practiced in Mecca or any of the surrounding regions, either.

The silent sentries searching us were therefore safeguarding a fundamental aspect of Hajj and a central theme of Mecca. We were truly within a Sanctuary. As I entered the Masjid al-Haram, I was taking the first steps of a ritual which long predated Islam. Countless millions had travelled to Mecca before me.

The Ka'aba in Mecca had been the site of an annual religious gathering for centuries before Islam was revealed to the Prophet. The Ka'aba itself, at the center of the Masjid al-Haram, was originally built by Abraham to blueprints said to have been revealed to him by the Angel Gabriel. But in the centuries since Abraham's initial building and before the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), spiritual deviancy had almost extinguished monotheism in the region. Instead a pagan, polytheistic ritual had overtaken these holy sites and severed, (until the coming of Muhammad (PBUH)), the only uniting tie in a deeply fissured and warring region. Nevertheless, this pre-Islamic Hajj provided an opportunity for lucrative trade, while becoming a powerful political actor in its own right. As a result the ancient Hajj became a potent economic force, driving migration and ultimately explaining the racial heterogeneity of today's Hijaz region of the Kingdom (in stark contrast to the monolithic Najd).

The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was the modern reformer of Hajj, and his personal efforts dispelled the heinous pre-Islamic associations with idolatry. He restored the Ka'aba as the House of God and cleansed it of statues and symbols of pagan worship, which were sometimes stored even within its hollow core. He returned monotheistic worship to Mecca, making Hajj the pinnacle of Islamic worship, as the Quran specified. Abraham, the founder of monotheistic belief, and his profound love for and unwavering worship of God are symbolic Islamic ideals which were a central part of the Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) Message from God.

Today this precious and monumental ritual is controlled by the Saudi dynastic monarchy and its Wahabi theocracy, referring to themselves as the self-appointed Custodians of the Two Holy Places. They are enormously powerful in controlling who can make Hajj and how often. They take their duties seriously and discharge their responsibilities with enormous care and attention to detail, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure a safe and healthy Hajj for millions of Muslims each year. Ye t it is this supreme, self-appointed authority which the non-Saudi Muslim world particularly begrudges. While I was attending Hajj unimpeded, and completely identical to the Hajj of any male pilgrim there, whether women could do this to the same extent in the future was less clear. Short years later, these same authorities would issue some fearful recommendations exposing just how authoritarian they actually were.

In August 2006, Reuters reported on new limitations Saudi clerics wished to impose on women who were praying at the al-Haram. Interestingly, the al-Haram is one of the few places where male and female worshippers can intermingle. (Normally mosques are segregated with sections for male and female worshippers strictly separated.) The clergy wanted to ban women from the immediate vicinity of the Ka'aba.

Even within the conservative Kingdom, this suggestion by the religious authorities has raised enormous ire, especially among Saudi women activists. Correctly, they accuse the theocracy of misogynistic discrimination. Currently, women are able to pray immediately next to the Ka'aba, in its forecourt, within its shadow, even to touch its perimeter. But the orthodox theocratic forces controlling the all-male Hajj committees overseeing such matters suggest quite openly that women should be barred from this central area of the sanctuary and plan to assign women to a remote area from where they could have a vantage of the Ka'aba but not approach it.

Worse, they suggested this was a considerate move for the protection of women, conveniently disguising their discrimination with a thin veneer of patronizing gallantry. Effectively they hope to remove women from public view in all Holy Sites, just as they were succeeding in doing in public life in the Kingdom. Reuters quoted one committee advisor: