Standing Alone (10 page)

I closed the book, my finger marking the page, and set off alone with Shibli in the path of Hajar. At each hill I recited the prayer again. I walked briskly along these steps that Hajar had run in desperation. Green fluorescent lights rose from domes that marked each hill, reaching into the dark sky like strange beacons.

In another window into the hudud, or “boundaries,” erected around women over the centuries, Saudi law prohibits women from running the distance of the walkway, even though Hajar herself ran in desperation to find water and men are allowed to sprint. This ban reflects the way in which men have redefined women's roles throughout history. The edict came from the days after the prophet Muhammad. Ibn Umar, one of the first leaders of Islam, said: “Women are not obligated to jog around the Ka'bah, nor while making sa'y between Safa and Marwah.”

This admonition might have started as an allowance, not an order, to give women a physical break, but it had turned into a rigid rule. A little over a year before, in Pakistan, I had asked an aunt who had done the pilgrimage, “Why can't I run?”

“Just obey,” she had answered. No questions allowed.

As I followed in Hajar's footsteps, my external reality was quite different from hers. I was traveling with a packet of Cottonelle Fresh Folded Wipes, premoistened and flushable. “Now with Vitamin E!” it said on the package. But my internal reality was very much in sync with what I knew about Hajar. I felt such compassionate empathy with her. I had made a choice, like her, to raise my son alone, contrary to the traditions of our cultures. Although millions of people swirled around me, I too felt as if I were standing alone in Mecca.

In today's society, Abraham's abandonment of mother and child in the desert would make him a deadbeat dad, sacrilegious as that sounds. He didn't wire Western Union child support payments to the desert. In my home state of West Virginia, social workers would have moved to dock his paycheck. I felt angry at Abraham and wondered if I could ever forgive him and feel compassion for him. Clearly, I was projecting my own emotional experience and cultural context onto history. I felt as if the biological father of my son was the Abraham in my life. Ironically, my house in Karachi, the place where I most likely conceived, was on a street named after the holy water that Hajar had found. I had lived on Zamzama Street. When I left that house, my unborn son within me, I was scared and confused, but I was determined to persevere, surrendering myself to divine will and my own resources.

In the path of Hajar, I repeated her words to myself. I prayed to God those words that had crossed Hajar's lips. “Have mercy,” I prayed. “Lord, have mercy on my son and me.”

It is our responsibility on this earth, the tradition goes, to respond to the call of God. Rumi, the mystical saint of centuries ago, once instructed his students to breathe in the divine of the universe with the utterance of Allah in
zikr
, or the remembrance of God. Breathe in the divine of the universe with the expression of
Allah
. Breathe out the inner divine into the universe, he said, with the utterance of
hu
, meaning “is.” I sang to Shibli as I walked between Safa and Marwah, “Allah-hu! Allah-hu! Allah-hu! Allah-hu!” God is. The divine is.

The run, or sa'y, was meant to remind us of a mother's struggle in search of mercy. Broadly, it represents the struggle of each one of us for mercy. But what was Hajar's sin for which she needed mercy? It seems, if
you believe Genesis, that she taunted Sarah, but maybe this young woman was merely seeking legitimacy from the father of her child. These days, her sa'y could have been a lifetime of the night shift behind the cash register at the local 7-Eleven, supporting herself and her baby. But in the ancient world it meant that she ran alone in the desert in a ritual I commemorated with Shibli.

I looked at my son. Shibli's birth had awakened in me a new mindfulness and clarity that I had never had before about my purpose in life. For most of my adult life, I was a woman trying to reconcile the dissonance between my birth, religion, and ancestry and my Western upbringing. I had wandered the world for two and a half years, from meditation caves off the coast of Thailand to grass huts on the banks of the Indus River. I had returned to Morgantown, betrayed, disillusioned, and yet somehow still hopeful. With his birth, Shibli had given me new life.

Islam encourages men and women to be courageous in their spiritual jihad. I tried to fulfill the expectations of my culture by marrying a man of my faith. When it became clear after I married him that we were incompatible, I had to overcome my cultural programming to leave him, believing that Allah did not want me to suffer in a suffocating, emotionally empty marriage. Ten years later I chose to leave the father of my baby after it became clear that the relationship would be unfulfilling and tumultuous. I realized that I had been trying to stay together with him for the wrong reasons. I felt incomplete, and I had wanted him to complete me. I felt illegitimate without him as my husband, and I wanted him to make me legitimate. With this understanding, I dedicated myself to centering myself on my own life. I wanted to offer Shibli the best I could provide. Throughout my life I had felt so much pressure from my culture and religion to get married that I often stayed in deadend or unhealthy relationships longer than I should have. Breaking free of unhappy relationships was symbolic of my wider effort to question the rigid acceptance of rules set forth by others, be they religious, government, or community leaders or family members. Islam reinforced the idea that we must think for ourselves, and so did my common sense. I was trying very hard to do just that. Religion is supposed to inspire the best in ourselves. That was why, despite being abandoned by Shibli's father and despite the judgment of others, I could be in Mecca and stand with my child before God.

I had drawn on the best in myself to try to save my friend Danny. I drew on the best in myself to bring my son into the world. It was because I went through so much that I could hold my child without shame.
Men and women don't define what it means to be a good Muslim. It is defined by the core universal values of what it means be a good person. I went through that struggle. And that is how I became legitimate. The sincerity of Hajar's heart allowed her to find her zamzam. She had to tap the best of herself to find the water. She was alone. She was desperate. God knew her sincerity and answered her prayers. She didn't need any intermediaries.

We had slipped into the earliest hours of the morning, just before dawn. I was far from the earth where Hajar ran in desperation, looking for water, but I felt close to her spirit. With the heavens above me, it was as if I could feel the pulse of not only Hajar but every mother since the beginning of time.

I was praying without pause, making resolutions from my heart for a wise and good life with my son. Women continually kissed Shibli on his forehead. “Little hajji!” the women exclaimed. My heart smiled with each expression of love for Shibli. They didn't know that I had no wedding ring. A spiritual umbilical cord connects all women through the timeless universality of motherhood. I was one of those women.

A flurry of birds called ababeel dashed and darted above us in the night sky, as if to punctuate my celebration of motherhood. They squealed and chirped in a concert both eerie and lyrical. My father told me later that these birds hold a divine place in Islamic history. It's said that an Abyssinian leader named Abraha assembled an army of sixty thousand warriors and elephants to destroy the Ka'bah, coincidentally in the year the prophet was born. When the warrior reached a valley outside Mecca between two cities called Muzdalifah and Mina, the elephants knelt down and refused to proceed to Mecca. These birds pummeled the soldiers with rocks, forcing their defeat.

Divine expressions are often used to glorify human destruction. In Iraq the Thou al-Faqar Factory in the city of al-Taji, north of Baghdad, produced missiles called Ababeel. In Pakistan the military used a low-speed target drone called Ababeel for antiaircraft gunnery training. And in Syria a journalist and human rights activist, Nizar Nayyouf, spoke about a system of torture, “the Stones of Ababeel,” that he witnessed in 1993 while being held as a political prisoner in a penitentiary called Tadmor. From a height of about twenty feet, guards would drop concrete blocks on prisoners walking to the courtyard. The prisoners often died, their skulls crushed.

Ahead of me, I saw my father and Samir wrapped in their sacred togas. They were at polar opposites of manhood. Samir's towels flapped while he ran between the two green lights that marked Safa and Marwah. As they passed me on the return I saw tears in my father's eyes. He was thinking about Hajar and the struggle of this mother alone in the desert with her son. Samir looked at him, curiously. With the clarity of a wise child, he came up with a remedy for his grandfather's tears. “If you don't cry,” he told my father, “you can pray louder.”

My father smiled at him and dried his tears.

As we continued through the late hours of the night, Shibli stayed awake and alert. With both hands, I grasped his fingers around mine, gently extending his arms out like rudders steering us forward. Boys pushed wheelchair-bound pilgrims beside us, sprinting and then jumping onto the backs of the wheelchairs from time to time. I secured Shibli's body with my hands and tried to move more briskly without breaking into a full run, lest the religious police reprimand me. Back and forth we went. At each hill we said a prayer. I saw my father and Samir complete their rounds: my father pulled out a pair of scissors to snip a lock of Samir's hair, a symbolic practice to mark the end of this ritual.

After them, I completed my rounds just as Shibli started to stir restlessly. His cries started slowly but soon built into a plaintive wail. He was hungry. I looked around me. The walkway had become crowded. Crowds had arrived for the predawn prayer, called
fajr
; it was said that the closer you prayed to the Ka'bah, the more blessings you got. I didn't know how I could feed my hungry son in this crowd. I was a mother desperate to feed my son. His cries grew louder. I grew more desperate. I dropped to the floor facing a wall off the path of Hajar, sitting in the direction of the Ka'bah below me, straddling Shibli on my lap. I reached under the bottom of my
hijab, which fell by my waist, and frantically began undoing the buttons on my long shirt, but my chemise was tight around my breasts. I turned to my father beside me and in desperation asked for his scissors. I cut the top of my chemise and ripped it open with my bare hands. I drew Shibli to me. His desperate lips found the milk within me, flowing to him like holy water onto his parched lips. I felt as if I was connected to Shibli with the eternal bond that linked Hajar to Ishmael. It was the life force of creation that touched everyone and everything around us, before us, and after us. To me, it was what we call God. It was what we call Allah.

As Shibli suckled, the sounds of the morning call to prayer erupted into the cool air and reverberated in his ears. It was the same azan, the same call to prayer, that my father had whispered into his ear at his birth. In the holiest place for Muslims, Shibli was hearing the call from the muezzin, the person who makes the call to prayer, of Mecca. There is only one line added to the morning azan: “Prayer is better than sleep.”

That moment meant so much to me. I was in Mecca, a criminal in this land for having given birth without a wedding ring on my finger. And I was nursing my son at the holy mosque of Mecca, overlooking the sacred Ka'bah. This was nature's law expressing itself, more powerfully than man's law. I drank the sacred water called zamzam. From me, it flowed into Shibli. I recognized then the great lineage I had in Islam. I was a daughter of Hajar. I looked up to the sky with one thought: blessed are the daughters of Hajar.

MECCA
—As the call for prayer broke through the air, something drew me away. “Let's go,” I told my father.

“Now?” he said.

“Yes, let's go,” I urged him again.

He was an accommodating man, even though he wanted to pray there. He saw my brows furrowed. He saw I felt tense in the crowd. We tumbled through a rush of pilgrims jamming their way to enter into the Masjid al-Haram, the Sacred Mosque. We emerged onto the road on which the Sheraton sat, when I saw two familiar faces in the crowd: my mother and my niece, Safiyyah. We had prayed for Safiyyah's return to good health, and now she was bouncing again with youthful energy. “Your prayers worked,” my mother exclaimed.

I felt complete, reunited with my family and standing together in Mecca. While we were standing there, more people spilled out onto the streets to line up for prayer. We decided to join the congregation near where we stood. We were not within the gates of the Sacred Mosque, but we were part of the congregation that spilled out of the Ka'bah. Prayer started, and we stood together, shoulder to shoulder as a family. We had prayed this way at home, but never before in congregation with other Muslims. One time when I visited our local mosque in Morgantown, I was separated from my father and found myself alone in the “women's section,” isolated from a band of men giggling as they read the Qur'an aloud in Arabic, making fun of each other's mistakes in pronunciation. It was a different experience in Mecca. There were no formal boundaries between men and women, between boys and girls. Families prayed together. Men and women who happened to pray beside a stranger, as many of us did, tried to pray beside someone of the same gender, but it didn't always work out that way and nobody ruled mixed-gender prayer lines indecent. It was no more complicated than that. There were no curtains, walls, or partitions dividing men and women from each other, just common sense. In contrast to my mosque in Morgantown, this arrangement made me feel respected and valued. The idea that I needed a wall to protect me from the guiles of men seemed insulting. Here in Mecca the arrangement was more natural. This experience, in retrospect, planted the seed for actions I never thought I'd have the courage—or the will—to take toward reclaiming women's rights in Muslim communities.

We stood in line like this with at least another million pilgrims in front of us, behind us, and around us, all of us facing the Ka'bah. Near us, some men and women stood on cardboard boxes they had flattened to use as prayer mats. Somewhere in each of our personal histories, different as they were on so many accounts, we had all learned and memorized the movements that make up Muslim prayer. I was ten when my mother taught me how to pray at home. She guided me gently through the stages of prayer. When I did yoga as an adult, the yogic positions that were a part of Hinduism, a religion that predated Islam, would remind me of the postures I'd learned for Muslim prayer. The prostrations are meant to capture the surrender that defines Islam and the social justice and equality that are supposed to define Muslim communities. At the time of the prophet's revelation, the society around Mecca was stratified into the upper classes and lower classes that made up most societies. The prostrations he prescribed were meant to dismantle hardened egos and equalize everyone before God. Growing up with the experience of putting my forehead to the
ground to pay respect to God, I couldn't help but inherit the humility my mother and father taught me. I always liked to dismiss it as the inheritance given by a professor to his daughter, but in truth, it was much deeper.

The call to prayer rang again, heavy in the air. With the legions of men and women around us, we stood facing the Ka'bah, even though we couldn't see it. As my mother had taught me to do as a young girl, we declared the intention of prayer with open hands at our ears. “Allahu Akbar,” we each whispered to ourselves, starting our prayers and drawing our hands over our chests, right hand over left hand. “God is great.” My mother taught me, as Muslims are taught around the world, to stare at one spot on the ground in front of me while praying, a focusing technique similar to what I learned in yoga.

Whispering under our breath, we followed the imam, or prayer leader, of the Sacred Mosque of Mecca as he recited the first chapter of the Qur'an—“Al-Fatihah” (The Opening). Akin to the Lord's Prayer for Christians, it was a recitation we used often.

My mother had taught me these simple verses in Arabic when I was a child in Morgantown, and I had committed them to memory, always seeking this elusive straight path. Now in Mecca I was again calling to God to guide me to the straight path. When I ended the recitation in concert with the gathered, our voices echoing in unison over our lines of congregation—“Ameen” (Let it be so)—the effect on me was profound. This awesome testimony to the union of people was magical and lovely. Having
my family together as a part of that voice gave me a deep sense of unity with the strangers around me.

We continued with another chapter of the Qur'an. According to tradition, it can be any chapter. The imam recited one that I didn't know, and I followed his recitation with my eyes squarely focused on the ground in front of me. When I prayed alone, I had always picked the shortest chapter to recite, one of the first chapters I had memorized after “Al-Fatihah.” This time, I recited the words of the imam.

“Allahu Akbar,” we said, marking the end of this part of our prayer and moving to the next motion.

Together, we leaned over with our hands at our knees and repeated a proclamation of devotion three times.
Allahu Akbar
again. We stood straight.
Allahu Akbar
. We went to the ground, our feet beneath us, and pressed our foreheads to the ground. Three proclamations of another devotion. Along with the image of women wearing head scarves, this image of Muslims prostrating themselves in prayer is perhaps one of the most photographed images of Muslims because it reflects the total submission that the word
Islam
means. I knew I hadn't totally submitted to the faith, however, and the posture usually didn't feel right to me.
Allahu Akbar.

We sat up. I turned my feet under me in the precise way that my mother had taught me. Pause.
Allahu Akbar
. Forehead to ground again. At this point I considered myself a Muslim yogi. Three proclamations again.
Allahu Akbar
. That was one
rak'ah
(unit of prayer) completed. There is a science to prayer in Islam. Each prayer has a specific number of
rak'at
(the plural of
rak'ah)
. Some are
fard
, or mandatory. Some are Sunnah, or blessed but not obligatory. And some are
witr
, which means “odd number”; they represent an odd number of voluntary rak'at after the last prayer of the night.
Nafl
prayers are “extra” or optional actions. I became adept during a summer vacation when I stayed at my paternal grandmother's house and my youngest paternal aunt wrote the number of each prayer's rak'at into my childhood diary. The predawn prayer is two rak'at blessed but not obligatory followed by two mandatory rak'at. Yes, it is confusing. But somehow, like Masons with their ancient secret handshakes, we memorize these rites as part of being Muslim.

We returned to standing position. The imam led us through “Al-Fatihah” again.

“Ameen!” we all declared together, our unified sound merging with the wind. It was an exciting sound. The imam led us through another chapter. I didn't recognize it but followed silently.

At the end of the second rak'ah of this prayer, as in the final rak'ah of all prayers, we sat and said another required prayer. During this prayer we raised our index fingers while we recited words that included the
shahada
, or testimony of Islamic faith.

From the corner of my eye I saw the index finger of the elderly woman next to me flutter upward while she made her proclamation of faith. My finger sat suspended in air too for a moment. It was quite profound that this woman and I were separated by culture, language, and economy, but we were both making a proclamation of faith at precisely the same moment. Bringing our fingers back to our laps, we quietly finished our Qur'anic recitation. We both turned to greet, first, the angel who sits on our right shoulder.

I was always pleased to recognize the presence beside us of spiritual beings other than our bodily selves. Then we turned our heads to greet the angel who sits on our left shoulder with the same greeting. When my mother taught me this ritual, she instilled in me a consciousness that divine eyes are always watching us. “These angels are recording everything you do—good and bad,” my mother told me.

We put our hands together in prayer in front of our faces. I prayed for peace of mind, called
sukoon
in Urdu, as I had done since my first prayers as a girl. To end prayer, my mother had taught me to
phoonk
, the Urdu concept for a breath of air meant as protection from harm. The word
phoonk
is a noun, but a dear friend of mine, Rachel Kessler, turned it into a verb not long after she learned about it. I had worked with Rachel in the Washington bureau of the
Wall Street Journal
, and she had supported me during the dark days of depression following the breakup of my marriage. She was Jewish American, but religion rarely entered into our discussions. We talked mostly about how to keep our souls intact and thriving as we tried to find love and happiness in the world. In Mecca I
finished my prayer and sent a
phoonk
to the world. May we be protected and blessed.