Standing Alone (11 page)

There is no compulsion in religion.

MECCA
—That night we returned to the Sacred Mosque for my mother's and Safiyyah's first entry. Sheikh Alshareef, our guide, led us through more stretching exercises. “C'mon, Mom! Stretch!” I yelled at my mother.

“Oh, Asra! I can't,” she answered. She didn't consider it appropriate to be bending over, touching her nose to her knee, especially in this country that so controlled women's movement. I had spent my entire life doing stretching exercises like the kind we were doing to prepare ourselves for another circling of the Ka'bah. I grew up as an athlete with a real sense of ownership over my body. What I felt in societies such as this puritanical Muslim culture was that men had more control over women's bodies than the women themselves did. Men set rules and laws that defined women's reproductive rights, women's sexual rights, and, in a way that had proven deadly just the year before, women's right to free movement. To me, these restrictions not only defied internationally accepted standards for simple human rights and decency but also violated important tenets and traditions established at the time of the prophet Muhammad. So many rules are imposed upon us in puritanical societies as absolute laws of God when they are simply controls instituted by men. We have certain societal rules that bring order to our world. But it has long seemed to me that women, like men, should be able to live with rights to self-determination over their own bodies. To me, there is something fundamentally wrong about the way Muslim communities define themselves. It strikes me that women—and men too, because they are oppressed in a different way—should be bound by something greater than rules: the inspiration of living well. All around me in Mecca were reminders of the constraints imposed upon women in traditional Muslim society.

As we walked together to the Ka'bah, passing Nigerian mothers selling their wares without any male chaperones present, an elderly man and his
thin wife passed by us. From their features, I recognized them as people living on the Afghan-Pakistani border in the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan, where the most puritanical version of Islam defines society. The men there had just enacted rigid interpretations of sharia. The man wore a black turban, a trademark symbol of the Taliban. The woman looked like the first wife of the Taliban deputy ambassador I had interviewed in Islamabad after 9/11. She had the same thin face with a pointed nose and fair, weathered skin. There was something remarkable about this woman in Mecca, though: her face was bare, and she walked beside her husband, bumping into men as they wove through the crowds. When I went to a bustling city called Peshawar in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier, I wrapped my scarf around my face, only my eyes visible through a slit in the fabric, to follow the local tradition that required women to never show their faces in public. There was only one way this woman could publicly show her face to the sun, according to the men in her region, and that was by going on the hajj. Even the strictest of Islamic scholars, as well as my pocket-sized hajj rulebook, ruled that it was “forbidden” for women to do the hajj with face veils. Aisha, a wife of the prophet, had apparently lifted her veil when she did the hajj.

Two years before, I had ridden my motorcycle into my mother's ancestral village of Jaigahan, India, and walked about freely, wearing a scarf over my hair but no veil over my face, as all the other Muslim women had to do. “What is it like to feel the wind on your face?” a cousin had asked me.

I was stunned by her question. I had never fully appreciated the great freedom I enjoyed in being able to feel the sun on my cheeks. I had taken for granted the experience of having the wind and sun caress my face when I was outdoors. All my life I had enjoyed this luxury without fully valuing it. Before my jaunt through Peshawar, I had covered my face only three other times in my life. The first time was when I had visited my relatives in the university town of Aligarh in northern India. For a day I had worn the burka, the full gown and veil, as my cousins did every day. Though I realized that the veil couldn't deny the person I was within, I noticed that I retreated a bit socially because of the symbolic meaning the veil carried. I didn't feel I could truly be myself or fully express myself. After that I had covered my face again to shield my cheeks from the dust of the mostly barren Himalayan village where I had gone with my sister-cousins Lucy and Esther Ansari for the Buddhist holy pilgrimage of the Kalachakra. Lucy taught me how to turn any long scarf into a veil. Then, after I had returned to America, I veiled myself when I taught meditation
to fourth-graders on Exploratory Day at Morgantown's North Elementary School—I even taught the eager boys how to turn themselves into little ninjas.

My mother was shocked at the feelings that coursed through her as we stepped into the Ka'bah. As a girl, my mother had known the strictest restrictions imposed on girls in traditional Muslim society. She had spent her earliest years in the one-road village of Jaigahan, where I would later ride my motorcycle and wander bare-faced. She would have never dared do the same when she was a woman there. Conservative Islam defined the community in that part of India, and her village was no different. Women received no more than the barest education, and men were mostly farmers. As a young girl, my mother ventured across a dirt path from her house to the threshold of the mosque only to deliver food prepared during the holy month of Ramadan by the women of the house—
channa
, or chickpeas, and
bhajiya
, appetizers made from chickpea flour—for the men gathered at the mosque to break their fast. Throughout her life her relationship to the mosque never changed. Even though my father helped start mosques, she never entered them. Like other women, she wasn't encouraged to pray in that space. That was why she was so profoundly affected by crossing the threshold of the Sacred Mosque of Mecca. It was only the fourth mosque she had ever entered in her almost sixty years. She said, “I didn't feel it was my right to go inside.”

As we walked through the corridors I was impressed by the women resting on the floors of the Ka'bah between prayers. They were unescorted, and that was impressive in and of itself. Part of me wanted to be one of them. I wanted to sleep in the Ka'bah rather than in room 708 of the Mecca Sheraton. I wanted to know this level of surrender. Even my mother was impressed. “This is devotion,” she said, looking at the women.

She remembered something Sheikh Alshareef had told us about the responsibilities that privilege carries: “We should be the first at the Ka'bah when we stay at the Sheraton.” In fact, we weren't. We skipped the crowds to come only in the dark of the night lit by the thousands of bulbs in and around the Ka'bah. I held Safiyyah's hand and my mother's to guide them as Samir kept instructing them, “Close your eyes. Close your eyes. Close your eyes.”

I put Safiyyah in place between two pillars, the Ka'bah in front of her. I released my hands from her shoulders. “Now, open your eyes!” Samir shouted. He felt a sense of privilege. Safiyyah's eyes fluttered open. There before her was the square building draped in black fabric. “It's supposed to be the house of Allah,” I said, repeating what I'd read in my hajj material.

Safiyyah stared at the Ka'bah. “Did God really live there? Isn't the air his house?” I looked at her, startled. I appreciated her critical thinking. I felt the same way. I didn't believe an ethereal force such as God would be contained even symbolically in a man-made structure. The domain of the divine seemed more to be in the nature all around us. “Good point,” I told Safiyyah. Samir contemplated the question. “But they can't build a house in the air,” he said. “That's true too,” I said.

What the children underscored for me was that, indeed, the Ka'bah is a human manifestation of the universal presence of the divine. Human beings put four walls on the house of Allah. Men and women attribute human traits and even gender to Allah when they declare His anger, His joy, His forgiveness. This has created a historical tension for those, from poets of yesterday to my mother and me, who resist human definitions of the spiritual and religious path, including a gender association with God. I don't consider God to be a He. To me, God is a force beyond gender and human emotion. To make such associations seems to limit the awesome force of creation. Many a Muslim mystic poet has written about the true Ka'bah being in our hearts. But what really meant so much to me was that we were having this conversation as a family—a man, two women, a girl, a boy, and a baby—in the most sacred place in our religion. This would not have been possible in so many mosques of the world where women and men, and boys and girls, are separated by man-made rules controlling movement and space.

We slipped into the courtyard and became a part of the pulse of humanity circumambulating the Ka'bah. Even though it was my second time going around the Ka'bah, I had to admit I really didn't understand what I was doing. Michael Wolfe had warned me that “confusion about the rites is universal.” My mother was swimming in many emotions. She was awestruck that she was actually at this place she had heard about all her life. But more importantly, she was afraid the children would get crushed.

“Safiyyah! Safiyyah!” she yelled, as she saw a throng of pilgrims coming our way. Safiyyah cut the perfect figure for a petite gymnast, making her vulnerable to physical danger from this crowd.

We made it only once around the Ka'bah before my mother started feeling too claustrophobic. The crush at the point in the ritual of kissing the Ka'bah frightened her. “Let's leave!” my mother yelled. She wanted to go upstairs to the roof, where it wasn't so crowded. We shouldered our way out of the courtyard and breathed easier as we rode the escalators upstairs, winding our way to the top floor. This was remarkable because we were allowed to move freely, which is unheard of in so many mosques of
the world that have designated sections for women, usually cramped and out of the way. The ordinary in Mecca is extraordinary in so much of the rest of the Muslim world.

On the roof I walked independently with my mother and Safiyyah, Shibli on my chest. My father and Samir were far ahead of us. I was struck by the devotion around me. As I studied the ritual scars on the cheeks of a black African woman, Shibli stirred restlessly, as he had done the night before, groping for milk. What to do? Where to go? I headed over to an empty expanse of the roof as my mother and Safiyyah continued walking. Eyeing a short bookcase piled with copies of the Qur'an, I nestled in front of it, in part to block the wind that was now rushing by us. How could I protect Shibli from this wind? I was confused. The wide fabric of my hijab was the perfect cover for my son. But if I dared remove it from my head, I would risk being arrested as a criminal.

I thought about the fourteen girls who had died trying to escape a fire that broke out at Intermediate School 31 in Saudi Arabia the year before, in March 2002. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, a New York–based human rights organization, eyewitnesses, including Saudi civil defense officers, reported that several members of the
mutawwa'in
—the religious police of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—interfered with rescue efforts because the fleeing students, age twelve to fifteen, were not wearing the
nikab
, the long black cloaks with head and face coverings that were obligatory public attire for girls and women. Some even beat girls who were evacuating the school without proper dress. A Saudi journalist told Human Rights Watch that the mutawwa'in at the scene also turned away parents and other residents who came to assist. The
Arab News
, a newspaper in Jeddah, concluded that the mutawwa'in were at the school's main gate and “intentionally obstructed the efforts to evacuate the girls. This resulted in the increased number of casualties.” The religious police reportedly also tried to block the entry of civil defense officers into the building. “We told them that the situation was dangerous, and it was not the time to discuss religious issues, but they refused and started shouting at us,”
Arab News
quoted civil defense officers as saying.

I had heard about this case, and I considered it tragic testimony to dogma overriding common sense—an apt description of my own situation at that moment on the roof of the Sacred Mosque, with my son getting cold in the night wind. A woman rubbed her arms with her hands as if to gesture that I needed to cover Shibli.

“I know. I know,” I said to the wind in frustration.

But I dared not remove my hijab to warm Shibli.
What am I supposed to do?
I thought to myself. With the Ka'bah below us in the courtyard, I nestled Shibli under my hijab and let him find the warmth of my breasts. He nuzzled against me, nursing. I felt calm for that short time. After Shibli dozed off, I stood up to try to find my family. I circled half the Ka'bah and found myself again at the place where Hajar had run. Settling with my back against a wall that marked the hill of Safa, I stared at the paisleys on the scarves of women in the sea of worshipers around me. I wondered about the women who drifted by me, all so anonymous but all united by one mission, to move between these two hills. I knew that I was very different in many ways from the women I was watching. We looked different. We talked differently. But we were the same in that we were enjoying some of the greatest freedom of movement allowed throughout the Muslim world while still facing immense constraints. I stayed like that for hours, absorbing and appreciating the expression of movement around me.

So often it seemed the law cracked down on women trying to exercise freedom of movement. For instance, women weren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. On November 7, 1990, during the buildup of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War, forty-seven women from the Saudi intelligentsia challenged the unofficial ban on women driving by taking their husbands' and brothers' cars out for a drive in Riyadh, the capital. Mostly Western-educated, they had driver's licenses from other countries. The Saudi religious elite struck back with a fatwa against women driving, and many of the women were detained, lost their jobs, or had their passports revoked for two years. The king made the fatwa the law of the land.