Standing Alone (16 page)

MEDINA
—Our room in the Medina Sheraton became a place of reflection.

“Do you believe in Allah?” I asked my family. “I don't know if I believe.” I wasn't posing the question as a flirtation with atheism. I most certainly believed in a higher power. But I did doubt the presence of a being to whom I could ascribe human qualities. This pilgrimage made me wonder about my faith. Throughout my girlhood I had believed unequivocally in the concept of God. Until I hit high school, I believed firmly in a God in the way
He
is described with human attributes. But then as I battled shattered expectations in love I wondered how there could be a God who would so disregard a daughter's prayers for happiness. Michael Wolfe had told me that the hajj made him wonder about his faith. “That's the point,” he had said. “You're just coming closer to the purpose of the hajj.”

After thinking a while, Samir answered my question. “I believe in
Allah
!”

“Why?”

“There's so much evidence of Him. There are so many pages in the Qur'an. There are so many sermons from the prophet Muhammad. It's hard for me to think somebody made all that up. He was testing people to be good.”

“Oh.”

“Even though you don't know if God is for real, he told you that you should go around the Ka'bah seven times. People wouldn't do that if they didn't love him and believe in him.”

“Maybe they're just stupid?”

“Two million people couldn't be stupid.”

“There are hundreds of millions who aren't there.”

“Maybe they can't pay.”

“Maybe.”

“And what about nature?”

He had me there. I found my greatest faith in nature. When I saw Shibli for the first time, I believed in God. When I saw a bird soar through the sky, I believed in God. When I saw the moon, I believed in God. It was the rest of the time that I doubted the existence of God.

“This is not a new doubt,” my father said, the scientist in him coming out.

Not only were we confronting spiritual questions, but we were beginning to have doubts about our physical ability to complete our pilgrimage. Outside our hotel every day we saw men with “Bin Laden Group” on their work uniforms. As part of the contracts it had won in Mecca and Medina, Osama bin Laden's family had built one of the world's largest car parks below the mosque in Medina, and its workers filtered in and out of it beside our hotel. It added to the sense of menace.

In room 214 of the Medina Sheraton, my family was fallen from exhaustion and sickness. It wasn't just the physical challenge of late nights and constant travel, but the hajj was taking its toll, I thought, on our spiritual beings. After all, our lives, like most, were caught up in the momentum of worldly pursuits, from our jobs to the children's schooling. We paused to pray, meditate, and reflect, but we had rarely immersed ourselves so continuously in spiritual journey. Crumpled pink tissues littered the floor of the hotel room, a health hazard in itself. We were coughing germs onto each other in that room we shared.

I emerged one night for a lecture given by our group leader, Sheikh Alshareef, about the next stages of the hajj. He held court on a floor of the Medina Sheraton with an air of both solemnity and humor. We were getting ready for the chaos that unfolded in a tent city called Mina outside Mecca. We were headed there at sunrise. Although we had been in Saudi Arabia for days, the hajj truly began the next day.

Sheikh Alshareef knew about the violence that can accompany the
hajj because of a ritual in Mina called
jamarat
, in which pilgrims throw stones at symbols of the devil. During the hajj in 1996, he was waiting at the jamarat to throw his pebbles. About thirty minutes before
zuhr
, the early afternoon prayer, a wave of people tumbled upon him, he said, and they all fell down like dominoes. A friend asked, “What shall we do?” Sheikh Alshareef studied the crowd, saw that they had no options for escape, and advised his friend that they should proceed with faith in the process of the rituals. “Let us go and throw our jamarat.” As sirens blared and helicopters rocked the air above, he lost his friend and found himself leaning back to back against a woman he'd never met before, something he would normally never do. He thought about a saying of the prophet Muhammad that people would be naked on the Day of Judgment. Aisha had worried about lustful thoughts passing between the men and women and asked her husband, the prophet, “Won't the men and women look at each other?” The prophet had replied, “Aisha, the issue is more severe than that.” The dangers were so intense that the usual issues of sexuality dissipated. Instead, something stronger gripped their souls: terror. “I see the fear in people's eyes at jamarat,” Sheikh Alshareef told us, looking intently into our eyes.

Another real danger was flying rocks. For this, Sheikh Alshareef recommended gas masks. “Gas masks make good eye protectors,” he told us. I scribbled the insider's tip into my notebook.

I carried his warnings back to room 214. My mother's eyes widened just so slightly in horror. The tales of the boiling sun of a city called Mina, the hike to a place called Arafat, and the stampedes at the jamarat convinced my mother she should bail out with the children. To her, no ritual is worth risking life. A sister-cousin later told us about how the flames of one of the fires that had rampaged through Mina came close to her family's tent. Her father had kept insisting, “I will die here. It doesn't matter.” But our sister-cousin dragged him out. For my mother, the purpose of life is to serve humanity, not discard life in the pursuit of rituals. Instead of endangering the lives of her grandchildren, she had an idea: Mina was on the outskirts of Mecca. She would stay in the Mecca Sheraton with Safiyyah, Samir, and Shibli while my father and I camped out in Mina.

“Mom!” I yelled. “You can't quit now!”

I realized later that I press on the accelerator in my own life because my mother seems to have her foot on the brake. At the time, I was irritated at my mother for being so cautious, but I realized that there is a delicate balance between caution and risk-taking, between holding on to the security of the familiar and having the courage to grow.

To appease my mother, I called the Mecca Sheraton, hoping, of course, that it was booked up. No such luck. It had rooms. But my mother didn't insist. Instead, she pulled one of our new Medina-bought prayer rugs out of a bag and unfurled it to offer prayers that the children would emerge unscathed. I pulled out a white terrycloth bib that had somehow landed in our clean laundry in Mecca. It had an image of a smiling baby Mickey Mouse flying a kite with a baby Pluto, his tongue wagging eagerly and his tail upright joyfully. I flipped it inside out over Shibli, the back all-white side on his chest. It was the closest I could find to an ihram, the sacred toga my father and nephew were wearing. Shibli's involvement was so important to me on this hajj. He represented the faith in divine forces in me. As we got off the elevator downstairs to board our bus, Sheikh Alshareef's wife spotted Shibli, and I could feel a smile creep across her face even though I couldn't see it behind her veil.

“Baby ihram,” she said, appreciatively. We piled into our tour bus, without a clue what lay ahead, and began our official hajj.

MINA
,
SAUDI ARABIA
—It was an arduous journey through the night to our next stop. A Saudi government official counted and recounted the pilgrims on our bus at a stop labeled the Ministry of Pilgrimage Pilgrims Departure Control Center. The dawn arrived while we sat on the bus. The blaze of the morning sun lit Shibli's face with a beautiful radiance. As we pulled into our next transit point, I couldn't help but feel as if I were rolling into a tent city to God. We had visited this place days earlier when we were in Mecca, and it was just acres of barren valley. It sat about three miles outside of Mecca. As we drove into Mina, I saw that the Saudis had transformed the place with miles upon miles of pitched white tents. That was where we were going to officially start the hajj.

There we were supposed to praise God and evaluate our lives. The trip had already had a profound impact on me. After all our discussion, I was surprised that we had gotten out of room 214 of the Medina Sheraton, and I was curious about what the actual hajj would reveal to me.

As we got off the bus I saw an even broader representation of the Muslim world. Group A and group B had converged here from our tour group, with new faces and new stories. For instance, as we got off the bus a young man with a short beard and glasses shepherded our luggage to us. His American accent and officious mannerisms caught me off guard. His name was Suhaib al-Barzinji. He and a partner had started a company in 1995, Astrolabe, named after the navigational tool perfected during the golden era of Islamic civilization. Started as a production house, it became a leading distributor of Islamic media, from Muslim rap to Qur'anic recitations.

All around me there were new faces, and I had my guard up. I didn't fully trust my fellow pilgrims, as Muslims, because I had to admit that a
part of me was afraid of them. I was afraid they would scold me, judge me, and make me feel unworthy. I worked so hard in the rest of my life to succeed and do good, but somehow in my own community I never felt I was good enough. I always had a deep sense of inadequacy.

For the first time in Saudi Arabia my family was going to be segregated, but it didn't feel puritanical, just practical. Our colony had two tents, one for men and the other for women. Outside the tents, men and women mixed easily and comfortably. Approaching the tent farthest away from the street, I pulled back the flaps and entered the sacred space that was the women's tent, Shibli tucked into my arms.

When I had been thinking about doing the hajj, Michael Wolfe said that my voice from the women's tent would be vital because so many of the tales from the hajj had come from male pilgrims who couldn't cross into that sacred space.

The tent was a wide expanse of space divided into three sections, with two rows of about twelve bedrolls in each section. There were fifty-four women under this canopy, all reflecting different expressions of Islam. Over the last days I had developed a quiet bond with several of the women. Unable to stop Shibli from crying at one point during the bus ride from Medina to Mina, I had passed him over the seats to an Afghan woman with stitches over her eyebrow. (She'd accidentally run into the glass door at the Medina Sheraton.) She had rocked Shibli so fiercely I got worried, but it had worked: he quickly fell asleep. Also on the ride, Sheikh Alshareef's wife, Amber, gave Safiyyah and Samir each a box of Nestle Turtles Original. At a rest stop, a fellow pilgrim pulled a package of Pringles down for Safiyyah. Sick from her cold, it was a buoyant moment for her.

The fronts of each section in our tent had a flap tightly closed to avert the eyes of peeping Ahmeds. Because of the fires that had broken out during past pilgrimages, these tents were supposed to be fireproof. I didn't want independent verification. By the time we arrived most of the bedrolls were taken, and we couldn't find three in a row; we didn't want Safiyyah to have to sleep next to a stranger. A bright-eyed woman and her daughter had two beds together. They were an endearing mother-daughter team, often sitting together on the bus and talking quietly to each other. Seeing us trying to figure out how we could sleep three in a row, they separated and gave us their beds so that we could sleep together.

The woman was on the hajj with her husband, a dentist, and son, both in the other tent. They lived only a few hours' drive from us in the college town of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Understated and polite, they were
pleasant to be around. The mother was the kind of person I appreciated. When we talked, I felt as if she was actually listening to me. So often in my community I felt as if I wasn't having a conversation but rather that I was either listening to a monologue or being expected to quickly deliver my own monologue. After 9/11, she told us, she made an effort to talk to her local community about Islam; recently she had talked to the local media to explain that the 9/11 terrorists were acting contrary to Islamic teachings.

An undergraduate at Penn State University, the daughter had emerged as a leader in the Muslim Students' Association. The college newspaper, the
Digital Collegian
, had quoted her at an interfaith evening organized with Campus Crusade for Christ in the days after 9/11 when I was in Pakistan. She defended Islam's record on women. “Men and women are completely equal in the eyes of God,” she told the one hundred students gathered on campus that night. “Women have had the right to vote, to initiate a divorce, to work, and to own property for almost 1,500 years,” she said. For her, a Muslim woman's covering up of her skin “is our way of being modest.” She told the students: “Women should be appreciated for their minds and for who they are, not how they look.” I couldn't argue with that, and I appreciated this young college student's poise as she went through the rites of the pilgrimage. The year before she had been on security detail for the Muslim Students' Association annual convention. Not long after, Reuters published a photo of her around the world protesting U.S. plans to attack Iraq, alongside tens of thousands of others in Washington, D.C. She looked thoughtful and resolute, standing firm while gazing skyward with her sign in her gloved hands and hair covered in hijab. As 750 naked women in Australia spelled “No War” with their bodies at the time of our pilgrimage, her image remained understated but biting. “
US
: 9/11,” the sign read. “
IRAQ
: 24/7.” Just before leaving for the hajj, she had done another panel to explain Islam to the Penn State community, and she spoke again about women in Islam, arguing that “Muslim women are not oppressed.” She pointed to the Qur'an's presentation of men and women as equals at a time in Arab culture when women were considered property. She noted that men are required to dress modestly just as women are. “To Muslims, women are precious gems, and those precious gems need to be protected.”

I was happy to see my mother sitting beside the Palestinian-Jordanian woman from West Virginia with whom we'd had such rich conversations in the hotel dining room in Medina. We had really connected with her and her husband. They had been so open and engaging. Her husband was
in the men's tent. If he wanted to talk to his wife, he dispatched a young boy, like Samir, into the women's tent to tell her to step outside. Samir could still navigate freely in both worlds. Safiyyah couldn't.

We'd brought too many bags into the tent. Our tentmate was kind enough to let me tuck a big suitcase between her bedding and the tent wall. Her gesture was small but it touched me.

“Thank you so much,” I said, grateful for every act of kindness.

We unrolled our bedding and sat against our pillows to absorb the scene. Safiyyah was buttressed on the right by my mother and on the left by Shibli and me. To my relief, our friends from the bus had settled in around us. This was a strange country, and the company of familiar faces was a welcome thing. Sheikh Alshareef's wife lifted off her veil across from us. I hadn't seen her out of nikab, and I was curious. I thought veils hypersexualized women, rather than the opposite, by making a woman alluring and those around her curious about seeing her face.

All the while, I kept seeing acts of generosity all around me. A young professional woman across from us unpacked her shampoo to share it with Safiyyah. She touched me by the way she played so lovingly with Shibli. More than anything, I saw people trying hard to get along—a virtue in today's world. The back flap of our section opened into a restroom area with portable toilets. Some of the older immigrant women cut into the lines created by those like myself who were raised with a very Western idea about waiting for your turn. When women waiting in line protested in English, their admonitions fell on deaf ears. The women cutting in didn't understand English. It was all quite comical—unless you were the one losing your place in line time after time, as happened to me one morning as I stood to take a shower.

“
Sabar, sabar, sabar,
” I said to myself, invoking the catchall Muslim call for patience. Also a buzzword on the hajj, the authorities used it to make us feel guilty if we got impatient. There were strict codes of conduct for the hajj: no fighting, no lying, no swearing, no false accusations, and no slandering. It seems to me that Muslim communities—and for that matter all communities—would be so much better off if they lived by these guiding principles all the time. Instead, in high school, in college, at work, even at the local mosque in Morgantown, I have often heard backbiting and slander that only hurt people. My parents had given me a strong ethical training, and at its core were these principles, which were Islamic but also universal. Underlying most of these principles was a commitment to truthful living, and it was my belief in this principle that made me choose to be a journalist. It frustrated me that so often my Muslim community
didn't live up to these simple codes of conduct. Gossip seemed to define the community, and it led people into deceitful, not truthful, living just to save face.

As happens to people in all communities, we were tested. We were living in luxury, and that sometimes allowed us to squabble about the mundane—such as air conditioning and toilets. Cool air blew on command from huge units between our rows of bedrolls. Sometimes the cool air gusted out so fiercely that our teeth started chattering from the cold. At those times we feared the air conditioning might trigger my mother's asthma and would use the curved white handles of our hajj umbrellas to turn the air conditioning off. One night a few women bickered over whether the air conditioning was on enough. “Sisters, I don't know why you turn off the air conditioners,” one woman yelled, noting, “The tent is stinky and smells.”

My mother, Safiyyah, and I just stared at each other and remained silent. The women in the tent tried to keep the air conditioning on just long enough to satisfy the pilgrim.

In the simplicity of the acts of kindness I saw in my tent, I received a serious lesson: we are the accumulation of our small deeds. The tent told me that the outside world must be like the inside world: we must be kind, respectful, and considerate, and we must live by the golden rule that Jesus taught and Muhammad echoed.