Standing Alone (17 page)

MINA
—At moments I felt the retributive spirit that Islamic theology, not unlike other religions, sometimes creates. My mother emerged one morning from a shower, her hair wet, tangled, and loose. An elderly woman from Sudan snapped at her, “Your hajj is not accepted. You are showing your hair!” My mother stared at her, stunned, then walked away speechless.

At home I didn't pray five times a day. Here I was trying to join the congregation. For each prayer we folded up our bedrolls to widen the aisle between our beds. After one azan, I jumped up and stood in line with Sheikh Alshareef's wife and the young professional woman sleeping across from me. As I folded my bedroll back down, an elderly woman tapped me on the shoulder and scolded me. I didn't understand what she was saying. She kept pointing at the skirt of my
jubbah
, the loose gown popular in
Saudi Arabia. I stared down. Another woman translated: while I was praying, the elderly woman said, she could see the profile of my legs, fully covered in long johns, through my jubbah. I didn't get it. Wasn't she supposed to be focusing on the symbolic Ka'bah in front of her? Why was she looking at the profile of my covered legs underneath my jubbah? This kind of scrutiny made me want to run as far away from such puritanical devotion as I could get.

In the culture of Islam, as in many religions, there is a layer of rigidity that is judgmental and oppressive. This rigidity provides a means of authoritarian control to keep people in line. I'm not sure what it is that makes some Muslims exercise this type of dogmatism. I know it arises from their staunch belief in practicing Islam literally, but it seems to be a belief in the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. Other people, like my mother, believe that you achieve piety by who you are in your inner core, not simply by outward actions. If you are a person of love and charity, you will do good. As I had seen, the men who plotted Danny's kidnapping prayed five times a day while doing so. History has proven, however, that spirituality is a much deeper experience than adhering to rituals. Jesus angered the temple leaders of his time because he didn't follow the religious law; for example, he performed miracles on the Sabbath. I saw around me in Mina expressions of alienating rigidity in religious practice. Such puritans form a wall around the essence of religion and keep away all except the select few who know just how to mind the law.

I heard evidence of the rigidity from dispatches from the men's tent. My father was standing outside the gate to our tents when a police officer approached one of the pilgrims from our group.

“Give me reel!” he yelled, demanding the film from the pilgrim's camera and enforcing the country's ban on photography. The problem was that the pilgrim had a digital camera. It had an electronic card that tucked into the camera and recorded the pictures digitally. He turned his camera to view mode and deleted the picture. That wasn't good enough.

“Give me!” the officer yelled, grabbing the camera and crushing it beneath the heel of his boot. The camera owner told my father the story in the men's tent.

“It's so stupid,” my father told me. The Saudi government accepted the strictest interpretation of sharia to ban public photography, but somehow it justified displaying images of the royal family everywhere.

In our women's tent, we listened to lectures piped into our tent from the men's tent. They were often a crackle of sounds and difficult to make out. I didn't like the separation of men and women when it deprived us of equal
access to information. A Saudi sheikh visited the men's tent one night. I listened intently, trying to pick up pearls of wisdom. Instead, he horrified me.

“When you greet a Muslim,” the crackle of his voice said, “say ‘Assalaam alaykum.'” I knew that. It meant, “Peace be upon you,” and it is often used as evidence of what a peace-loving religion Islam is meant to be. “When you greet a
kafir
(a non-Muslim),” he continued, “do not say, ‘As-salaam alaykum.'”

“What?” I exclaimed to my mother. “That's ridiculous. We don't wish peace upon non-Muslims?”

Kafir
had become a dirty word for nonwhites in South Africa's apartheid culture, and I resented such judgmental distinctions. Sure enough, my little pocket-sized prayer book had a special greeting for non-Muslims. Prayer number 123: “Returning a greeting to a
kafir
.” It stipulated that the greeting should be: “And upon you.” The greeting returned to a Muslim: “And peace be upon you.” The distinction disgusted me. My mother read my mind and murmured to me: “These are the things that turn you off.” I didn't hear protests from any of the other women.

In the men's tent my father was challenging this teaching. Our imam, Sheikh Muhammad Nur Abdullah, the president of the Islamic Society of North America and leader of a mosque in St. Louis, didn't agree with the ruling. “Greet everyone,” he told my father, “with ‘As-salaam alaykum.'” That relieved me, and it reminded me again that Islam simply isn't practiced one singular way—no matter how much any one Islamic ideology insists that its path has a monopoly on virtue. From our
adab
(culture) to the way we pray, Muslims have many paths to Mecca.

MINA
—Inside our tent, something remarkable happened. Shibli seemed to take his first step. It was a gentle stutter step with our hands to catch him, but my maternal eyes saw it as his first little step. A first little step was the least we could all hope to do in our own hearts, although the hajj seemed to be a major step for me because it was helping me define and clarify who I am and who I want to be. One thing I realized was that I want to live truthfully. I had to lie all through my twenties when I felt I couldn't tell my parents the truth about my love life. I realized that living a lie is like living with a noose around your neck. Living a lie is harder to do than living truthfully.

I stood between the kitchen and the tent where they had put four portable toilets. Another woman waited in line with me. She was from Pakistan but had a different air about her than the aunties I'd gotten to know from Pakistan. For one thing, she was exuberant. She would yell across the tent to try to get Shibli's attention.

“
Shhhhiiiiiibli!
” she'd yell. Her name was Zarqa Ekram, and she lived in Atlanta, Georgia. As we stood there she asked me, “Are you married?”

I was too stunned to answer immediately. Everyone had assumed that I was married, and I had played along with the charade. Ever since I landed in Mecca, I had been living a lie. Zakia Zikria, a young, fresh-faced Afghan American pilgrim from Alexandria, Virginia, had innocently asked me about my husband while we sat amid our tumble of luggage and shopping at the Jeddah airport. “He lives in Pakistan,” I had said, inventing a wedding contract between Shibli's father and me. At a rest stop between Medina and Mecca, at a mosque, a woman had said to me, “Shibli's father must really miss him.”

“Yes, I'm sure he does,” I answered, figuring that, yes, any father would miss his child.

“What does your husband do?” another woman had asked me. I had answered with the truth about what Shibli's father did in Karachi, without clarifying that he wasn't my husband.

It was a tangled web, and I didn't like it. I had been flipping from time to time through the pocket prayer book we'd gotten on the trip to Mecca. “Exhort one another to truth,” it said, repeating Qur'anic chapter “Asr” (103:3). I felt conflicted by deceit.

I returned to the woman asking me about Shibli's father. “You're not assuming that I'm married?” I asked her.

“What do you think? I have daughters. I know life isn't that simple.”

“I'm so relieved,” I told her, and I admitted the truth to her. “I'm not married. I'm raising Shibli on my own with my family's help.”

I felt as if I had pulled the noose off from around my neck. From childhood, I had confronted the repression of sexuality. I had learned at an early age to not talk about this part of myself because it was so taboo. In the fifth grade my mother didn't want to sign the permission slip for the school's sex education class. She relented when I insisted, and I didn't learn anything that I thought was sacrilegious. Throughout my teen years I never had a conversation with my parents—or anyone else, for that matter—about sex. When I was twenty years old and confessed to my mother that I had had sex, she told me: “Stop!” And that was the end of the conversation. When I tried to talk to her about it again at the kitchen table
around the same time, she started sobbing uncontrollably. My mother told me later, “My upbringing taught me there was a right and a wrong. According to my values, dating was wrong. My world was black and white. I didn't know how to travel in the gray area. Only later did I realize that we have to have open discussions even if they are difficult.” The message was clear that I was doing something terribly wrong. By having to stay secretive about my relationships, I didn't have a community to help me make wise decisions about relationships.

When I became sexually active, I began to understand the power of sex, but I didn't see why we attach stigma to adults having sexual relations. I always believed there was a better way than the way I was taught to think about sex, which was that it is wrong, dirty, and sinful outside of marriage. Then in our meetings in Mecca, I had to confront the “sin” of having a child out of wedlock.

Our group, like most, met daily for religious lectures. We took our seats in a room at the Sheraton, men and women sitting wherever they wanted. I sat in a row of seats along the side. The speaker one night was Muhammad Nur Abdullah, the president of the Islamic Society of North America. A tall man with dark skin and a calm disposition, he cut an impressive figure. He told us our old selves died symbolically on the hajj. The pilgrimage was an allegory for our final farewell from earth. We were supposed to make our final will and testament before departing. We were also supposed to pay our debts, erase ill will, resolve conflicts, seek forgiveness from others, and realign the moral compass of our lives.

“Like a new baby,” he said, sweeping his hand toward Shibli, sitting on my lap, “we are forgiven of past sins. We are blessed to be here.”

Sheikh Abdullah guided us to repeat after him: “Oh God, forgive us.”

I whispered the words underneath my breath, but I didn't utter them from my heart. This concept of forgiveness eluded me. My father and I had an argument about it before we left Morgantown. My father believed fully in forgiveness, but I asked, “What's the point of asking for forgiveness for decisions that can't be changed? Why live with regret?” At that time, I was resisting the concept of forgiveness because so often it seemed to be attached to regret, punishment, and repentance. If I sought forgiveness for Shibli's conception, did that mean I regretted it? I didn't and never would. Did seeking forgiveness mean I believed I should be punished? I didn't and never would. It was only much later, with the help of an American Buddhist teacher named Tara Brach, that I learned that seeking forgiveness is a way to be compassionate with yourself about actions that carry emotions such as shame, blame, or hurt. With that understanding, I did seek
forgiveness. I wanted to free myself from my self-loathing over the errors in judgment that had led me to love and trust a man who left me hurt, sad, and alone.

I struggled with the question of how to find forgiveness. Did I earn it? Did I punish myself for it? Did I have to be punished to deserve it? With these questions, I listened to Sheikh Abdullah. “May Allah (
subhana wa tala
) forgive us,” he said, invoking another parlance in the secret Islamic code, meaning, “the sacred and the mighty.” “We come with our backs heavy with sin.”

Was my back heavy from sin? Truly, my back ached from the weight of carrying Shibli on my chest over the past two days of the pilgrimage. Was creating Shibli the sin for which I had to seek forgiveness? I knew I had to resolve this question. I brought Shibli close to my heart as I slept that night and felt as if I knew the answer with the softness of his breath against me. Even though I wished I had resolution, I didn't.

I decided to resolve this issue. So often, traditional society in so many faiths defines gender relations by sin and sexuality. Women have so often been elevated—or denigrated—based on sin and sexuality. Mary, the mother of Jesus, has to be a virgin. Even Islam considers her a virgin. Mary Magdalene, a companion of Jesus, is conceived as a harlot and prostitute, although modern historians dispute that portrayal. The Bible frames Hagar as the unmarried sexual concubine of Abraham. Islam redefines her as a second wife; even if that conception is accurate, she wasn't equal to the first wife as a co-wife. After all, Abraham, based on the stories of all the faiths, left Hajar in the desert while building his home with Sarah.

I felt the pressure of the weight I carried on my back for the sin of having had sex as a single woman. According to the sheikh's logic, with the hajj I would become a reborn virgin. Did I need that in order to feel good about myself? To feel pure? To feel worthy? It made me wonder why we had to associate gender relations with sin. In Mecca I realized that I needed to examine the messages that I had received about sex.

In recent years I had started thinking about issues of sexuality from the vantage point of a cultural anthropologist or sociologist. At the
Wall Street Journal
, my friends joked that I was the newspaper's informal sex reporter even though my beat was officially travel at the time. I was trying to understand sexuality outside the prism of religion. I even wrote a memo to the managing editor of the
Journal
proposing a beat on the sex industry, arguing that it paralleled major industries in sales, labor force, and contribution to national GDPs and that we weren't giving it the journalistic attention it deserved. I never sent the memo.

This led me back to reflections about my own sexuality, which had been germinating since my earliest days. Everyone has a choice: either we figure out on our own what we believe about sex, or we accept a religious authority's edicts about it. It was during that period that I got the assignment to report on the big business of Tantric sex. It was a peculiar philosophy that had me traveling from Canada to California for weekend workshops on sacred sexuality. Partly because sex sells, these workshops focused on concepts such as “sacred spots” and “divine love.” My page 1 article about Tantric sex turned into a project to write a book about Tantra. As a Muslim, I ventured into Hindu and Buddhist philosophies about sacred sexuality. I learned a fundamental concept during this assignment: sexuality is a vital part of our being, and we're best served if we deal with it as a healthy part of society, not as something to repress, sanction, or adjudicate.

I also discovered that Islam has a very rich tradition of sacred sexuality. The prophet Muhammad talked about the “sweetness” of intercourse, and he dealt realistically with issues of pleasure, desire, and even frustration. Children were married when they reached puberty. I don't think it's appropriate in today's age, but child marriages at that time allowed for a codified expression of sexuality at the age when it ripens. The prophet told men not to leave their wives for more than six months because sexual tensions would get too high. Islam rejects celibacy as a way of life. And the Qur'an speaks eloquently about the concept of sacred sexuality between husband and wife.

I was drawn into exploring sexuality and gender relations because I saw the profound effect of these issues on our lives, from power, position, and social acceptance to love, marriage, and intimacy. I knew I had a commitment to speak out about issues of sexuality because my own experiences told me that this subject needs to be discussed among all religions.

And I had to think about what I was going to teach Shibli. I wanted to raise him in an environment in which he could discuss sex with me openly and honestly, in which we both acknowledged that he might have sex before he was married. I wanted to present sex to Shibli as an act of love between two human beings carried out with respect, honesty, and responsibility.

Over the ages, healthy relations between men and women have been repressed in the name of religion. Just as Prohibition didn't work in the United States with alcohol, the puritanical repression of sexuality doesn't work. In Pakistan, I saw that sexual repression creates a hypersexuality that leads men to sexual dysfunctions, such as premature ejaculation. It
also creates an atmosphere in which women are killed by their brothers, husbands, and fathers for allegedly breaching the sexual honor of the family. I rejected this ethos. I didn't believe that my worth was attached to my sexuality, and I was relieved to have gotten pregnant. My baby allowed me to be honest about myself as a sexual being. I believed that as a society we need to be honest about sexuality as a part of our communities.