Standing Alone (18 page)

ARAFAT
,
SAUDI ARABIA
—We were on the eve of a ritual called the Day of Arafat, an annual event that marks the most important day of hajj. We were going to a wide, open, desolate plain called Arafat, twelve miles east of Mecca. The Day of Arafat symbolizes the judgment day when we go before God to be judged for the acts of our life. There are no secrets from God. “The hearing, the sight, the heart—all of these shall be questioned,” says the Qur'an (17:36).

I had heard about this moment since I was a child. Heaven or hell—our eternal fate is decided on that day. I had heard that we will walk a tightrope the width of a strand of our hair. We will be able to find our balance if our good deeds outweigh our bad deeds. We will fall into the pits of hell's fire if they don't. I vividly remembered the day when I first heard the concept of “hellfire.” We had moved to Morgantown, and we were living in the faculty apartments. My mother was teaching my brother and me about Islam. Even though she had become a skeptic, my mother taught me the most about Islam, its rituals, and its beliefs.

“Stay on the straight path,” she had warned us. If we didn't, a tragedy awaited us: hellfires. From that moment forward, I despised the fear that religion puts in our hearts. I wanted to be motivated by love of Allah, not fear.

On the bus ride to Arafat, I suddenly realized that I didn't know what to believe. It seemed like an auspicious day to figure it out. In a dramatic way, I was facing the possibility of God's forgiveness and benevolence. I remembered the exact moment when I realized that Allah is forgiving. It was a few years back when I lived in Brooklyn Heights, and I was standing next to the window through which on so many nights I would gaze at the full moon ascended over the steeple of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. One of my cousins had come to visit a local college with his high school daughter. I had just gone through another heartache with
yet another man who dashed my hopes for love. My cousin and I had gotten into a theological argument about Islam. “But what hope is there for any of us if Allah doesn't forgive?” I asked.

My cousin looked at me gently. “But Allah
does
forgive.”

“He does?” I asked, realizing that I had somehow evaded one of Islam's greatest teachings. God forgives.

“He does,” my cousin gently said.

That night I called my mother and complained, “Why didn't you tell me that God forgives?”

My mother sighed. “I did, Asra. You forgot.”

On the way to Arafat and my day of reckoning on this earth, I pondered the consequences of forgiveness. I mostly doubted the anthropomorphic sense of God as someone who sits on a heavenly throne, particularly as someone who would annul the blessings of hajj over something like wearing a safety pin on one's ihram. I gazed out the window at the devoted piled into open-air school buses. They spilled out of trucks like cattle. The people with the darkest skin seemed to be the most destitute. These pilgrims wore air masks to block the car fumes. My family and I sat in air-conditioned luxury buses. We passed a pristine building marked
SAUDI RED CRESCENT SOCIETY
. The Saudi society was the equivalent of the Red Cross in the West. Instead of the cross that marks the Western charity, the Muslim group uses the crescent, the symbol of Islam, as its mark. We drove by canvas tents where worshipers spent their nights amid litter. To fulfill the rules of hajj, we had to arrive before noon.

Our physical journey took me back in time. There was another woman besides Hajar who found herself alone in the desert outside Mecca. She was Eve. The Qur'an, like the Jewish and Christian histories, says that God made Adam and Eve as the first man and woman. The angels protested God's plan: “Will you create beings there who will cause trouble and shed blood, while we praise Your Holy Name?” Indeed, God made Adam and Eve with a soul, free will, intelligence, reason, and
fitra
—an inner nature that seeks God and is disposed toward virtue. After being exiled from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were first separated, but God answered Adam's prayers and reunited him with Eve on the top of a hill called Jabal-ur-Rahma, or the Mount of Mercy, in the valley of Arafat outside Mecca. It's said that Eve spent the whole day with Adam, the two of them standing modestly, thankful and awed in worship of God. For that reason, the hill is called Arafat, meaning “recognition” or “knowledge” in Arabic.

Unlike Genesis, the Qur'an doesn't single out Eve for blame in tempting Adam toward sin. “They both sinned,” the Qur'an says. But interpretations of Islam portray women as temptresses who can doom a man with just a glance or a strand of hair askew, hence all the prescribed restrictions to protect women's honor. The story of Eve underscores the issues of sin and redemption that Muslim women face in a religion that defines every aspect of their lives, from the way they dress to how they have sex.

Like other women wracked with guilt, I'd had to grapple with the question of whether my sexuality had led me astray. My religion attaches sex to marriage, and since I was unmarried when I conceived, I had to wrestle with the issue of religion, sex, and sin. I saw that women are the ones who are condemned for sexual activity, while men are allowed to walk away. I concluded that the doctrines of religion shouldn't set the parameters for our bodies and our hearts. All adults, including women, should be able to make these intimate determinations for themselves. That way, we can be free of all the guilt and shame that too often mark the lives of people of all religions but do nothing to promote healthy societies.

ARAFAT
—On the ground in Arafat, the prophet Muhammad followed the path of Eve, riding a she-camel in the afternoon of his hajj as far as the middle part of the Arafat Valley on the Mount of Mercy.

This is the main hajj rite, the day known as Yawm al-Wuquf, the Day of Standing. The prophet Muhammad said, “Hajj is Arafat.” The Qur'an (42:11) says, “The Beneficent . . . [rose over] the [Mighty] Throne, over the seventh heaven [to us], and he only comes down over the first heaven on the Day of Judgment.” We were supposed to stand until sunset in the same valley where the prophet stood, speak to God, and ask for mercy for past sins, as if our judgment day had come.

There, in the year 632, the prophet recited his farewell sermon, known as the Sermon of the Farewell Hajj. He said in that sermon that no one is superior to any other, a message lost in the schisms that now divide the world's religions. In the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat on the ninth day of the month of Hijjah in 10
A
.
H
., the prophet seemed to know he was going to die. There, in his farewell sermon, he said: “Oh People, lend me an attentive ear, for I don't know whether, after this year, I shall ever be
among you again. Therefore, listen to what I am saying to you carefully and take these words to those who could not be present here today.”

He spoke of the golden rule: “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you.” The essential message was one of equality in duties, rights, and obligations. “Oh People, listen to me in earnest. Worship Allah, say your five daily prayers, fast during the month of Ramadan, and give your wealth in zakat. Perform hajj if you can afford to. You know that every Muslim is the brother of another Muslim. You are all equal. Nobody has superiority over another except by piety and good action.”

This day marked an important moment in the history of women in Islam. The prophet Muhammad's sermon included a message for the empowerment of women. “Oh People, it is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights over you,” he said. “Do treat your women well and be kind to them, for they are your partners and committed helpers.”

Our bus pulled up to a lane lined on both sides with tents. We slipped behind one entryway. The men slipped into the first tent, and the women continued to a second tent. There were mattresses everywhere, as if we were there to nap. I was confused. But as with so much else on the hajj, I tried to follow the spirit of what we were supposed to do.

I had always had trouble accepting the concept of sin. As in so many religions, it was used in Islam to instill a spirit of fear and punishment that I intuitively rejected. For example, when my mother's hair once again spilled out of her hijab, Samir asked her, with incredulity and slight annoyance at having to protect her again from the rigidity around us, “Do you
ever
cover your hair?”

I resented having to live with such fear because of this amorphous concept of sin. Before we left for New York, I told Samir, “We're supposed to wipe away our sins with hajj, but that's not a problem for you and Safiyyah. You both haven't sinned.”

Samir shot me a quick look. “Nuh-uh! I've sinned zillions of times.”

“When?” I asked. I couldn't imagine that he had anything to confess.

“The time I hit Safiyyah.”

“When did you do that?” I asked, surprised. Samir and Safiyyah got into the usual sibling tussles, but nothing violent.

“The day Safiyyah sinned! She pushed me into the rocking chair!”

Indeed, it had been a toddler tussle that had given Samir a permanent dimple on his right cheek.

Even in her innocence, Safiyyah recognized this day as the most important of hajj. “My cousin Shibli stood with me and prayed,” she wrote in her journal. “We saw a pretty butterfly.” She appreciated the unity of the day. “Today was a beautiful day with everyone remembering God! together.”

Outside under the sky, with the earth beneath his feet, my father stood contemplatively under a tree. When the men complained about the air conditioning not working in the tent, my father retorted: “There's a nice breeze. Sit under the tree.”

It was as if my father were in heaven. Throwing his hands into the air, he spoke directly to Allah. Tears welled up in his eyes. His voice quivered. He asked for blessings for everyone. “Please forgive me, Allah, the sacred and the mighty, for anything I have done intentionally or unintentionally. Please make me a good person to serve humanity as long as I am alive.”

He couldn't stop weeping.

It's said that the prophet proclaimed, “There is no day on which Allah frees more of His slaves from fire than the Day of Arafat, and He verily draws near, then boasts of them before the angels, saying, ‘What do they seek?'”

I stood outside with Shibli on my chest in his baby carrier.

During the hajj of 2002, Saudi Arabia's leading cleric took the moment of the great sermon on Arafat to criticize the “pillaging Jews” in Israel. What would today's sermon be? I would never know. I tried hard to hear it. It was just a crackle over the loudspeaker system. I continued to stand with my son. Shibli faced out, his back against me.

We prayed, as the prophet did, with
wuquf
, or devotion. People around us were also praying, begging for forgiveness of sins, weeping, in the spirit of Eve and Adam. The prophet said that the prayer of this day was the best of all. The women around us were in various stages of prayer—and exhaustion.

Standing outside with me, Safiyyah asked, “Did we pray enough?”

As Shibli fell asleep, I lifted him out of the carrier and lay him beside me on one of the many mattresses that lined the courtyard. In his sleep, Shibli kicked the pen out of my hand as I was writing. Nearby, a pair of white shoes with the Wal-Mart “No Boundaries” label sat outside our tent. A woman slipped into them and stepped inside. This Wal-Mart line has made me wonder about boundaries ever since I first saw the label. Should we live with no boundaries? In Arabic, it would be
la hudud
. In my life I ran up against boundaries and crossed them. I hadn't yet resolved my thinking about boundaries—their worth and their cost.

Inside the women's tent my mother wanted her judgment day to end. It was so hot that she couldn't concentrate. An African American nurse from Boston lounged on her mattress and complained, “What about the air conditioning?” She listened as a pilgrim joked that the air conditioning would turn on just as we left.

My mother stepped outside into the courtyard to get some fresh air. She was more than angry about the heat. She was angry with God. “You gave me so much misery. Since you have given me so much misery, help me out of it,” she told God.

She asked for Shibli to have a good father. She prayed for peace of mind for everyone in her family. Then she went back inside and lay down, exhausted.

Before the sun set, we were ready to depart to follow the centuries-old trail that Eve took with Adam to Muzdalifah, a place between Mina and Arafat. The movement of pilgrims from Arafat to Muzdalifah is called
ifadah
, or overflowing. Piles of discarded rice and meat stretched along the side of the road as we left. It was filthy outside, with the trash of the day all around us. Humanity seemed so flawed on a day that was supposed to be a bridge to the divine.

On the way there the prophet Muhammad kept saying, “Labayk. Allahumma labayk.” Here I come. At your service, Oh Lord, here I come. The people were chanting the same. I couldn't know God's judgment of me, but I felt clean as I left my judgment day.

MUZDALIFAH
,
SAUDI ARABIA
—When he got to Muzdalifah, the prophet asked his companion Bilal, the emancipated Abyssinian black slave, to give the call for prayers. He said the same
maghrib
(sunset) and
isha
(night) prayers that we now said.

It was considered a blessed night there in the place where the prophet rested. The stars engulfed us in their splendor. Pilgrims were sleeping everywhere, not on cool desert sand but on asphalt. The Saudis had paved acres of the land there to make a massive parking lot in the holy land. My father and Samir wandered through the parked buses and cars and sleeping people to collect pebbles to throw the next day at pillars that symbolize the devil. They were a wonderful image to see: Samir in his white, my
father in his white, the two of them separated by two generations but united in purpose: collecting stones for the three days of stoning.

Late that night I sat on the bus with Shibli in my arms and talked to one of our guides. Somehow the conversation turned to Shibli, and the guide asked me about Shibli's father. I marked the first day after my judgment day on earth by telling our guide the truth about Shibli's father. He didn't judge me but simply asked: “He wasn't a practicing Muslim?”

I didn't know how to answer that question. It wasn't my place to judge. He certainly hadn't treated me with kindness, even in those vulnerable months when I was carrying his baby. But I didn't know what beat in his heart. I hesitated, and the guide filled the silence with a prayer.

“May Allah give you a good man.”

“Thank you.”

His prayer made me realize that I could have a husband—that I was worthy of finding happiness in a marriage.

I curled into a seat on the bus and slept with Shibli close to me. The dawn broke, and we stirred awake.