Standing Alone (19 page)

MINA
—The masses seemed to flow everywhere around us as we rode our tour bus to our tent city. An old man and his wife lumbered through an empty ravine. A flag of Pakistan floated by us. A mother in a burka shepherded her brood, a girl on her shoulder and another girl with a white scarf on her head. I saw an African woman nursing her child. They were strangers, but I felt so connected to the mothers, each leading her family through this journey. What it said to me was that I now had a new definition as a mother. I looked at the women and felt a kinship. As much as the rituals of the hajj were supposed to connect me more to my faith, I was more moved by the people around me. They were affirming a spiritual connectedness between me, my son, the world, and history.

A tidal wave of emotions struck me among this mass of humanity. We passed a pilgrim with a white umbrella with
BANGLADESH
on it. Another umbrella read
EGYPT AIR
. Another,
AIR INDIA
. A man waved a flag:
HAJJ GROUP SRI LANKA
.

A girl balanced a white plastic container on her head. We were all headed to the same place on this morning, to stone Satan. The trash around us horrified me. It didn't seem like a sign of respect to either God
or the earth. I wondered how the devoted could be so careless. We were going in the direction of the qibla—the direction that points to Mecca. Dark-skinned men in yellow jumpsuits picked up the trash. They were all from either the Indian subcontinent or Africa, it seemed. The old man and his wife we saw a moment before had found a seat on the roof of a van that drove by us. They looked beautiful.

In our bus we passed through the valley where warriors on elephants had gathered to proceed to Mecca to destroy the Ka'bah. When he did the hajj, the prophet Muhammad instructed pilgrims to move quickly through there. As we continued over the bumpy road we passed by a sign that read
MUZDALIFAH ENDS HERE
. It marked our passage from the valley of redemption to the summit on which we were to reject sin.

A sign beckoned us to the place where we were supposed to confront the devil.
MINA STARTS HERE
, it read. The streets were so crowded that our bus had to stop. We walked the rest of the way to our tents in Mina, not a long walk in distance—just half a mile—but a long way in perseverance. The scene in front of us was disgusting: we walked in a packed stream of pilgrims through a path of dirty water, trash, and sleeping pilgrims littered beneath a bridge named for King Khaled Ibn Abdul Aziz, the wealthy Saudi family heir who ran the county from 1975 until his death in 1982. I realized that, to me, religion is about helping others in need before it's about praying five times a day. I was in the midst of a religious pilgrimage, but it seemed to me that the best thing we could do in the name of our religion was to stop the rituals and help the people around us.

The scene under the bridge was testimony to the worst that happens to humanity in the name of religion. It was so bad that the Saudi government even warned about it in a health brochure that an English expert clearly hadn't edited: “Dear Pilgrims, Laying under bridges and setting on the footpaths is an uncivilized behaviours, and doing so causes you many risks. so do not exposure yourself for risks.”

Of course, the pilgrims wouldn't have slept under the bridge if other accommodations had been available to them. Another one of the Saudi government's tips seemed to defy reality: “Crowding is an important factor for transmission of meningitis, try to avoid crowded areas.” Trying to avoid crowded areas on the hajj was like trying to stay dry in the ocean. The dangers became apparent to me in one swift moment. The crowd started to crush me, pressing me toward a wall of squat buildings on my right. We were going forward. Samir was troubled by seeing the people close in on him. There were slippers everywhere too. People had lost
them and been unable to retrieve them in the crowd. Our guide, Sheikh Alshareef, had warned us: no matter what, don't stop to pick up lost shoes. Let them go. Otherwise, we risked being trampled in the press of the crowd. Stopping for shoes was an invitation to death.

Samir said quietly to himself, “Allah, please don't let me be trampled.” He looked at the packets of water littered on the ground. They looked useless to him, but then he saw pilgrims dousing their heads with the water. “Oh, I get it,” he said to himself. It was so hot that the government of Saudi Arabia doled out packets of water to cool pilgrims down.

Shibli squirmed in his carrier on my chest. It was increasingly hot, and I jabbed my hand into the crowd like a linebacker, trying to protect Shibli. Safiyyah recalled later: “I almost died because I was getting crushed.”

Women and men yelled at me in Arabic. I couldn't understand what they were saying. “What?” I exclaimed.

“They're saying, ‘Put your baby up!'” Sheikh Alshareef's wife translated. “How?” I exclaimed. Suddenly, a handsome young Egyptian American man broke stride beside us. “He is my friend,” Sheikh Alshareef's wife said. “He can carry the baby!”

I hesitated. I didn't know this man. I could lose my son in this crowd. To avoid the danger of choking on an ID tag's cord, I didn't even have Shibli wearing his ID, which identified him as “Card Number 34” in our tour group. I had a badly photocopied map of Mina folded into my pocket with phone numbers beside Arabic script I couldn't read. The only instructions in English: “In case of lost,” we had to look for Mena Square 49 under the King Khaled Bridge or call a Mr. Arafat on his mobile phone. Of course, I had no idea how to get to a public phone. My only other option seemed to be to find refuge in the open door of a smelly men's restroom beside me. It was one of those perilous moments that mothers have faced since the beginning of time. I chose to take the calculated risk.

I handed Shibli to the young man and tried to stay close beside him. We navigated gingerly but forcefully through the crowds. Shibli rested on the man's shoulder. I felt so grateful, yet remained worried. I couldn't risk losing my son. Finally, we took a turn out of the crush. We proceeded quickly to our tent, where the young man brought Shibli safely into my arms. “Shibli!” I said, grateful. We tumbled into the women's tent, where, to my shock, tears awaited us from our fellow pilgrim from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. She had gotten separated from our group in the crush and arrived just moments earlier. She had been weeping because she was so worried about Shibli's safety in the crowd. She epitomized the best of
what religion teaches—compassion for others. In pursuing ritual, some people would have stepped on my head and Shibli's too, and somehow that made no sense. But this woman, a virtual stranger, had tears running down her face because she was worried about my baby's safety. It's said that the hajj is supposed to teach us spiritual lessons in the most unusual of ways. I smiled at the woman and offered her a gesture of gratitude. I dropped Shibli into her arms.

Meanwhile, Safiyyah fell onto her bedroll to float into the safety of her dreams. All she wanted to do was sleep and turn the air conditioning on—really high.

This trip revealed to me what is good and evil. To me, evil is social injustice, discrimination, bigotry, and intolerance.

In the tents of Mina I listened to lectures piped through a sound system from the men's tent and heard the story of Satan, or Shaytan in Arabic. The Qur'an says that when God made Adam and Eve, he educated Adam with knowledge about the wonders of the earth. The angels were wary about a human having such abilities, so God tested the angels' knowledge of nature.

“Tell Me about all of this,” he ordered, speaking of the earth.

The angels, who lived in a different realm, admitted defeat immediately. When Adam explained animals, plants, and the world to them, the angels conceded that humans were superior to them in intellect. God had the angels bow to Adam to pay their respects. Some Muslim scholars interpret this as God's support of human rights. The angels bowed, and bowing with them were creatures called jinn that God had also created. They were surreal creatures that had followed me into my childhood. My mother used to tell me stories about jinn. They were like the spirits of haunted houses, only I never felt afraid of them. There was one jinn that we were particularly supposed to fear: Iblis. He stood with the other jinn in Paradise, but he refused to bow to Adam. God asked him why.

“I am better than him,” Iblis declared. I was later told that this statement made Satan the world's first racist. Racism was unacceptable in God's world. Angry, God turned Iblis out of Paradise, according to the Qur'an. But Iblis had a wager for God. “If you give me time, I can corrupt [your precious humans], and in the end you will find most of them ungrateful to You.” God accepted the challenge and gave Iblis free reign over the world until the Day of Judgment. Iblis vowed: “I will attack them from their front and back and their right and left, and I will create in them false desires and superstitions.” God set only one rule: Iblis wouldn't have any power over
anyone who sought God's protection. Iblis made the deal. His name became Shaytan, meaning “to separate.” Some of the jinn went with Shaytan and took the name Shayateen, or “separators.” By the standards of “the straight path,” I had separated. I had become a bad girl of Islam.

I had committed many of the so-called vices, and by the strictest standard my worst trait was not being ashamed of my errant ways. To me, what I had done was a part of life, and I wasn't going to punish myself for it. I also didn't live in fear of punishment from God. Fear underlies so many Muslims' belief. We are always told, “Fear Allah,” but I didn't fear God. And for that matter, I didn't want to fear God. I thought the dance of love and fear of the divine was an unnecessary drama. I also didn't
hate
the devil. I didn't even believe in the concept of a devil with human attributes. We all had a dark side. But I had come to believe that we allowed ourselves to be more positively transformed if we
accepted
, not despised, our dark side. I had read somewhere that it was just like the way we accepted gentle pain during stretching exercises. These feelings didn't put me in a repentant space as we entered day four of the hajj, the day when we were supposed to face the devil.

On that day and the two that followed, we were supposed to throw our stones at the devil in a ritual called
ramy
. The devil was symbolized in three stone pillars: al-Jamara al-Kubra was the tallest pillar, al-Jamara al-Wusta was the middle pillar, and al-Jamara al-Sughra was the smallest pillar. As sacrilegious as it sounds, I couldn't help but feel like Goldilocks facing Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear.

The prophet said that when Abraham wanted to do his rites of hajj, Satan blocked his way. Abraham threw seven pebbles at him, and Satan sank into the ground. Abraham proceeded to the second pillar and threw another seven pebbles at Satan, and again Satan disappeared into the ground. Blocked yet again at the third pillar, Abraham again threw seven pebbles.

The devil wasn't the only thing to fear here. In 1998 a stampede in the plain of Mina killed 118 pilgrims as large crowds assembled near a bridge on their way to the devil-stoning ritual. I was going to go alone against the devil. I left Shibli at the tent with the women there, his first time spent with strangers since he was born. He was purer than any of us, I believed, just descended from heaven. Safiyyah was more practical about the virtue of leaving her cousin in the tent. “Shibli might accidentally get hit by a rock!”

Sheikh Alshareef and his wife, Amber, were leading our group and trying to play it safe shepherding us through the pilgrim rush-hour traffic, as
we had done in Mecca. As we walked together through the crowds of pilgrims, I absorbed the scene around me. The modern day mixed with mythology. Not far from the place for throwing stones at the devil sat a rotisserie chicken restaurant that went into Safiyyah's journal as the “best chicken in the world” when she got a taste on another day. I kept pace with Amber, enjoying her conversation. She was fully cloaked in her nikab with its face veil, and I was wearing my hijab only to stay out of jail, but I felt a connection with her that I enjoyed. What she and her husband showed me was that we can be diametrically opposed to each other on important theological and ideological questions—the veil, polygamy, interpretations of sharia—-but still get along. We can still respect each other. I also learned that we don't have to abandon simple rules of decency, civility, and friendship even when we differ profoundly on issues as important as God's so-called law.

We paused near puddles and groups of pilgrims huddled together in casual conversation as Sheikh Alshareef went off on a reconnaissance mission. He returned and said that we needed to wait a while for the crowds to thin. I was in conversation with Amber and didn't mind the delay. We watched my father talking enthusiastically with another pilgrim. I shook my head. Amber didn't need a translation. “I tell my father too, ‘Can you stop talking?'” I laughed, hearing my own voice in hers.

Then it was time to go. We climbed a ramp onto a wide, two-level, roofless pedestrian walkway, inside of which sat the three tall stone pillars. I wondered about this ritual we were about to do. Samir saw the shape of the Washington Monument in the stone pillars. I saw giant phallic symbols rising into the sky. To me, the stone pillars represented something much deeper than the human struggle between good and evil. I believed evil came in many forms, one of them being the patriarchal oppression that has so suffocated women's spirits and voices throughout time. Pummeling the stone pillars represented for me the destruction of the forces that have domineered over women. When Muslim men use religion to oppress women, Islam is sullied, just as in any other religion characterized by such domination.

Months later I would listen to the journalist Bill Moyers interview the religion scholar Karen Armstrong. He asked her whether a religion could be true to its theological principles if it oppresses women. Absolutely not, she responded. I appreciated Bill Moyers asking this question as a man. And I so appreciated Karen Armstrong's blunt response.