Standing Alone (20 page)

I stared at these phallic symbols and flung my stones, one after another. “Allahu Akbar,” I said under my breath with each stone I threw. God is
great. A woman pushed me to get closer to the stone pillar. I didn't surrender to this obsession. Each toss of our stones was supposed to be a message that we could fight Satan, just as Abraham did. I didn't feel I had to muscle my way to a ringside seat.

With all our stones thrown, we gathered with our group to attempt a safe return.

MINA
—A new day began.

It was the third day of hajj, Yawm al-Nahr, the Day of Sacrifice. Just as it's said that Allah tested Abraham's and Hajar's faith by sending Hajar and baby Ishmael into the desert, this day memorializes yet another supposed test of Abraham by God. It's said that Allah told Abraham to sacrifice his son, now grown. “Do as you have been commanded,” Ishmael said. So Abraham put a blade to Ishmael's throat. At that point, an angel came to Abraham and ordered him to stop. Abraham had passed this test of faith and would be recorded in history as brave. Where is the courage in blind faith? Nothing is said about the whereabouts of Hajar—the courageous one, in my estimation—during this ordeal. We don't know whether she had died or was alive but not around.

Even this sacrifice was transformed into a battle of egos: Jews say it was Isaac who was about to be sacrificed, and Muslims say it was Ishmael. In Islam the day is Eid ul Adha, also known as Buk'reid, or “the Festival of the Sacrifice.” It marks our second most important holiday after Eid ul Fitr, or “the Festival of the Fast Breaking,” which follows the last day of the holy month of Ramadan. For both holidays, children get new clothes and the gift of cash called
eidie
. After Ishmael was saved, he and his father built the Ka'bah and beseeched God to make their descendants compliant.

I was one of the descendants of whom they spoke. They beseeched God to make
me
compliant. They called upon rituals and sought repentance. I had little of this spirit of surrender in me and never liked the holiday honoring their sacrifice at the altar of God, which always struck me as an odd test of faith. I wondered whether I would ever have so much faith in God as to sacrifice my child. Unlike Abraham, I would never put a knife to my son's throat, no matter how certain I was that God was commanding me to do just that. Today we feel that we don't have to challenge ourselves so deeply. We simply pay a fee to our travel agency to
sacrifice lambs for our family and are told that the meat will go to pilgrims and the poor. The underlying principle goes much deeper, of course: to sacrifice what we love for the sake of God. To some, such sacrifice is also a way to act on their love of God.

To symbolize our willingness to sacrifice and symbolize our new birth into the faith, we got our hair clipped, trimmed, or shaved. My father and Samir got their hair shaved with an electric shaver. Back at the tent, men were giving themselves a smoother shave with razor blades. Safiyyah laughingly noted that my father's shave, with just a ring of hair around his bald head, didn't take long. But she took note of a few remaining strands on top. Samir wanted a closer shave. “Can I get one?” he asked. Outside the tents a young man, Saad Tasleem, stood over Samir with a razor. Samir liked these men. They were young and responsible. “They aren't lazy and stuff,” he said. “I got my head shaved,” Samir wrote in his journal, where he also drew a picture of himself.

Samir went outside the tent to feel the breeze on his bare skull. We were now released from most of the requirements of hajj—some of us more than others. Fourteen pilgrims were trampled to death on the King Khaled Bridge on their way to stone Satan.

Often over these days I had been told, “Fear Allah.” Did I want to be motivated out of love of God, fear of God, or a combination of the two? To find my answer I looked around at what already motivated and inspired me. There was the day I spent some time with two women helping in our tent. The back flaps of the tent opened to the kitchen, where they slept and worked. They were robust, young women from Sudan, now living in Saudi Arabia; they had been hired to help during the pilgrimage. They slept on bedrolls on the floor, like us, beside a stove, with several toddlers and a baby who was a little older than Shibli. One of the women tugged at the long pants in Shibli's jumper and said something in Arabic. I didn't understand. I called a woman over who translated, “She would like a jumper with long pants.”

This encounter evoked the traditional divide between the haves and the have-nots, as well as conflicting emotions in me. I felt imposed upon, but I wanted to share. I decided to share. After all, it was the hajj. I rifled through Shibli's clothes and found an outfit that had been a gift for Shibli from my former
Wall Street Journal
colleague Liz MacDonald, now a senior editor at
Forbes
. Raised a devout Catholic, she had once delivered heart medicine to Mother Teresa in Calcutta. When Mother Teresa had raised her hand toward Liz to bless her, Liz gave her a high-five, jolting the frail nun and sending the other nuns into a frenzy. Mother Teresa laughed. Liz
had gotten distracted and worried that she was going to hear another recruiting speech to make her a Missionary of Charity nun. I knew Liz would want me to give one of her outfits to a Sudanese baby in the middle of hajj. I pulled out one with ABCs on it. The mother took the outfit and another one I had. She didn't seem as grateful as I thought she would be. It rekindled the conflicting feelings that such requests generate in me. Did I want to help others out of love?

I found an answer about the inspiration that religion can be when I read a memo that my niece had written to God in my notebook.

It seemed that our Muslim society could be so much more proactive about social services if we were motivated more by love of God than by fear of God. One night our guide, Sheikh Alshareef, lectured about the benefits of the social services that Christians provide in churches, like hosting Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, giving out winter clothes, and helping the needy at holidays. This was one of the first lectures my mother fully appreciated. She said: “I'm a broad-minded Muslim. I believe in service.” I appreciated his philosophy too. The lecture caused me to reflect on my belief. As a Muslim, I wanted to encourage Muslims to engage in more social service activities that would help people marked by taboo, such as unwed mothers, alcoholics, drug addicts, and AIDS patients. My mother and father had taught me from my earliest days to “serve humanity.” I heard this mantra so often from my father that I would roll my eyes. But at that moment, on the hajj, I realized that I needed to do more social service work. And it also struck me how narrowly Muslim communities often define their role in improving society. The solution in the most puritanical Muslim societies is simple: corporal punishment.

Hearing Sheikh Alshareef's words and experiencing the kindness of my fellow pilgrims made me realize that my life back home was a little out of
balance. I volunteered regularly at my niece's and nephew's schools, but beyond that I didn't feel as if I gave back to my community in Morgantown, whether Muslim or non-Muslim. I realized I wanted to be a more generous citizen, and I made a commitment to contribute to the social welfare of my community when I returned home.

I felt that only love, not fear, could change the tenor of the world, where the threat of violence loomed everywhere.
Arab News
reported on an alleged CIA warning about al-Qaeda attacks on the United States and Saudi Arabia as early as the end of hajj. More bad news trickled into Mina: another twenty-one people had been trampled to death under the King Khaled Bridge on their way back from stoning the devil. The Saudis reported that they would investigate the deaths and set up eight medical units to deal with stampedes. But faith can supplant good sense. CNN quoted a forty-five-year-old Sudanese pilgrim saying, “I am afraid to die, but this is a ritual that has to be performed.”

What kind of public service was provided by these deaths? In 2001, 35 people died in a stampede. In 1998, 180 people died. The Saudis responded by turning to their Islamic scholars to bring rationality to the rituals. After another stampede killed pilgrims, Saudi Arabia's interior minister, Prince Naif, chairman of the Supreme Hajj Committee, was quoted on the front page of a newspaper calling on Islamic scholars to modify the narrow window of hours for stoning Satan. “I know that the scholars want . . . the pilgrims [to] perform the Hajj rituals following in the footsteps of the Prophet, but we have to look at this matter in the light of the present situation and problems,” Prince Naif said.

If the Saudis could institute new interpretations of religion to deter stampedes, I wondered why they couldn't take the same position on so many more of the rules, restrictions, and rituals that didn't make sense.

MECCA
—As our final act in the pilgrimage, we were supposed to return once again to the Ka'bah to circumambulate it and perform Hajar's run between Safa and Marwah. We returned to Mecca to perform our sacred duty without a clue about the dangers that awaited us. Our bus dropped us off about a mile from the Ka'bah, the crowds were so big that night.

It felt as if every pilgrim was descending on Mecca from Mina that night, and they very well might have been. We walked on the road on
which the Sheraton sat, passing the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the House of Donuts, and the Nigerian women peddling their rosary beads. As we neared, the crowd swelled in a way that we hadn't even experienced in Mina the day pilgrims had been trampled. The crowd pulsed with each step we took closer to the gates of the Sacred Mosque.

I remembered a time I'd just learned about. In the year 630, in this same place where crowds engulfed my family and me, the prophet Muhammad led ten thousand soldiers on a march to Mecca. The city surrendered without a fight. The once-despised former goatherder entered the city in triumph, went straight to the Ka'bah, and destroyed the idols of the 360 gods worshiped there. Later he reconstructed the shrine to Allah alone. Then, instead of taking vengeance on the city that had harassed and persecuted him for more than twenty years, the prophet declared a general amnesty. It was a new beginning, he said. “Allah be praised.” Islamic history marked this juncture as the end of the period of Jahiliya, or ignorance. From Mecca, Islam spread quickly. Muhammad died in the year 632 after giving his sermon on Mount Arafat. Within a century the empire of his successors stretched from Spain to Afghanistan. It engulfed the armies of the Persians and the Byzantines and reached as far as the gates of Vienna.

I couldn't escape one thought. Just like any of the soldiers who accompanied the prophet Muhammad, we could die in Mecca. In our case, it would just take one mad scramble. My mother held tight to Safiyyah and Samir, their nimble bodies dwarfed in the crush of men and women who were not even aware of the young children near them. Strands of her hair slipped out from under her hijab and flirted daringly and defiantly with our eyes. Safiyyah felt an arm around her neck as pilgrims scrambled to move forward. “You don't think anything when you're about to die,” she said later.

My father burrowed into the crowd like a mole in the subterranean layers of the earth. Shibli wasn't even in my arms. He was in the arms of a young man named Anthony Camadani, an American convert in our tour group with his two brothers. They had been a novel addition to our pilgrimage group of mostly immigrants. For starters, they didn't have the dark skin and black hair of most of our group. Second, they were cute, a thought I dared to entertain. Finally, they seemed to march to the beat of their own drummer—a refreshing change in this environment of cult ritual. Anthony's older brother, Daniel, threw his arm out to body-block for Safiyyah, whose svelte figure wasn't much defense against the crush of the pilgrims.

For his last visit to the Ka'bah, Shibli was in pink leopard pajamas—maybe not the best attire to tell him about when he turns twenty-one, but for the moment he was comfortable. He was eager and bright-eyed as the lights of the Sacred Mosque loomed in front of us. It was warm in the air, and Shibli was barefooted. He wiggled his toes and his face widened with a smile.

We had less than two hours to complete the final
tawaf
, or the circumambulation of the Ka'bah. To do this ritual is to complete the hajj. Gasping, we broke through the narrow entranceway, lucky not to have died. The crowds thinned out in the expanse of marble tile surrounding the walls of the mosque. We turned up the stairs and entered into this holy place. It was a madhouse. It would be impossible for us to join the scrum. We forced our way through the crowds and ascended to the third floor. The crush of people was enormous. It would be impossible there, too, to complete our rituals and catch our bus out of town. My father and I stood, staring at the crowd, confused about what to do.

“It's not safe for the children. You will be able to compensate,” one of the young converts from our tour group proclaimed. “You can sacrifice a lamb to make up for it.”

“Is that true?” I asked my father.

He shrugged his shoulders. He didn't know. It seemed impossible for us to accomplish our prescribed seven circumambulations in less than two hours. It had taken us all night to do it when we went there the first time. What to do? “Let's go,” I suggested.

One person was clear about what we should do. “Forget about it,” my mother said. “The children can't do it.”

I thought to myself:
Oh no, the brakes again
. Samir was disappointed. “We can do it!” Samir pled. Safiyyah remained silent, staring at the crowd.

We tried to move forward but could barely move an inch. Completing our circumambulations seemed an impossibility. Maybe another floor? We slipped down a packed elevator to the second floor. It was even more crowded. We needed air. We returned to the roof.

“I don't think we can do it,” I concluded sadly.

“Your father can go,” my mother suggested.

“No, I will stay with all of you,” he said. That was huge. My father made the sacrifice of staying with the family instead of completing his hajj ritual.

We settled for a picnic without the picnic food, sitting on the marble tile near a Saudi family. The husband gestured to Shibli. I smiled. He said
something that I couldn't understand. I smiled politely, just a little frustrated that I couldn't figure out a solution for our final tawaf problem. His wife wanted to hold Shibli. I reluctantly passed him to her.

“I take baby?” the man said. I actually worried that he might be serious. I smiled and took Shibli back in my arms and drew him close to me.

Below us, men and women walked briskly on an interior hallway reen-acting Hajar's run between Safa and Marwah. There was such an artificial feel to the mosque. It seemed remarkably fabricated. We peeked over the edge of the wall to look at the Ka'bah.

The Saudis had recently draped the Ka'bah in a new imported black silk cloth, called a
kiswa
, weighing about 1,500 pounds. They had done it while we stood in Arafat. It must have been much emptier that day with the pilgrims away. The Saudi Press Agency put a price tag of $5 million on the cloth. Saudi Arabia had set up a special factory thirty years before to design, manufacture, and tailor the cloth. That brought employment. But the price tag seemed like another unnecessary expense for a country with an impoverished class of people. The factory workers had decorated the upper half of the kiswa with a one-yard-wide strip of Qur'anic verses inscribed in silver threads painted gold, weighing about 250 pounds. Remembering the images of the poor under the King Khaled Bridge leading to our tent in Mina, such extravagance seemed outrageous to me.

It was time for us to leave. According to the rituals of Islam, we hadn't completed the hajj because my family, for safety reasons, didn't do the final circumambulation of the Ka'bah. I had to think about what
complete
means. There were actually two relevant concepts of
completeness
to think about—the physical and the spiritual. I didn't think about the former: though I felt uneasy about not physically completing the hajj, I knew I was doing the right thing for my niece, my nephew, and my son. To me, spiritual completion was more important. In the tent colony Sheikh Alshareef's wife had told us: “The scholars say you will know your hajj is accepted if you go back from hajj a changed person.” I knew that something meaningful had happened during our pilgrimage. I just hadn't had time to reflect and recognize any of the transformation that might have occurred within me. Not doing the circumambulation was important, but leaving safely from Mecca was even more important.

On the bus when we were leaving Mecca, I had a simple conversation with an Egyptian-born pilgrim who told me that the name Shibli means “
my
lion cub,” not just “lion cub,” as I had thought. This seemingly insignificant revelation was nevertheless quite important to me. I had chosen Shibli's name in part because I felt it captured a spirit of courage.
With Shibli in my arms, the storefronts of Mecca sweeping by our departing tour bus, I realized that, indeed, my son was not separate from me. He was an extension of me. He was the physical manifestation of
my
courage. That courage had expressed itself on the hajj. I had come to Saudi Arabia thinking of myself as a criminal who needed to avoid detection and in the midst of a deep spiritual conflict over my son's conception. I left having nursed my son on the sacred ground of the Ka'bah, having liberated myself with truth on the sands of Arafat, and having vowed to throw whatever stones I could at the forces of darkness in the world. I was leaving complete.