Standing Alone (4 page)

KARACHI
,
PAKISTAN
—Later that year, I found myself in the most unlikely of places. I was living in a posh neighborhood in Karachi, Pakistan.

When Muslim hijackers killed thousands in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I went to Pakistan as a journalist for
Salon
magazine. I had been writing my book in Morgantown but put it aside. I was a Muslim of the West. Somehow, I thought that through journalism I could bridge some of the critical failings that had led to the violence of September 11. I had last been in Pakistan under very different circumstances. When I was twenty-seven, I met a Pakistani man, projecting onto him my deep desire to reconcile the dissonance in my life between East and West. Like me, he had run high school crosscountry, and he lived a bifurcated life: born in Pakistan, he was raised in Paris and settled in Washington, D.C. Over the years my mother had warned me: “If you marry an American, your father will have a heart attack.” Muslim guilt set in. Within weeks I left an American Lutheran boyfriend who loved me fully, said he was willing to convert to Islam, and was ready to learn Urdu. I got engaged, sold the condo I had bought off Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, and moved to Washington to prepare for a wedding in Islamabad, Pakistan. The deeper voices of my religion were speaking to me: the ban on Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, the disapproval toward sex before marriage. I was looking for a reunion between my two selves.

Within weeks after the wedding, however, I knew I hadn't made a suitable match for me. I fell into depression, and my husband left the marriage, withdrawing from our joint bank account the proceeds from the sale of my condominium. After that disillusioning experience, my pendulum swung to the West, and I escaped into beach volleyball, my work, and casual dating. Still, I couldn't escape my programming. I threw hopes of matrimonial bliss on every man I dated. On my trip to Pakistan after September 11, I landed in Karachi alone, on a grim search for the family of a suicide victim. I was reporting a story on how despair over dismal economic opportunities was driving record numbers of men to commit suicide in this Islamic country where religious clerics ruled that suicide was a one-way ticket to hell. I didn't think their rulings allowed compassion for the real chemical imbalances that actually drove people to commit suicide. To me, their rule was as compassionate as condemning a heart attack victim to hell. The helplessness and hopelessness that led Muslim men to acts of violence against themselves seemed to have much in common
with the imbalance and frustration that was leading other Muslim men to commit suicidal acts of terrorism, such as the 9/11 disaster.

To my surprise, in the midst of my reporting I fell in love with a young Pakistani man. We met one Sunday afternoon when I went to visit the son of a local newspaper columnist, a family acquaintance, at a weekend getaway called French Beach. We started seeing each other, as openly as if we were dating in the West. The candor surprised even me, but I got caught up in the emotion. He told a friend, yelling into his cell phone as we entered an elevator at the Karachi Sheraton Hotel and Towers, “I've met the woman I'm going to marry!” His proclamation might have seemed frivolous to some, but I took it seriously. I had been traveling the Indian subcontinent for two years searching for divine love. Just when I had given up, I seemed to have found it.

During the first days of January 2002, I rented a villa with jasmine flowers in the garden to write my book and pursue my romance. Again, I saw the two aspects of myself in this Muslim man whom I had met. Even in love, I was seeking truth and wisdom.

I was also again trying to do my hajj. This time I had a potential assignment from
Outside
, an outdoor adventure travel magazine, to experience the hajj in the most adventurous way that I could. For years as a
Wall Street Journal
reporter, I had thought I could do an unconventional profile on the big business of the pilgrimage. It amazed me that you could do the hajj and also get Hilton honor points. The magazine assignment seemed a good way to report this side of the hajj phenomenon. I was struggling with the question of whether to go as a journalist or as an ordinary pilgrim. To go as a journalist, I would have to get a journalist's visa from the Saudi Ministry of Information. I was fortunate to know a fellow
Wall Street Journal
reporter who had penetrated Saudi Arabia's bureaucracy and reported from there. His name was Daniel Pearl, and we'd been friends since the summer of 1993, when I was reeling from my failed three-month marriage to the man from Pakistan. Close in age, we bonded immediately and built a close friendship over office pranks, beach volleyball, and immigrant parents who wanted us to marry within our ethnic and religious roots. Danny made a decision to choose love over religion and ethnicity; he married an exuberant French Buddhist woman, Mariane Vanneyenhoff, born to a Cuban mother and Dutch father. Danny became the South Asia bureau chief for the
Journal
, and he and his wife flew straight to Pakistan after the planes hit the World Trade Center. I called him in Islamabad, where they were staying.

“Should I go as a journalist or an ordinary pilgrim?” I asked him.

Danny told me a Saudi information chief was a man named Prince Turki bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz.

“He's a real turkey,” Danny chortled, in a joke he admitted was obvious. More seriously he said, “Stay away from him.”

These weren't ordinary times anymore. On the ground as journalists, we were trying to avoid the dangerous nexus between political power and world events and not get entrapped by nefarious personalities or hidden agendas. Another Prince Turki—Prince Turki bin Faisal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, the son of King Faisal, ruler of Saudi Arabia from 1964 to 1975—had been making the news under less than stellar circumstances. From 1977 through August 2001, he had been head of Saudi Arabia's Department of General Intelligence. Prince Turki was considered a potential heir to King Fahd, the ruler of Saudi Arabia since 1982. He abruptly resigned late in August 2001 and was replaced by an uncle. Journalists had raised questions about his being affiliated with the puritanical and anti-American wing of the royal family sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. The U.S. independent commission reviewing the September 11, 2001, attacks on America later reported that the Clinton administration had turned to Prince Turki bin Faisal for help in getting bin Laden expelled from Afghanistan after the Saudi government successfully thwarted a bin Laden–backed effort in the spring of 1989 to launch attacks on the U.S. military stationed in Saudi Arabia. The report said that, as Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki bin Faisal, using “a mixture of possible bribes and threats,” received a commitment from Taliban leader Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden. But Omar broke that pledge during a September 1998 meeting with Prince Turki and Pakistan's intelligence chief. “When Turki angrily confronted him, Omar lost his temper and denounced the Saudi government. The Saudis and Pakistanis walked out,” the report would say.

From Danny's warning alone, I decided to proceed as an ordinary Muslim pilgrim. I soon learned that that wasn't going to get me anywhere fast.

Outside
editor Stephanie Pearson connected me to a Saudi guide she found through a documentary producer and convert to Islam, Michael Wolfe, also the author of a book about the hajj. I had never met Michael, but I would one day feel blessed that I got to know him on this journey. The guide was a Saudi architect, Dr. Sami Angawi, who traced his lineage to the prophet of Islam. With a PhD in Islamic architecture from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, he lived in a city called Jeddah, the main arrival point for pilgrims. He founded an organization called the Amar Center for Architectural Heritage to preserve the traditional history of Saudi Arabia, and he was a former adviser to the
government on the hajj. Stephanie envisioned me doing my hajj in the path of the prophet Muhammad, camping out and trekking through the hajj, just as a caravan might have done at the time of the prophet. Sami seemed to be the perfect person to guide me in re-creating the prophet's steps. But I realized we weren't planning a jaunt through Yellowstone Park when I started asking Sami questions that would help us realize the vision.

“Can we camp out?” I asked him.

Sami answered with a question: “How old are you?”

That seemed like an odd response, but I answered anyway. “Thirty-six.”

“And your father?”

“He's sixty-eight.”

“I don't know. It might be suspicious. They might wonder what a man is doing with a woman in the desert.”

Okay
. I was speechless. My father was not only old enough to be my father; he
was
my father. Such considerations were beyond my cultural sensibilities.

I envisioned following the path of the prophet Muhammad's pilgrimage on camelback. “That will be difficult,” Sami warned me.

“Why?”

“The Saudis have destroyed so much in the name of Wahhabism.”

“
Wahhabism
?”

Before Wahhabism became a household term, I didn't know what this word meant. I hadn't grown up with a sense of the differences between Muslims. I always thought a Muslim was a Muslim was a Muslim. Sami explained the history to me. Wahhabism is the ideology of Saudi Arabia. What I was going to learn was that just as Christianity has different denominations, Islam is not a monolithic religion. It has two sects, the majority Sunni and the minority Shi'a. The Sunni history was marked by scores of schools of jurisprudence called
madhabs
. Four schools had survived into the modern day: Hanafi, Malaki, Shafi'i, and Hanbali, named after the scholars who led them. Mystical Islam, or Sufism, evolved both in peace and in conflict with these schools of jurisprudence. Wahhabism sprang out of the Hanbali madhab, and it is more puritanical and rigid than most other schools of Islam practiced around the world. It arose in the eighteenth century through a religious reformer, Muhammad Ibn 'Abd Al Wahhab, and later the ruling Saud family had made it the law of the land in order to use religion to control the masses. Following this brand of Islam, Saudi Arabia doesn't allow cinemas or theaters because it considers most entertainment frivolous and often
haram
, or “unlawful,” according to Islamic standards. The country not only forbids churches and
synagogues but prosecutes Christians for holding religious services in their homes. To Sami's professional horror, Wahhabi clerics had dismantled the prophet's house in Mecca to clamp down on anything that might be interpreted as worship of the prophet Muhammad. (In Islam the prophet Muhammad is considered a very great man, but still a man; in the Wahhabi interpretation, there should be no tokens of his life that Muslims could worship.) In the process, Wahhabi clerics had destroyed other relics from the lifetime of the prophet Muhammad. Their religiosity is akin to the Puritan practice of Christianity in early American history. When I next called home to West Virginia, I shared with my father what I'd learned from Sami. He lamented the loss of so much history in the name of religion.

Trying to get a visa, I realized that I was going to have to overcome other expressions of Wahhabism before even landing in the desert with my father. An official at the Saudi consulate in Karachi told me my passport had to be submitted with the passport of my mahram. The process seemed ridiculous. After all, I had traveled freely through Pakistan, a Muslim country, without a mahram. Just three months earlier, I had applied for a visa into the Taliban's Afghanistan without a mahram. (I was turned down, but for other reasons, not least of which was the looming war with the United States.) My travel experience was just more evidence that as much as the puritan Wahhabis insisted their path was the
only
true Islam, there were alternative ways of practicing Islam.

As a last-ditch effort, I visited the consulate of Saudi Arabia. A polite Pakistani man behind the counter ushered me into a meeting with a hajj official. Sitting in his office, I eyed the piles of hajj applications around me.

“Isn't there a way that I can get my visa through the Karachi consulate and my father get his visa through the Washington, D.C., embassy? We could meet first outside Saudi Arabia in, say, Amman, Jordan, and travel into Saudi Arabia together?”

“I am sorry. That is not possible.” He explained the rules: we had to apply together through a registered tour operator, and the tour operator would submit the application to the government of Saudi Arabia.

Trying to work every angle, I asked, “Okay,
you
can't give me permission. But how might I get permission?”

He looked at me curiously, as if wondering why his denial wasn't good enough. He scribbled on a piece of paper and passed it to me. “Hajj Ministry.” This was the government office in charge of Pakistani pilgrims. I could try to get a tour operator to agree to let me go with his
group. Every time I called a local travel agency, however, I got the run-around. Meanwhile, in Morgantown my father was so stressed about arranging the logistics of traveling with me in Saudi Arabia that he was driving my mother crazy.

KARACHI
—As the start of the hajj crept closer, I was still desperately trying to pull off the trip when Danny and Mariane came to visit. Mariane was five months pregnant, and they had just learned the day before that their baby was a son. That night we exchanged war stories, quite literally, listened to Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and a Pakistani Sufi rock band, Junoon, and tried unsuccessfully to watch DVDs on Danny's laptop.

The next day, January 23, 2002, Danny left for an interview he thought he was going to have with a spiritual leader named Sheikh Gi-lani. He was investigating reports that Sheikh Gilani had ties to Richard Reid, “the shoe bomber” who had tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Paris to Miami by lighting a fuse connected to explosives hidden in his sneakers. Unbeknownst to Danny, a Muslim militant by the name of Omar Sheikh had hatched a plot to kidnap him. In the early evening, Danny stopped answering his cell phone. Worried, Mariane and I began a mission that night, searching for Danny. The next morning, after we alerted the
Wall Street Journal
, the U.S. government, and Pakistani police, my house became a command center for the investigation. My boyfriend had been with us the first night, but when he came over the second night after Danny's disappearance he told me that Pakistani intelligence officials had visited him to find out what he knew about Danny and me. The visit frightened him as well as his parents and friends. He wouldn't come around anymore. I wept that night, privately, in a walk-in closet where I knew nobody would find me. And then I wiped away my tears and focused on only one goal: finding my friend. With Mariane, I crossed physical boundaries rarely breached in that culture. We lived alone in that space that women rarely claimed without a chaperone—their homes—and we worked alongside FBI agents and Pakistani antiterrorism specialists trying to piece together the clues left by Danny's kidnappers.

As the first week of our search ended, I wrote to my father to assure my family that I was safe, with armed police escorting us everywhere.

“We will find Danny,” I wrote. “Every day we are one step closer.”

As Mariane and I entered the third week of our desperate search for Danny, I realized something shocking: I might be pregnant. A pregnancy test confirmed my suspicion. I was shocked. I had never gotten pregnant before. I didn't know what to do. I didn't wear a wedding ring, but I didn't feel as if I had done something wrong. I had loved my boyfriend deeply and surrendered myself to him. Even if my assumptions had been wrong, I loved him when I made this baby. He had abandoned me, but that was not because of my failure. It was because of his fears. I called my boyfriend and asked him to visit me. He arrived that night, and I took him to my bedroom. “I am carrying your baby,” I told him, sitting on the edge of my bed.

He looked at me stunned. In a pause that I filled with so many dreams, he sucked his breath in hard and said, “I have to go.”

The truth revealed itself. He didn't want me to keep the baby, and all of his fanciful talk about marrying me disappeared. Despite my intellectual confidence in myself, I felt completely illegitimate. Within me was an American woman who believed in free will and thus knew that I had the right to keep my baby and raise him with my head held high. But the voices of my religion's traditions also spoke strongly inside of me. I was consumed by the shame of ignoring the rulings of sharia, the “divine Islamic law.” For reporting I had done on the subculture of sex, drugs, and nightclubs in Pakistan, a leader of Jamaat-i-Islami, one of Pakistan's religious parties, told me that the laws policed even sexual intimacy between consenting adults. In 1979, he told me, Pakistan passed laws based on
hudud
, or “boundaries” for moral conduct.

I knew these rules were used to control us, but now I learned that violating them could have more serious consequences. My situation could land me in prison.

To me, these laws emblemized a deeper crisis of self-determination for women in Islam. Women in Islam are so very much defined by hudud. These hudud are used to control everything about our lives, from our sexuality to where we can pray in the mosques that are our places of worship. By other names, these types of boundaries have also defined women throughout time in other cultures and religions, including Judaism and Christianity. So often religion is used to impose boundaries that ultimately deny women rights that have now been articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the right to self-determination, the right over our bodies, the right to travel freely. These religiously imposed boundaries directly affect a woman's economic life, identity, sexuality, and political power. But when I discovered I was pregnant, I realized that the
deepest boundaries we have are within ourselves. We are often most constrained by the fears that keep us from crossing the boundaries.

Tragically, in the fifth week of our search, we found out that Danny's captors had slaughtered him. They had taken a knife to his throat and decapitated him. They titled a videotape of his murder
The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl
. It lasted three minutes and thirty-six seconds. I was in disbelief.

The next day the phone in my house rang. It was Mohammedmian Soomro, the governor of Sindh, the province in which Karachi lies, and his wife, Khadijah Soomro, expressing condolences. They were on the hajj that I had been trying to join. Mariane and I had met them in our effort to lobby for political muscle behind the search for Danny. They had been kind and generous, and Khadijah Soomro had given us shawls. In Mecca they were celebrating a holiday called Eid ul Adha, which marks a pivotal moment in the life of Abraham. Like Jewish and Christian children, I was taught that God told Abraham to slaughter his son as a sign of his devotion to God. Modern-day Muslims slaughter goats, sheep, and even camels as a symbolic gesture of their willingness to sacrifice in devotion to God. Outside my house in Karachi, goats had been bleating for days, tied up for the sacrifice. In the hours since we received the news of Danny's murder, their noises had grown increasingly dimmer.

The governor and his wife were somewhere in Saudi Arabia. I had no idea where. I still didn't understand the confusing litany of rituals that filled the hajj. I wondered about Islam in the world. In the name of religion, men punished—and even killed—women like me who were unmarried and pregnant. In the name of my religion, men hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, murdering thousands of innocents and changing the course of histories, both personal and global. In the name of my religion, men had slaughtered Danny, a young man with dreams no more complicated than to buy a double bass for his fortieth birthday, love his wife, parents, and sisters, and nurture his son.

Instead of Danny's dreams being realized, police were interrogating four young men who were charged with plotting Danny's kidnapping. They considered themselves devout Muslims. While planning Danny's kidnapping, they had interrupted their strategy sessions to bow their heads toward Mecca for the obligatory five-times-a-day prayers. His murderers videotaped Danny talking about his Jewish heritage, which, in their puritanical Muslim hatred of Jews, was enough to sentence him to death.
Among Danny's last words were: “I am a Jew.” To my shock, Danny's murderers slandered the name of Islam by killing in its name.

On the dawn after the news of Danny's murder, I was standing in the abyss of a darkness wrought by man's distortion of religion. I was engulfed in a pain that made me feel the angels crying when it rained that morning. I was angry. I was afraid. I was sick to my stomach when I even dared allow myself to feel. Yet, in that sacred space of my womb, life had been created.

In my computer “in-box,” I had received an e-mail with rental prices for campers in Saudi Arabia. But early on in the desperate hunt to find Danny, I had told the editor at
Outside
that I was putting aside my hajj planning. She understood immediately. By then, my destiny was clear. It wasn't yet time for me to do my pilgrimage. Would there ever be a time? Michael Wolfe, the author and producer who had introduced me to Dr. Sami Angawi, had a philosophy that answered my question. “Hajj is in the heart. You don't go until you're supposed to go.”

In my heart, I felt fear and loathing for my religion. Could I remain in a religion from which so many people sprang spewing hate? Could I find space in my religion for my kind of woman? Could I remain a Muslim?

I didn't know the answers, and I wondered if it would ever be time for me to venture into the heart of Islam.