Standing Alone (5 page)

MORGANTOWN
,
WEST VIRGINIA
—It took the great gift of a child in utero to put me in the right place in my life to do my pilgrimage. It seemed that the answers to my questions about my religion lay within me. Answers to all of the great mysteries are to be found in our inner selves, but in my case this was literally true.

Throughout my pregnancy I tried to make peace with my boyfriend so that we could marry and make the nuclear family that so many people in my religion and culture expected. But my baby's father broke promise after promise, leaving me empty and depressed. I spent most of my pregnancy in Paris, helping to bring Danny and Mariane's baby, Adam, into the world. I had a certain amount of responsibility and guilt to handle.

“As a Muslim, I want to welcome Danny's son into the world,” I told a man Mariane and I called “Captain.” He was an honorable Muslim law enforcement officer who led an antiterrorism team in Karachi. Even
though the hajj had bypassed me one more year, I was still trying to get glimpses into this mysterious experience. Captain told me that his faith had been renewed when he did the hajj with his wife years earlier. Now, to defend his religion, he fought to stop men who killed in the name of Islam; he wanted to represent Islam well in the world.

I knew of what he spoke. I didn't pretend to be a model Muslim according to Islamic standards for rituals and external appearances. I didn't pray the requisite five prayers a day. I didn't cover my hair. And, yes, with my baby as evidence, I had sex outside of marriage. Although I had a firm faith in a divine force, I didn't invoke the name of a God who judges, punishes, and rewards. I tried simply to live as a good Muslim with humanitarian values, in the same spirit as a good Christian, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist. I didn't lie. I didn't cheat. I tried not to hurt others. I tried to live sincerely. And I wouldn't think of taking someone else's life. Thus, I was reeling from the shock of the darkness in the world when I decided to return to my hometown at the start of my ninth month of pregnancy. I was still trying to understand how some men could take the lives of others, and how another man could want me to take the life that sprang up within me, all in the name of preserving their image of propriety.

Morgantown was the only refuge I could envision for myself in the world. It was a place where I felt I had roots. Since my family moved there when I was ten, my parents had never moved away. After I left the nest, first going to Washington, D.C., then San Francisco, Chicago, New York, India, and Pakistan, I always returned to Morgantown. I had been running the same route around my neighborhood since I was twelve, turning right off Riddle Avenue to avoid a mammoth hill that was the hallmark of the landscape of our little town. Morgantown was where I learned to be a writer and honed my skills at the local newspaper, the
Dominion Post
. In case I had any doubts, the city had made the top ranks of best small American cities in which to live.

However I intellectualized about what I had experienced, I was also devastated, broken, and raw when I returned to Morgantown. When I arrived, my mother and father hugged me and my swollen belly without a word of reprimand. “We love you. We love our grandson,” they said. I sank into my parents' loving embrace and settled into a room my father had added to their new house. They cared for me and tried to return me to physical and mental health so that I could be strong for my son.

My son entered my arms on October 16, 2002, on the sixth floor of Ruby Memorial Hospital, five days before the nine-month anniversary of
Danny's disappearance. When I gazed at my son, I knew divine love, I knew heaven, and I knew God. I had been blessed with life springing forth from the midst of death. Because of my parents' love, I was able to love my baby with a full and open heart. They were expressing the principle that Islam had taught them best: love. I looked at my son, and I knew that the name I had chosen for him was perfect: Shibli Daneel Nomani.

Shibli Nomani was the revered name of a paternal ancestor who had been a reformer and scholar in the Indian Muslim world at the turn of the twentieth century. As I was told, Shibli means “lion cub” in Arabic. I chose Daneel for my son's middle name because I wanted to pay homage to the spirit of my friend Danny. Over the nine months of my pregnancy I had come to firmly believe in the meaning of the name Daniel: “God is the judge.” It seemed that, in the rush for moral supremacy in our world, so many have forgotten this simple message. Danny's murder and the rejection of my pregnancy by puritanical Muslim standards of decency told me that the world is in need of more pluralism and tolerance. It was for this reason also that I gave Shibli a version of the Jewish name Daniel. Shibli Daneel—Daniel and the lion cub—captures an important message of the Bible story about Daniel in the lions' den. A king sentences Daniel to death in the lions' den because Daniel refuses to worship him. Daniel's spirit transforms the lions into friends, and the message of the story is clear: God, not man, is the judge of what transpires in our hearts.

According to Islamic tradition, Shibli's father was supposed to whisper the call to prayer, or
azan
, into his right ear. It is the same call to prayer that springs forth from the minarets of mosques throughout the Muslim world. It is heard five times a day in Mecca. But Shibli didn't hear this proclamation from his father, who had broken his promise to be with me during delivery. Instead, my father performed the sacred duty of uttering the azan into Shibli's ear on the sixth floor of Ruby Memorial Hospital.

“Come to prayer. Come to prayer. Come to success. Come to success,” I said to myself. The words echoed in my mind over the next weeks as I tried to reconstruct my life. I was drawn again to do the hajj. To complete the hajj is to emerge “reborn,” in the tradition of the great evangelical Christian revivals. What more could I seek? I felt that I had made many mistakes that I would not reverse or erase even if I could, because they had all led me to the creation of my son and they were necessary for me to understand what I truly believed. I had to acknowledge that they also brought me great pain and even sorrow. According to the rulebook of Islam and most of the other religions, I had sinned. I had broken the moral code of my religion. The father of my child would not marry me because I was not acceptable in his family's traditional ethos. The hajj is supposed to be for the pious. But I knew I needed a new beginning. Living with my parents and my all-important mahram, the logistics of doing the hajj were now possible. I made my decision. I would go on the hajj.

And, sleep deprived and perpetually exhausted, I realized that I was going to raise my son alone. I called my boyfriend in Pakistan one night when Shibli was just weeks old. I misdialed the country code and city code and dialed the 911 operator. The West Virginia State Police dispatcher answered the phone. I hung up. The phone rang. It was the dispatcher calling back to make sure I didn't have an emergency. “Is someone holding a gun to your head?” she asked. The epiphany hit me. Someone was holding a gun to my head, and she was I. I had to let go and start a new life with my son. I had always thought of a pilgrimage to Mecca as an assignment. But I realized that maybe I was ready for something deeper. I had started reading about a woman named Hajar. She was one of the few hits I got when I did a Google search of “Islam and single
mother.” I didn't know her story, but somehow it was intertwined with the hajj, and I knew I needed to know more.

Now the question was whether I had satisfied the spiritual prerequisites for doing the hajj. “Am I worthy?” I wondered, curling my body around my sleeping baby, caressing the top of his head with my cheek. His newborn warmth soaked straight through to my heart.

MORGANTOWN
—I started filling out visa applications for the hajj as Shibli's first teeth started emerging in his third month. The warning of a death sentence screamed at me from the visa application for Saudi Arabia. It was a proclamation—loud and clear—that anyone caught with drugs faced the death penalty. I was clean on that account, but the message underscored the reality of a society that strictly punishes lawbreakers.

I would be a lawbreaker. Even more than Pakistan, Saudi Arabia punishes women like me who have children outside of marriage. These countries' strict interpretation of sharia says that unmarried men and women who have sex are to be whipped and married men and women found guilty of having sex outside of wedlock are to be stoned. The crime:
zina
, the Arabic concept of illegal sex. If Nathaniel Hawthorne's scarlet letter was an “A,” would I have to wear a scarlet “Z”?

I knew my pilgrimage would be a much more cautious journey than I had planned the year before because, in my heart, I knew I had to go with Shibli. Some of my friends warned me that he was too young to travel, that his immunities were still developing. But I knew that I wanted him with me because he was the result of the best in me. He lived because I had chosen life over fear. He smiled because I had chosen happiness over shame. He grew because I believed the present and the future define us, not the past. He was the result of my efforts to be a better person, to flow toward the divine.

The hajj represented a danger to this new being because it is a physically arduous journey marked by fires and stampedes. In 1975 there was a fire in a tent colony outside Mecca that killed thousands. In 1987 the Saudi government gunned down about 400 unarmed Iranian pilgrims protesting its rule. In 1990, 1,426 pilgrims were crushed to death in a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel leading from Mecca to Arafat. In 1994, 271 pilgrims were trampled in a stampede. In 1997, 343 pilgrims burned
to death and another 1,500 were injured in a blaze that roared through 70,000 tents outside Mecca. The air was left thick with the smell of smoke, and burned-out buses, charred water bottles, and other blackened debris littered the ground. In 1998, 119 pilgrims were crushed to death in a stampede. In all of these incidents, spokesmen for the government blamed divine predetermination.

To die in Mecca during the hajj is considered by many to be a blessing, and people will sometimes abandon personal safety for faith, creating dangerous situations for those like myself who aren't particularly interested in dying. I knew that I didn't want to lose my son to human caprice after I had overcome so much to bring him into the world. I had to carefully safeguard the precious health of my baby, but I also knew I had to take the risk.

One of the main purposes of hajj is to submit completely to God. It is like taking an oath of citizenship. For Muslims, our Ellis Island is Mecca. Our Statue of Liberty is the Ka'bah, a peculiar center of devotion by any stretch of the imagination. Its name means “cube,” appropriate for its box shape. The Ka'bah, which sits in the middle of a courtyard surrounded by a marble palace to God, is quite unremarkable architecturally. It's a big square building about the size of half a football field. The Ka'bah reminded me of the poem written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 and since memorized by so many American schoolchildren, such as my niece Safiyyah when she was a second-grader at North Elementary School in Morgantown.

Symbolizing heaven and earth and everything in between, the Ka'bah beckons the spiritual pilgrims of Islam. It is supposedly the house of God on this earth. Wherever we are on earth, all Muslims are supposed to pray five times a day with their prayer rugs laid out toward the Ka'bah in Mecca. To pray in front of it on the hajj is supposed to reinforce a Muslim's belief. When we return to our homes, we have new status in life and are called by a new honorific: men add
hajji
to their names, and women add
hajjah
. In many parts of the world relatives and friends greet returning pilgrims with garlands of roses and jasmine. The pilgrimage symbolizes a
transformation. As I thought about going, I had to admit my own limitations: I didn't think I would be so deeply touched by this religious exercise that I would emerge transformed.