Standing Alone (7 page)

“Mom!” I screamed. “We'll get arrested!”

I dragged her down into the suitcases with me to keep her from detection. Men and women chewed on wooden sticks, using them like brushes, as they shuffled by, their plastic sandals scuffing the tile with an irritating sound. “They're
miswak,
” my father told me, explaining the sticks. In another hadith, or tradition of the prophet Muhammad, it was said that he brushed his teeth with the bark of a tree. It was another act called Sun-nah, not obligatory but blessed. Hundreds of years later, strict devotees did the same to garner blessings, and the miswak was the toothbrush of these Muslims. It was another universal in the ummah, a tradition practiced by Muslims from villagers in India to men at my mosque in Morgantown. For my own dental care, I had packed an Oral B.

Jets rumbled overhead with more arriving pilgrims. A Bangladeshi man
dragged a suitcase teetering on three wheels, the fourth wheel a casualty of the travel. A man walked by with a box on his head:
HAJJ TOWELS
.
MADE IN CHINA
. They were the terrycloth used in ihram like the kind Samir and my father wore. I snickered to my mother, “Made in China where no religion is allowed. Perfect.”

As the sun started to rise, I caught a glimpse of the morning sky in an opening in the canopy. Soft, white clouds swept across a sea blue sky. The morning light cascaded into our holy space, warming the Muslims of the ummah who had assembled here, bathing everyone in a fresh beauty.
Maybe, just maybe
, I thought,
my family and I will be able do this journey without getting arrested.

A young man approached Shibli. “As-salaam alaykum! How are you, youngest hajji?” He had delivered the Muslim greeting that means “Peace be upon you.”

“Walaikum as salaam,” I responded for Shibli. “And peace be upon you.” Shibli looked at him with wide eyes and a curious smile. I appreciated this simple expression of kindness by my fellow Muslim brother. It reminded me of a moment while we were in transit in Jordan. A man in our group by the name of Hameed Omar pushed heavy airport chairs aside so I could squeeze Shibli's stroller close to a group leader giving a sermon. “You are not alone,” he said to me quietly. “We will look out for you and help you.” I looked at him and wondered if the Muslim ummah would indeed look out for me and help me. As a new mother raising her son alone, I found myself in the greatest position of need that I had ever known.

JEDDAH
—I had to admit something: I was afraid for my safety. I was in a country that was totally defined by the repressive ideology that I was just learning about, Wahhabism.

When the Saudi royal family allied itself with Islamic evangelical Ibn ‘Abd Al Wahhab in the eighteenth century, it was the beginning of the growth of a very puritanical branch of Islam. With the help of Lawrence of Arabia and the British, this alliance enabled the Saudis to remove Turkish rule from the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. Over the centuries the Saud family allowed the Wahhabi clerics to have control over the masses. It was their ideology that bred Osama bin Laden. He was
a son of Saudi Arabia, and he used U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and Israel's control of most of Jerusalem to link his call for a holy war against the West to the rights of Muslims to maintain complete authority over the land where the three holiest mosques in Islam stand. Those three mosques were on our itinerary: the sacred mosque of Mecca; the sacred mosque in Medina, a city north of Mecca in Saudi Arabia; and a mosque called al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, these sacred mosques are not just spiritual centers. They are also political symbols.

In an interview with CNN in 1997, bin Laden said the ongoing U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was an “occupation of the land of the holy places.” In February 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, calling for Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. Three other groups, including the Islamic Jihad in Egypt, endorsed the ruling. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [of Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim,” read the statement, which was issued under the name of the “World Islamic Front.” It was published three months later in the London newspaper
Al-Quds al-'Arabi.

On the hajj, I stood in bin Laden's “lands of Islam.”

He and the events of September 11 had made our religion a lightning rod. Saudi Arabia was the birthplace and breeding ground for most of the hijackers who flew planes that day into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed another plane into a Pennsylvania field. It is a country that has been skewered by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its abuse of the human rights of dissidents, reformers, non-Muslims, and women. I stood in Saudi Arabia sad that my religion was being misrepresented by Osama bin Laden and his brand of puritanical Islam. No longer perceived in all their complexity and humanity, Muslims had become a monolithic enemy.

What troubled me even more was that our broader Muslim community was being taken over by right-wing Muslims. I'd seen it happen everywhere from my hometown in West Virginia to Pakistan, where Wahhabi ideology had taken root. This is the dilemma of all societies, including the United States, where moderate voices have been challenged by the emergence and increasing power of the religious right in politics. The handicap is obvious: extremists are usually more fanatical than moderates. On the hajj, our responsibility to the world was already becoming obvious to
me: as moderates, we must be as impassioned about transforming the world with love and tolerance as the extremists of all faiths are about conquering it with hatred and division.

In thinking about fanaticism, I couldn't help but recall the connection between the fanaticism of Osama bin Laden and the development of modern-day Mecca and Medina. His father, Muhammad bin Laden, founded the Bin Laden Construction Group in the 1950s in Jeddah and since that time has spread his resulting wealth among his clan of fifty-four sons and daughters from several marriages. With close ties to the Saudi royal family, Muhammad bin Laden's company won a multibillion-dollar contract to expand Mecca and Medina. The construction firm's other big projects included building several royal palaces in Riyadh and Jeddah. It is no wonder that the mosques look like palaces: there is even a massive parking garage below the mosque in Medina. Following the Wahhabi edicts against anything that resembles worshiping the prophet Muhammad, the bin Laden empire paved over and dismantled many of the historical remnants of the original hajj. Osama bin Laden was disowned in 1994 when the Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship for his links to terrorism and his criticism of the al-Saud ruling family. But the family has remained in good standing despite its black sheep. Bin Laden Construction won the contract in 1998 to build a $150 million facility in al-Kharj, south of Riyadh, for the 4,300 U.S. troops based in the kingdom.

Kicked out of Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden sought refuge for his militant network first in Sudan and then in Afghanistan. After 9/11, America responded by trying to destroy his empire. What troubled me as an American Muslim was that the leaders of both Islam and the American government had betrayed essential principles of human decency and Islamic religious teaching with their politics of power. In that way, the West and the United States were complicit in creating the extremists within Islam who had become their adversaries. In Afghanistan, the United States had helped to create the vacuum filled by bin Laden and the Taliban. With Pakistan's intelligence agencies, the United States trained Muslim mujahideen, or “freedom fighters,” to fight the Soviet takeover of the country, but when the Soviets pulled out, the United States did little to rebuild the Afghan economy, repatriate the Afghan refugees who had fled Soviet occupation into Pakistan, or disarm militants. The result: a fresh breeding ground for the Taliban and bin Laden's militant brand of Islam.

In Iran, in a plan sanctioned by the Eisenhower administration, the United States joined British intelligence agencies in a complex covert
plan called Operation Ajax that led to the ouster of the country's popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, in 1951 after he refused to yield power over Iran's oil fields to the British. The operation installed the Shah of Iran, who maintained cozy relations with the United States and the British over his country's oil supplies until anti-monarchy forces overthrew him in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in part out of retaliation for the West's heavy-handed role in Iranian domestic affairs. In March 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressed regret that Mossadeq had been ousted a half-century earlier: “The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America.” In addition, America had been friends with Israel since its inception in 1948, without resolving the crisis created when the Palestinians lost their homes. I had heard my father's frustrations with world politics since my earliest days. “It is not a question of Islam or Christianity, East or West, democracy, justice, or freedom,” my father always told me. “It's a question of power. It's a question of modern-day colonialism of countries for money and natural resources and the corruption of Muslim governments betraying their people.”

Now, as I began my pilgrimage, America was on the brink of war with yet another Muslim nation. As we had sat at JFK Airport before takeoff, CNN reported that President Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair had met that day over plans to launch a strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The headline: “Showdown: Iraq.”

I couldn't help but feel sad.

       
And proclaim the hajj among mankind.

       
They will come to thee on foot and [mounted] on every camel,

       
lean on account of journeys through deep and distant mountain highways.

ON THE ROAD FROM JEDDAH TO MECCA
—Throughout the changing tides of history, pilgrims had overcome their fears to venture onto this path on which I found myself.

Until the nineteenth century, a pilgrim usually traveled the long distance to Mecca by joining a caravan. There were three main caravans: the Egyptian caravan, which formed in Cairo; the Iraqi one, which set out from Baghdad; and the Syrian caravan, which, after 1453, started at Istanbul, gathered pilgrims along the way, and proceeded to Mecca from Damascus. Because the hajj journey took months, pilgrims carried the provisions they needed to sustain them on their trip. The caravans were elaborately supplied with amenities and security for rich pilgrims, but the poor often ran out of provisions and had to interrupt their journey in order to work and save up their earnings before they could continue. As a result, the hajj was a long journey of ten years or more for some pilgrims.

Travel in earlier days was filled with adventure. The Begum of Bhopal, a woman ruler from India, risked death to become the first royal pilgrim from India centuries ago. The roads were often unsafe owing to bandit raids. The terrain the pilgrims passed through was also dangerous, and natural hazards and diseases often claimed many lives along the way. For this reason, the safe return of pilgrims to their families was the occasion of joyous celebration and thanksgiving, a tradition that continues to this day.

With the days of caravans over, our modern-day pilgrimage with the Islamic Society of North America promised us air-conditioned buses, the Mecca Sheraton, and buffets. When we piled into our air-conditioned diesel bus at the Jeddah airport, we could sit freely wherever we wanted. On the bus there was no segregation of men and women, just as in my earliest days when I rode the yellow school bus that picked me up at the corner of Headlee and Briarwood Streets, a block from my house in Morgantown. I still preferred to sit in the back of the bus, and my family and I nested in the last row of our tour bus. My father sat next to my mother, and in front of us husbands sat next to wives. There was no men's bus or women's bus. I was surprised. I knew it was illegal for men and women who weren't married to mix freely in this country. This arrangement most certainly broke the rules. We hadn't even split the bus into a men's half and a women's half. On public buses in Pakistan, women had a small section separated from the larger men's section by a floor-to-ceiling metal screen. It seemed to me that the segregation only created a hypersexual society. When I was eighteen and in Pakistan for the first time, a man poked his finger through the screen into my rib just to feel a woman.

“Sicko!” I yelled, scowling, while my older cousin berated him.

Sitting in the back of our tour bus, with Shibli nestled against me, I felt conflicted as we went deeper into the land of Saud. I faced a
contradiction. So often when people are faced with contradictions, they don't resolve them. I was trying to resolve mine, and even though this journey was risky, I knew it was the right thing for me to be doing. I felt safe in the refuge of our air-conditioned bus as we went deeper into this holy land. But I was also afraid, because Saudi Arabia is so notoriously repressive. Despite the risks, I was happy that I was there. One way to resolve contradictions is to create a delicate balance between safety and risk-taking.

To control the pilgrimage, the Saudi government required that each pilgrim be part of a group to which it assigned a Saudi monitor. In “Group A” of our tour group, we were given bright yellow wristbands bearing Arabic script we couldn't even read. They supposedly detailed the Saudi tour operator who had responsibility for our tour. Indeed, all sorts of politics expressed themselves during the hajj. Russia said police in Mecca arrested fifty-nine pilgrims from the Russian republic of Dagestan during the hajj in 2002 for trying to sell weapons, including rifles, swords, and night-vision goggles, to fellow Muslims.

On the road, lonely trees greeted us on a parched land spotted with trash. We were traveling forty-five miles east, inland to Mecca. For us, the road to Mecca meant traveling Spine Road No. 6. Gazing out the window, I thought about how different America and this land felt to me. I'd always loved the vast green spaces of America's East Coast. The land here was desolate. A sign told us we were on the road to “Makkah.” We didn't even spell the names of cities the same way. Batik fabrics lay strewn out in the sun to dry. A factory filled the vista with concrete pylons reaching into the sky. Squat apartment buildings under construction dotted the landscape. We passed a billboard sign advertising Dunlop tires. Despite my travels, I was always surprised to find touchstones from our global economy in foreign lands. Two years before, I had stood in line at a McDonald's in New Delhi just to see what the Big Mac tasted like in India, since the fast-food chain respected the Hindu ban on eating beef and made its hamburgers with lamb. When I sank my mouth into the lamb Big Mac, I retched. It wasn't the same Big Mac I'd grown up eating in America.

Before we arrived in Mecca, we were supposed to declare our
niyyah
, or “intention,” to perform hajj. I quietly declared my intention somewhere on the road between a billboard for
DANON CREME CARAMEL
and a sign for
THE BEAUTIFUL CREATURES ZOO
.

Lumbering down the road, we passed a sign for “Palestine St.” and then a sign for “Falasteen St.,” as “Palestine” is pronounced in Arabic. There
was a sign for Ikea. Could it be the same as the one where I shopped for tea light candles and inexpensive furniture after graduate school? It was. Off the road from the airport, the Swedish home furnishings outlet had opened Ikea Jeddah in 1983 with its trademark Swedish meals in a restaurant inside; its hours of operation respected the Muslim custom of observing Friday as the Sabbath; the store opened after 5:00
P
.
M
. that day. We passed a turnoff for King Abdul Aziz University, a sprawling university named after the country's founder. A chipped CD dangled from the rearview mirror of a truck passing by us. It was the same kind of CD with a Qur'anic verse printed on it that taxi drivers hang from their rearview mirrors in New York City for protection.

An eerie feeling consumed me. I felt as if the land had been raped and trashed. “This country haunts me,” I wrote in my notebook.

We were headed into the Arabian Hijaz, a region of western Saudi Arabia that includes Mecca and Medina. I gazed at the tar road stretching in front of me. Using the back row of our bus as a refuge from the outside, I unbuttoned my shirt. After nursing, Shibli splayed out on my arms, milk-drunk. Shrubs dotted the landscape. I stared at the white pearl on the end of the stickpin tucked into the black head scarf of the young woman two rows in front of me. In the row in front of me, my mother stared out the window. She wouldn't have been there if it hadn't been for me.

“Look at this,” my mother said, gazing out the window. “How many rocks there are.”

“The better to stone people with, I guess,” I said, under my breath.

Sometimes it was just easier to joke about the most oppressive interpretations of sharia. I tried to imagine the prophet Muhammad here on camelback. Someone propped a tire up with stones on both sides, like a modern sculpture. A man stood with a herd of sheep. I loved such scenes outside America. The United States was so sterile in comparison to most of the world. I had studied Arabic for two years at West Virginia University, but I could hardly read more than the “Allah” on the highway signs that we passed.

Allah was mentioned everywhere here in the birthplace of Islam. I remembered the Hindu pilgrims who had passed by me in buses marked “ShivShakti” when I visited goddess temples in India's Himalayan foothills. To them, the divine was expressed in Hindu deities such as the goddess Shakti and the god Shiva. I remembered the Buddhist pilgrims in the Tibetan pilgrimage in India. They meditated on the image of Tara, a goddess of compassion. What separated those faithful from the ones who filled my bus as it barreled toward Mecca? Our rituals, I believed, but not
our core principles. We all believed in a higher being. We had all learned the golden rule: be kind, honest, and virtuous.

I thought about my mother's skepticism about the sacred worth of this land into which we were going deeper and deeper. “She doesn't believe,” I wrote in my notebook.

Some hours into our journey I saw a tollbooth that led into Mecca and knew then why my mother didn't believe in the values perpetuated in this country in the name of Islam. In English, the sign read bold and clear:
NO ENTRY FOR NON
-
MOSLEMS
, using one of the transliterations of the word
Muslim
. The government knew how to be pluralistic about one thing: it translated the message into Japanese, French, and three other languages too blurry to recognize as the bus passed by. A sign over one of the lanes to the tollbooth spelled out the exclusive path on which we found ourselves:

MUSLIMS ONLY

The other lane led to an exit ramp for non-Muslims. This made me sick to my stomach. For me, gaining entry into the Buddhist and Hindu pilgrimages had allowed me to understand—and appreciate—these two religions that otherwise would have remained mysterious to me. On those pilgrimages, I watched faith unfold before me in rituals, prostrations, and prayers that were strange to me. I heard the call to prayer in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Hindi. I saw the devoted surrender themselves to a higher being with the hope of somehow improving their station on earth. I wouldn't accept having Rome, Jerusalem, or Allahabad, India, closed to me. I didn't believe in closing the doors of any community to others.

Mecca hasn't always been closed. For hundreds of years people of all tribes wove their caravans into the desert city of Mecca, sitting at a crossroads between the Western empire and the riches of the East. Mecca was a religious center at the time, and thousands of pilgrims each year would pay homage to hundreds of gods and goddesses enshrined in the giant black structure called the Ka'bah. To me, it wasn't wise to close Mecca to non-Muslims. We could only benefit by opening the doors of our Muslim communities to others, in the spirit of tolerance that we wanted others to show our community.

The Saudi economy had relied on foreign workers since the earliest days of the country's existence. U.S. oil companies led economic development in the country. And especially during the oil boom years of the 1970s and early 1980s, the state had used oil revenues to fund big development projects designed by foreign contractors, employing huge foreign
workforces. There are fewer foreign workers today than during that period, but according to estimates, there are still more than 5 million expatriate workers in a country with a population of 24 million. Saudi Arabia's population is so young—45 percent are under the age of fifteen—that foreign workers are estimated to account for more than half of the total workforce. The economy relies on these workers, but the non-Muslim among them aren't allowed to step into the sacred space. Clearly, you can't be a non-Muslim Ikea delivery man entering Mecca.

It is the Wahhabi extremists like Osama bin Laden who want the doors to Islam's holiest places shut; one of his protests, after all, is that U.S. troops are stationed in the holy land of Islam. It seems to me the House of Saud would do Muslims a favor by opening the sacred city of Mecca to those who don't practice Islam.

I stared ahead at the exit ramp. Part of me wanted to escape. I felt a conflict in the fact that Saudi Arabia opened its borders to Ikea, foreign workers, and Western products but closed the doors of its holiest city. The Saudis had absorbed so many aspects of modernity, but their prejudices remained unchanged. I continued, however, on the road into Mecca. I felt there was no exit open to me.