NanoStrike (5 page)

As he walked, he began to recite the prayers that had filled his mind since he woke. Imam Ali had said: “A haji speaks his prayers to Allah not in a quiet murmur, but as he would to a friend who takes tea with him.”

“
Bism Allah,
Allahu Akba
(In the name of God, God is Great) . . .
Allahu Akbar
,
Allahu Akbar
(God is Great, God is Great) . . .
wa lil Lahi Alhamd
(and praise be to God).”

Like spokes of a great wheel, his line and dozens more crept toward the principal mass of pilgrims, tens of thousands, who were performing their Tawaf—walking seven times, counterclockwise around the Ka’ba.

After passing through a gate in the outer wall of the huge open mosque, David shuffled another two-hundred feet, and finally joined the circling crowd.

He moved with the crowd until, as though someone yanked an invisible string attached to the center of his brow, his head turned toward the Ka’ba, three-hundred feet away across a sea of bodies. Forty feet wide, fifty long, and fifty high, the looming black building appeared far larger to him.

A clump of pilgrims gathered at the east corner of the Ka’ba. For a fraction of a second, a space cleared between their heads, and sunlight glinted from the polished setting of the Black Stone.

The Black Stone, a dark, reflective pupil the size of a man’s head, set in a four-foot-high vertical silver eye.

The Black Stone, sent from heaven to fall at Adam’s feet.

The Black Stone, which reminded every Muslim there was but one God and none before him.

David marked his location relative to the Stone. He pulled his Ihram off his head and slid the right half of the garment down, baring his shoulder. The first of seven circuits of the Ka’ba began from that point. Shuffling through the rotations, David would edge toward the center, never pushing, moving with patience and respect. With Allah’s blessing and help, he would kiss the Black Stone before his Tawaf was complete.

After each circuit, when he returned to the position where he had begun his Tawaf, he raised his right hand, pointed to the Stone and chanted his prayer to Allah’s greatness.

As he edged nearer to his goal, the rectangular building towered over him. Black curtains draped the walls; embroidered on them in spun gold were the words of the Shahada:
There
is
no
God
but
God
,
and
Muhammad
is
the
messenger
of
God
.
The purity and truth of the words burned hot in his mind.

When he pointed to the stone for a sixth time and began his final circuit, still sixty feet from the Ka’ba, the crowds were dense, but it seemed to David that a way was made for him. Spaces opened, and as he rounded the south face, his fingers touched the wall of the sacred building.

Ahead, a crush of bodies surrounded the eastern corner. He slowed his pace, taking space as allowed by other pilgrims as they completed their Tawaf and moved to their next rite. His prayers were loud. They filled his mind with the power of their meaning, their strength reinforced by prayer echoes from those around him. Finally, he placed his hand on the warm silver of the Black Stone’s setting, the undulating rhythm of prayers vibrated through the metal.

Then the grasping crowds faded, and he glided, untouched, toward the Stone. Leaning forward, he laid his lips where millions of Muslims had before him. Like Muhammad himself, he kissed the Black Stone. Immediately, he was swept away, his place taken by scores of pilgrims, straining and pushing to touch its smooth surface.

It had not been so for David.

Allah had cleared a way for him.

Of this, he was sure.

He drifted in a trance, allowing the crowd to squeeze him outward, toward the less populated areas. After two more circuits, he broke from the throng, found a space, and faced Muqaam Ibrahim—The Place of Abraham—the direction indicated by high green beacons mounted on towers. He opened his prayer mat, prostrated himself before Allah, and thanked him for the precious gift he had bestowed. The prayer chant was on his lips. It was in his mind. It resonated though his body. It consumed him.

His prayers complete, David entered the long air-conditioned tunnel connecting the hills of Safa and Marwah. In a transcendent daze, head high, prayers spilling from his heart, he moved alongside thousands of Muslim brothers and sisters who shared his journey.

At the well of Zamzam, he quenched his thirst with the same water Abraham’s wife, Hagar, had used to save the life of her son, Ismael. He drank five cups, each downed in three gulps. Sated, he filled a water bottle from the coolers provided—a gift for his father.

He walked seven times between the two hills to complete his Sa’i. When he left the tunnel, night had fallen, and he followed a tide of pilgrims to the permanent tent city at Mina. In a crowded marquee, he found a space on the ground, and made his last prayer before lying, exhausted, on the bare earth, to sleep.

David dreamed of the Black Stone. The silver eye appeared before him. He faced the stone with arms outstretched, and a dazzling golden light ushered forth. Its rays bathed his body and warmed him like the sun. The light beam held him fast. It began to lift, and he rose with it until he floated high above the East corner of the Ka’ba. He looked down on the moving mass of white-clad pilgrims circling the holy building. David observed their Tawafs from above, as Allah must see them.

The next morning, he rose early, took food and water, then began his prayers. All day he chanted aloud the hypnotic verses from his Koran. The familiar words carried more meaning spoken in this holy place. That night, he again dreamed of the Black Stone. Its golden light elevated him so that he floated over the pilgrims as they flowed like cream around the Ka’ba.

When he woke on the morning of the third day, it was still dark. After sunrise, he joined a snaking line of pilgrims on the fifteen-mile trek across the plain of Arafat to Wuquf: the hill of forgiveness, the keystone of the Hajj.

By late afternoon, David reached Mount Arafat. For the final few miles of the journey, his eyes had locked on the white marble obelisk that crowned the hill. An inner voice told him to climb and pray at its base.

A crowd, thirty deep, clustered around the stone pillar. He stood as close as possible and read from his Koran. The day waned, and worshippers moved and changed positions. When it was polite to do so, he edged closer until, as the sun’s light was setting, he changed places one final time.

David faced the white pillar. The stone marked the place where the Prophet Muhammad had given his last sermon. David lowered his hands and spread them slightly from his sides, palms facing the obelisk, mimicking the stance from his dreams of the Black Stone. He braced his legs and swayed in time to his prayers. Forward and back, his arc of movement increased until his brow touched the smooth, warm marble.

His motion stopped.

The stone held his head as a magnet holds metal.

Passages from the holy book, passages he had never before spoken, ushered from his lips. He opened his eyes, inches from the stone, and a golden light, the light from his dreams, dazzled him to sightlessness.

The stone released him. He straightened and turned. The golden beam warmed his back. When he regained his vision, David saw the land as it had been in the time of Abraham—bare rock, sand, and boulders. The hill of Wufur and the plain beyond were barren and empty of people.

David began to preach. His voice projected in a rhythmic rise and fall as he chanted the words of the Koran: the sacred words given by Allah and transcribed by his prophet Muhammad. He sang as a muezzin, his voice vibrating as the words of Allah poured forth from his heart.

Time passed. The heat from the obelisk diminished, and the force of his prayers lessened until at last they became a whisper. The golden light extinguished, and he fell silent.

Weary, like a water skin drained of its liquid, David slid his back down the stone until he sat. His eyes closed, shutting out the empty desert. A deep, dreamless sleep took him.

David woke with a start. A man in a white Ihram, his face inches away, poked David’s arm.

“Al-Mahdi?” he asked.

Confused and displaced by the spiritual enlightenment he had undergone, David blinked to clear his eyes. The hill was again crammed with bodies. A few hundred pilgrims clustered in a semicircle at his feet.

“Al-Mahdi?” He heard it spoken in whispers among the crowd. A hushed reverence filled the air.

The man who had woken him spoke again, in English. “Are you the Mahdi? Are you the Messiah?”

David looked at the gathered people. The murmured sounds of the Koran being read aloud had ceased. A waiting silence hung over the group. All eyes turned to him.

“I am Dawud,” he said. Then, “
Bism Allah Allahu Akbar
.”

Those sitting close spoke the words back to him.

Again he spoke, but louder. “
Allahu Akbar
,
Allahu Akbar
.”

Voices from below him on the hill echoed his phrases and David completed the prayer, “
wa lil Lahi Alhamd
.” The prayer chant spread beyond the group at David’s feet. More and more took it up until ten thousand raised voices pledged, as one, their love for Allah.

The faces of the pilgrims were lit with joy from the epiphany they had shared at Mount Arafat.

David, for the first time, saw a clear path ahead. The mist had lifted. Allah had guided Imam Ali, and through that guidance, his father had moved the family to Ohio. That move had enabled David to study, to excel in science, and finally, to create nanobots—a technological breakthrough. He thought of the meeting Imam Ali had arranged with a stranger. Allah had planned this meeting, so David could help this man.
And the son shall complete the work of his father.

There, on the hill of forgiveness, David pledged obedience to Allah. From this point forward, Allah alone would guide David’s path in life. With a huge weight lifted from his shoulders, he began the march back to Mina.

A haji hurried alongside, matching steps with him. “Dawud?”

He recognized one of the pilgrims who had traveled with him from Jeddah. David could not bring himself to speak. He had forgotten how to converse. For three days, he had spoken only to Allah. He nodded to the man.

“Dawud, in America, are you an Imam?”

The question confused him. He shook his head.

“Then how did you learn to recite the Koran as you did on the Mount?”

With difficulty, David formed words and spoke. “I . . . I read from the holy book each day.”

“But you spoke from the heart. You preached for an hour. Even Imam Ali cannot move me as you did.”

“
Allahu Akbar
,” David said.

“
Allahu Akbar
,” the pilgrim replied.

Chapter 6

The bus dropped David and the other hajis at the mosque in Jeddah late in the evening of the sixth day. The men hugged as they parted, no longer strangers, now Muslim brothers. When the hajis dispersed to their homes, David remained. The Ihram, so revealing and thin when he boarded the bus before the Hajj, was now a second skin. A warm breeze brushed over his bald pate, shaved clean on the fourth day. He stared at the open doors of Imam Ali’s mosque and felt the weight of the moment.

Finally, he climbed the marble steps, removed his sandals, and, with back straight and head high, walked with purpose across the empty prayer space, conscious of the air flowing past his face as he moved.

He knocked on the office door. When he saw Imam Ali, David began to cry. Not with childlike tears of sadness, but from a welling of powerful emotions that spilled down his cheeks. The Imam opened his arms and enfolded him as a father would a long-lost son.

“I see on your face that you have accepted Allah as your one God.”

David nodded, his head buried in the Imam’s robes.

“I heard of your revelation at Mount Arafat. I called your father and told him how Allah had touched your spirit.”

“I saw a golden light.”

“You are blessed, Dawud, but with this blessing comes great responsibility.”

David pulled back and wiped his face with the loose end of his Ihram. “Allah has shown me my path. I ask your help in attaining it.”

Ali placed a hand on David’s shoulder. “I promised your father I would aid you as if you were my own son.”

David looked Ali full in the face and spoke in the strong, confident voice gained on his Hajj. “I wish to become an Imam.”

“Dawud, at Mount Arafat you led the prayers as only an Imam could.”

David smiled at the truth in Ali’s words. “Imam, before my Hajj, you spoke of a meeting. Allah has commanded me to help this man.”

Ali nodded. “He comes tomorrow. But in this thing, I am like Yahya—I opened the way, and I can guide you, but Allah calls to you alone, Dawud. Now come, eat, then you must rest. The Hajj takes a physical toll. Allah needs his servant to be strong.”

That night, David slept peacefully on a mat in the conference room.

The next day, he folded the Ihram in his suitcase, showered, and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clothes felt strange, false.

He walked through the prayer hall and knocked on the Imam’s door.

“Come!”

Imam Ali sat at a small table beside a large man dressed in black shirt and jeans. The stranger stood and offered his hand. The man’s neck was thick, like a bull. A scar, red and angry, distorted the left side of his face. Rough laborer’s hands delivered a powerful grip that crushed David’s fingers.

“Dawud, this is Imam Ghazi.”

Ghazi bowed. “Dawud-bin-Hussein-bin-Ferran, it is an honor. Imam Ali told me of your Hajj,
Allahu Akbar
.” The man’s voice was deep and resonant.

“
Allahu Akbar
.” David met the stranger’s gaze. “Allah commands that we meet. I am yours to instruct.”