Standing Alone (8 page)

MECCA
—We crossed into that place where most of the world's population cannot enter. We passed the sign that marked our entry into this sacred zone.
HARAM
BOUNDARY
, it read.

For me,
haram
, which means “forbidden,” has a negative connotation. It's used to characterize all actions that aren't considered Islamic. I found out later that a linguistically related word, pronounced
harram
, means “sacred” or “noble” in Arabic. I found that curious. But to me this place might as well have been called “forbidden.” Most of my friends could never have come there. With a slightly different pronunciation, “sacred” becomes “sanctuary.” We were headed into a space of the world called Haram Sharif, a “noble sanctuary.”

Mecca sits in a narrow, sandy valley called the Valley of Abraham for the prophet of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The land is mostly barren with a rugged, rocky terrain and mountain ranges on the west, south, and east. It sits just 909 feet above sea level. The first thing I spotted as we crossed into this sacred space was a billboard for the exclusive French
hotel chain the Sofitel. “
Mubarak
,” I said to my mother, using the Arabic phrase—“May Allah bless you”—meant to communicate congratulations in my native India. “You made it to Mecca!” After
salaam
, the Muslim greeting of peace,
mubarak
was the only other insider Muslim language that I used, and slightly tongue-in-cheek at that. Arabic isn't my language, and I don't subscribe to the logic of those who want to declare Arabic the language of all Muslims. Many Muslims think Arabic is the language of God. We memorize the Qur'an in Arabic, as I did as a child, to internalize the word of God. I have often seen proficiency in Arabic used as a litmus test for how Muslim a person can claim to be. I inherited my own linguistic sensibility from my mother, who came from a literary family of poets and writers of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. She didn't accept the inferiority complex that some people attach to a lack of fluency in Arabic.

On the road, an exit for the Inter-Continental Hotel veered off the highway. Acres of buildings loomed ahead of us, set on rocky hills, and the early afternoon sun was high in the sky. Sitting in the row in front of me, my father sighed with joy. “It's Mecca!”

We passed men scurrying along on the sidewalks. I didn't see one woman among them. We passed a billboard for Rado watches and an advertisement for Toshiba computers. Sprinklers shot water into the air on the side of the road. We hit a business district with storefronts advertising Sealy mattresses, Pepsi, and Farnas Rent-A-Car. I had so wondered what it would feel like to enter Mecca. It felt quite familiar. I could have been entering any other urban capital of the world. It was a mix of traditional ways and Western trappings. The manifestations of the modern economy were new creations. The shade of the trees and the stir of their leaves were the constants in life.

I spotted the first woman I'd seen on the streets. She was cloaked in black, her face crinkled. A store called Neha Optical advertised tinted contact lenses; behind the scenes, it seemed, vanity was universal. We passed a band of African pilgrims. They looked so regal and beautiful. One woman balanced a folded prayer rug on her head. We entered a tunnel that reminded me of the Holland Tunnel, which I'd taken as a child from New Jersey into Manhattan, only this entryway into Mecca had sidewalks for foot traffic.

Mecca was a plethora of sights as we emerged from the tunnel to busy streets with endless strips of stores and streams of pilgrims. A lone woman stepped down the steps leaving Sons of Saleh Musa Money Exchangers, which ran the lucrative business of exchanging foreign currencies for the
local currency, riyal. She was a curiosity to me, someone to wonder about as I tried to understand how women lived their lives in this country.

The back of a bus carried a sign urging pilgrims to avoid the type of tragedy that ripped through tent colonies when lit cigarettes caused fires:
TOGETHER
.
HAJJ WITHOUT TOBACCO
. Vendors spilled onto the sidewalks, taking most of the space away from pedestrians. Gender dynamics were fascinating to watch here. A woman pilgrim held the strap of a man's shoulder bag, not daring to hold his hand. Couples rarely hold hands in Saudi Arabia and other traditional Muslim cultures. Even in America, I never saw my parents hold hands. They lived by the rules their parents had taught them for appropriate behavior between a man and a woman: no public displays of affection. We turned down a crowded, narrow street when I spotted an unexpected sign.

“House of Donuts!” I shouted. Next to the donut sign looming in front of us I saw a touchstone of my life in America, a familiar red-and-white-striped sign. “Kentucky Fried Chicken!” I exclaimed as my niece and nephew turned to look. “But where is Colonel Sanders?” Colonel Sanders is nowhere to be seen in Mecca. His goatee makes him acceptable in this land where wearing a beard is considered a signal of piety because the prophet Muhammad had a beard. But, strictly speaking, photography is illegal in Saudi Arabia. Creation is an act accorded only to God.

Just then we pulled in front of glimmering glass doors that led into the fourteen-story Sheraton Makkah Hotel and Towers, towering above the street. As we stepped into the gleaming marble lobby of the Sheraton and ascended from the elevator into the reception area, I saw that in the land of Saud there seemed to be an exception to every rule for those in positions of privilege. I looked up to see three larger-than-life images of the king and two princes of the House of Saud. To give a nod to the rule, the royalty didn't stare directly into the camera. It's a fundamentalist Muslim Kodak thing. The Taliban banned photography in Afghanistan, but even there leaders would get photographed, avoiding the camera's eye. I'd noticed that al-Qaeda upholds this practice, though Osama bin Laden often gives the camera the straight eye.

We went upstairs to our home base for this leg of our pilgrimage, room 708. It was an ordinary hotel room with two double beds and a TV, just like one of the many hotel rooms I'd stayed in on reporting trips from Long Island, New York, to Los Angeles, California. There was one notable difference, however: an arrow on the ceiling marked
qiblah
for the one direction in which we were supposed to keep ourselves focused, the Ka'bah.

The Kingdom of God is within you.

MECCA
—Past midnight, my father, my nephew, Shibli, and I slipped out of room 708 of the Mecca Sheraton with great anticipation. My niece wasn't feeling well, and my mother stayed behind with her, caretaking again. It was as my mother predicted. We were in Mecca, and she was in a hotel.

We were about to go into the most sacred of places—the Masjid al Haram, or “the Sacred Mosque,” in which sat the Holy Grail of Islam—the Ka'bah. The Qur'an established it as a house of God. “Remember We made the House a place of assembly for men and a place of safety.” Just to be particularly safe, we were going in the middle of the night to avoid the crowds that swarm the Ka'bah by day.

I was wearing layers of loose clothing for the required modesty. Underneath, I wore a long white polyester chemise my mother had bought at the Jeddah airport in one of the many stalls set up by entrepreneurs cashing in on pilgrims who didn't pack quite enough slippers, head scarves, or prayer rugs. Over that I wore a long white skirt my mother had bought at Kassar's, a grocery store and restaurant run by a kind Syrian family in Morgantown. On top I wore a kurta, a pink shirt from my mother's boutique on High Street in Morgantown; popular in the 1970s among hippies, this one was a new-millennium reintroduction at the Gap, with short slits on the seams that made it fit generously over my butt and hips. As a first layer on my head, I wore a tight scarf like the tube tops in fashion in the 1970s in America—only I used this one to keep strands of hair, not breasts, in place. Over that, and draping over me from my shoulders to my bottom, I wore a flowing white head scarf; it was the most convenient hijab I'd ever worn. In the middle it had a hole that I slipped over my face. It was just small enough to catch my chin and forehead in a very snug fit around my face. Atop my heart, my baby Shibli rested in his Baby Bjorn.

I had only seen images of the Ka'bah, embroidered, painted, stenciled, and replicated in every imaginable form. Physically the Ka'bah is an ordinary cube-shaped building, the size of a house, but it's a powerful symbol in Islam. It is the figurative house of God. We aren't supposed to worship the Ka'bah, but to focus on it.

On our way to stand before it, we stopped in the lobby for our group to
assemble. Our guide was a young, unassuming man by the name of Sheikh Muhammad Alshareef. Born in 1975, he grew up in Canada and connected easily with all of us, whatever our generation. He reached my father with quotations from the Qur'an, chatted with Samir about Play Station 2, and won me over by leading us through stretching exercises like the kind I'd learned from 1970s marathon champion Bill Rodgers in old issues of
Runner's World
. Our sheikh had a serious air that offset his youth. He had graduated with a degree in Islamic law from the Islamic University of Madinah (as it's spelled there) in the class of 1999. He was the image of a pious Muslim with a full beard and gentle voice.

I pronounced the Arabic
sheikh
like the English word “shake,” and I couldn't resist a pun. “It's Shake-and-Bake,” I murmured to my nephew, not to be disrespectful but because the concept of a sheikh was so inaccessible to my irreverent American mind. A sheikh in Islam is sort of like a CEO in corporate America: instead of an MBA, a sheikh has a degree from an Islamic university or an Islamic scholar. It's an artful term for the leader of a group. Sheikh Alshareef passed out snappy business cards that identified him as executive director of AlMaghrib Institute, which ran classes on Islam accredited by places like al-Azhar University, a preeminent university in the Islamic world.

We eased outside. Even though it was late, the street was lit up with open storefronts. The House of Donuts was open. We slipped into a gentle wave of pilgrims streaming in one direction—to the Ka'bah. There was a calm buzz in the air as hundreds of other pilgrims walked with us to the Ka'bah. We passed the Kentucky Fried Chicken. As we walked we were supposed to chant a prayer called the
talbiya
to respond to God's call to us.

It reminded me of the chant of a Hindu man whom I followed to a temple dedicated to a goddess in a corner of India. “Shakti Ma,” he kept calling, beckoning the feminine goddess energy known as Shakti and associating it with
ma
, or “mother.” It reminded me of the mantra, or the
chant, of Buddhist monks as they circumambulated a special shrine in the city of Sarnath, outside Benares, India.

Like those faithful, we were supposed to utter the prayer with a sincere heart. All around me, my ear snatched utterances of the phrase, some loud, some quiet. I said the words and kept stumbling at “La shareeka laka. Labayk.” (No partner do you have. Here I come.) It was like a tongue twister, but I kept repeating the spirit of the prayer to myself in my heart: “Here I come. At Your service, oh Lord.” I wondered what my service would be. I didn't consider myself particularly extraordinary, but I felt as if I was destined to make a difference in this world. I just didn't know how.

As we pressed through the crowds, we repeated the call of pilgrims from time immemorial. Venturing to the Ka'bah for the first time, as we walked in the footsteps of those pilgrims who'd come before, was like a mysterious adventure. The desert air was cool, and the crowds thin but present. To make sure I didn't lose my nephew Samir, I tied a white cotton cummerbund between my wrist and his. As the road came to an end, the Sacred Mosque loomed in front of us like a religious albatross. I stared at it glittering against the night sky and couldn't help but feel like I was entering Disney World. We entered through a gate that I tried to squeeze through unscathed in the crowd.

When my father did the umrah in 1967, he entered through a humble main gate over a sand floor. The present haram dated back to 1570. It formed a central quadrangle surrounded by stone walls. But the mosque was nothing like it used to be. The hand of the wealthy Saud family had transformed even the physical experience of Hajj. In 1988 King Fahad Bin Abdulaziz started “the project of the second Saudi expansion” of the mosque in Mecca; this was the multibillion-dollar project awarded to the bin Laden family. Sure enough, the gate my father had once known had been replaced with a regal entryway called King Fahad, with minarets that reached almost 300 feet into the sky. The sand had been covered by marble tile. (My father would have preferred the sand.) The Saudis opened a three-story building to make up a side of the new mosque. The area of the mosque had been increased to 88 acres, including a rooftop prayer area—almost five times the area of the White House grounds and almost as large as the Vatican. Its capacity was increased from 410,000 pilgrims to 733,000, about ten times the number of football fans who squeeze into the Louisiana Superdome for the Super Bowl. The expansion added 56 escalators and 13 stairwells to the mosque. There were 1,091 places to do wudu, the ritual washing that precedes prayer.

A series of gates, shorter but just as regal as the big gate, encircled the mosque. We entered through one of those gates, stepping into the wide expanse of a marble plaza that surrounded the mosque like a perimeter of wealth. It was crowded but not suffocating on this marble pavement, called El Mataf. My father was beside Samir, Shibli, and me. Just as in a documentary I once watched, tracking the dance of people, men and women walked freely here, politely keeping some distance from each other and avoiding collisions. I was surprised at the freedom here. I could have been approaching the steps of the New York Public Library. I felt no inhibitions or restrictions as a woman approaching this daunting creation.

We slipped our sandals off and put them into plastic bags that Sheikh Alshareef had told us to bring to keep from misplacing them. We proceeded freely up a dozen steps to the doors that led into the actual mosque. As our sheikh led the way, I followed him. There was no women's entrance, as in the King Faisal mosque I'd entered in Islamabad, Pakistan, or my mosque back in Morgantown. There was no distinction of space separating men and women. We were one and the same here. It felt so liberating.

The Ka'bah sat inside a courtyard beyond the prayer halls that lined the inside of the mosque. A friend had told me that gliding through the passageways of the Sacred Mosque and emerging into the courtyard where the Ka'bah sits would be like going through the birth canal into the world. Around us in the massive inner halls, men and women moved in the different postures unique to prayer in Islam. Some were standing. Some were prostrating. Some were sitting. They were images of faith. As we walked my father recalled a story of devotion. There was a companion of the prophet, he told us, who had an arrow shot into his back during battle. As a reflection of the intense focus with which he prayed, he is said to have told his friends: “Take the arrow out while I am praying.”

We continued through the massive halls. I sensed the light from the courtyard and started looking down at my feet. A physician in Islamabad told me that God will realize any prayer said at the precise moment that a pilgrim sees the Ka'bah for the first time. This physician was explaining her own spiritual path to me. I thought about her and the path of faith, surrender, and hope that brought devotees to Mecca. I had met her trying to get into Afghanistan. “When I looked at the Ka'bah,” she told me as we zipped around Islamabad, “I asked Allah to make me a good Muslim.” “You are either a Muslim or you are a
mu'min
,” the physician said as she nosed her four-door car through the streets of Islamabad's upper-class neighborhoods. A mu'min is someone who is faithful. “My prayer came
true. I became a mu'min.” I didn't believe, however, in such hierarchical distinctions in people's faith.

In Mecca the moment arrived for me to see the Ka'bah for the first time. I was nervous. I was scared. I was excited. I was also cynical. Slowly, I opened my eyes and lifted them. I stepped into the light of the courtyard a little hopeful but so skeptical I couldn't take the pressure of a wish upon first sight. “The Ka'bah,” I whispered to Shibli, whose young eyes focused on this place where history and faith intersected. Having safely brought my son here, I felt triumphant. I had heard stories of people weeping when they saw the Ka'bah, overwhelmed by the emotion of standing before this sacred image in Islam. I didn't see anyone outright weeping, but I saw the crowd getting worked up into a frenzy circling the square black box. For many people, it's a symbolic climax to their religious practice.

This building represented the first prophet Adam's connection to God, and thus our connection to God. It's said that after exiling Adam and Eve from paradise, God told Adam to build a shrine similar to one in the heavens known as Bait-ul-Ma'mur, the house in the seven heavens, where Islamic tradition says that seventy thousand angels circumambulate and worship Allah 24/7. The site chosen for the shrine on earth was Mecca. Adam built the building we now know as the Ka'bah. The story called it the first building on earth. The Qur'an says that Adam built the Ka'bah with the help of an angel, Jibril, who appears in the Old Testament and New Testament of Judaism and Christianity as Gabriel, a heavenly messenger of God's will. In Islam, Jibril brought a stone from paradise and embedded it in the eastern corner of the shrine. Other history says this stone was a meteorite. The stone was bright in the beginning, but with time it lost its luster and is now called Al-Hajar al-Aswad, “the Black Stone.” When Adam finished building the house, the angel Jibril taught him the ceremonies of circumambulating the Ka'bah. It's said that the floods at the time of Noah destroyed the Ka'bah and only the black rock from heaven survived. Later, the prophet Abraham was dispatched to rebuild the Ka'bah.

Centuries later the job of rebuilding the Ka'bah was, ironically, passed on to the bin Laden family construction enterprise, and that political reality interfered with my surrender to the moment. Instead, what impressed me was the diversity I saw. There were people from all over the world in front of us. I heard the hum of different languages and absorbed the shades of different skin colors.

Most Muslims, like myself, spend their lifetime gazing at the image of the Ka'bah until they finally stand before it in reality. There is a funny tension between accepting the familiar in our lives and challenging ourselves
with the unfamiliar. I tried to stretch my mind around the idea of this structure as a manifestation of the divine. For me, however, it was an anticlimactic moment. The Ka'bah itself wasn't attractive. Most of us are looking for symbols of God that bring us a sense of spiritual completion. Some of us in Islam find it at places like the Ka'bah. I didn't. What the Ka'bah said to me was that I was still searching. I even forgot to make a wish.

We dove into the sea of humanity around the Ka'bah and started our first circumambulation facing the black stone. We hadn't even started the actual hajj. Sort of like a practice round, we were doing umrah. It replicated the rituals in Mecca that we did on the hajj. We had to walk seven times around the Ka'bah—a ritual called
tawaf
, or “encircling”—reciting the call of pilgrims. Our circumambulations are supposed to reflect how our lives revolved around God.