Something even more urgent and personal was at stake. I had felt like a sinner for years because I thought I had “killed” my mother with the shame of my sexuality. This pilgrimage would be in her honor. Maybe she (and I) could find a place of forgiveness in Mecca? It would also be a way for me to silence my Muslim critics who called me an infidel. A Jihad for Love was about my coming out to the world as a proud homosexual. This pilgrimage would be about my coming out as a prouder Muslim. But I was always a troublemaker and thus the pilgrimage was timed perfectly, a few months after the Arab Spring and bin Laden’s death. I was walking into the jaws of danger defiantly and willingly again. This penchant for real, raw menace has always been part of who I am. The Saudis rightfully were terrified of their populace’s catching the revolution bug. I intended to be right there if it happened. Hajj after all brought millions together.
But first, there were a few things that needed attending to.
My lawyer said Keith and my getting married would be a good idea. The possibility of being “found out” in Saudi Arabia was real and the consequences unimaginable. We knew the Indian embassy would do nothing to protect me. She said a marriage and the “alien with extraordinary abilities” green card might help get the attention of the US consulate in Jeddah, in case anything happened. In a backhanded way, I was obeying Islam’s recommendation to be married before going on the Hajj. I would “fulfill all worldly obligations.”
Keith and I were able to tie the knot in Manhattan’s City Hall on the historic first day that it was legal. We approached marriage with a blasé attitude. A reporter who knew me approached. After he agreed to keep us anonymous, both Keith and I told him, “We are doing it just for taxes!” He did use the quote. I was paranoid. I was slowly creeping back into the closet. My Saudi visa was still in process and I had to be careful not to be photographed or mentioned as a gay Muslim this or that. My sins, my crimes were a mere Google search away.
On my wedding day I carried my decades-old Quran with my mother’s passport photo inside. This day was the polar opposite of the bacchanalia of Gay Pride. The latter was all about big penises, bubble butts, six packs, and corporate sponsorships. This day was about commitment, wholesomeness, love, and history.
I proudly showed Keith my mother’s photo inside the Quran.
“She wouldn’t have approved, you know,” he said, “and neither would this book.”
“It’s not just a book,” I said tersely.
He put his arm around my shoulder. “I know. But I’ll never understand your need for it.”
We kissed for the first time in public. We’d been together for eight years, and it was my first PDA. I felt safe. And I felt loved.
I now knew where home would forever be. It was wherever Keith was.
But a pre-Hajj obligation evoked terror.
The platform of the 125th Street station on the 1 train is one of my favorite places in Manhattan. It is above ground, and in winter, as the snow softly falls, I sometimes get off there for no reason at all. The snow creates an effect such that the surrounding apartments seem to float in the air and almost touch the platform. Through the windows, warm young Columbia University undergrads are unaware that I can stare at them staring at their laptops.
But that’s winter. I was headed downtown on a super-hot August 2011 morning to obediently submit myself to Islam in the harshest manner possible. I had carefully planned the date to coincide with Eid.
New York was the fabled Mecca of freedom. Her trains roared underground through the world’s greatest example of diversity. Their routes marked a geography, which often on ground level easily changed into different realities, even nations. On the subway, just like Muhammad’s Ummah, everyone was equal.
On the downtown 1, the spectacle of New York was always visible. Sometimes there would be perfect parents bringing their perfect children to and from school. They had fulfilled their mandated roles. Ordinary people, whose children would be their only legacies. Would they leave a mark on history or would it be people like me, I thought arrogantly.
As the Quran droned in my headphones, I sneaked a few longing stares at the white boys who had just boarded exposing their youthful, superior skin color, in thrall of the last days of summer. Were they unaware of their youthful beauty?
At the end of every day I sat and Islamicized my new iPhone. It was coming with me as my primary hope and tool for filming with some ease. Sadly, the screensaver picture of Keith had already been replaced (though I did keep several in my photos app) by the green (Islam’s color) Saudi flag—sword, testament, and all. Why would this nation choose to put an instrument of absolute violence on its primary national symbol? Allegedly it was visual evidence of how strictly the country enforced Wahhabi sharia. To be safe, my iPhone’s playlist was fast filling with recitations of various Quranic Surahs instead of hip-hop that used the C- and D-words.
As I turned my worldly possessions halal, I was constantly aware that Islam’s scalpel of disciplining sexuality had missed me by a hair’s breadth when I was a child. I was spared the blade owing to some “medical problems” that remain unexplained. My research terrorized me. Google reliably threw up strangeness. One website claimed the Prophet had said, “Prophet Ibrahim circumcised himself at the age of eighty, using a hatchet.” And then there was a more obscure Sunni hadith that says that one should not pray for a dead Muslim who is uncircumcised.
As a Sunni, my decision to go on Hajj with Shias instead was unusual. For the Wahhabis, the Shia are worse than Islam’s bastard children—infidels, as much as I was, but for different reasons. The hatred is mutual. But even they, my fellow infidels, agreed with their Sunni oppressors on this one thing: The uncircumcised Muslim male was damned. Thus, the religious opinion that terrorized my soul the most came via Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s highest Shia authority. The year before my Hajj he had allegedly pronounced the death penalty for all gays in US-occupied Iraq, leading to a pogrom that lasted for years. And unfortunately I had publicly dared to investigate and write about the ayatollah’s call for the killing of gay men.
About circumcision, this ayatollah opined: “If an uncircumcised pilgrim in ihram, be he adult or discerning child, performs a tawaf, it is invalid. Unless he repeats it, after being circumcised, he will, as a matter of precaution, be regarded as a person who has abandoned tawaf.” The tawaf is the obligatory counterclockwise circumambulation of the Kaaba, performed several times during Hajj. For my fellow Shia pilgrims, al-Sistani’s word is usually like God’s word. It is al-Sistani who is also credited with a famous fatwa about depicting Muhammad:
“If due deference and respect is observed, and the scene does not contain anything that would detract from their holy pictures in the minds [of the viewers], there is no problem.” No Sunni would dare say this.
An uncut penis could be a dangerous thing in the small Indian town I grew up in. The fractures of intolerance rarely surfaced amongst the Hindu and Muslim communities coexisting mostly peaceably as they had for generations. But once there were riots. During this mayhem, we barricaded ourselves. The adults whispered about how the mobs of either religion identified whom to kill. My grandfather was staying with us during one period of these clashes, brought on by a Hindu mob that had dumped the carcass of a pig in a mosque. The Muslims retaliated by slaughtering a cow outside a temple. My grandfather had lived through the death trains of India and Pakistan’s partition. He recounted how his two best friends were stripped, genitally identified as Muslim, and hacked to death. I hid to hear this whispered adults-only story.
As the train screeched to a halt at the 86th Street station, I was rudely reminded of the purpose of my journey. A fully veiled woman boarded the train with her festively dressed little girl. It was Eid, after all. I got up immediately to offer them a seat. I would never know if she smiled in gratitude; there was no face to be seen. But the mind of a sinner always wanders. As the imam musically intoned the Quran in my headphones, I stared sexually at yet another cute
hipster boy.
My urologist, Dr. Stein, said I was a “brave man.” In that moment of trauma, as he began the procedure, I felt safe telling him what I had told no one but Keith. During my pilgrimage, I would be wearing the ihram, two seamless pieces of white cloth with no underwear. In my many nightmares, my ihram would fall off in Mecca, subjecting unsuspecting pilgrims to my un-Muslim penis.
Dr. Stein laughed and said, “The two Valium and Percocet you took should be kicking in now. Does this hurt?” as he jabbed at what must have been my penis. I yelped in pain. But soon I seemed to be in some kind of waking dream.
In Arabic, the word Islam means “submission.” For its obedient followers, this is a religion of meticulous discipline. Osama bin Laden’s jihadis feel superior to all other Muslims in their belief that only they know how to live by the harshest strictures of our religion. A distant uncle in my family refused to even swallow his own saliva during Ramadan. He used to lecture us as children, “We are superior to all other people.”
This uncle was the only unmarried adult relative I knew, and now I wonder if his doctrinal adherence to some of Islam’s harshest strictures masked the shame of his own sexuality, which I imagine he never acted upon. The morality of sex is tightly controlled in Islam, as in all patriarchies, and women’s bodies are primary targets. But penises and male dress (modest—no sleeves rolled up) are also technically controlled. I was leaving for the holy land as a fearful pilgrim. If my sexuality was my primary sin, then surely its most visible marker was my penis, which I had failed to discipline. This, perhaps, was my chance to undo some of the sin that marked my penis, by irreversibly altering it.
“You have a new penis, Parvez,” said Dr. Stein. “This looks perfect. But you don’t have to see it quite yet.”
I was taking all of the dissonance of my twenty-first-century life into an almost seventh-century Saudi Arabia. Siri and my new penis were coming along. All that remained on my i (for Islamic) Phone was a hidden picture of Keith.
“It will take eight weeks to look normal,” said Dr. Stein.
Friends said my circumcision proved I was “crazy” and they would never take such an irreversible, life-altering decision. I had no choice.
Now that my penis was halal, it was time to tackle the last few preparations for my journey to Mecca. Alcohol was out but sleepless nights Googling every possible Saudi atrocity were in. There needed to be a crash course of the vast Shia canon. One of my prophets, Steve Jobs, died a few days before I left, but he bestowed a final gift that would accompany me on my journey—the iPhone 4S. With it I would document my journey in the hopes that I could use the footage for a new documentary film. Tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia was ramping up over an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States. The day before I left, Muammar Gaddafi was assassinated. Everything seemed to be telling me to stay put.
I tried to remind myself of the purpose of my journey of the spirit. I assuaged my fears by reading famed Iranian scholar Ali Shariati’s famous rumination on the Hajj. The book, originally in Farsi, was simply called Hajj and translated into many languages. Shariati is considered the ideological father of the Iranian revolution and is one of the loudest progressive voices in recent Islamic history. In his book, he said:
Now take off your clothes. Leave them at Miqat. Wear the Kafan which consists of plain white material. You will be dressed like everyone else. See the uniformity appear! Be a particle and join the mass; as a drop, enter the ocean.
Shariati is also famed because he was one of the first Iranian scholars to view the Shia religion through a revolutionary lens, making him in a sense a “father” of the idea of a Shia political Islam. A revolutionary lens to view an entire religion? I held onto that. I was a revolutionary too and this Hajj was my jihad.
Years ago I had been introduced to Shariati’s work by a friend who left France for the UK to do a PhD at Oxford. I had always admired her. Rereading Shariati reminded me of Shahinaz. I emailed her about a possibility. Her response thrilled me.
CHAPTER 4
THE GARDEN OF PARADISE
Here a ninja
There a ninja
Everywhere a ninja ninja!
I hummed my made-up ditty in my head. I was surrounded by them. Ninjas. Not the combative kind, but the Saudi version. Some women on my flight were women no longer! Their Hajj gear—black sheaths covered every inch of their bodies. I understood that women in Saudi Arabia were commanded to cover their bodies, but why, oh, why, in the beating hot sun, were they forced to wear all black? Were these foreign women masochists, or did fear of retribution on Saudi soil compel them to suffer this way? The men looked comparatively comfortable in their civvies. They felt no need to change, at least not until they entered the area of Miqat (the many standing places outside Mecca where ihram needs to be worn) in Mecca. In addition, we were flying to Medina first. The Quran itself only called for modesty for clothing for both men and women. Nowhere in the book were there references to these tent-like black (or Taliban blue) sheaths, and this question of dress is subject to heated modern debate. Those who enforced the morality of the hijab quote from various parts of the Quran, like Ayah 59 of al-Azhab, Surah 33:
Oh prophet tell your wives and daughters,
And the women of the faithful,
To draw their wraps a little over them.
They will thus be recognized and no harm will come to them.
God is forgiving and kind.
There were curtained prayer rooms fitted right next to the toilets. Many in my party decided to pray. What time zone? Which prayer? I stayed where I was. I thought it was absurd to pray on a plane, but my TV screen reminded me, with its Mecca arrow, which direction to point my supplications should I be overcome with a need to show off my piety.
My Shia group leader, Shafiq, distributed pamphlets and prayer books. The Shia were entering a butchered land. The Wahhabis had destroyed broad swathes of Shia history and culture, most notably the graves of their ancestors. We were given maps that marked the names and locations of these burial sites. This was remarkable. It was a feat of diligent, secret cartography.
A week before my circumcision, I had emailed my friend Shahinaz in London and asked her to join me. Being adventurous, she agreed. Shahinaz was an old friend whom I also filmed for my first doc. She, like me, was gay. She was “Allah conscious,” like her Somali parents in Paris, but Islam’s strictures were not for her. They had emigrated to France when she was five. She was my Shia, African, and French cousin! I always introduced her as my London “cousin.” Later, we were destined to become husband and wife, Saudi style.
It was karma that a real cousin of hers in Birmingham was coming on Hajj the very same year with the UK contingent of my very same Hajj group—we would all become one big group upon arrival. What are the chances! We both felt it was meant to be. Especially because as her cousin he became her mahram, or male guardian—a practice that many Hajj groups still follow, to allow women to perform the pilgrimage. In some modern Shia and Sunni practices, it is not necessary, as the group leader becomes the mahram for “unaccompanied” women. I paid for Shahinaz’s Hajj—it only seemed fair. She knew I was planning to film and also write a book.
Shahinaz and I reunited at Doha International Airport where the British contingent had joined us. We were not able to sit together on the connecting flight, but we checked on each other often.
Medina Airport was dated and dingy, boasting only a few squeaky luggage carousels—hardly the ostentatious display of Saudi excess I expected. Men and women lined up separately to retrieve their baggage.
As far as I and many in my group were concerned, our Hajj began at touchdown. Even though the formal Hajj took only five days, my journey of the spirit started here.
A naked fear filled me as I walked toward Saudi immigration. I wondered if I was Muslim enough to be allowed in. I was at the doors of the nation I most feared and loathed: Wahhabi-land. Wahhabism
is the cruel and puritanical form of eighteenth-century Islam the Saudis practice. In 1744, a struggling and ridiculed desert cleric called Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab made a pact with an also struggling tribal leader called Muhammad Ibn Saud. Wahhab would be allowed to make his version of Islam the law of the land that Ibn Saud was trying to create. And he and his followers in exchange would accept Wahhabi dogma as Saudi sharia. The land and country that would be created would be a monarchy composed of Dar Al Saud, “The House of Saud.” They reserve the death penalty for people like me. Beheading and being flung off a tall building were the punishments of choice.
Immense faith had brought me here. I was obeying my highest calling as a Muslim, to embark on the Hajj pilgrimage. This was my journey of the spirit. I prayed I would be allowed to finish it.
“Muslim?” said the balding border guard scrutinizing my Indian passport.
“Yes,” I answered with a confidence I did not feel. He typed into a tired-looking PC. Had he Googled me and already known who I was?
Stamping my passport with his grubby fingers he said, “Ahlan al Hag” (“Welcome, Hajji”). Premature, I thought. The greeting was reserved for those who had already fulfilled Islam’s highest calling.
“Inshallah,” I replied. He smiled. My response contained a reservation—I did not yet feel like a true pilgrim.
I had dreaded this moment for months, fearing that my status as an out gay man would prevent me from entering the holy land. I had built the moment up in my mind to such a degree that the actual event could only feel anticlimactic. I was not thrown in jail or barred from entry.
A Sinner in Mecca Page 11