Instead, the guard’s warm greeting felt as though he had stamped the word “Muslim” on my forehead.
“Bonjour Monsieur! Welcome to the land of the unfree,” read a text from Adham.
“Inshallah, I will meet God!” I replied, tongue firmly in cheek.
“Inshallah, for everything! The best Muslim excuse there ever was!”
“Just put it all in God’s hands LOL!” I replied.
At the time, I thanked the late Steve Jobs for the iMessage function of my 4S. I got unlimited free texts riding on the kingdom’s largest network, Mobily. I created a Keith, Adham, and Shahinaz MMS group for general texts.
“It will all be fine. I love you,” Keith texted. He had dealt with the enormity of my fears preceding this pilgrimage. His love would sustain me in the weeks to follow.
“Have they taken your passports yet?” Adham asked.
A few minutes later, on our bus, they did.
The following morning, I overslept and missed Fajr, the first prayer of the day. Big mistake. I had already opened myself up to the condescension of my roommates with my careless disregard for ritual. These judgmental men in my room were forming a schoolyard-like clique at breakfast. I was subtly excluded from their camaraderie. Pretending to sleep, I would sometimes hear conversations. One of them, a hypochondriac called Abdullah, had a bagful of medication and Epipens. One morning he said that if he became a martyr in Mecca, he would consider himself and his entire family blessed. He had earlier looked disapprovingly when I prayed in the Sunni way. So I kept my eyes shut.
He audibly whispered to the others that he worked for the US military in Virginia, where he lived with his wife and newborn son. He operated drones over his native Pakistan.
“How do you know you aren’t killing your Shia brethren?” asked a roomie.
“I don’t know for sure, but I always hope it’s the evil Sunni jihadis and not one of my own.”
Shahinaz and I walked toward Medina’s heart, which was the Prophet’s Mosque right across the road. In the light of day, it felt otherworldly. It is impossible for someone of my generation not to think of Tatooine, the desert planet where a young Luke Skywalker discovers his destiny. The sand and heat did call Tatooine to mind, but it was also the architecture and the people.
A mutawa thwacked us. “Marry?” he said.
“Yes, of course!” we both exclaimed.
“Proof?” he snarled.
We made great show of searching our belongings and then said we had left them at the hotel. “You’ll just have to take our word for it, brother. Why would we lie in Medina?” Probably illiterate, he left us alone, and Shahinaz set off to find the women’s corrals.
A quarter of humanity is Muslim, and they all gathered here from every corner of the globe during Hajj season. Mecca and Medina are the United Nations of Islam, showcasing the diversity of the world’s fastest-growing religion. The rest of Saudi Arabia is a monoculture of “ninja”-style abayas for the women and the dishdasha or thawb, a long, flowing, usually white robe, for the men. Here, it was a rainbow of colors and styles. I saw Chinese men wearing teal vests and white caps, Kenyan women in bright pink scarves, and Somalis in dazzling block-printed fabric. Every group was color-coded so members could easily spot one another in the crowds. In a cosmopolitan place such as this, it’s not always easy for the Saudis to enforce a tight dress code. The immensity of the Hajj promises a strange freedom that can only come from strength in numbers and hiding in plain sight. There was an occasional all-black abaya-trapped woman floating around, but this was really the United Colors of Islam. I started taking photos surreptitiously, with the goal of documenting these styles on an imagined Tumblr I would call “Hajj Couture,” but then I remembered that I could be hauled to prison for taking pictures of women here. In a Twitter-obsessed country I was ironically afraid to send out tweets from my Hajj, because that would be a sure-fire way to invite the attention of the wrong kind of Saudis—in my case, their Interior Ministry and their Mukhabarat. Biggest concern of all: I was not a US citizen but an Indian one. Both the Saudis and the Indians would want someone like me gone. In retrospect, it feels like a small and petty fear, but the reality of it then seemed big. The chances? Fifty-fifty.
Massive retractable umbrellas bloomed over our heads from unassuming marble columns, shielding us mercifully from the mid-morning sun. We were periodically spritzed by mists of cool water. Just like I’d experienced in Palm Springs! All of this across miles and miles of pristine marble. Gulf excess was not new to me but this was quite the sight.
Did my fellow pilgrims realize that this comfortable microclimate came at a heavy price? In the two holy cities, the bin Ladens colluded with the House of Saud for the biggest reconstruction project in the history of Islam. Countless artifacts, burial sites, objects the Prophet loved, and historic structures were steamrolled to make way for the high-tech yet tasteless glitz and marble. It’s difficult to imagine a broader tragedy of cultural erasure in modern history. The Al Saud gave the Mecca and Medina reconstruction project, predictably, to one of the world’s richest construction companies, the bin Laden Group. One of the family’s many sons was called Osama. He worked briefly at the Mecca office, to oversee the destruction and would later lament about all that the Al Saud destroyed, never mentioning his own family who actually executed the destruction.
This was the Masjid al-Nabi, the “Mosque of the Prophet.” He was buried here, and Medina represented, for me, a student of Islam, the birthplace of Islam’s democracy. Exiled by his own tribe from Mecca, Muhammad had laid down the foundations of the religion’s first constitution. At its center was the principle of Tawhid, the oneness of God. This was al-Madinah al-Munawwarah, the “Radiant City,” primarily because Muhammad built Islam’s first society of peace and tolerance within its boundaries. In seventh-century Yathrib, as the city was called then, women had real rights. Jews existed harmoniously alongside Muslims. The first Muslims, the ones we’d always been taught to emulate, came from Medina. They called it the city of Sukoon (“Peace”). A peace of the spirit.
Inside the mosque, a maze of striped archways stretched out before me. The melodious, drawn-out call to Zuhr prayers echoed through the halls. This is the only semblance of music that is allowed in the entire country. All else is forbidden. A country without music? To many this would be inconceivable. But for young Saudis, music can be a dark secret whose volume is always set low.
I had not come to my Hajj unprepared. The history between Saudi Arabia and Iran and Sunni-Shia conflagrations through the centuries had been part of my research material all my adult life.
It was the night of the Shia prayer, the long Dua’a Kumayl, a supplication of a man who was, for them, the most devout follower of the Prophet’s son-in-law, Imam Ali. The latter for all Shia was the rightful successor to the Prophet because he was married to Fatima, the Prophet’s youngest daughter. She gave birth to the next two imams, Husayn and Hassan, as the Shia lineage progressed from the Ahl al-Bayt (Muhammad’s family). For Sunnis, the Prophet’s inheritor was a sahaba (close companion) called Abu Bakr. And that lineage rift would forever separate Shia from Sunni.
In this Shia prayer, Ali’s faithful servant Kumayl speaks for Ali. The faithful recite this prayer in order to seek fulfillment of “legitimate” desires, to request safety from enemies, to request the forgiveness of sins and to ask for wealth, and more. My new group-friend Hossein marched with me toward this redoubtable scene with a confidence I didn’t feel. He was Iranian and, as often happens, we bonded over a cigarette.
There is a political element to this prayer ritual. The Iranians deliberately gather in large numbers to recite the extremely long supplication near the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. It’s a Dua that can happen only on a Thursday night. That night there were, by my estimate, about 2,000 Iranians. Ironically a much greater number of Saudi riot police corralled them. Shia protest would be intolerable mobocracy. Post-revolution Iranians often used the Hajj for protests agai
nst many matters, including the Dar Al Saud. Iranians have been frequently banned from the Hajj, either by their own government or by the Saud who fear them.
Islam’s deepest schism is about who inherits the Prophet’s wisdom. He would not recognize the sectarian Islam of today. The most-visible symbols of this divide are the nations of Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. The greater Middle East has always been their playground. The fleeing colonizers in the mid-twentieth century left gore and hastily carved nations in their wake. To this day, both Iran and Saudi Arabia compete for hegemony in countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and more recently Syria and Yemen. Revolutionary Iran in 1979 married political power with religion, filling the Saud with terror. Their utopia was of a Wahhabi-Saud marriage, where the clergy were left alone as long as the monarchy stayed in power. The head honchos of that clergy even issued fatwas on command to enable the monarchy to continue wielding political power. Iran’s revolution turned logic like that upside down, because, most important, it toppled a monarchy—the shah of the Pahlavi dynasty that had ruled Iran since 1925. If this could happen in a nation that had had monarchy for 2,500 years, what would befall the House of Saud if the same winds of revolution blew Saudi-ward?
In the sixties, the Iranian shah sent a series of open letters to the Saudi king, Faisal. In one he famously said, “Please, my brother, modernize. Open up your country. Make the schools mixed women and men. Let women wear miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern. Otherwise, I cannot guarantee you will stay on your throne.” Miniskirts were forever banned from the Iranian mind just a decade later. In any case, the Saudis were skittish because of history. In winter 1979, as the Iranian revolutionaries were taking the US embassy hostage, the Masjid al-Haram (Noble Sanctuary) in Mecca was overrun by revolutionaries. They were led by one Juhayman al-Otaybi, who declared the Mahdi (Islam’s redeemer; in this case, his brother-in-law) had come.
Much blood was shed in this city where the Prophet had forbidden even the killing of an insect. The mayhem lasted two weeks and infidel French troops ended the siege. This seizure at the Kaaba while revolutionary Iran jubilated fueled eternal terror in the House of Saud.
The newly anointed Ayatollah Khomeini spoke out on Tehran Radio on November 21, 1979: “It is not beyond guessing that this is the work of criminal American imperialism and international Zionism.” He knew he was beginning a decades-long tirade against the “Evil Satan,” often represented by the US and Zionism. In Iran, anti-Western rhetoric grew. At the same time, Saudi Arabia solidified its ties with the US.
Not only was the ayatollah expressing the hatred his revolutionaries were carrying out at the US embassy in Tehran, he was also during that time of innumerable daily fatwas making the claim that monarchy like the government structure of Saudi Arabia was un-Islamic. The rise of the Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih (“Rule by the Jurists”) would be akin to Saudi King Khalid’s handing over power to the Wahhabis’ grand mufti.
In Islamic eschatology the arrival of the Mahdi signaled that the Day of Judgment was fast approaching. Both Shia and Sunni believe in this end of times, with the arrival of this Mahdi. But for most Sunnis, the Mahdi has not yet come and exists only as a theological and theoretical concept. For the “Twelver” Shia, the Mahdi (basically their twelfth and final imam) has always been there and can manifest at any time (with Jesus)—he just went into a state of occultation 1,200 years ago. Both Shia and Sunni call him Muhammad al-Mahdi, after the name of the Prophet. It is interesting that some Shia believe the Mahdi’s coming out will have several portents, including massive war in Syria, destroying it, and in Iraq fear and death for its people. I would love to see the faces of Wahhabi-inspired ISIS terrorists when they learn the despised Shia share their thinking about this critical truth we are actually living.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are the world’s most prominent examples of sharia law, and yet they couldn’t be more different. Iranian zealots have never let go of their idea of their utopian, pan-Islamic revolution, which is abhorrent to the Saudis. The fight is about both oil and ideology. In the Iran-Iraq War, the Saudis plied Saddam with $25 billion. Their temporary love of Saddam was disingenuous. He conveniently kept the country’s Shia majority in check, while retaining an important geographical and cultural divide between them and Iran. In 1984, the countries came to the brink of war as Iranian planes flew over Saudi soil. Khomeini, who was never at a loss for words, declared, “These vile and ungodly Wahhabis are like daggers which have always pierced the heart of the Muslims from the back.” Using the familiar and time-tested idea of takfir (Islamic excommunication, where one Muslim accuses another of being a kafir, a nonbeliever), he made the claim that Mecca was in the hands of “a band of heretics.” All Saudi kings took immense pride and earned most of their legitimacy by appending the title of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” to their names. The ayatollah was attacking that basic precept.
Since 1981, Iranians had held yearly Hajj protests against the US and Israel in Mecca. The Saudis tolerated this. But in 1987 troops arrived to stop them. This led to riots that killed 400. The Saudis conveniently blamed the trouble on shirk (idol worship). Angry protesters, always easily conjured up by the Iranian religious police (the Basij), ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran. All Iranian pilgrims were banned until a 1991 thaw.
Later in Mecca, our group’s mutawif (Hajj guide) would show us the exact overpass where the clashes occurred. As with their unusual maps of unmarked graves, the Shia would inherit the memory of what happened at this overpass.
Ayatollah Khomeini was the only reason Indian novelist Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses) earned worldwide fame. When the gang of Iranian jurists, with Khomeini as their leader, issued a death decree against Rushdie, the Saudis wanted a piece of the action as well. The Saudi Wahhabis pronounced that Rushdie would have to appear before a sharia-sanctioned tribunal before he could be sentenced. It was an exercise in foolishness—both countries trying to outdo each other as to whose Islamic condemnation of Rushdie was the valid one.
In 1988, King Fahd called for ceasing all anti-Iran media campaigns. Was it détente? It was clear that the Al Saud dynasty controlled what passed for Saudi media. They would later even go to great lengths to launch Al Arabiya, their reaction to the often anti-Saudi, Qatar-based Al Jazeera. In 1990, both countries rejected the use of force in the Persian Gulf and came out strongly against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Détente again? A brief one, yes, this time. Official ties between the two nations were even restored in 1991. Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, visited Riyadh. Flashbulbs popped and hands were shaken.
Real evidence of rapprochement would come from the Hajj. The Hajj operates on a quota system. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia claims that Hajj visas from different countries are directly proportional to their Muslim populations. Iran is a nation of more than 80 million Muslims. Saudi Arabia, in comparison, has about 30 million. In 1988, a determined King Fahd had allotted Iran only 45,000 pilgrims. Protesting this quota, Iran boycotted. Thus, with much fanfare the Saudis announced that they were letting in 115,000 Iranian pilgrims in 1991. The ayatollah smiled.
In Medina later that Dua Ku’mayl night, I couldn’t help but notice Iranian flags outside certain hotels.
“That’s where the Iranians stay. They put the flags so that they can find each other,” said my Hajj guide when I asked about it at a daily majlis (“gathering”). My group, like all Shia, regularly held these where they mourned the injustices brought upon them by the Sunnis and commemorated their greatest imams, including the Prophet’s grandson Husayn, the second in the succession line after his father Ali. Husayn’s butchering and death at the Battle of Karbala in the seventh century was mourned as if it had happened yesterday. In India, as in Iran, it was even a national holiday. I would sit on the side trying my best to visibly commiserate.
I wondered if the majlis of my Khoja group was the same as other Shia? The Khojas are yet another example of Islam’s great diversity. They are one of the many su
bsets of Shia Islam, with ancestry in Western India and East Africa. It seemed my group had both Twelver Khojas and Nizari Khojas. The former believed in twelve imams, with the last being in occultation and scheduled to reappear as a Mahdi who would rule for five, seven, nine, or nineteen years (according to whom you talked to) before Yawm al-Qiyamah (the Day of Judgment) and rid the world of all evil.
The Nizari Khojas in my group placed great emphasis on the Islamic principle of ijtihad, or independent reasoning. I was always drawn to their discussions throughout my Hajj. They seemed a reasonable lot and I wondered—would they also leave my homosexuality open to the ijtihad they so revered, if they found out?
As far as the Wahhabi-Salafi establishment was concerned, all Shia, including Sunnis like me who choose to travel with Shia, were infidels. Much had changed from those heady days in 1991, when the Saudis also agreed to an Iranian request to allow 5,000 relatives and friends of the 412 “martyrs” of the 1987 riots to attend the Hajj. Our group was told to stick together and march under the Canadian flag—to display a US or British flag during Hajj was unthinkable. Did Saudi BFF US presidents even know this? Every other nationality during the Hajj, including the (despised) Iranians, marched with its national flag.
To worldwide surprise, Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami came on a state visit in 1998, the first since the ’79 revolution. And in February 2007, the biggest surprise of all—the often-reviled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad performed his pilgrimage at the invitation of King Abdullah. I had come on the Hajj as an educated pilgrim. My decision to be there in 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, which I very openly reported about (especially from Cairo), and the death of Osama bin Laden, was a deliberate one. Less than a week before my departure, the FBI uncovered an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. “Operation Red Coalition,” as the FBI had named it, produced headlines. Stuxnet, the malicious computer worm, had struck Iran recently.
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