She was my eyes and ears to peer into a forbidden world. I was eager to know what happened to the women on Hajj. We had never imagined this extent of segregation. She asked if my burden of faith felt lighter. We were opposites. She, like Keith, did not have a religious bone in her body. She respected how I was putting life and limb at risk, so she had also come wanting to “watch my back.” Pretty soon we had realized how impossible that was. The shared cigarette on that “Hizbullah Night” was a moment we needed to cherish. Shahinaz would suffer so much more, being a woman smoker on Hajj. In the best of times, even in India, smoking women were derided and labeled.
A menacing mutawa approached from the darkness. I was glad that Shahinaz had a small, boyish frame with a frizzy, afro-like mop of hair. From afar she could pass for a boy. We ran. This poor night-shift mutawa never got a chance to use his cane and write us up. Or worse, haul us to a Saudi dungeon.
The next morning was a flurry of activity. Younger Hajjis like me rushed between rooms of the second-timers. The day was upon us. We needed to don the ihram, the mandated dress for male pilgrims that consists of two seamless pieces of white towel. Two pieces, one for each half of the body. Both halves were about two meters long. The tying of the one over the lower part of the body was particularly challenging. The upper part was just like draping a shawl. Underwear was forbidden, so the lower half was challenging. My circumcision was still not healed. The terror I experienced over accidentally exposing it was unspeakable. One false move and my shame would be public. A kind uncle invited me into his room. He was already in full-on Hajj couture. The uncle looked at ease, wearing it around the waist, running to the ankles, which had to be exposed. His was held in place by fabric folded over without a knot.
“This is the Burmese style,” he said, “easier because you are not too fat.” He showed it to me, draping it over my pants.
“They will tell you not to tie a money belt around it, because it is not sunnah, but don’t listen to them. You will need that belt after you have worn this for even a day. So do it secretly when no one is looking,” he whispered. Sage words because they were true. I bought several. In Mecca, word spread that Parvez had extra fanny packs. This was no Christmas. Yet I felt like Santa Claus dolling them to the desperate men whose ihram’s were in danger of falling.
Upon donning the lower part of my ihram, after performing all rituals and making sure I wore no underwear, I realized the sexual potential of an unsheathed penis rubbing against this Made in China towel fabric.
“A horny gay man into mid-eastern types would be in paradise here, with all this man smell and exposed genitalia,” I texted Shahinaz, who replied, “The burqa vs Hijab vs Niqab vs Abaya wars are on here, my dear!”
I banished thoughts of the sexual implications of each man around me, separated from nudity by just a towel. We looked like the men I had seen in gay-hookup saunas during my first trip to the US in 1998. Also, fragrance was part of the long list of the forbiddens while wearing ihram, making for an unpleasantly malodorous Hajj.
I focused on the spiritual. The ihram was much more than a mere garment. A long list of restrictions came with it. I know the Prophet had deemed it as Hajj couture because he imagined an equal Ummah, in white, dressed in exactly the same way, facing their maker, naked on Judgment Day. The ihram was supposed to signify Muhammad’s equal Hajj. I had grown up listening to many opinions about ihram. Some elders used to say the word “ihram” meant abstention—abstention from war, hunting, the sexual, and so much more. Donning this garment, I entered an ineffable state of grace and piety. Faith had brought me here and it would protect me in the weeks that lay ahead. From this point on, even killing an insect was forbidden.
The terrors of walking thirsty for miles, with underwear-less thighs rubbing against each other in humid weather that feels like the 100s, lay in the future. Caused by walking with these brutally chafed thighs, the Hajj rash no one talks about is hell on Earth. I wish I had known that since 2007 the Saudis had offered pilgrims the option of “seamless trousers.” The English-language Saudi Gazette had written a piece on it on July 16, 2007, saying, “Pilgrims often complain of sore thighs because of friction as a result of long walks. The trouser will protect the thighs.”
I texted Shahinaz, “What is your Hajj couture, Madam? No underwear?”
“I will leave that to your fertile imagination darling,” she replied snarkily.
We were innocents, she and I. No one had ever dared to tell us the unspeakable horrors that unfolded when unsheathed male genitalia rubbed against the bodies of hundreds of thousands of women, not separated in the holy mosque in Mecca. At peak time, the tawaf was violent. The majority of these men had never been in such extreme proximity to the bodies of women. And not every male pilgrim had the discipline of piety.
Going down for my first fag in my brand-new threads, I took a pathetic-looking selfie for my MMS group. An older pilgrim looked on disapprovingly. I winked at him. There was no way on Earth I was going on Hajj without cigarettes. And thankfully I was not the only one with tobacco on his mind and breath.
CHAPTER 6
THE NAKED BELIEVER
Subject: URGENT!!! Tim Hortons!
I would like to thank a brother for giving me this information
Salam Alaikum, Brothers and Sisters.
I asked my owner a question about if the Ice Capp has alcohol or not. My owner gave me a specific number for me to call because he was not sure. So I called that number. It turns out that the Ice Capp does have “ethyl alcohol,” which is the same thing that is used in drinking alcohol. So the Ice Capp is now confirmed HARAM for us Muslims. They said that anything that usually contains any artificial flavoring at Tim Hortons will likely contain some trace of ethyl alcohol.
I also asked them about all other products like smoothies, lemonade, french vanillas, and hot chocolates. And they said that all of them have artificial flavoring, which will end up in all the drinks also having alcohol. So then I asked them about all the baked goods (donuts, timbits, bagels, etc.) so they gave me a list, please look at the list to see.
Al Hamdellah rubal alameen that inshAllah all of us will be granted a spot in paradise for following the laws of islam. InshAllah we will all be granted rewards.
Mixed Berry Smoothie
Anything in can or bottle
Food:
12 Grain Bagel
Wheat & Honey
Sesame Seed Bagel
All donuts/timbits are HALAL except the following:
Lemon Cake Donut
Apple Cinnamon Donut
S’mores Donut
Red Maple Leaf Sprinkles Donut
Razia Sultana, the author of this edited email, was a newly married immigrant to Canada who had “forced” her husband Rashid to come on the Hajj. We had sat next to each other on the plane from Doha to Medina. Rashid made sure he sat in the middle. This friendly couple had already acquired the Canadian “eh” and the earnest jovial manner I had always admired in the people of their adopted homeland. He told me that he was a nonbeliever and that she had forced him to come so he could quit smoking. Seemingly possessed of only religious bones, and dressed in the opaque ninja body armor of her deep black abaya, Razia gently admonished him through her full-face niqab. I stared straight ahead.
When the plane had landed in Saudi Arabia, and as Razia moved to be processed in the female pilgrims’ line, Rashid asked if he could bum a few cigarettes from me.
“Don’t tell her. We will smoke in secret when the women are not around.” As if Shahinaz were not enough, I now had the added burden of another secret smoker and unfortunately one of the opposite sex who could face unthinkable consequences if caught.
As it turned out, for most of our Hajj, the women were corralled out of reach.
I told Razia she shared her name with a historic Indian warrior-queen, played to seductive perfection in a famous Bollywood film from the eighties. By this time Rashid and I had become smoking buddies and I knew he was fifty
and had another wife and two daughters, as old as the much younger Razia. She didn’t know of their existence, he said. He had married wife #1 only for immigration reasons and then his parents found him Razia in Bombay. With a Canadian passport he was an eligible bachelor, a perfect match. I did not tell Razia. I also did not tell her that her famed namesake had taken on many women as lovers during her short but tumultuous reign in India. Thankfully, Razia had not seen the film or she might have remembered a provocative song sequence where the voluptuous Muslim actress Parveen Babi was bathed in camel milk by a harem of young women, who like their queen were in various stages of undress. Meanwhile the real Razia now wore black gloves, extreme even by Saudi standards.
Men and women are not separated in the Noble Sanctuary in Mecca, so-called because it contains Islam’s center of gravity, the Kaaba. Both genders get equal face-time with God in this, his “house.” During our Hajj, many women around the Kaaba chose to defy the Prophet’s own edict not to veil. Perhaps word had spread about the indignities women suffered from the underwear-less male pilgrims, most of whom had never been in such close proximity to so many women. Toward the end of our Hajj, Razia, like so many of the other women, would approach the Kaaba covered in the black sheath and even socks!
Six days after we left the holy land, I to America and Rashid and Razia to Canada, the latter started an email list-serve. Exercises like haram-halal studies of the Tim Hortons’ menu made her its most prolific poster and I perhaps her most loyal reader.
All Muslims know that Hajj is a pilgrimage that most of the world will never be permitted to make. For centuries, Mecca, sitting at an ideal crossroads between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, was the city into which desert tribes weaved their caravans to trade and to pray. The city had always welcomed the thirsty and the weary, the believers and the merchants whose primary religion was money. No one was turned away at the doors of Mecca, it was said. Not true in the Mecca I went to.
Muhammad did only one Hajj during his lifetime. Returning triumphant as the Prophet to the city he had been banished from, and accompanied by 100,000 newly minted Muslims, he spent the night in a desert oasis called Dhul Halifa, had a bath, and put on his own ihram. He then went straight to the ancient mosque and, on seeing the Kaaba, fell to his knees, proclaiming, “Oh Allah, You are Peace. With you is Peace. Our Lord, keep us alive with peace.” However, his next acts were not exactly peaceful, as he set about methodically destroying the idols that had been placed and worshipped in the cube for hundreds of years. He needed to lay down the foundations of Islam: The idols needed to go. He knew that the sanctity of the young religion he was bringing to this city’s inhabitants needed protection. Non-Muslims brought idols with them.
Preparing for my departure I was thankful that it was my mother’s courage that ran through my veins. But I had also spent most of my own adult life afraid of my own faith, tormented by what I believed was certain: I was just not Muslim enough to ever be allowed into the holy land. For me, Islam had always been a faith of fear. Perhaps I was here to conquer my fear of faith. Access to twenty-first-century Saudi Arabia is tightly controlled, and Mecca is perhaps one of the world’s most secret cities.
Large signs on all roads that led to Mecca warned “Muslims Only.” Well-marked exits to get off this Islamic highway to heaven make sure that all sensible unbelievers leave while there is still time. But I already knew that Chinese construction workers, for example, had become quick converts to Islam so they could be allowed to enter, just like the French soldiers who liberated the grand mosque in 1979. It helps that Islam’s testament of faith, the Shahadah, takes less than a minute to articulate: “I bear witness that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is his Prophet.” The five days of Hajj are all about Mecca and it is here that the keys to heaven are supposedly made available to each pilgrim. But for me, like many, the Hajj was every single moment we spent on Saudi soil including, especially, Medina.
Our Shia-filled bus sped toward Mecca. At the time, I thought I was the only Sunni in my Hajj group. I shared this secret with our group leader. My bigger secret I dared not share. That stayed in my Hajj closet.
“We Shia welcome you, brother Parvez,” said Shafiq. “But if it were the other way around, it would never happen. A Shia pilgrim in a Sunni group? Never!”
Shahinaz and I sat together at the back of the bus. As in Medina, I wanted to establish that she was my cousin. We shared our fears at what lay ahead. She was close to being ninja-like, but it was at least a practical white and best of all her face, as the Prophet had commanded, was uncovered. Her real cousin Abdellah from Birmingham snored softly next to her.
In the middle of the night, as my Mecca-bound bus had filled with fellow pilgrims, all of us announced our arrival to God at his own house by chanting, “Labbaik Allahuma Labbaik!” (“Here I am, oh God, here I am!”) As we smoothly passed through each of Islam’s checkpoints, my heart lightened. No one had dared to stop me entering Mecca.
The Prophet I knew, the Muhammad whom I came here to seek, would have fought valiantly to prevent the schism between Shia and Sunni, which violates every single principle of the united Muslim Ummah he had worked hard to create. As we chanted, I realized that, just as Islam belongs to nobody but its believers, Muhammad and his Quran thankfully belong to all Muslims. I was following in Muhammad’s footsteps, entering a city that in so many ways had been forbidden to all of us on the bus, just as it had been forbidden to him, to try to take back ownership of Islam. Perhaps our Hajj itself was an act of subversion? There was a strange comfort in knowing that these fellow pilgrims sharing my bus were, like me, Islam’s outsiders.
Many truths, though, were uncomfortable. It is clear to most Muslims that many of the September 11 hijackers, trained in the kind of Islam the Saudi monarchy ordains and survives because of, must have performed this very pilgrimage. Why? Because, they were Saudi, and that’s what (the religious) Saudis do.
I had been doing all five prayers for months, but that was hardly prep for what lay ahead. It was 3:40 in the morning when we arrived. We had been on the bus for a grueling eight hours. Under normal circumstances—not during Hajj—the trip from Medina took about five. After we deboarded, Rashid, Razia, Shahinaz, Abdellah, and I approached the Noble Sanctuary together, in the hopeless hope we would do this together. But within a few minutes it became clear we could not stay as a group, and the couples disappeared into an urgent mass of humanity larger than anything I had ever seen. I tried to hold Shahinaz as long as I possibly could.
And then I was left alone. My solitude amongst the millions who surrounded me was incongruous and immense.
I was wearing my ihram, Burmese-style. The ihram was about the democracy of Muhammad’s vision of the Ummah. The Saudi Hajj of the twenty-first century, however, is an unequal pilgrimage. For many it plays out in posh five-star comfort. As I entered the boundaries of the holy mosque that is home to the Kaaba, I felt a profound sense of accomplishment. I was here as a rebel, one who would never be allowed in by the Saudi brand of Islam, which thrives on inequality and oppression.
The image of the Kaaba is imprinted on every single janamaz (prayer rug) I ever saw. As with most Muslims, the image had been seared into my memory since childhood. For a religion that does not like images, that of the Kaaba is the most sacred.
My first thought was that I was not supposed to be here. And then, transfixed by the sight of the cube, I was reminded once again that it was just an empty room. Its geometry ensured that it had no direction. Instead, one-sixth of humanity was commanded to face it five times a day for their entire lives. Was this it, the center of my faith, of my prayers, of love, of life and death?
On this night as I looked at the black cube for the first time in my life, I wept. The tears that were stolen from me at my mother’s funeral returned in a violent and unstoppable tide. I wept like a newborn child. But here she was, holding me, breathlessly, in a complete and loving embrace of some kind of final acceptance. She whisp
ered how much she loved me. In that moment of grief and of recognition, of loss and of discovery, I did not realize that I was about to begin the most violent night of my life. I declared my niyat, my formal intention of performing Hajj. And then, like a drop entering the ocean, I joined the moving mass.
The strict rules of Islam here in Mecca were enforced by several thousand mutaween. Post-Medina I could spot these orange-beards—some dyed their facial hair with henna—in their loose-fitting red headscarves, patrolling the crowds with their thin wooden canes, ready to arrest anyone they found breaking the rules—from dress-code infractions to sexual acts, alcohol possession, consumption of un-Islamic media, and various other forms of Western behavior including smoking. The last they merrily did themselves.
The mutaween also enforced the prayer times. I had seen them in action, prowling around, making sure that all the shops selling kitsch closed their shutters five times daily, and making sure that each of us was praying “the right way.”
They had to make sure we maintained proper posture during our daily prayers, and even during the sometimes hours-long wait times before those prayers. According to the mutaween, my right foot needed to be arched upright under my right buttock and my left foot needed to lie horizontal between the various ritual prostrations of prayer. This was a torment to my unaccustomed body, and the longer I knelt during my daily prayers, the more acute—and familiar—my pain became. I had recently realized that I was suffering from the recurrence of my old pilonidal cyst, developed two years earlier after countless hours sitting with bad posture at my computer. It was what they used to call “Jeep’s disease” during World War II, the painful result of prolonged rides in bumpy Jeeps. I needed a heavy course of antibiotics and some women’s sanitary pads for any bleeding, and most of all, I needed to keep pressure off my coccyx. At this moment, as I approached the Kaaba, built up in billions of Muslim minds like mine as a moment of lifelong immensity, I had none of those options.
A Sinner in Mecca Page 16