A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  “You won’t believe it,” she said coming out. Apparently collections of condoms, tampons, and sanitary pads were displayed prominently under a glass cover in the back.

  A shopkeeper invited us into a nondescript clothes-and-bags store. It was true Meccan enterprise on display—this town for at least fourteen centuries had been home to a fiercely competitive merchant class. He was proof. At the back he had photocopying, laminating, and scanning machines. There was also a flat-screen Hewlett Packard monitor. He spoke fluent Arab-lish, as I had taken to calling it.

  “You not her mahram? I make life easy for you.”

  He asked for 500 riyals, about 50 US dollars. He took passport photos. Within minutes he had made what looked like two authentic Saudi IDs. Shahinaz, whose Arabic reading was superior to mine, said they looked authentic.

  “From this day, Parvez Hussein, I, Shahinaz, am your wife!”

  I couldn’t believe it. We could be together all the time. For her cousin Abdellah, I remained a friend. For our Hajj group, she, like him, was my cousin (and Abdellah understood the reason for the lie). And now for these Saudi brigands, we were husband and wife with the IDs to prove it!

  One day, sitting with Shahinaz in a sliver of shade contemplating the Kaaba, I started to tell her a story of an unlikely Prophet. I knew that while nonreligious, she was interested in the intellectual sparring about what was academic to her and spiritual to me.

  It was a moonless night in 610 and a forty-year-old Meccan merchant called Muhammad sat meditating in a cave called Hira on a mountain called Jabal al-Nour. In Urdu, hira means “diamond.” In Arabic, Jabal al-Nour means “the mountain of light.” Muhammad had been suffering for months from what a modern-day psychiatrist would perhaps diagnose as a bipolar depression accompanied by hallucinations. He trudged regularly for two hours to this cave for some silent contemplation. Islam’s oral and written history tells us that Muhammad took some water and simple food with him.

  Mecca’s still jahil (“ignorant”) residents were busy worshipping 360 idols, all kept within the black cubical room built by Ibrahim and Ismael. This room would become the center of a religion that had not yet been revealed to this illiterate man who was not yet named Prophet.

  On a particularly difficult night, the angel Jibreel appeared to Muhammad.

  “Ikra!” commanded the angel. Read! Muhammad was naturally petrified and told the angel he was illiterate. The angel held Muhammad in a stranglehold, now commanding him to recite. Finally, the angel burst into verse and revealed the first of what would become twenty-three years of revelation. This would become the 96th Surah of the Quran, called Al-Alaq (“The Clot”).

  In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.

  Read: In the name of your Lord Who created.

  Created man from a clot of blood.

  Read: And your Lord is the Most generous,

  Who taught man the use of the pen,

  And taught man that which he did not know.

  As I had been in childhood, Shahinaz was as fascinated by the idea of an illiterate man being asked to read/recite. I told her that as an adult I would ponder the significance of the first revelation in so many ways being about knowledge and education. It was God who “taught man the use of the pen,” the verse was saying. Surely the religion that would follow would be about intellect, literacy, freedom, and wisdom. This verse being revealed first is not an accident. Islam would need an intellectual submission to God. Had the power of that pen been lost forever?

  Shahinaz understood that islam (“submission”) came with the intellect of the qalam (“pen”).

  After receiving his revelation in the Hira cave, not far from us, I told her how Muhammad knew he could not dare report it to anyone in his community of the Quraysh tribe. He ran from the cave into the arms of his now sixty-five-year-old wife, Khadija, and begged her to “cover him.” Here was a young husband seeking protection from a wife who was older and the breadwinner in a society that was ruled by polygamous men with wives who had no rights. His shameful revelation needed to be kept secret that night, from everyone but her. She believed him, as she always had and would until the end of her life. Muhammad and Khadija’s love story always lay at the heart of the birth of Islam, I told Shahinaz.

  The story we discussed next was dangerous territory here. It was little known. The Quraysh allegedly worshipped three female goddesses: Al-Lat, Al-Uzzat, and Manat. At the time, the central characters in Muhammad’s life were all women. Guided perhaps by their feminine energy, he headed to the Kaaba on a cold night in 616, hoping for new revelation, for new converts.

  It was said he found himself chanting some verses about the three daughters of God: “Have you ever considered what you are worshipping in these three Goddesses—these are the exalted gharaniq (“cranes”) that fly higher than any bird and their intercession is approved?” These were reprobate verses—and Muhammad’s later biographers, mostly male, concluded that Satan had put them on his lips. The Quraysh were electrified and ready to embrace this new religion that would include their beloved female goddesses. But Muhammad remained troubled that the Quraysh were not learning the humility, submission, and democracy of his new religion.

  Allegedly, Jibreel came back to him and said, “You have recited to those people something I did not bring you from God.” Muhammad was contrite and Jibreel said that all the previous Prophets had made “Satanic” mistakes, mistakes that could be easily rectified.

  The few Muslims who even know this story are told that Surah 22 was now revealed: “God renders null and void whatever aspersions the Satan may have cast and God makes his messages clear in and by themselves.” The important precedent of revelation’s being progressive was set. God could alter revelation.

  The biographers claim that Muhammad now chastised the Quraysh. Why did they attribute daughters to Allah when they themselves preferred sons? These so-called goddesses were simply empty names and fabrications. Thus, these “Satanic verses” were obliterated forever from the canon, and Muslims now four years into Islam could no longer take the old religion of idolatry seriously.

  “Patriarchal bastards,” again murmured Shahinaz, whose attention I still held.

  The God the Muslims experienced was harsh and powerful, “meteor-like,” I said to her. Shortly after this repudiation of the Satanic verses, chapter 112 of the Quran, the Surah of Sincerity, was revealed: “Say He is God, one; God forever; not begetting, unbegotten and having as equal none.” This brought the central crux of Muslim spirituality: the principle of Tawhid, or unity. It was not a mere metaphysical abstraction of the singularity of the divine; it was a call to action. God had taken charge of previous transgressions and was commanding and ordering, “Say.”

  Biographers say Muhammad brought respect to women in a society where they had had none. Having up to ten wives whom he treated respectfully was proof. The widows and divorcees he married would have otherwise been the dregs of society.

  “I can’t deal with the ten wives,” interrupted Shahinaz, “just as much as I can’t deal with the polygamy in the Mormons.” I told her it was a product of the times, but she remained unconvinced.

  Unfortunately, the same men who obliterated the Satanic verses from the Islamic canon also got to write Islam’s history. Sitting there, we both wondered if Muslims like her and me would have found a better place in Islam if the women of the faith had been allowed to control its destiny. Our female Muslim ancestors, other than Hajjar, celebrated mostly during the Hajj, were conveniently forgotten. The few who did make it into this male narrative are there for very particular reasons. Virgins, for example, fit perfectly into the narrative of the ideal Muslim woman because their sexuality has been controlled and they become paragons of virtue. For the Sunnis I grew up with, therefore, the Prophet’s second wife, the virgin Aisha, became his favorite wife after Khadija died. The Saudis, we both realized, had no room for Khadija and Muhammad’s rebellious marriage.

  For most Sunnis Ai
sha is the best woman of her time and she gets to be called Umm al-Mu’minin, the mother of all the believers, and she is the most important woman in the Ahl al-Bayt, the sacred core family of the Prophet Muhammad. Aisha’s virginity at the time of her marriage to the Prophet is what makes her an object of so much reverence. But she is also divisive.

  Shia, Shahinaz reminded me, never include Aisha in the Ahl al-Bayt. For them the most revered woman within the Prophet’s family is his daughter Fatima, who was married to his rightful successor, his cousin Ali, and the Shia’s first imam, and bore him his two beloved grandsons, Hassan and Husayn, who would also follow as imams and the rightful caliphs. Shia theology, which at its heart is about a great deal of public mourning, made sure that the women in Shahinaz’s group openly wept nightly when a famous hadith called Hadith e Kisa (“the Hadith of the Cloak”) was narrated. It is a particularly moving hadith. Muhammad takes his daughter Fatima, his son-in law Ali, and their two sons under his cloak, raises his right hand, and speaks to God:

  O Allah, these are the people of my Household (Ahl al-Bayt).

  They are my confidants and my supporters.

  Their flesh is my flesh and their blood is my blood.

  Whoever hurts them, hurts me too.

  Whoever displeases them, displeases me too.

  I am at war with those at war with them.

  I am at peace with those at peace with them.

  I am the enemy of their enemies and

  I am the friend of their friends.

  They are from me and I am from them.

  O Allah! Bestow Your Blessings, Benevolence,

  Forgiveness and Your pleasure upon me and upon them.

  And remove impurity from them and keep them thoroughly pure.

  I told her why this hadith was so powerful to me. It conveyed a very visual image of a man protecting his family and claiming them powerfully, using a blanket-like cloak. It spoke to the kind of blanketing warmth of parental safety I never knew as a child.

  As we talked, hundreds of wheelchair-pushing young boys (you would not want to cross their path) raced past, allowing the old and infirm to do their tawaf on the second level of this beyond-mammoth mosque, which its bin Laden builders said was almost ninety acres. Theirs was a civilized tawaf. There was no way they could be in the mosh pit of thousands around the Kaaba. Shahinaz laughed at my word choice. After a Zamzam water break, we returned to our miraculously still-empty spot at Starbucks.

  Changing subjects, we spoke of how the France she grew up in, once a violently colonial power, like much of Europe, suffered from what I have always called a “reverse colonialism.” In Britain, the colonizers of my ancestors, colonialism was manifested in its largest minority: the immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. In France, said Shahinaz, the immigrant flood came from the colonized soul of North Africa.

  Historical memory is short. Or were the shadows of the horrors that followed Weimar Germany just too hard to erase? It seemed that this Europe forgot that immigrants included impoverished souls fleeing the demons of poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy—byproducts of a particular kind of Islam that resurged only after the colonizers abandoned their nations to many uncertain freedoms. My prescience was right. In only a few years there was a helpless flood of those escaping Daesh terror, arriving in indescribable pain.

  Xenophobia was hardly a novelty to Europe. As a descriptive for this impending terror, the media invented the catchy phrase “Eurabia.” Less than a century ago, the expansionist and seemingly unstoppable Ottomans intent on creating Islam’s greatest caliphate had been turned away at Europe’s doors. Panicked pundits opined on TV. A carefully built edifice of Caucasian Christianity that often masqueraded as secular could forever be destroyed by a new wave of dark-skinned immigrants from Turkey and North Africa—the inheritors of the blood-thirst of the once-powerful Ottomans!

  For Osama and later Daesh, fears of the impending doom of a new “Eurabia” were a godsend: a strange reaffirmation of the perverted logic and stated desire to reclaim Islam’s lost glory.

  Shahinaz reminded me about how I had begun filming her in 2005 for A Jihad for Love. I had arrived soon after the riots that followed the electrocution of two unemployed French Muslim teenagers at a Paris electrical substation. They were escaping a xenophobic police force that loved chasing Muslim youths through the streets.

  It was the stuff of urban legend. Touring the burnt remains of the destruction, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the interior minister, decided to channel the revered French author and philosopher Albert Camus, who was raised in colonized Algeria. In 1947, in perhaps his most influential and enduring work, La Peste (“The Plague”), Camus wrote: “If we put all this lowlife in prison, honest people could breathe.”

  Camus referred to these “lowlifes” as racaille. And Camus, being one of the most influential wordsmiths in the language, finds his quote immortalized in the authoritative Le Petit Robert, which defines the word variously as “contemptible populace,” “rejects of society,” and more.

  Sarkozy was already anointed for many as the worthy, if controversial, successor to French President Jacques Chirac, as he toured the troubled suburb of Argenteuil. This was once a rural retreat for well-heeled Parisians, immortalized on canvas by Claude Monet, among many illustrious others. Monet would not recognize the contemporary Argenteuil, where I would become a frequent visitor and which for all intents and purposes was Europe’s largest slum for the nation’s Muslim “scum.” Mile after mile of what in New York would be “the projects” was an overflowing cauldron of immigrant discontent and now allegedly sinister, planned dissent.

  In 2005, a resident of one of these public-housing towers that Sarkozy toured, perhaps nostalgic about the Argenteuil Monet had painted, called out to the future president from a precarious perch on his balcony: “Quand nous débarrasserez-vous de cette racaille?” (“When will you get rid of this scum?”)

  Always in campaign mode and very aware of his upcoming ascension, Sarkozy did not skip a beat and declared: “Vous en avez assez de cette bande de racailles? Eh bien, on va vous en débarrasser.” (“You’ve had enough of this group of scum? Well, we’ll get rid of them for you.”)

  In this almost royal “we” was his arrogant certainty that in the not-so-distant future he would be forming the government of the Republic. In his emphatic restatement of the problematic racaille, Sarkozy was successfully creating his brand-new avatar: The president who would save this nation from the religion (code for Islam) and the impurity of foreign dogma that was oozing like a coming plague from the once-infallible towers of an increasingly shaken Fifth Republic.

  But this was Hajj 1432 (2011). We were at Islam’s ground zero. Shahinaz reminded me of what I had said in Paris: “Part of the Islam that lives in Europe will be a problem.” But I did not want to damn my religion here in Mecca so I added, “Has France forgotten its recent revolutionary past? The savage Jacobins were using the guillotine to chop heads at the end of the eighteenth century when Islam was at its highest intellectual powers!”

  “Wow, this will explode,” I had said once to a friend driving me around pre-9/11 Marseilles. It was a bizarre premonition, but I needed to explain my perspective about the sheer numbers of unemployed, disgruntled, primarily North African men who just hung about at squares, sharing cigarettes, fashion, and a constant yearning for sexual contact with women their mothers would never approve of. These were rightful citizens; France is where they were born. “Protection Sociale,” though mired in socialist bureaucracy, was a good-enough monthly check. Who needed a job in those circumstances? Unlike their parents or grandparents, these were no “refugees” who would have to fight to win their passports through a complicated asylum officialdom. For many of them, as in atheist France, the mosques their mothers hoped they would attend, but which they had scant interest in, had been moved to basement levels and their lives seemed purposeless. Like their families they had never quite risen from the poverty line and lived in shabby tenements in w
ell-hidden, graffiti-filled suburbia. Nanny states like France put food on the table and a roof over your head. Clearly Europe was ripe for “recruitment.”

  I reminded Shahinaz of how we had first met. On a chilly late December morning, I got off the Paris metro stop called Barbès-Rochechouart, a short walk away from le marché Dejean, a familiar open-air market, rich with the smells and flavors of the Maghreb, which is North Africa west of Egypt.

  This neighborhood, which was, as always, buzzing with the calls and whistles of merchants trying to attract customers, is called La goutte d’or, which translates into “drop of gold.” The French call it Little Africa. The open-air market is not the only famous feature of this neighborhood, much celebrated in many a backpacker’s guide to Europe. Most of them, however, do not mention its other special qualities beyond the enterprising immigrants who seem to make it rich enough to be on the tourist circuit. These would be its flourishing crack-cocaine trade and its high crime rate: all visible markers of the otherness that frightened some Caucasian natives.

  Simply put, it crawled with a large, colorful assortment of racaille.

  The woman I was meeting introduced herself to me with a question: “Parvez, am I the first of the racaille you have ever met?”

  Like many of her fellow disenfranchised young French friends, she had appropriated the derogatory term.

  I did not tell her that no one had ever introduced herself to me in quite that way before. Born in Somalia, Shahinaz, under her strikingly frizzy, Afro-like mop of wild hair, had a life force that was infectious. She became my guide to all of the racaille hangouts in her troubled and ever expanding city.