Their jacuzzis, saunas, and steam rooms promised “a guaranteed way to melt away stress.” This Hajj experience was quite different from mine, to say nothing of those of the poorest pilgrims, many of whom slept on the streets throughout their Hajj.
Abdullah, like me, had discovered the spotless Starbucks bathrooms and together we performed our wudu there.
Then he said, “Now let me teach you how to pray in a shopping mall.”
“But the Kaaba is right there,” I replied, pointing to the entrance to the mall.
“It’s hot,” he said. “It can’t be ‘Kaaba, Kaaba’ all the time.” We took sanctuary in the air-conditioned mall, kneeling with others in neat rows below beckoning neon signs. I was one with the mall-praying lazy pilgrims.
Later, I obeyed my maxim: If in Mecca, head to the Kaaba. The Hajj is a harsh pilgrimage that is fundamentally about faith and surrender. My moments spent praying to and contemplating the Kaaba offered great succor. The hungry hands of sinners, over centuries, had made its grainy, granite surface a vessel of forgiveness. It radiated a strength that filled me. Drawn to it like a magnet, I would return night after sleepless night. If Islam offered redemption to its sinner-pilgrims, it was to be found right here.
“Parvez?” It was Younes, a thoughtful, mild-mannered doctor from Montgomery, Alabama, who was part of my group. I’d instinctively liked him—we’d become Hajj buddies. We marveled for a moment at the unlikelihood of finding each other in these immense crowds. “I have something to tell you,” he said. I listened. He proceeded to come out to me as a Sunni man.
“But I thought your wife and mother-in-law were Shia,” I said.
“An unlikely marriage, but a very strong one,” he replied. He asked me if I knew how to pray like the Shia. I told him I had spent months learning their customs before I came. When with the Shia group, I prayed like they did. When alone I prayed the slightly different Sunni way.
“A good compromise,” he said. “It wouldn’t be good to be found out as an outsider here.” I already knew that Younes chose his words carefully. I wondered if he knew the shameful secret I carried. We sat in contemplative silence for a while. I had always been taught that where we sat was God’s abode. And God detested liars, my mother used to say. My burden of deceit suddenly felt heavy.
“I have something to tell you, too,” I whispered. “I am gay.” The three words I have never even dared say to my father.
“I knew,” he said. And then there was silence. Eternities passed. Younes gently put his arm around my shoulder.
“Why would you want to be a part of something that wants no part of you?” he asked.
The Kaaba gave me the strength to come out, I wanted to tell him. His kind gesture validated my very being. The sleepless nights spent here had changed me. By now I believed that I had received acceptance from a higher power than those who patrolled these walls with rifles and batons. Now, my Islam would forever be different. It would no longer be a faith of fear. It was no longer a question of whether Islam would accept me. It was a question of whether I would accept Islam.
And sitting there silent, with the nice Sunni doctor from Alabama, steps away from Islam’s beating heart, I did.
CHAPTER 9
MUSLIM BOOT CAMP
On my sixth night in Mecca, it was time for me to begin the rituals of my actual pilgrimage. Everything leading up to this point had been emotional preparation and spiritual tourism. It was the last month of the Islamic calendar, Dhu al-Hijjah (“Month of the Pilgrimage”). The Hajj is performed on the eighth, ninth, and tenth of this month. By this time, I had lost track of the Western calendar, and in a sense—all track of time. Everyone in my group had been talking for two weeks in terms of the Islamic calendar. This disconcerting effect contributed a deeper sense of timelessness to this place, as though it existed within its own spiritual realm.
It took me half an hour to complete the ghusl, the exacting ritual cleansing that must precede the putting on of the ihram, an act I’d performed upon first entering Mecca. In Islam, every minute action, down to the number of times you wash your armpit, is regulated by ritual. But by this time I was an expert. In the bathroom, unseen by the rest of my Shia group, I performed my ritual cleansing in the Sunni way. At this point I was breaking the solidarity I’d held with them since our arrival in Medina.
I must confess here that I performed another ritual in this sacred place, before performing the ghusl. This ritual was not part of my Hajj. In fact, it is forbidden in Shia jurisprudence. I performed istimna: I jerked off, which I reasoned to be OK, since I was following it with the ritual cleansing. It had been months since I’d experienced any sexual contact, and I was not looking forward to more abstinence. It was now or never.
I returned to the Masjid al-Haram to repeat the tawaf and saee. This time, I tried to touch “Hajjar’s Skirt,” the place where Hajjar and Ismael were buried, according to Sunni and Shia both. The manic crowds eager to earn extra credit points with Allah prevented me from getting anywhere near it. Almost overnight, it seemed, the crowds had ballooned with pilgrims. The population, by my estimation, had tripled since my arrival. Mecca was bursting at the seams, and the crowds were compelled by a stronger urgency, resulting in a Hajj experience that had diverged dramatically from that which had been commanded by the Prophet Muhammad. He argued that this experience was sacred and should be approached in a state of tahara (“purity”). Instead, I was elbowed, pushed, and pulled the whole day. The women had it even worse. Sometimes their screams felt louder than before.
Just as I exited Islam’s holy mosh pit, my iPhone lit up. It was Keith, who must have sensed my fears. I told him the actual five-day rituals of the Hajj were beginning.
Walking out, I silently thanked the bin Ladens for what in this section was a surprisingly free Wi-Fi network. This imperfect network did work in some places. I was able sometimes to Facetime alongside hundreds of thousands of other users texting, emailing, tweeting, and more.
Exhausted and thirsty, I found one of the ubiquitous water containers throughout the mosque area. These fountains produced the holy Zamzam water, named after the magical spring that saved Ismael’s life. Hajjis took home gallons of “healing” Zamzam for their loved ones. It is used during blessing ceremonies at weddings and births. I had my doubts that all of this water was sourced from a single well. I had Googled enough to know that the British Food Standards Agency alleged that the water contains dangerous levels of arsenic. The Saudis denounce this claim as Islamophobic propaganda. With apprehension, I drank my fill, reminding myself never again to be without sealed bottled water. At the time, I could not have imagined the H2O scarcity that was coming.
Sunni pilgrims had already departed in the thousands during the day, but some Shia dogma I didn’t understand decreed that we travel at night. Under cover of darkness, we headed to the dusty plain called Arafat sitting at the base of Jabal ar-Rahmah (the Mount of Mercy). I hopped onto a bus for the fifteen-minute journey. What I thought would be a short jaunt turned out to be a seven-hour, bumper-to-bumper nightmare. The bin Ladens, like American planners they studied, had favored building roadways rather than public transportation, so traffic gridlock plagues this area during every Hajj season. I stood on the bus the entire time. My fellow pilgrims granted me no mercy. It was every pilgrim for himself.
Arafat is extremely important in Islamic exegeses. The Prophet had delivered his farewell sermon to the earliest Muslims here. This place is synonymous with the Day of Judgment. There is an urgency to Arafat and a sense of deep piety. Most Islamic scholars agree that this is one of the most important rites of the Hajj. The Prophet Muhammad himself said, “Hajj is Arafat.” Pilgrims only had till before sunset to pray for redemption. The Sunnis stood in the merciless sun all day, sometimes holding umbrellas branded by Zain, the second-largest Saudi telecom. The Shia did it differently. We stayed in our tents, where the group leader led the rest of us in mournful chanting.
Every minute detail of the pi
lgrimage was ordained in two dense Hajj guidebooks we were given early on. Everything that was wajib (“recommended”) was there and there was much dwelling on what wasn’t. I had grown up afraid of a lot of fard (“obligatory”) things good Muslims did. The Shia seemed to live in a similar black-and-white world of wajib and fard. These two books became my much-used companions in my struggle to perform a Hajj that would be accepted. I prayed for many Hajj Mabroor (“Accepted Hajj”) greetings from fellow pilgrims and fellow Muslims when I got back home. Nothing less would suffice in my struggle to earn the status of a good Muslim.
My group leader reminded me why this day was important. I questioned him about a hadith I was told as a child about a successful Hajji being like a newborn.
“As long as you follow these,” he said, pointing to the books. In the first book, he pointed to page 48: “The wuqoof there for this period is obligatory and whoever fails to do so by choice commits a sin.” Wuqoof, a ritual central to Hajj, literally means to remain stationary at a place for a while. In Hajj-speak it’s the plain of Arafat.
I did not dare ask him if the Shia wuqoof was similar to the Sunni one, which in the poetry that often speaks for Islam meant “to pause in contemplation of the divine.”
I hurriedly leafed through the book. There were almost twenty pages about Arafat itself. And there were many “rules,” the much-feared fard of my childhood. At one point it said we were supposed to recite:
100 times Allahuakbar
100 times Alhamdulillah
100 times Subhanallah
100 times Chapter of Ikhlas
And supplications of your choice
I couldn’t possibly keep track.
The Meccan Surah of Ikhlas was one of my favorites, though, so it came easily. Al-Ikhlas meant “Pure Faith,” which is why it had always been close to my heart.
In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever-merciful.
SAY: HE IS God.
the one, the most unique,
God the immanently indispensable.
He has begotten no one,
and he is begotten of none.
There is no one comparable to him.
I will never be sure if I did the many other 100-this and 100-that the Hajj group mandated during my supplications that day. I am sure, however, that I found great redemption and succor for my soul by reciting Surah al-Ikhlas a hundred-ish times.
A young man scurried around the tents, passing out pieces of paper with Arabic text on one side and English on the other. He was the son of one of the men in our group. He was always hanging around the group leaders, performing little tasks like this. He looked and behaved like a teacher’s pet—the type that you kind of want to bully and don’t want to be caught red-handed by. He gave me one of his slips of paper and sat down next to me.
“I know you are Sunni,” he whispered conspiratorially. “Let me explain this.”
I turned the paper around.
“These are special duas,” he continued. “If you are a Shia, you write your name before Maghrib while making all your wishes to Allah on this special day. Then you bury it, and your wishes will come true.” And so I did.
All Sunnis were obliged to climb to the top of the Mount of Mercy. My group took the easy way out, supplicating tearfully in the comparatively cool shade of their tents. I never got to go to the Jabal ar-Rahmah. I joined my fellow pilgrims in prayers for redemption. The chanting started again. The group leader wailed in English, practically screaming, alongside a mellifluous voice in Arabic that laid out the entire lineage of Shia Islam, beginning with the Prophet’s nephew and son-in-law Ali, wishing peace on the Prophet’s prominent Shia descendants. If we’d been in a Sunni tent, they would not have dared to include these prayers.
The group leader spoke up between the Arabic chants, invoking the merciless Allah of my childhood:
Oh, forgive the sins of our fathers, our children.
Too late to say Sorry, take me back, I’ll be better.
Then Allah says, “The only place you sit now is fire, it will not be your guardian.”
Then Allah says, “Look what a bad End. What a terrible, terrible End.”
But the prayer ended on a more hopeful note, saying that each one of us, upon performing our Hajj, with the right niyat (intention), would be blessed with a special place in Heaven. Of course, the implication was that the “terrible end” would befall the disbelievers like the Jews and Christians. These groups are specifically given preferential status in Heaven according to kinder strands of Islamic exegesis, because they’re identified as Ahl al-Kitab (“People of the Book”).
For a moment the entire place seemed to resonate with forgiveness, and yet mine felt incomplete. If any of these people had any idea who I was, they would not have wished me peace, or envisioned me alongside them in heaven. At dusk I left Arafat wondering if I was a good Muslim. Someone said it was the ninth day of Dhu al-Hijjah. I had lost all track of time, in either Muslim or Gregorian calendars.
Finally, we arrived at the open plain of Muzdalifah to collect forty-nine pebbles for stoning the devil at his domain in Jamarat (place of pebbles). My group leader had handed us little messenger bags to hold our pebbles and encouraged us to collect seventy, because we might lose a few on our way to the devil. Across the highway lay another plain exclusively for women to collect their pebbles. I wondered—if this ritual has been performed by millions of people every year for centuries, then how has Muzdalifah not yet run out of pebbles? Do the Saudis replenish the supply every year, trucking “used” stones back from Satan’s domain at Jamrat?
I desperately had to pee. The Saudis, in what now seemed like typical disregard for pilgrim comfort, had provided only six toilets to relieve thousands of pilgrims. I was afraid even to enter—the stench was overwhelming. I turned to a friend from my Hajj group.
“The Ummah that pees together stays together,” I said. He laughed. We held our noses and continued to wait in line. I knew that by Fajr time, it would be impossible to get into the restroom, because all the sleeping bodies around me would be awake and ready for their morning pee. Many Muslims like to believe they are the cleanest and purest people in the world. In that moment, as I gasped for air, it was hard for me to believe it.
The plain was littered with many thousands of white-shrouded bodies, many resting on sleeping bags. For me, there would be no sleep this night. It was lit up by thousands of smartphone screens being used as torches to aid in the search for pebbles. These gadgets gave the landscape an eerie, futuristic quality.
Confession is the first step on the path of redemption, and sinners have a way of finding each other. This is a land of secrets, and I found that many were comforted here by confiding in strangers. On this darkest of nights, I came across a modern-day Muhammad, whose sins are, in my mind, unforgivable. This pilgrim was praying and sobbing. This is considered un-Islamic. I wanted to remind him so he wouldn’t get into trouble with the mutaween.
“Why are you crying?” I asked. We exchanged names. His name was also Muhammad, Muhammad Bashir, from Lahore, Pakistan.
“Brother Parvez, you must have heard these days in Pakistan there are killings for family honor,” he said, with shame written across his face.
“I don’t understand, brother,” I replied.
“When someone is murdered in the name of honor, brother.”
“Yes,” I said. “I have heard and it makes me feel bad.” I feared where this was going. “But it’s the twenty-first century. Do you think murders happen in these times?”
Of course I knew they did. Saudi Arabia’s most famous honor killing took place in 1977, when Princess Misha’al bint Fahd, a niece of King Khaled, was publically executed for her affair with a Lebanese businessman named Khaled al-Sha’er Mulhallal. She was blindfolded, forced to kneel, and shot. Her lover was forced to watch and then beheaded next to her bleeding corpse. More recently, British newspapers reported in 2008 that a woman was killed by her husband for chatting with another man on
Facebook.
According to most interpretations of sharia law, an accusation of adultery can be made only when four male witnesses have testified in favor of the claim. The same applies to the act of “sodomy,” which is often equated with homosexuality. In 2008, a twenty-six-year-old Turkish student was shot by his conservative Kurdish father five times when the young man left his apartment for some ice cream. While filming A Jihad for Love, I had visited gay cafés in Istanbul, and yet a spirit of intolerance ran deep throughout the country. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuals are routinely whipped, imprisoned, and executed by the mutaween. Vigilante justice is also common.
Muhammad confirmed that honor killings are common in Pakistan. “I personally know they happen, sir. That is the reason I am here. It was done in my house. Every time I try to pray, I see her face. I see her face when I look at my two nephews. My brother did not want to come on the Hajj. He doesn’t think he did anything wrong. But I had to.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“My sister-in-law. Her name was Yasmin. Her family is asking for blood money. I don’t know what we will do.”
“Did you participate?”
“Yes, sir. This is the reason I am here on Hajj.” I realized I was sitting next to a murderer. There was nothing left for me to say to him. I did not know how to bring him comfort. I did not want to.
The next morning, we walked from Muzdalifah to Mina, the world’s largest tent city. Here there are more than 100,000 air-conditioned tents sprawling across twenty square kilometers. Historically, pilgrims brought their own tents. In the nineties, fires raged through sections of the city, so the tents that met my eyes were fiberglass coated with Teflon.
I felt awful. We hadn’t showered in three days and had walked for miles in the dust. We walked bowlegged to avoid further chafing of our inner thighs. Our white ihrams had lost their made-in-China gleam. I had stopped eating and drinking sufficiently because I was terrified at the thought of having to use another overused Saudi toilet, the most disgusting I have ever seen in the world. A seasoned traveler, I had travelled to more than thirty countries and I came from India, a country that practically invented “disgusting toilets,” enshrined for cinematic history in the opening sequence of Slumdog Millionaire. Our feet were calloused from our Hajj-mandated open-toed sandals. If it was good enough for the Prophet, it was supposed to be good enough for us.
A Sinner in Mecca Page 20