A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  I knew she knew a great deal about my favorite subject.

  “So as you know, in some parts of India Wahhabism is seen as a reform movement . . .” I began gingerly.

  “Of course,” she said, “In eighteenth-century Islam there were reform movements all over the place. Wahhab promised the same, including to people like my grandfather who used it to the very last day.”

  I challenged her about barbaric Wahhabi ideology that lay at the heart of Saudi sharia and was now everywhere. Zainab was a very learned woman, having earned her PhD in Islamic theology at India’s famed Aligarh Muslim University.

  “You have to study its appearance in context,” she said, telling me what I already knew. Wahhab was a product of a time when Islamic empires were losing to colonizers. His pact with ibn Saud was necessary for “stability,” she said. The man in his own lifetime saw his “reform” bastardized. It is true that a “split” between “peaceful” and “violent” occurred in Wahhab’s lifetime. However, even his “peaceful” puritanical theology was destined to be a destructive force.

  We discussed how Osama was in part a product of the violent part of Wahhabi logic. We assessed the immense anger and a sense of loss amongst empires of Muslims because their borders were being redrawn by colonizers like the British. For the Mughals and other Muslim powers, this political disintegration became a religious problem too. And then came the eighteenth-century Wahhab with his seventh-century logic.

  “Yes, it was puritanical. It hated the Sufi style that the Mughals had encouraged and celebrated. It took away the freedoms of Muslim women, which they till then had taken for granted. But I still wonder if Wahhab thought he was on a divine mission to build what he viewed as an equal Ummah just like the Prophet had envisioned it,” I said.

  “That is worthy of research,” said Zainab. “He was from the Nejd and thus walked the same sands the Prophet’s early Muslims walked. He would have despised Hindus.”

  “But then why did it appeal to your grandfather?”

  “Because even Deobandis embraced it. He was drawn to Wahhab’s condemnation of idol worship, India’s main religion. You see, he saw Wahhabi Islam as a reform movement. Which it was, in the eighteenth century.” We both agreed that Wahhab himself had believed in Tawhid, the sunnah, and the Quran, and was probably not a violent man. His successors invoke his name “for horror,” I said.

  I was happy to find a Muslim woman scholar who said that Wahhab was no political ideologue. His transformation into the latter was the handiwork of Muhammad ibn Saud, eager to set up a divinely ordained monarchy.

  We spoke about the contexts of those times. In 1744, post-treaty, Wahhab and the early ibn Saud deliberately moved tribes from nomadism to sedentary life, which allowed Wahhabi proselytizing. But even at the time, the ancient “ghazu” raids that had only involved the plunder of livestock for food morphed into takfiri and kafir human slaughter.

  The Saud-Wahhab marriage was one of convenience. Wahhab would have no followers if ibn Saud did not conquer and bring them to him. Critically, Wahhab found no Islamic evidence for the ibn Saud–created Ikhwan’s annihilation of humans. They were no martyrs, he said.

  Was he an eighteenth-century Arab version of the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther? He preferred literacy, ijtihad, and Quranic exegesis. But he also favored public beheadings and taking away Quranic rights for women. For me, his “revivalism” is a bastardization of the Quran’s comity. Sufi mystic ibn Arabi had said in the thirteenth century, “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest.” Wahhab would never have agreed. But surely he knew that a great deal of Islam’s geographical expansion had used Sufi mythology, venerated by kings, mystics, and ordinary mortals alike.

  “But Wahhab would have destroyed all the Sufi shrines here in Lucknow,” I said to Zainab. Sufi mystics like India’s syncretic “Chisti” Sheikh Nizamuddin Auliya was buried a few blocks from one of the homes where I grew up. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was normal for scholar-poets like him to say that he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, and not even a Muslim, because once the divine had been revealed to a believer, these manmade divisions no longer mattered.

  She agreed about Auliya but added, “Wahhabization of this region is so complete that it’s only a matter of time. Just look at Afghanistan and Pakistan.” I could not imagine an India without a Nizamuddin. But twenty-first century Islam is increasingly suspicious of its Sufi mystical roots and legacy.

  Wahhab’s distaste for needless violence died with him. Future Sauds used jihad and takfir with equal ferocity to slaughter entire tribes. They plundered cities like Karbala, holy to the Shia at the turn of the nineteenth century. The ascendant Wahhabis were thrilled to see the evolving demise of the Ottomans they had warred with several times. However, there was relentless butchery in Arabia until Abdulaziz ibn Saud in 1932 formally established what Adham and I, like many, call KSA, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This modern entity remembers the savagery at its roots full well and is never afraid to use it, even in our times.

  I sometimes wonder what Zainab would think of Wahhabism’s impact on Daesh? How would she view the wastelands of Syria and Iraq, and their connection to “end of days” logic? Daesh savages break bread with their own, and everybody else is up for death with lances and swords. Ignoring Islam, they have routinely massacred “apostates” including unarmed villagers in their thousands, thinking nothing of raping women and slaughtering children, and routinely slitting the throats and even beheading male captives. Their cameras capture it all competently. In the late 1920s, Abdulaziz al-Saud or ibn Saud (not the Saud who made the Wahhabi pact) was as captivated as the Crawleys at Downton with telephones and the telegraph, cars, cigarettes, and gramophones. His own itinerant Ikhwan said anything modern (not used in the seventh century) was bida, heretical innovation, and declared war on him. He finally defeated them in 1930, but they never really went away.

  Ibn Saud got his early ulema to say “militant jihad” was un-Islamic. The rest of Wahhab’s ideology became Saudi sharia. This official stance was clearly never practiced. After 1979, Western governments including the US, as afraid of revolutionary Shia Iran as the Sauds, gave their blessings to the Saudi project of Wahhab-izing the planet.

  I asked Zainab what she felt about this Wahhabi spread-ology.

  “Islam has destroyed itself,” she said sagely.

  It has been years since we saw each other.

  “I’m looking for the moon,” said a little boy. “My father sent me to find it.”

  I was perched on a rooftop in chaotic Old Delhi, above the tangled web of wires that were miraculously able to bring intermittent electricity to the surrounding homes. It was winter 2012 and I was now a Hajji. Celebration was in the air. This night was called Chand Raat (“The Night of the Moon”). Shopkeepers cooked mithai (sweets). My favorite was the sevaiyyan (toasted, sweet vermicelli noodles). Women applied henna, and everyone wore new clothes. Ramadan was ending. For a month, I had fasted from sunrise to sunset like millions of my fellow Indian Muslims and began my renewed journey with faith and vigor. I joined tens of thousands of supplicants at New Delhi’s Jama Masjid wearing a kurta (tunic) my mother gave me. Just a year ago I had pounded Saudi sands.

  That night we searched for the sliver of a crescent moon called hilal that would signal Ramadan’s end and assure the faithful that their prayers had been answered. We waited for Delhi’s highest cleric to proclaim the hilal sighting through many loudspeakers. Often sectarian, south Asians, like their TV channels, reported different times of the moonrise. Joyous cries and firecrackers took over when he proclaimed the sighting. I suppose that seventh-century Muslims weren’t aware of time zones. But finally the declaration was made. Tomorrow was Eid al-Fitr.

  I retched on the stench permeating my second-class cabin on the train to Saharanpur. This stench brought back uncomfortable memories of childhood. I checked into the shabby Atlantis Hotel, which was far from even
being a distant 1,000th cousin to its shiny sister in Dubai. My beloved Real Housewives of Beverly Hills frolicked and quarreled in nouveau-riche luxury in the latter. This one welcomed me with cockroaches scurrying about what the staff in Hinglish were calling a “suit” in lieu of “suite.”

  The next morning, I spoke with a local cleric at my childhood mosque about my intentions in Saharanpur.

  “This is a complicated issue,” I said, daring to explain that I went on the Hajj with Shia pilgrims and that their madhhab (doctrine) left the question of the method of goat slaughter as a matter open to the individual. I was never sure about what the various Sunni madhhab said on the issue.

  “They ran out of goats,” I explained. “I wasn’t able to complete the final ritual of my Hajj. Our Shia group leader said he had done it on our behalf. I don’t know if this is a matter of fiqh,” or Islamic jurisprudence.

  The junior cleric held his earlobes in imitation of a schoolboy’s punishment. In India, disobedient children are told to clasp their earlobes. After a while, this hurts like hell, and is used as a common form of corporal punishment and public shaming.

  “Astaghfirullah!” he exclaimed. The translation is “Forgive me, God,” but it could be better understood as an outburst like “Oh, my God!” The melodramatic cleric was indicating his shock that I dared travel among Shia. He scurried into another room and retrieved a pile of books. “There are many religious opinions on this matter,” he said.

  I cut him short. “You just need to tell me if I can do a qurbani (sacrifice) after the Hajj is finished.”

  Sensing money, the mullah was eager to please.

  “If you have the means, you can do it,” he said. “Let me warn you—there’s a lot of fiqh that will nullify your Hajj because you went with Shia apostates.”

  As I got up to leave his mosque, the cleric left me with a final question: “But can you make sure the meat is distributed here in this neighborhood?” I nodded and hugged him twice, as many Indian Muslims do when bidding goodbye to a same-sex member, slipping 3,000 rupees into his hands.

  I wandered the streets of Saharanpur. For me these were streets of shame. My mother never forgave me for being gay. I looked all over the streets of the wood market, and there it was: our childhood halal butcher shop. To my disbelief, the same man was still running the family business. His wrinkles told the story of a difficult life.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I always cut the meat for your family on Eid.”

  “I need a qurbani.”

  “You want me to do it for you, you mean?”

  I did not explain the circumstances that brought me to his shop. “I need to use my own hands, but I want you to be there to finish the job. Please don’t ask too many questions.” I handed him 10,000 rupees, a sum that would cover the cost of the sacrifice and quell any curiosity that might inspire him to get chatty with me. I associated this man with my past, which was marked by judgment and worse.

  “How about eleven o’clock, tomorrow morning? I hope your wife and children are well!” It was inconceivable to this man that I could have reached adulthood without taking a wife and reproducing, as all good Muslims should.

  The stink of daily death is particular. In the West, the smell born from animal slaughter is conveniently hidden away. Here in India, death in any form is out in the open. Slaughterhouses compete for space with every other kind of business, so one is never far from its unique odor. I met the butcher at the appointed hour the following morning. Together we procured a goat from a nearby market. The closer we got to the final act, the more I was plagued with inner conflict. On the one hand, I was dreading the experience. I had never performed an act of violence in my life. The sight of the slaughter was familiar to me, but I’d always kept a safe distance. Never before had I taken an animal’s life with my own hands. On the other hand, I desperately craved the catharsis that I hoped would follow the sacrifice. I had left Saudi Arabia feeling that my Hajj was incomplete. My faith had been severely tested there, and having missed the chance to perform the sacrifice, I felt bereft. With the force of my own will, I had created a scenario that would enable me to find atonement.

  Knife in hand, I stared at the goat I had personally nicknamed Ismael. As a child, my perception of the story of Ibrahim sacrificing his son Ismael was shaped by my fragile relationship with my own father. We were emotionally distant in both directions. The idea that Ibrahim was so ready and willing to sacrifice his own son struck me as an authentic portrayal of a father-son relationship. As a boy, I felt that if my own father had been given the choice, he, too, would not have hesitated to place me upon the altar. Would I find last-minute redemption as Ismael had?

  No redemption for this thrashing animal was at hand.

  “Bismillah,” I said, as I brought the blade to the goat’s throat. I struggled to break the skin.

  “Push harder,” said the butcher. The goal was to cut the jugular vein, the carotid artery, and the windpipe in a single clean swipe. Every aspect of Islam is carefully regimented. I summoned all my discipline to ensure that I performed the dreadful ritual correctly.

  When it was done, I clutched the dead animal. My clothes were soaked with blood. My mind raced. Did I do it correctly? Had I been blessed with redemption? Were there certain supplications that I’d neglected? Would my mother have approved? What would my father think? The finality this brought was unfamiliar. With this animal, had I also killed my childhood?

  I recited the first chapter of the Quran, which had always brought me comfort. Not this time. I felt like a murderer. I fell to the ground in a fetal position and lay there for what seemed like hours. I had never felt more unclean. Few Muslims would approve of what I did next. Covered in blood, I climbed to the rooftop and performed the Namaz (prayer) with extra rakats (prescribed movements). I was performing the wrong prayer at the wrong time, all while covered in animal blood, and thus in no state of tahara, or purity. In Islam, prayer had always been performance—a kind that is used to instill discipline and a retreat into the spiritual. Heavily ritualized, it’s almost like the yoga of the Hindu religion.

  As a child I had used the very expansive Ayatul Kursi (“Verse of the Throne”) from the Quran to comfort me into sleep, and it unfailingly did that. But I had learned its meaning only as an adult. This is probably the most famous Quranic verse in the world, used for countless occasions, comforting me to sleep being one of them. I had often seen it etched in all kinds of wall hangings, silk, velvet, and more. Infinite styles of Arabic calligraphy, as seen in the Taj Mahal, were used for this verse, too.

  “Allah. There is no god but He—the Living, the Self-subsisting, Eternal. No slumber can seize Him nor sleep. His are all things in the heavens and on earth. Who is there can intercede in His presence except as He permits? He knows what (appears to His creatures as) before or after or behind them. Nor shall they compass aught of His knowledge except as He wills. His Throne doth extend over the heavens and the earth, and He feels no fatigue in guarding and preserving them for He is the Most High, the Supreme (in glory).”

  On that night in 2012 it still worked, better than any sleeping pill.

  I was back in India, again. It was late January 2014. I sat on the verandah of the lavish Golf Links home of a prominent Delhi socialite. I was visiting her guest, a well-known Pakistani journalist called Ghalib Kidwai. He had just run in to “order” some more chai. I was in India, editing the film that would become A Sinner in Mecca upon its release in 2015. Delhi had not yet turned into a 50-degree-Celsius hellhole. Late January was still nice enough to sit outside. Ghalib and I had known each other for years from my early days as a cub reporter. He was always my ear to Pakistan, a country I had only once been granted a visa to. Visiting each other’s country is nearly impossible for Indians and Pakistanis. Like many North Indians, my family had deep connections to Pakistan and vice versa. My grandfather had studied at a prominent Lahore college.

  Ghalib, wh
o is an atheist, knew the film I was editing and was afraid for me. We had been talking about a critical 2013 EU report that received scant media attention. “I just brought these pages; the whole thing is hard to get,” he said. He knew I might quote him. His name and affiliation, like all others in this book, have been changed. Public knowledge of our long-standing friendship could do him and his career great harm—my name was notorious in Pakistan. Ghalib was my first Pakistani friend to discover that my first film was on Lahore’s pirated DVD market.

  It had taken some journalistic digging for him to find these quotes from the EU report. This usually comatose entity paying its bureaucrats hugely inflated salaries to manufacture miles of PowerPoint presentations seemed to have done something useful? I rifled through its tedious pages. It tried to explain the global network of finance using the Islamic principles of zakat and da’wa. It had started in the seventies with the Saudi oil boom that made Osama’s family rich beyond description. There were ibn Saud and bin Laden billionaires everywhere. This cash had fueled al-Qaeda and much other mayhem. Safe in their seemingly secure, lifelong desk jobs, these bureaucrats had finally woken up to a fact that Muslims had known for decades.

  There it was on the photocopied page 74 of the EU report: Wahhabi and/or Salafi groups (depending on how you chose to name them—for me they were one and the same) based in the Middle East were closely involved in the “support and supply of arms to rebel groups around the world.” Any Gulf returnee to Pakistan in the eighties could have told you that. We had known it for years but here was proof that the Sauds and their Wahhabi clerics had direct links to terrorism. It warned that, “No country in the Muslim world is safe from their operations . . . as they always aim to terrorize their opponents and arouse the admiration of their supporters.” Ghalib returned with more chai.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “Do you think that the Obama White House knows?”