A Sinner in Mecca

by Parvez Sharma

  “So much,” I said. “And yet so little.”

  “Well, it definitely made you skinny. Hajj diet people! Hajj diet! Move over, Atkins, South Beach, and all the other blah blahs!” she exclaimed. There was mirth and gratitude at our table that night.

  I had learned a lot in Saudi Arabia. And with all the years of study and real work, I felt I had finally won the right to sit at the table of Islam’s ongoing reformation, forced upon it by 9/11. This is important. Islam didn’t ask for a twenty-first century reformation. It’s been forced to embrace one because of 9/11 and more. Post-Hajj, I can confidently say that the legacy of Saudi Arabia and Wahhab seen in history’s vast moral arc will be destructive. And unfortunately the dogma (whatever you call it, Salafi or Wahhabi) has been more successful than oil in being the biggest Saudi export. Very few mosques in the world remain untouched.

  Muhammad’s legacy has been annihilated. Getting my hands dirty in many Muslim nations, living, studying, and filming with the most religious within my faith I believe gives me the authority to be one of those reformers. Wahhabi mindsets drool at ijtihad as a continuing tradition. But allowing Muslim pundits amongst us—let’s say those in the West—to erroneously offer ijtihad as a solution would be a historical mistake.

  How can it be a solution, in fact, when an ijtihad-loving Deoband issues illogical Wahhabi fatwas such as “all photography is un-Islamic” (2013)? Or that a family surviving on the earnings of a woman was un-Islamic, and that men and women should not work together (2010)? In modern India? Impossible.

  The biggest problems in the Muslim “worlds,” as I discussed with Ghalib, are illiteracy and poverty. Standard modern education is unavailable to the majority. And what’s available in places like Nadhwa doesn’t produce mujtahids—sharia-compliant scholars using independent reasoning (ijtihad). Does just being a gender-studies major lead to paying jobs? No. Nadhwa graduates face the same fate. Jobs for the ones not on their way to jihadist camps are pretty much impossible.

  Therefore, for Islam’s majority, their mujtahids are Wahhabi. Most are dangerous. And it’s their style of ijtihad that a Wahhabi or Daesh mind seeks. No one cares about the “gay imam” in South Africa who offered ijtihad as a solution in my first film. I have come to disagree with the conclusion of my own A Jihad for Love. I wonder if he has finally learned to engage with world politics or if he is still lost in the Quran?

  The House of Saud helped build a global terror network. In 2003, it arrived at the House’s own doorstep when bombs exploded in Riyadh, killing thirty-nine. Osama berated the Sauds as un-Islamic in his frequent faxes and later Al Jazeera “interviews.” After 9/11, the bin Laden family furiously began undoing any umbilical cord that would connect Osama to them or the House of Saud while shuffling their billions to offshore accounts. But how could they? 9/11 was a recent memory.

  In the kingdom, its grand muftis serve at the pleasure of the king and, in return, the Saud monarchy survives only because of Wahhabi religious favor. Abdullah, then king, ordered the infiltration and monitoring of all Islamic charities that existed in his fiefdom and predictably ran to his always-obedient one-eyed grand mufti (Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al Shaykh), who was also chairman of the senior ulema, to produce a detailed fatwa-on-demand. In part, Al Shaykh said:

  Firstly: The recent developments in the United States, including hijacking planes, terrorizing innocent people, and shedding blood, constitute a form of injustice that cannot be tolerated by Islam, which views them as gross crimes and sinful acts.

  Secondly: Any Muslim who is aware of the teachings of his religion and who adheres to the directives of the Holy Quran and the sunnah will never involve himself in such acts, because they will invoke the anger of God Almighty and lead to harm and corruption on Earth.

  There was more, including a subtle reference to the media’s “defaming” Islam.

  Not one Saud or ulema mentioned that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers held Saudi passports.

  Saudis like Adham laughed. Had the monarchy forgotten that it had created and funded Osama’s jihad? Didn’t the Saudis know how much support he and now Daesh had amongst their own?

  The nineties’ Grand Mufti ibn Baz made jihad-lite fashionable. Young Saudis were encouraged to go for jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They had to learn Islam’s “challenges.” It was like a semester abroad, and the jihadi-fied returnees strutted around like peacocks in their fatigues and military accoutrements at the Jeddah corniche. Didn’t girls love men in uniform? Islam and violence? Never a novelty for the Saudis.

  “Jihad of the Sword” is not unfamiliar to most Saudis or me. It has always had discreet support amongst some ordinary Saudis, many scholars, and even within the Saud and bin Laden families. Officially, the Sauds were partners in George W. Bush’s “global war of terror.” Ties between Dar al Bush and Dar al Saud went way back. Soon after his election and a few months before 9/11, Bush had asked the CIA and FBI to “back off” investigating the bin Ladens and Saudi royals. At the time of writing, Zacarias Moussaoui, the infamous al-Qaeda operative who is under life imprisonment, told lawyers that members of the Saudi royal family, including former intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal Al Saud, “supported” al-Qaeda to carry out its attacks.

  I had arrived in Saudi Arabia just a few months after Obama got Osama. Getting rid of the body was urgent. No one in the Obama administration wanted this man to achieve “martyr” status. Did they not realize that for many he was anyway? WikiLeaks has claimed that his body was brought to the US for pathological analysis and then cremated (against Islamic doctrine). Others say he really was dumped off the USS Carl Vinson, wrapped in a shroud and 300 pounds of chains. CIA head honcho Leon Panetta said in his book, “Bin Laden’s body was prepared for burial according to Muslim traditions, draped in a white shroud, given final prayers in Arabic, and then placed inside a heavy black bag.”

  A few Muslim scholars disagreed with how Obama did it. Did they want a funeral procession? Even Amnesty International made the ridiculous claim that since he was found unarmed he should have been taken alive.

  It was also a few months after the fires of an Arab Spring were lit. The Shia in the East were predictably protesting and this Hajj season had to be monitored carefully. When I was there, the mutaween were on edge and particularly proliferating. I was often in trouble with them. I had chosen Hajj 2011 deliberately.

  In his lifetime Osama bin Laden had learned to detest his homeland, and yet conveniently both he and now Daesh take much of their logic from the Wahhabi Islam that is indistinguishable from the nation of its birth. The abominations of the Wahhabi state continue and often resemble Daesh and what remains of al-Qaeda. Many Saudi tweets said by mid-2015 that the Saudis had beheaded more than twice the number Daesh had. This airing of dirty laundry on Twitter and infuriated the monarchy and its new King Salman, who obdurately proclaims a new era. How? No one knows. His subjects are busy tweeting, the densest user base for Twitter along with Kuwaitis. Some say seven million Saudis are users. Do they know that this sophisticated surveillance state, built during the time bin Laden lived there, has moved with time—today policing Twitter, like daily life?

  King Salman heads a shaken yet rigid state unlike any other. In October 2016, the New York Times reported that the long-named Prince Turki bin Saud bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabeer had been executed for murder, probably by beheading. The Al Saud and grand mufti were in warning mode: If we can behead our own blood, a prince, imagine what can happen to an ordinary mortal. It had been four decades since a royal had faced the sword. The fear spread virally. Adham, like other young men, began to wonder if this meant a return to the brutal past. In reality, the brutality had never gone anywhere.

  The Al Saud are famously opaque, yet the younger royals continue Instagramming their lavish lives, much like the Kardashians and the Real Housewives of everywhere. Probably the second-most-powerful man in Saudi Arabia is the thirty-one-year-old deputy crown prince Salman, who is the king’s son. He
sees his path to kingship clearly, while obliterating any power that the first in line to the throne—the diabetic, doddering, fifty-seven-year-old crown prince Nayef—has. Salman has his hands in practically every national matter in the kingdom. Yet his love of objectionable excess led to his purchase of a 440-foot yacht he had spotted while vacationing on the Riviera. This profligate spending does not sit well with the always-tweeting Saudis, who were shocked to learn of its $550 million cost. This is a time when the regimented “clergy” has been ordered to proclaim frugality. It’s an Islamic virtue, they say, and helps the country remain stable in uncertain times. The government has slashed the state budget, frozen government contracts, and cut civil employees’ pay at a time of low oil prices. But the Al Saud, as per tradition, never stop shopping.

  Even so, if Salman Junior emerges victorious in the collusion-filled palace intrigues, friends like Adham point out how he is seen as a palatable and young choice, as if he were the ascendant Saudi Obama. Salman poses in royal threads on the website of his pet project—Vision 2030. The site claims the project will kill Saudi dependence on oil and save the flailing economy. Big text on the website says, “Our Vision: Saudi Arabia, the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds, the investment powerhouse, and the hub connecting three continents.”

  The prince also established an “Entertainment Authority” to placate his majority young subjects with things like comedy shows. Does the future of young Saudi Arabians lie in the hands of this charismatic man in his thirties who purportedly understands them? Will his subjects question what in great part was his decision for the misguided Saudi-Iran proxy war in Yemen? What would he do to hypocritically curb his enormous family’s excesses? Princess Maha from the powerful Sudairi wing of the family infamously fled the ultra-luxurious Paris Shangri-La Hotel in the middle of the night to avoid paying a $7.5 million hotel bill.

  “Everyone loves him,” texted Adham. There are more than 10,000 royals in the kingdom, and depending on rank, each gets his or her share of the depleting moolah.

  On October 15, 2016, the New York Times reported, “The White House got an early sign of the ascent of the young prince in late 2015, when—breaking protocol—Prince bin Salman delivered a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy during a meeting between his father, King Salman, and President Obama.”

  Saudi tweeters don’t tweet against the monarchy or religion, and thus the heavily monitored Twitter is good for the royals. It allows their young subjects to vent, and a Trump-like state of distraction seems to have formed.

  Not with the regularity of Trump, but for similar reasons of diversion, King Salman tweets frugally to his couple-of-million followers. Everyone knows about the disappearing petrodollars. And even economists like Adham’s well-liked uncle says privately that at least a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line. Surely this number includes the immigrants in servitude? A Saudi version of poverty porn, à la the favelas of the film City of God, exists for Hajjis who look for it. My trip into Mecca’s fetid by-lanes, like the one I had taken with my almost-trick Muhammad, was proof.

  I believe that affluent Saudi youths got used to this peculiar nanny state. Every king threw subsidies at every problem. Most still believe the Al Saud will never let them down.

  “We are too lazy for revolution,” Adham said.

  When the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s only real election by a landslide, I was one of the unsurprised few. This Ikhwan was nothing compared to Wahhabi ones, I reasoned. Egypt’s demographics are clear: majority poor, illiterate, and thus devout. Their Ikhwan built decades of ingratiation and goodwill amongst these grassroots. For them, at the time, Mohamed Morsi’s becoming president was a legit outcome. Moral policing was not number one on their agenda. So Egypt continued to be a kind of Saudi Riviera for those who were not rich enough to rent villas in France. Therefore the annual summer ritual of gaudy and vulgar Saudi excess in Beirut or Cairo has never stopped, even through dictators and revolutions. I have seen both women in “burqinis” and women in full-on abaya floating in the pool of the Four Seasons. Words cannot describe the comicality of a bloated black sack with a human under it in a five-star swimming pool. Yet another example of Saudi patriarchy.

  With the oil drying up the House of Saud, try to take some comfort in this: The Hajj economy, at least, is never going away.

  Adham had done his bachelor’s in Islamic theology, which he said was “convoluted.” In 2009, he enrolled in an engineering program at the controversial King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Jeddah. KAUST made headlines because ikhtilat was halal—a key Twitter igniter. The ikhtilat is just one reason why conservative Saudis stayed away, keeping Saudi enrollment relatively low. In addition, like in Mecca, women at KAUST allegedly don’t need to cover their faces. As long as their ungodly hair is covered, it’s all halal. But foreign students clamored for admission, imagining degrees from here would lead to high-paying jobs in the region. Meanwhile, a quote from Sheikh Ahmad al-Ghamdi, the puritanical head honcho of Mecca’s cruel mutaween, circulated like wildfire, and Adham texted me a link to the report in Okaz, the Saudi newspaper version of the New York Post.

  Ghamdi said ikhtilat should be allowed. There was no need for gender segregation.

  “Here comes change!” texted an obviously jubilant Adham. The Ha’ia (another name for the religious police) freaked out.

  Ghamdi was fired.

  But he built his own cult on Twitter and TV. He has at various times said it was OK for women to drive and shops didn’t need to shutter at prayer times. He said that in the Prophet’s time women rode camels, which was way more provocative than veiled women driving SUVs. Ghamdi is sly, and he, unlike most, knows the loopholes in religious laws that allow him his chutzpah. He is an insider gone rogue. In a July 10, 2016, New York Times article, Ghamdhi said about the mutaween: “Often, people were humiliated in inhuman ways, and that humiliation could cause hatred of religion.” He said false eyelashes were OK and he appeared on TV with his made-up and facially uncovered wife.

  Ghamdi’s views are probably shared by the majority in Saudi society and even by the royal family. This man comes from Islam’s very heart, Mecca. And perhaps policing morality there actually helped him realize how diverse Islam really is. Still, addressing these matters in public is rare. And his statements forced Salman to put the mutaween in line. But how will someone like Ghamdi make a living now?

  Adham sent a picture of a KAUST cinema. “A land of no cinemas now has one. Wahhabi logic?”

  “They will keep their mouths shut because the Saud built it,” I replied.

  Any reform there will be glacial. A strictly government-scrutinized and -patrolled film industry is forming. At least two fiction films, Wadjda (2012) and Barakah Meets Barakah (2016), have been submitted to the Oscars as “Saudi films.” I am proud that my film, A Sinner in Mecca, is the world’s first foreign-produced documentary set in Mecca and Medina, portraying the Hajj and the country from deep inside, warts and all. It’s not a government-approved junket film but an unprecedented guerrilla-style documentary made on an iPhone. This, too, makes me an active participant in the ongoing revolution forced upon Islam after 9/11. Muhammad, though, would not hesitate to say that we live in a time of jahiliyah (ignorance). He would quickly realize the biggest problems that ail twenty-first-century Islam are poverty, illiteracy, and joblessness.

  Muhammad would have favored what would have shocked suffragettes of decades past: Saudi women finally voted, after getting franchised in 2015. Twenty-one women candidates were even “elected” to municipal office. I put “elected” in quotation marks because in this land of no music, cinemas, or political parties, this sorry attempt at democracy is farcical. In the minds of many Wahhabis, we are still in the three centuries that followed Muhammad’s death. Usually, they don’t open their mouths when the king periodically pays lip service to reforms and human rights, conditions they have never lived in or understood.

  Like ev
ery grand mufti, Baz’s successor, al Shaykh, is “House of Saud compliant.” He famously issued fatwas saying chess was un-Islamic and he banned Pokémon Go, the smartphone virtual-reality game phenomenon, because it was “gambling.” Relatively early in his tenure, in 2007 he had aroused universal uproar in the Muslim world by issuing plans to destroy the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the tombs “around it,” and the Green Dome above it. This was perhaps the pamphlet my group leader in Medina had spoken about. Truth is, the Saudis know they dare not touch the dome. Worldwide (imagine more than 1.6 billion outraged Muslims) fitna is assured.

  Palestinian extremist Abdullah Azzam, his former Saudi student Osama, and the still-alive Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri fathered the deliberately named al-Qaeda. It means “foundation.”

  They were all influenced by a radical ideology that Egyptian Islamist Syyed Qutb wrote about in his prolific career. Qutb was seen as influenced by a theologian called Hassan al Banna, who fathered the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn), which has no connection to the Daesh-style Ikhwans of today. Regardless, all these men at different points in history have been experts at using the Quran and our canon, producing violent and illogical material.

  The success of Daesh, unlike an al-Qaeda of a different time and space, has been its prowess at using the social web. Even in 2011, Daesh couldn’t have dreamt of “recruiting” in European capitals from London to Brussels. But, in truth, all it takes is a lonely room, no job, a pre-existing psychopathic mindset, and a laptop. The glossy new mujahideen of this disparate entity the world has taken to calling ISIS or the more sensible Daesh carry European or even US passports. And because of them, people like me, with my name, my beard, and a still-new US passport, are profiled at airports.

  A recent victory, therefore, felt especially sweet. Traveling to Europe and stuck in one of the horrendous TSA lines at JFK, I ended up with a TSA official who recognized me from my film A Sinner in Mecca. I was flabbergasted as he said how much he loved the film, which he found while zipping through Netflix.