by Zarqa Nawaz
The Saudis faced a logistical nightmare keeping pilgrims sorted, fed, hydrated and alive. Every year pilgrims die because of accidents, old age and epidemics. There was a dedicated morgue with coolers for hundreds of dead people with a cemetery, Jannat al Baqi, out back. You die at hajj, you get buried at hajj. But Muslims consider it a blessing to be buried in the same cemetery as the companions and relatives of the Prophet. It was an open secret that some people waited to do hajj until they were old in the hope of being buried there. I imagined it was a bitter disappointment if they had to go home alive.
Going through security was quick. Serious-looking men rifled through our suitcases. My Vanity Fair was confiscated. I looked at Sami.
“I told you to read the manual,” he said unsympathetically. “They’re big on censorship.”
I didn’t have time to sulk because we were loaded onto a bus that took us on the hour-long journey to Mecca. We travelled on a four-lane highway through the desert, which was dotted with small hills and shrubbery. The passengers on the bus started the Talbiyah chant, the official hajj prayer—labbaykah-allahumma labbaykah, which translated means, “Here I am, O Allah, here I am. Here I am, you have no partner, here I am. Indeed all praise, grace and sovereignty belong to you.” It was hypnotic listening to everyone repeat the same melodic prayer as we swayed together on the bus. I could feel everyone’s growing anticipation, which was like a charge in the air.
We got to our air-conditioned, five-star hotel in Mecca, where I lay on the crisp bed and luxuriated in the fine linens. I was officially on my first hajj, and I loved it.
“We should do this every year,” I told Sami as I made a snow angel on the fluffy down duvet. He lay down on the bed beside me.
“Mmm-hmm,” I said, nuzzling up to him. “We don’t have to worry about a little tiny creature disturbing us.”
“No,” he said playfully. “But just tell me one thing.”
“Sure.”
“Did you read the manual?”
“Of course,” I lied as I snuggled closer.
“So you know sex is forbidden during the hajj.”
“WHAT?” I nearly choked. “Why would God do that?”
“Probably because God knew that some people wouldn’t focus on anything else.”
“Really, no sex during the whole thing?”
“There might be a window of opportunity between umrah and hajj,” he said, laughing. “But you’ll have to read the handbook to be sure.”
This time I grabbed the handbook with real appreciation. The hajj consists of two sections. The umrah is a preamble, a lesser hajj to be done first, and involves two main rituals: tawaf, circling the Kaaba seven times in a counter-clockwise direction, and sa’i, walking between the two hills of Safa and Marwah. Then the ihram is removed, and people take a break and engage in activities that normally aren’t allowed, like sex, until the eighth day of Dhu al-Hijjah, at which point the official hajj begins. All the pilgrims, now wearing ihram again, travel to the tent city of Mina, visit the neighbouring areas of Muzdalifah and Arafat, and perform ramy, the symbolic stoning of the devil. Then, back in Mecca, men shave their heads while women remove about a centimetre of hair, and an animal is sacrificed to commemorate Eid al-Adha. Then finally another tawaf and sa’i, after which the ihram can be taken off, marking the end of hajj, and all the restrictions are lifted. I was out of luck for the next four to five days, but at least the hajj would keep me busy.
Someone knocked on our door. It was Sabreena, Sami’s sister.
“Did I get you at a bad time?”
“Unfortunately, no,” I said.
“Do you want to come with me to circle the Kaaba?” she asked.
“Sure.” I picked out my best sandals for the visit.
“I should come with you,” said Sami. “It gets pretty crowded. Did you read the section on—”
“We’ll be fine,” I said breezily as I took Sabreena’s arm. I was tired of hajj being theoretical. I wanted to do the real thing.
As we walked out of the hotel and turned a corner, the Kaaba suddenly appeared in front of us. I stopped breathing for a second. I’d seen pictures in books since I was old enough to know I was Muslim. But to actually see it in the brick was something else. I was surprised by how emotional I felt. The central tenet of Islam is to believe in an unseen and unrepresented God. Our entire lives, we pray towards the direction of the Kaaba. “Kaaba” literally means “cube” in Arabic, and now here it was: a simple structure enshrouded in black silk cloth with verses of the Qur’an embroidered in gold near the top. I felt my throat constrict as I looked at the building. It was a powerful connection to the past. Although Muslims believe Abraham and his son Ismail built the original structure as a house of worship, I had to remind myself that it had been completely rebuilt over the centuries and this particular structure wasn’t from the ancient times.
As I stood there, staring at this symbol of my faith, a verse in the Qur’an*—”They will come to thee on foot and on every kind of fast mount, coming from every far-away point on earth”—rang through my head and reminded me of the quote from Field of Dreams—”If you build it, they will come.” And they had come. A sea of humanity was circling the Kaaba in a counter-clockwise direction. As Sabreena and I got near, the noise became deafening. From far away, the movement had looked peaceful and orderly, but as we got closer, we noticed a lot of pushing and shoving. Patience is a prerequisite of hajj, but it was easy to see how people could become agitated. Most of the frenzy was in the rows of people closest to the Kaaba. Some people wanted to touch the Kaaba and tried to move in closer. Their real goal was the black stone, the Mona Lisa of the Muslim world, which is encased in an oval silver structure and used to count the rotations of the tawaf. Although touching the black stone is not a required part of hajj, the Prophet had kissed it during hajj. People were becoming incredibly emotional when they saw it and kept trying to stop and kiss it.
“It feels so sacred,” I said as I watched the whole mess of chanting pilgrims moving around the Kaaba. When I finally managed to tear my eyes away and look around me, I saw a McDonald’s, a KFC and a Rolex store. The Saudis have a strange way of preserving the past. They destroyed all the ancient Muslim sites, such as mosques, tombs and homes of the early historical figures of Islam. In their place, they’ve erected luxury hotels and malls. The official justification was that Muslims would worship the sites themselves and not God, so they had to go. There’s been an outcry in the Muslim world at the loss of its collective heritage under Saudi control. The Saudis follow an extremely austere form of religion, called Wahhabism or Salafism, and unilaterally enforce anything they deem un-Islamic.
“It’s like we went to Vegas and hajj broke out,” I said to Sabreena, a little dismayed by the large, opulent structures surrounding us.
The ground around the Kaaba is covered with marble to keep it from eroding under the constant movement of footsteps. We left our sandals by the entrance to the building that contains the Kaaba and joined the surge of people orbiting it. It felt like getting sucked into an eddy of humans, and it was oddly beautiful. We were with thousands of people who shared our faith, moving in unison in an act of pilgrimage. Old people lying on stretchers were carried by burly attendants. Toddlers bobbed above the crowd on the shoulders of their fathers. We were all doing what our ancestors had done for thousands of years. Sabreena and I got so caught up in the moment that we got swept away and were suddenly too close to the Kaaba, where the crowd became unbearably thick and moved as an organic unit, inch by inch. I linked arms with Sabreena so we wouldn’t get separated. As we reached the black stone, people ahead stopped to pray while the people behind kept pressing on. I was being squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. My ribs started to bend painfully, but I couldn’t even fall down because I was so compressed. Panic and fear overwhelmed me. I lost Sabreena. There was simply no way to escape the crowd. At the moment I felt I was going to black out from the pain, the crowd eased again. Sabreena was sudde
nly beside me.
“That was horrible,” I said, relieved it was over, and then someone grabbed my breast and squeezed it. “Sabreena!” I yelled. “Someone’s touching me.”
I could only get a vague sense of a figure beside me, and then he disappeared into the crowd. We looked around but there was no way to find the culprit. We worked our way out of the crowd as fast as possible. I was so shocked I couldn’t speak at first. All the holiness went out of hajj like a deflated balloon. That was the last thing on earth I thought would ever happen in a place like this. The intimacy of being surrounded by all these Muslims, which had made me feel so warm and cherished moments before, was now gone. In front of Islam’s holiest symbol, there were perverts circling around hoping to cop a feel. I felt violated and furious at the person who did this, and I wanted him to be punished. But there was no finding him in that lava flow of people.
“What just happened?” I asked.
“I think you just got sexually assaulted in front of the Kaaba,” said Sabreena.
“What’s wrong?” Sami asked as soon as he saw me coming through the door of our hotel room.
“Someone grabbed my breast.”
Sami held me as I explained what happened. I had wanted so badly to get away from home and to have a break from Maysa, but now all I wanted was to be back with my little girl. I felt she would be just as appalled as I was, given her affinity for my breasts.
“Don’t ever go there alone again,” he said.
“That shouldn’t happen here,” I said. “The Kaaba should be the safest place on earth.”
“Muslims are still people, and people do bad things.”
“What happened to hajj being an experience of spiritual enlightenment? It says here in the manual, everyone has to focus on their relationship with God. No gossiping, no rudeness, no swearing.” I flapped the booklet. “It doesn’t actually say no groping, but I think that’s implied!”
“Look, not everyone is here for the hajj. It’s like anywhere that draws large numbers of people—you’re going to have some people who come to take advantage.”
I couldn’t believe how naïve I had been. I lay down on the bed, trying to calm down. “And that reminds me, someone stole my sandals.”
“It did say in the hajj manual to wear a cheap pair of sandals so no one would be tempted to steal them,” said Sami.
“Can’t I just feel sorry for myself?” I said, annoyed by his practicality.
Sami and I sat quietly together for a while. Finally he spoke.
“What can I do to make hajj better for you?”
“I just want to hate this person and not be judged for it.”
“Fine, but we’re going together on the rest of the rituals,” he said as he tightened his ihram.
“You’re not wearing underwear, are you?”
“No,” said Sami, looking a little vulnerable. Underwear is a stitched garment and was therefore forbidden for him.
“You’d better hope there aren’t any female gropers in that crowd,” I said.
“I’ll take my chances.”
On our way to the Kaaba, the call for the evening prayer started, erupting out of loudspeakers set up throughout the city. I’ve always loved the sound of the azan. The sound was melodic and serene and so familiar. It was comforting to hear the same words of the azan that I was used to hearing back home. The echoing, tinny loudspeaker voice soothed my frayed nerves. Everyone just stopped in their tracks and lined up for prayer. The crowd around the Kaaba stopped and stood for prayers, radiating outwards into all the streets and sidewalks of the surrounding areas, every empty space filled with people. Men and women stood side by side. This was new for me. Muslims are normally manic about separating women from men, with women taking the subordinate positions in mosques, but here in Mecca, both genders are ordered to pray together in mixed lines. Because the Prophet did not leave instructions to alter this arrangement, it’s never been allowed to change. I could tell the men weren’t happy praying next to me, but they had no choice.
“I wish we could pray like this all the time,” I said to Sami.
Sami was well versed in my rage about the separation of men’s and women’s prayer spaces. In many mosques I’ve attended, women have to pray behind some sort of partition, like a curtain. Praying in this sea of men and women together, as they had been doing for fourteen hundred years, felt like a hopeful sign that change was possible in Regina.
When the prayers were over, Sami and I walked to the Kaaba, but this time kept to the outer circle of pilgrims, where there was more space. We noticed that male members of families formed a circle around their female relatives to keep them safe. I should have been more observant and less idealistic when I was with Sabreena. This time I was able to finish all seven circumambulations of tawaf without incident. Afterwards we said our prayers in a more isolated corner of the enclosed gated area to avoid being trampled.
The next day we joined the rest of Sami’s family for the ritual of sa’i. Muslims believe that Abraham was ordered by God to take his wife, Hajar, and infant son, Ismail, to an uncultivated valley in the desert. He gave her some water and dates and started to leave them. A confused Hajar asked Abraham if this was what God had ordered him to do, and he said yes. She said, “We are not going to be lost, since God, who has commanded you, is with us.” She waited under the hot sun, but after she ran out of food and water, she started to become frantic and ran between the two hills, Safa and Marwah, looking for help. After her seventh run, Ismail kicked the sand, and water began to gush out. A caravan of travellers came and asked permission to share the water. Gradually people settled in that area, which became known as Mecca, and built a well, which is known as Zam Zam, one of the oldest wells in history.
The walk today no longer resembles a desperate run between two sandy hills. Now it’s like walking in a giant air-conditioned convention centre, with marble walls and floors and an ornate ceiling with chandeliers and fans overhead. There are even water stations to slake your thirst. Hajar would have appreciated that.
There are three walking lanes separated from each other by columns. The right lane is for people moving from Safa to Marwah, a distance of 450 metres. The left lane is for people going in the opposite direction, and the middle lane is reserved for people pushing wheelchairs. As we entered the tunnel, we noticed the one nod to what the journey had once been—a piece of exposed rock at the end of the lanes representing the original hills, which had now been mostly worn away. People sat on the polished rock reciting prayers.
“It’s illegal to export Zam Zam water,” Sami told me as we stopped for a drink of water. I felt like the world’s slowest, holiest marathoner with my tiny paper cup.
“Why?” I asked. He loves knowing this stuff, so I try to humour him.
“Because of its religious significance, people try to bottle it for sale. So Saudi Arabia banned its export and gives it away to pilgrims for free. But people still bottle regular tap water and try to pass it off as Zam Zam water. There was a big scandal in the U.K. recently, where fake Zam Zam water was laced with arsenic.”
“People can be horrible.” I sat on the stones to rest my feet.
“How are you feeling about things?” asked Sami.
“I feel better,” I said, sipping my water. This part of our trip hadn’t been crowded. The Saudis had made sure there was enough room to accommodate people. To me, the journey was symbolic of a woman’s faith in incredible circumstances. Hajar had obviously been scared and worried about her baby, but she never lost hope. Several thousand years later we remember her resilience. Saudi Arabia doesn’t let women travel without permission from a man, and yet here were millions of Muslims retracing the steps of Hajar, a woman who had been left alone in the desert with no resources. She could have been attacked, and yet she had been safer than even I, who had been living in modern times.
“I would have made a pathetic Hajar,” I told Sami. “I would have just followed Abraham back to safety.”
“I’m sure God would have made a mirage in the desert to keep your hopes alive,” said Sami, smiling.
“Of what?”
“A barista.”
Afterwards, we decided to visit the myriad of bazaars that lined the city.
“Wow, this place is a Mecca for shoppers,” I said.
Sami looked at me.
“Sorry, too easy.”
We saw a group of people milling around an escalator, pointing and gesturing to each other. My heart stopped. I thought there had been an accident. But as we got closer, we realized that the draw was the escalator itself. In my life of privilege, it never occurred to me that there would be people here who came from remote areas of the world and had never been to a three-storey shopping mall with escalators. Oddly, I felt as humbled by the escalator as by the Kaaba. If Muslims weren’t ordered to perform hajj, these people might never have had a chance to travel. Sami and I stopped for a moment to watch the pilgrims urge each other to try the escalator.
Everyone, poor or rich, wanted to take advantage of the extraordinary shopping opportunities. I was looking at a toy cellphone for Maysa at a makeshift stall when a young Bangladeshi vendor came up to me.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Yes, why?”
“My fiancée sent me this letter and I can’t read English well. Could you translate it for me?”
I looked at the letter: I want you to mail me new videos of the latest movies. I didn’t like the ones you sent last week.
“I’m not sure this is the woman for you,” I said to the vendor.
Sami whispered in my ear, “It’s not your business to comment on his love life.”
“How could she not like Pulp Fiction and Shawshank?” I whispered back. “She’s got terrible taste.”
“You didn’t like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” Sami hissed. “And I still married you.”