So with much sounding of the horn by Hamza, who was driving, and much good-natured shouting by the rest of us, he elbowed the Hummer through the crowd, away from the access roads, and out into the open countryside.
It was a hot, bumping, jostling ride across dusty, rocky ground that had us holding onto the ropes to keep from being thrown off the open truck bed; sweaty uncomfortable and hardly conducive to conversation or reverent meditation. But we were more or less paralleling a highway where the traffic hardly seemed to be moving at all, the sight of which, I must confess, buoyed my spirit with a shamefully smug satisfaction.
But when we arrived at the point where the highway reached the hills and the mouth of the tunnel that passed straight through them, it was another matter. Hamza stopped the truck, and there was a discussion between him and Gregory which I could not hear, but judging by what I could see through the rear window of the cab, it was something of an argument.
Finally Hamza threw up his hands, shrugged, Gregory took the wheel, and we began climbing. Gregory drove like an inspired madman, rocking the truck along up twisting little canyons or dry creek beds, swerving suddenly onto slopes that seemed ascendable at least to him, circling around switchbacks, the truck listing from side to side, bouncing off boulders, climbing at angles that seemed to be about to throw us over backward.
It was a perilous and terrifying ascent that had us all praying to Allah for salvation, some of us aloud, myself included, but when we reached the crest, Gregory stopped the truck, he and Hamza descended, and we beheld a vision that made it all worthwhile.
From this height, Mecca was visible at the bottom of the lowland bowl to the west below us. Seven ribbons of highway clogged with very slowly moving traffic ran from the city to the eastern hills upon whose ridgeline we perched, windows and metalwork flashing and shimmering under the desert sun within long brown mists of smoggy exhaust. The tiny figures of camels, horses, donkeys, plodded along between these aisles of vehicular traffic. Enveloping the highways and the riders was a white sea of poor hadjis afoot that filled the entire valley.
This was desert under a brilliant sun and it shimmered beneath heatwaves, but while I beheld was a vision, it was no mirage. It was real. It was the Hadj.
It was the soul of Islam.
I had been born a Muslim. I had been educated as a Muslim. I read the Holy Koran and said my prayers and performed the required rites and so had considered myself devout. I was in the land where Allah had spoken through Mohammed and Islam had been born and below me was Mecca and the Al-Haram Mosque and the Ka’aba.
But none of these things were the soul of Islam.
Millions of Muslims from all over the world were moving in the same direction with a single purpose. Muslims who did not speak each other’s languages. Muslims otherwise divided by sectarian disputes hundreds of years old that were rendered meaningless from this vantage and down there among them.
This was the Hadj. The Christians had nothing like it. The Jews had nothing like it. No other religion had anything like it.
This was the flesh of Muslims united in the journey to Allah. This was the soul of Islam made visible in the flesh. This was why Allah meant Islam to enfold all the world and all the world to embrace Islam. This was His greatest gift to us, made all the greater because He had created the Hadj as a gift that we must give to ourselves.
I had been born a Muslim. But if I had not, this vision would have caused me to choose to become one.
* * * *
Mina was a small town except for the week of the Hadj, and Muzdalifa a few miles east of it, even smaller, banlieus of Mecca really, and though they would be of ritual significance later, today the Hadj flowed through them on the highways like a sluggish river and around them in the open country like a sea, eastward onto the Plain of Arafat, towards the Namira mosque, and the Jabal al-Rahmah, the Mountain of Mercy at the far end, where Mohammed had preached his famous Farewell Sermon, the last time he was to address a crowd of the Faithful in public.
The narrow desert valley leading eastward was filled with pilgrims afoot, on camels, on horses, on donkeys, moving as slowly as the traffic on the highways, and there was another tent city between Mina and Muzdalifa that the whole procession had to detour around, and then converge on the pass into the Plain of Arafat, marked by two pillars forming a symbolic gateway of no practical significance as the Hadj flowed around it as much as through it.
The Plain of Arafat was two or three miles across at the most and no more than six miles long from where it began beyond the pillars to the wall of mountains at the far end, more of a dry plateau than an actual plain, but enough of a plain so that it was mostly quite flat and we had supposed that our truck driving off the highways would have easy going.
But by the time we arrived, the entire plain was filled with the sea of hadjis oozing eastward towards the Mountain of Mercy like a great white amoeba, so that the further we proceeded, the more tightly packed the Plain of Arafat became, the slower the going, and soon we were moving at the same pace as the hadjis afoot.
From on high, I had seen the millions strong community of the Hadj on the move, but now I was immersed within it, I had truly joined it, and though I would not be entitled to call myself “Hadji Osama” until the rites were completed, now I felt that I was already a hadji in my heart.
The Hadji is the journey not the destination and now I understood the truth of it fully. Anywhere else, if there had been anywhere else in the world where millions of souls made their way to a single destination at such a shoulder-to-shoulder crawl, there would have been jostling, pushing, attempts to squeeze ahead, shouting, cursing, arm-waving.
On the Hadj there was none of that. Vehicles, camels, horses, donkeys, people afoot, all moved at the same measured pace in harmony, with no jockeying for position. When someone fell or staggered, he was helped along. When way had to be given, the only argument was a gentle one as to who would allow who to go before him. The sound, and a mighty sound it was, was a symphony of footfalls, engine rumblings, and rhythmic prayers, inducing tranquil immersion in the Will of Allah.
We were a single organism. A single soul. Islam itself on the move.
* * * *
We never got within three hundred yards of the Mountain of Mercy. The way farther was entirely blocked and we stopped the truck, dismounted, and stood there check by jowl with our brothers. The Jabal al-Rahmah was more of a hill than a mountain, dwarfed by the wall of peaks behind it, and all that we could see from where we stood was the very top with a white pillar jutting up from it and the last few steps of a stone stairway filled with ascending hadjis.
It did not matter.
I had not heard of this before, but the Caliphate had erected huge video screens in a semi-circle perhaps two hundred yards west of the mosque and mighty stadium speakers, so that all could see and hear when an imam mounted the hill and delivered a conventional speech exhorting us to brotherhood, virtue, and steadfastness in the face of the infidels.
This did not matter to me either.
He was replaced by a mullah who recited the famous farewell speech of the Prophet, which any boy educated in a madrass knew by heart. The words did not matter either.
This was the turning point of the Hadj. From here there might be the trek back to Muzdalifa to gather stones and the stoning of the pillars of Satan in Mina, but that would be a journey outward into the things of the world.
Here, three hundred yards from the Mountain of Mercy, my journey inward had reached its destination. I had journeyed to the heart of Islam and now it beat within me. I prayed to Allah that it always would. And there, one among millions whose hearts beat as one with the same prayer, I understood that even that prayer was less than what mattered most.
For Allah had given each Muslim both the power and the sacred duty to make it so.
* * * *
The rest of the day was like
a vast picnic on a beach with no ocean shore. The sun beat down. Makeshift tents and awnings were erected. Food stands appeared. Prayers were said. People wandered happily aimlessly among the gatherings from all over the world of Dar al-Islam to see what might be seen and hear what might be heard.
We moved our truck slightly so that we could shelter from the heat in its eastward shadow cast by the westering sun. We ventured out from our encampment to see the sights, eat food from many nations along the way, wandering from our little encampment alone, in twos, in threes, returning, wandering off again.
Hadjis or not, people tended to gather in little “arrondissements” around stands serving the food of their own countries, to speak easily among their countrymen in their natural languages, though it was far from a segregation of nationalities, more like what the Swedes call a smorgasbord or the Indonesians a ristafel, an opportunity to display the many cultures of Dar al-Islam and sample this and that.
Mahathir introduced me to a fiery duck stew which had me rushing to quench the fire with a rose water and yogurt drink from a Bangladeshi stand. On my next foray, Ruhollah introduced me to a pilaf in the Iranian style, with the rice on the bottom pile baked to a crispy crust. With Yassir and Hassan, I sampled falafel, balls of fried chickpea flower favored by Israeli Jews and Arabs alike.
People came and went like this from our encampment, only Hamza disappearing alone into the crowd for very long, but when Yassir, Hassan, and I returned, he was finally there, squatting with his back up against the Hummer talking with Mohammed, Jamal, Hamid, and Kemal.
“—will it end?” Hamza shrugged. “Ask the generals. The Americans fought in Viet Nam for a dozen years. I have heard it said that the Europeans fought something they called the Hundred Year War afterward.”
“You are saying that you cannot win your war?” said Hamid.
“I am saying that I see no one’s path to victory. We push the Biafran rabble back like frightened children, the Americans send in their drone fighter-bombers, and we must retreat, to lick our wounds. And advance again. And be driven back again. The Biafrans cannot hold ground against a real army, the Nigerian army cannot hold ground against the American robots, and the Americans don’t send in their own soldiers to hold ground themselves.”
Yassir curled his upper lip and departed again, perhaps offended by such talk in the midst of the Hadj, but Hassan sat down to listen, and I found myself sitting down beside him. Al Hadj Osama might be properly offended, but Osama the Gun was helplessly fascinated.
“Take heart,” said Hamid. “The Crusaders fought Islam for centuries but the soldiers of Allah finally prevailed against them. We fought the Russians for years but they were finally driven out.”
“By the American Air Force,” growled Hamza.
“Merely aiding Afghani mujahideen,” Hamid told him indignantly.
“Allah will provide,” said Mohammed.
“As he provided us with jihadis from all over Dar al-Islam,” said Hamid.
“Then where are the Caliphate troops?” demanded Hamza. “Where are the jihadis from all over your Dar Al-Islam fighting at the side of their Muslim brothers? Their black Muslim brothers?”
“The Caliph has proclaimed your war a jihad against the Great Satan,” said Mohammed. “You will see. They will come.”
“Inshallah,” said Hamza. “But while we wait for your jihadis, may Allah at least provide us with something better than old French arms. So far He has not. And neither has the Caliphate.”
“And while they salve their conscience by buying French arms for Nigeria,” said Hassan, “the Caliphate continues to sell the Americans oil.”
“What can we do?” said Mohammed. “We must have American grain.” He turned on Hassan. “Surely you do not mean that the Caliphate is betraying the Muslims of Nigeria?”
“The Caliphate betrayed the Muslims of France, why not the Nigerians?” Hassan said bitterly.
“What do you mean by that?” Mohammed demanded righteously.
“What do you mean by that, Hassan?” Hamza asked in quite another tone.
“We beurs were treated as faux Frenchmen, but that wasn’t bad enough for the Caliphate, so they sent in their provocateur to make things worse with an atrocity to turn civilized discrimination French style into crude repression—”
“You mean Osama the Gun?” I found myself blurting.
“The leader of the Ski Mask Jihadis!” said Jamal. “Even in Kurdistan we have heard of your hero!”
“Hero?” Hassan said scornfully. “Don’t you know that this faceless phantom was revealed as a Caliphate agent?”
“By a bank robber and professional criminal under torture who would say anything to try to save his own skin!” I cried without thinking, immediately wishing I had bitten my tongue.
“No such lie was reported in the Caliphate,” said Mohammed.
“How could you know that then, Osama?” asked Hamza, studying my face all too shrewdly.
“I…I saw it on French television…” I stammered.
“In the Caliphate?”
“There…there is…a satellite dish is permitted to the translators’ school so that we may improve our French accents…”
There were skeptical looks in my direction, but Allah diverted them through the instrumentality of Hassan, who continued the tirade I had interrupted.
“If the imam of the Grand Mosque hadn’t issued his strike fatwa or the French unions hadn’t supported it, we could have all ended up in concentration camps or deported. The Caliphate wanted it to happen, why else would they send in this Osama the Gun with his explosives? They failed because they underestimated the intelligence of the French, but they did want it to happen.”
No one seemed to really understand what he was saying. How could they? But I could. How could I fail to ask the question surging up from the depths of my uncomprehending heart?
“But why? What could the Caliphate hope to gain?”
Why send me deadly grenades when all I had asked for was more graffiti bombs?
Why force me to become a mass murderer?
“Turkey!” said Kemal. “The Caliphate’s always had its eye on Turkey. The French start throwing their Arabs into internment camps, or worse, there’s a doomed uprising, the Turks in Germany support their Muslim brothers with demonstrations that turn into riots, the Germans crack down, the Islamic parties in Turkey win an election by calling for solidarity with the oppressed Turks in Germany, the Caliphate once more offers to admit Turkey, and this time maybe finally succeeds.”
“That’s the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard,” said Hamid. “And I’m from Afghanistan.”
“Then you don’t know much about Arab politics,” Jamal said dryly. “Being Kurds, we’re used to it.”
“You mean the Caliphate didn’t even care about the beurs?” I exclaimed. “I can’t believe that we—that they were used for such a cynical purpose!”
“As the Americans are using the Biafrans,” Hamza said quickly, regarding me in a manner which had me wondering whether he at least had caught my slip of the tongue and was covering it for me for some reason.
“C’est la guerre,” said Hassan.
“C’est la merde!” I cried. “I can’t believe such a thing!”
But it made a terrible sense, and no other explanation made any sense at all. What cause had I served in serving the Caliphate? What cause had I served in the sincere belief that I was serving the cause of Islam?
“The Caliphate…the Caliphate betrayed Islam…?” stammered Mohammed. “This cannot be so! To say such a thing is blasphemy!”
“Islam is the Will of Allah,” Kemal told him. “The Caliphate is the will of Arabs. Islam is the True Faith. The Caliphate is politics. We understand that all too well in Turkey.”
“Dirty politics!” muttered Hassan.
“Is there another
kind?” said Kemal.
The silence that descended after that was leaden. Each of us averted our gazes one from the other. Save Hamza, who regarded me with an intensity that made it even worse. Around us swirled the hadjis in their millions. Tonight we would all go to Muzdalifa to gather stones to throw at Satan, but now I felt that Satan was peering up at us from his hole beneath the desert sands, and he was laughing.
And it was I, surely the least innocent of all these millions, who Allah chose to speak words that might wipe the grin from that face of evil, or at least the weight from my own heart if I could make myself believe them.
“Is there not the politics of Islam, my brothers?” I suggested. “The politics of surrender to the Will of Allah? And if we are faithful to that, will not even those who have been beguiled by Satan into committing great sins, even whole countries that have betrayed brother Muslims, be forgiven by Allah the Merciful and become once more His Instruments? Is that not why Allah has given us the Hadj, to bring us together here for that very purpose?”
“Praise be to Allah!” cried Mohammed.
“Inshallah,” muttered Kemal rather dryly.
And at least the silence among us was broken.
But not by Hamza who said nothing at all, but seemed to be regarding me more like a Sergeant than a haji.
CHAPTER 22
The trek back to Muzdalifa to gather pebbles for the stoning of the pillars of Satan at Mina was traditionally supposed to begin at night, but though it would be twenty minutes or so on the highways if the traffic flowed freely, the Hadj in its millions flowing back the way it had come would insure that it would not be. “Night” was elusive of definition, and it was therefore also traditional for everyone to seek a head start on everyone else, so that departures had already begun when the very bottom of the sun passed behind the highest peaks of the western mountains.
“Allow me to drive in this direction,” Hamza said as we were boarding our truck. “I promise you a faster and easier ride than we had coming.”
Osama the Gun Page 17