In the Land of Invisible Women

by Qanta Ahmed

  INTO THE LIGHT

  RANDA AND SHERIEF HURRIED THROUGH the streets of Mecca, leading me to the Ka'aba. I kept pace immediately behind. We scurried through the loose crowds that were swirling in narrow streets. We strained to see ahead, pitched into deep shadow by outcrops of buildings rising high above our heads. No two buildings were alike, each a higgledy mass of extensions that toppled dangerously close to each other, almost closing out the sky. Some were still partway under construction yet already inhabited—a town planner's nightmare. Everywhere I looked, pilgrims were in progress: robed at the wheel of cars; riding shotgun on motorcycles; perched on cycles; piled high on roof racks. Most, however, were now on foot, having left vehicles far behind them, or perhaps having arrived by sea. I was reminded of the famous verse in the Quran speaking about Hajj:

  They will come to thee on foot and (mounted) on every kind of camel,

  lean on account of journeys through deep and distant mountain

  highways… (Quran 22:27)

  Sherief led our trio steadily into the surging eddies of belief. We hurried. We wanted to reach the Masjid al-Haram by Isha, the nighttime prayer.

  We spilled into a curved plaza, joining a crowd of a hundred thousand. We had reached the edges of the Masjid al-Haram. Crests of humanity dissolved into surf, rolling first to the marble forecourt that surrounded the mosque and then, in the far distance, surging into it through innumerable gateways like a gaining tide. Dusk was falling, above the sky was clear, the heat of the day was finally dissipating and a gentle breeze tugged at the edges of my scarf. Randa and Sherief pressed forward, pulling me out of my stupefaction. As we crossed a final road cleared of traffic which separated us from the marble forecourt of the immense oval al-Haram Mosque at the center of Hajj, the Azan rang out. All motion began to slow. We had to answer the call of prayer.

  At once Randa turned. “Let's pray here,” she said and stopped exactly where we were standing. She stood next to Sherief, shoulder to shoulder, and I stood next to Randa. We removed our shoes, placing them in plastic bags we were carrying, and set them between us. I looked at my feet. We were immediately adjacent to the curb of the road. We would be praying on tarmac, yet the ground was clean, not even a single wrapper or piece of litter. We began symbolically patting the dusty ground around us and went through the motions of our ablutions, using dust in place of water, allowed precisely for the traveling Muslim who cannot reach water before prayer.

  Around us the mass of a hundred thousand had silently arranged itself identically. Where once a tumultuous crowd had surged, a peaceful, patient congregation now gathered, perfectly aligned in every direction. To my right and left, ahead of me, behind me, I found I had become part of a massive circular crowd, every pilgrim abreast of another, the sides of our feet touching, planted a little astride. Like a magic organism forming out of ether, the Hajj crowds had become a parish. After prayer, we would again dissolve into the Hajj ocean, leaving no trace of an assembly.

  To the rhythms of familiar prayer, we bowed our heads, kneeled, and finally prostrated in unison. The holy ground radiated warmth, pulsing with absorbed heat. Something lived here. Mid-prostration my veiled head grazed against the inches-high concrete curb. A smell of carbon, petroleum, and heated dust rose into my nostrils, yet I remained unsoiled. Completing both rakats (each rakat consists of two prostrations in Islamic prayer) of the prescribed pilgrims' abbreviated prayer, I expected to leave, but the invisible Muezzin called onward. There seemed to be more prayers due. These were unfamiliar, and the particular choreography not in my repertoire. I constantly muddled the correct order, exposing myself as a novice Muslim. I struggled to copy the veteran worshippers around me. As the prayers ended and the rows began their magic dissolution, I turned to Randa, “What were those final prayers? I did them all wrong.”

  “That was the funeral prayer, Qanta. Every prayer in Mecca during Hajj ends with the Janaaza prayer for the dead. We have to remember all the pilgrims who have died since the last prayer time. People die here all the time. We have to pray for them. You'll see, the funeral prayers are held at every prayer time while Hajj continues.”

  This was why they were unrecognizable. I had prayed at only one funeral, at the age of twelve. I had relied on mimicry then, as I did now. Death walked among us and with it followed a sense of both time and scale. Some spiritual lives would end at Hajj while others, like mine, would begin. Many came here at the end of their lives and some would die in the process; not as a result of trauma or disease, but because to die at Hajj was their destiny. Some pilgrims actually hoped for death during Hajj, and the salvation which would follow. Pilgrims know that the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had said that should a pilgrim die during Hajj, he would be rewarded like a pilgrim who had successfully completed Hajj, absolved of all sin, tantamount to the day of his birth and spend his afterlife in Heaven until the Day of Judgment. Many pilgrims therefore preserve their Hajj robes to be used again at the end of this life, as a burial shroud, so that when resurrected on the Day of Judgment (when Muslims believe all souls will stand before the Maker) they could appear in the same white ihram clothing again. I realized I was at the nexus of mortality and divinity.

  We continued forward directly to the threshold of a marble gate, one of 129 on the circumference of the oval mosque. Now as the crowds condensed around these bottlenecks, I was especially glad not to be on an escalator handling my long, deadly abbayah. One misstep and a fall could result in others stumbling and, quickly, a stampede. Gradually, in the dense mass of people, we edged forward, Randa, Sherief, and I; sometimes in single file, sometimes swinging out into a horizontal formation, molding ourselves according to the forces of the crowds around us. Always we remained connected by handhold.

  At the threshold of the gateway, under a towering arch, black-clad Saudi women stood as posted sentries, taming the human tsunami. These were the so-called female Mutawaeen. I had never seen them in Riyadh. Rather than state appointed, they were self-appointed arbiters of orthodoxy. Veiled totally, a short black specter gestured toward me, seeking inspection of my plastic bag. Her gold-rimmed glasses, eyeless, clung onto the side of her veiled head, almost outlining her veiled nose. After waving me on, the anonymous black-gloved hands searched Randa's purse. This force of women searched every bag carried by every woman pilgrim, quietly and quickly returning the items to us. Men were searched by Wahabi clerics, dressed like the Mutawaeen which patrolled Riyadh. Perhaps these women were their wives, I wondered, or maybe their sisters. The sentries, whatever their relationships, searched for weapons or other suspicious items, protecting the House of God and its guests. No one wanted a repeat of 1979. We had entered the Sanctuary.

  The Masjid al-Haram (haram literally means “sanctuary”) is historically delineated a zone free of bloodshed. No creature can be hunted, no animal kill made, and any violence is forbidden from defiling this holy place and its environs. It was and remains sacrosanct.

  Before Islam, the Ka'aba had been a site of worship and focus of pagan rites. Warring Bedouin tribes agreed on a truce to their enmity while performing their religious rites centuries earlier, and peace had been mandated ever since.

  In a way, Hajj itself is a sanctuary to all conflicts between Muslims. Hajj is a symbol of how the Islamic ideal of coexistence and tolerance should be practiced in wider society. Islam forbids any destruction of life at Hajj; no animals can be hunted or blood sports practiced in Mecca or any of the surrounding regions, either.

  The silent sentries searching us were therefore safeguarding a fundamental aspect of Hajj and a central theme of Mecca. We were truly within a Sanctuary. As I entered the Masjid al-Haram, I was taking the first steps of a ritual which long predated Islam. Countless millions had travelled to Mecca before me.

  The Ka'aba in Mecca had been the site of an annual religious gathering for centuries before Islam was revealed to the Prophet. The Ka'aba itself, at the center of the Masjid al-Haram, was originally built by Abraham to blueprints said to have b
een revealed to him by the Angel Gabriel. But in the centuries since Abraham's initial building and before the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), spiritual deviancy had almost extinguished monotheism in the region. Instead a pagan, polytheistic ritual had overtaken these holy sites and severed, (until the coming of Muhammad (PBUH)), the only uniting tie in a deeply fissured and warring region. Nevertheless, this pre-Islamic Hajj provided an opportunity for lucrative trade, while becoming a powerful political actor in its own right. As a result the ancient Hajj became a potent economic force, driving migration and ultimately explaining the racial heterogeneity of today's Hijaz region of the Kingdom (in stark contrast to the monolithic Najd).

  The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was the modern reformer of Hajj, and his personal efforts dispelled the heinous pre-Islamic associations with idolatry. He restored the Ka'aba as the House of God and cleansed it of statues and symbols of pagan worship, which were sometimes stored even within its hollow core. He returned monotheistic worship to Mecca, making Hajj the pinnacle of Islamic worship, as the Quran specified. Abraham, the founder of monotheistic belief, and his profound love for and unwavering worship of God are symbolic Islamic ideals which were a central part of the Prophet Muhammad's (PBUH) Message from God.

  Today this precious and monumental ritual is controlled by the Saudi dynastic monarchy and its Wahabi theocracy, referring to themselves as the self-appointed Custodians of the Two Holy Places. They are enormously powerful in controlling who can make Hajj and how often. They take their duties seriously and discharge their responsibilities with enormous care and attention to detail, spending hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure a safe and healthy Hajj for millions of Muslims each year. Ye t it is this supreme, self-appointed authority which the non-Saudi Muslim world particularly begrudges. While I was attending Hajj unimpeded, and completely identical to the Hajj of any male pilgrim there, whether women could do this to the same extent in the future was less clear. Short years later, these same authorities would issue some fearful recommendations exposing just how authoritarian they actually were.

  In August 2006, Reuters reported on new limitations Saudi clerics wished to impose on women who were praying at the al-Haram. Interestingly, the al-Haram is one of the few places where male and female worshippers can intermingle. (Normally mosques are segregated with sections for male and female worshippers strictly separated.) The clergy wanted to ban women from the immediate vicinity of the Ka'aba.

  Even within the conservative Kingdom, this suggestion by the religious authorities has raised enormous ire, especially among Saudi women activists. Correctly, they accuse the theocracy of misogynistic discrimination. Currently, women are able to pray immediately next to the Ka'aba, in its forecourt, within its shadow, even to touch its perimeter. But the orthodox theocratic forces controlling the all-male Hajj committees overseeing such matters suggest quite openly that women should be barred from this central area of the sanctuary and plan to assign women to a remote area from where they could have a vantage of the Ka'aba but not approach it.

  Worse, they suggested this was a considerate move for the protection of women, conveniently disguising their discrimination with a thin veneer of patronizing gallantry. Effectively they hope to remove women from public view in all Holy Sites, just as they were succeeding in doing in public life in the Kingdom. Reuters quoted one committee advisor:

  “The area is very small and so crowded. So we decided to get women out of the sahn (Ka'aba area) to a better place where they can see the Ka'aba and have more space,” said Osama al-Bar, head of the Institute for Hajj Research. “Some women thought it wasn't good, but from our point of view it will be better for them…. We can sit with them and explain to them what the decision is [about],” he said. “The decision is not final and could be reversed.”

  I knew I was privileged to be at Hajj at such a young age and as a single unaccompanied woman. I didn't know that one day I might be restricted from approaching the Ka'aba by the invisible and very devious forces always at work in the Kingdom. For now, I was already looking beyond the representative of the Custodians of the Sanctuary, already searching for my Maker. As our personal search was completed by the voiceless shrouds, I began to understand. Arriving in Mecca, at the threshold of the Ka'aba, I was entering a pristine, divine garden where all creation was welcome irrespective of what a male committee of mullahs might think. Here every life was equally valued and had been so for more than a millennium. I was walking in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) into the House of God. I was walking into the light.

  There could be no turning back.12

  THE CHILD OF GOD

  CROSSING THE THRESHOLD, WE ENTERED the brilliantly illuminated marble mosque and walked onto a glossy causeway. Lanterns suspended from a ceiling high above our heads (each large enough to cage a man) spilled their molten light, bathing the sea of pilgrims in white brilliance. Dazzling rays chased out the encroaching night, left bereft at the threshold. Wave upon wave of pilgrims carried us forward like flotsam. Pilgrims moved no more than a quarter-stride at a time, edging cautiously, as though on the verge of a precipice. Each footstep of mine dissolved into the collective footfall.

  We were on the ground floor of the three-story mosque, able to hold seven hundred fifty thousand at once. The oval-shaped mosque was a product of four expansions since the 1950s. The Saudis had dedicated more than $25 billion just to the renovation and modernization of the Hajj sites.

  I gingerly moved forward, carefully judging my steps. The ground was cool and refreshing underfoot, a brilliant feat of underground water engineering. A network of pipes conducted cold water under the marble, vital when Hajj occurred in the hotter seasons and air temperatures here could exceed 129ºF.

  To the sides of the causeway, carpeted areas were filled with pilgrims in different stages of supplication. Many sat, simply reading the Quran, or stopped to take sips of ice-cool ZamZam8 water, stored in orange plastic urns stationed all around the mosque. For the first time I noticed my thirst, despite the humid night. They were drinking holy water, the same water that had arrived while Hagar searched desperately in the desert, fearful that her son Ismail might die without it. I remembered the story well:

  While she ran frenzied, she left her child on the dusty desert ground. As the crying babe's heel struck the barren earth, ZamZam flowed for the first time, at exactly his footfall. The ZamZam still flows today deep under the ground below the Mosque, and has never run dry in the centuries since. Each Hajj, 141 million liters of ZamZam water are consumed by pilgrims and taken in containers to their friends and families at home.

  In Riyadh, a blue-eyed Bedouin father had asked my permission to anoint his 16-year-old son with ZamZam water while the son lay in the ICU dying from terminal lymphoma. I watched as he applied the precious drops with his gnarled fingers, daubing it on like costly French perfume. His arthritic, roughened fingers, wet with ZamZam water, ran over the broken skin, bleeding, blistered, the holy water mixing with blood in wounds that had failed to heal themselves. The boy died hours later, but the family still thanked me, accepting his death as “God's will.” ZamZam has healing properties, and the poor father had wanted to try every last hope.

  I looked at the lines of orange vessels surrounding the worshipers around me (more than 6,300 peppered the mosque) and at once knew this father must have collected the water here. ZamZam had galvanized his final hopes until lymphoma snuffed that flame too. Even ZamZam cannot change God's will.

  At the very perimeter of the causeway, lines of wooden cubby holes no more than two feet high contained the shoes of pilgrims. Muslims remove their shoes to recognize the purity and cleanliness of any place of worship. Most were wrapped in small bags and stashed carefully away in the white wood pigeonholes until the pilgrims returned for the footwear when leaving the mosque. I kept my shoes with me in the small plastic bag, knowing well I would never be able to relocate them in the massive mosque.

  As we descended yet another set of steps, the pilgr
ims ahead of us came to an abrupt standstill. Quickly we halted. I strained to see the cause of the delay ahead. Sounds vanished into silence. Thousands melted from vision. I found myself alone, standing at the gate of God.

  I gazed upon the Ka'aba, eyes widening with wonder. The unobstructed view blurred with salty, unexpected tears. I was overwhelmed. A lump constricted my throat, then released, dislodged by a torrent of undammed, silent emotion. Tears were now flowing freely across my face, dampening the shabby veil around it. Unashamed, my feelings were vibrant with a divine energy.

  I continued gazing. I was unable to peel my eyes from my Maker. He was here. He was everywhere. He had gathered me. He had forgiven me. My shoulders straightened, relieved of a heavy burden. My head lifted, unbowed without the weight of perpetual shame. My heart ached as it lurched open, stretching, suddenly swollen with relief. Inside me, the force chased away debris accumulated within once narrow, dark corners. I could hide nothing from Him and found myself no longer fearful of discovery. All my follies were exposed to my Maker and yet He loved me still.

  In these brief private moments, I placed the burdens of my broken life aside, discharged of shame. I stepped forward lightened, free, absolved. In a cast of millions, in that moment of electric intimacy, my Maker welcomed me. Like the Prophet had said, “If you take one step toward God, He takes ten steps toward you.” I could feel Him hurtling toward me, a colossal, joyous Father. I stood before Him, at last, His child.

  It was full minutes before I returned to my surroundings, to my senses. Other pilgrims were in a similar state of ecstasy. None was aware of any other pilgrim. I reminded myself of the effect of group dynamics in such a huge crowd but no rationalization could explain what I felt. I stared and stared at the cuboid building, bewildered at the energy emanating from its black-draped walls that beckoned me closer. It radiated light that even its sooty blackness couldn't extinguish. Here, there could be no shadow, only light.