In the Land of Invisible Women

by Qanta Ahmed

  I would discover my observations were not unusual. Ziauddin Sardar observed something similar about racial hierarchy in the Saudi philanthropic culture when he wrote about the “Saudi Sandwich” in 2006.16 He had noted deep seated preferences based on race as well. I realized the algorithm of racism I had encountered in Riyadh had intruded even the Hajj.

  Here at Hajj, I was experiencing a taste of the same poison. While the women in my tent weren't nearly as wealthy or polished as the bewitching woman at al-Multaqa, they subscribed to the same view, deciding (based on skin color and ethnicity) that I surely must be a handmaid or at best nanny to a poor Saudi family who couldn't afford the much better Filipina maids, having instead to resort to Pakistani or worse, Bengali help. In fact I did remember one Saudi woman in the tent asking me if I was Bengali.

  Yet I couldn't connect this racial purity with the warmth of the toothless, lined Bedouin women who showed me such affection in the hospital. I thought about the Bedouin patients I had attended in Riyadh and what they had taught me of acceptance. Surely these Bedouin were the purest Saudis of all, Daughters of Arabia, borne of tribal forebears who had roamed Arabia before the slick of oil wealth suffocated their culture, washing them up like half-dead seagulls into the new urban metropolis of modern Saudi Arabia. I decided it had to be wealth which made the stark difference. All I had to do was think back to the “real” Saudis I had met in Riyadh, so different than the women sharing this tent with me.

  DAUGHTERS OF THE DESERT

  IT WAS THE EXCEPTIONAL WARMTH that I had encountered in the Bedouin women which so drew me to them. Even in my first few weeks in the Kingdom I quickly began to look forward to caring for them.

  Saudi Arabia is the most urbanized country in the entire Arab world and only seven percent of the population of the Kingdom remains nomadic. Nonetheless, we had many Bedouin patients at the King Fahad hospital. I knew I wanted to know more patients like my first, Mrs. al-Otaibi. Their relatives fascinated me too. Few of them were Bedouins in the real sense, wandering and nomadic, most recently settled to Riyadh within a single generation. But when these elders became ill, their sons or grandsons would bring them in for treatment, often the whole family keeping vigil. Occasionally families would pitch tents outside the compound as they waited for the health of their loved one to be restored. And while doing so they cast a cozy umbra of reverence and affection for all those who cared for their kin.

  I quickly discovered the Bedouin families were invariably grateful and compliant. No family, indeed no Saudi patient, male or female, ever objected to me, a woman, examining. They did not express even this fundamental discrimination that elsewhere seemed intrinsic to Kingdom life. Bedouin families welcomed women doctors. When I cared for their sons or fathers or husbands or brothers or grandfathers, the very patriarchs of these noble ancient families, even the most orthodox families never objected. In two years not a single Bedouin family ever asked for a male doctor to replace me. Not a single Bedouin objected to my unveiled status.

  To the contrary, unlike the wealthy women who surrounded me at Hajj, they accepted me. I was constantly surprised and always gratified when the many families whose relative I did attend expressed open admiration that I was a woman, sentiments they transmitted with intense smiles, with deep, kohl-ringed gazes of emotion, or simply with a clumsy brush of fragrant attar (Arabic essential oil) smeared on the back of my snatched hand, clasped between the roughened, sun-blasted fingers of their senior sons. I blushed deeply when this happened the first time, amazed that a Saudi Bedouin man dared to reach for my unmarried hand and do so publicly. Their warmth was unmistakable and immediately transported me to the Arabia that had so bewitched Lawrence.

  Families generally kept vigil either at the ICU bedside of their relative or, during times of intense treatment activity, outside in the hallways, in the visitors' prayer area of the ICU. Any women (if allowed by their male relatives to visit) usually gathered in one corner of the room and squatted tirelessly for hours, a line of black bundles along one wall. In a fiercely protective role of their womenfolk, most families would not permit their female family members to visit during the critical illness of their relative, even a son or husband. They feared overwhelming the women (should they be allowed to see the extent of illness), preferring them to visit once the stormy course of the illness had settled. Of course sometimes this meant that women would enter only as the patient was at the verge of irretrievable death, leading to a sudden heap of fainting bundles at the bedside, but this was clearly a cultural gesture to protect the weaker, frailer womenfolk. I always viewed this as a manifestation of the menfolk's love for their women relatives and not an oppressive behavior.

  Meanwhile, the menfolk could never stop in one place, pacing through the ICU and greeting other family members in courtly succession. Once, feeling bad for one family of women whose patriarch was deathly ill, I started collecting chairs from the nurses' station to at least relieve some of them from sitting on the floor where they had been settled for hours. A Saudi colleague asked me what I was doing, and I explained.

  “Please don't worry, Qanta. They are Bedouins. Really, they prefer the floor, truly.”

  I doubted it, but when I handed them the chairs, I looked on, growing even more alarmed to see the bundles mounting the chairs, suddenly precarious on wheels. Distinctly ill at ease in the revolving chairs, these women really did prefer the floor after all. How I wished I could really talk with them and understand them more.

  Returned to terra firma, they followed me with kohl-lined eyes, silently locking their sights on me, so many tracking devices. I wondered what they could be thinking as they assessed me. What did my white coat, my Western clothing, my short, unveiled hair, my bright red lipstick, and my Muslim name emblazed across my chest communicate to them? Then I remembered they couldn't read English, so perhaps they didn't know I bore a Muslim name.

  Eventually, they began to speak to me. Ultimately, it was the Bedouins who took the initiative. The Bedouins were even more curious than I was!

  The conversations usually went something like this. Shyly, they always began by asking me from where I had come, most often making their surreptitious inquiries as I finished off some notes or stored away X rays. This furtive inquiry while I was occupied obviated the need for us to make eye contact, which many Bedouins, even women, did not wish to do. Caught unaware, I would explain, America; after all that was where I had moved from. (It would prove far too convoluted to explain my precise origins as a British-born Muslim woman of Pakistani origin derived of parents transplanted there from a post-Partition India who had herself migrated in adulthood to the United States.)

  “America,” I would say, bracing for their reaction.

  “Amreeka!” they would exclaim, inexplicably delighted. They repeated “Amreeka!” to one another, in affirmation, as if they had guessed as much. For a time, the bundles would babble among themselves:

  “Amreeka?”

  “Na-am, Amreeka.” (Yes, America.) I would confirm.

  “Umma, wa Bu-ey?” (And Mom and Dad?) They would inevitably inquire, emboldened. They would ask because tribal genealogy was so important for a woman, especially an unchaperoned female in a foreign country. They wanted to know of my stock.

  “Pakistan,” I would say.

  “Bakistan,” they would repeat, smiling widely, being unable to pronounce P (there is no P in Arabic). Thrilled, they would then gather courage to ask finally if I was indeed a Muslim. This, of course, had been the whole point of the interrogation. I would confirm and their veiled faces beamed.

  “Mashallah!” (Praise God!) they would cry and let me go about my work, clearly delighted.

  “Mashallah, Mashallah, Mashallah!” resonated throughout the bundles. “Musalmaan, Musalmaan,” (Muslim) they would say to each other, delighted they had found me to be a fellow believer.

  Their curiosity was sated. They asked me nothing further and would always stop at this point, satisfied, pleased, possibly eve
n relieved. Their dark eyes followed me with renewed interest and a genuine sense of pride, because they knew that the woman doctor caring for their family member was a Muslim too. Their ailing relative was in good hands, they must have decided. Being a Muslim made them feel connected to me. They seemed to be able to put aside my alien qualities much more easily than I was feeling. I remembered how very warm these Bedouin were.

  This extraordinary approval was repeated countless times; many of the women admiring me probably couldn't read or write and yet looked at me with untold genuine pride. The older women seemed most enthralled by the discovery that I was a Muslim. I was always touched but also so puzzled by how these Bedouin seemed to have so much affection for America. How could this be, when only few of them could have been there and most certainly none of them knew any Americans personally? What was it that infused their voices which such admiration for my origins from “Amreeka,” which they revered almost as much as my Muslim pedigree?

  NEXT STOP: ABSOLUTION

  THE TENT WAS ALREADY IN full swing when I awoke. Today, after an intense day of supplication at the Valley of Arafat, we would be spending the night outdoors on the plain of Muzdullifah. This was the pinnacle of Hajj: Arafat—the Day of Standing. All pilgrims would stand in worship en masse.

  Soon the tent was vacated, the air conditioner was switched off, the refrigerator emptied and disconnected. We filed out toward our bus, weaving a route through the city of fifty thousand tents. Outside, Tent City already seemed desolate, thousands of pilgrims already setting out for Arafat on foot where today all two and a half million of us would stand before God.

  The fifty to one hundred thousand vehicles snarled into impassable traffic. Pilgrims on foot made faster progress. Some were power-walking, weaving through traffic at a rigorous pace.

  Even the disabled hobbled faster, such was the urgency to worship. Young steeds pushed wheelchairs over bumpy tarmac while the disabled pilgrims, weak already from effort, prayed aloud. I could see their lips moving to the same Labbaik prayer I was reciting, which literally means “Here I am, Lord, hear me!” It is the Muslim's expression to answer the invitation to perform Hajj.

  Tendinous hands clung to Qurans heavy enough to snap their osteoporotic wrists. Even though the glass pane between us silenced our shared Labbaik anthem, I knew we were singing it in unison. Alone, a one-legged African jauntily limped on a homemade crutch, strapped together with rope and elastic, yet he was managing his flowing Hajj robes well and passing many able-bodied pilgrims who struggled behind him. The dynamism of Hajj was astonishing. Not a creature was still. It was as though an entire globe was on the move.

  I watched the feet of the millions scurrying by. Many wore sneakers, frequently Nikes! I couldn't imagine a better commercial for Nike than “Just do Hajj!” The American sneakers made an extraordinary contrast in a world of Islam, reminding us that though the Hajj rite was 1,400 years old, we now had modern comforts to ease the process. Many Filipino pilgrims wore plimsolls, their footwear of choice, and I spied a number of Birkenstocks too. Most on foot had to rely on rubber flip-flops. In my tent the teenage girls had shown a penchant for the rubberized platformed sneakers, hideously kitsch, that had seized Riyadh's fashionistas that winter, perhaps because their gargantuan height both eased movement in an abbayah and was the only statement of individuality that female teenagers heavily veiled in public could make in Riyadh at the time. These girls had brought their fashion to Hajj.

  Eventually, just before noon, we reached Arafat. The hundred-degree heat was already unbearable, deadeningly hot and humid without any relief of breeze. We were in a giant valley, without shade, and the sun was full-strength at its zenith. Again we were assigned a tent in which to rest and pray.

  The older guard heaved themselves against supporting poles of the tents and leaned their weight tiredly. They recited prayers, reading nothing. These were the illiterate Saudi women of a generation earlier. Education was very new to the Kingdom for women other than the highly privileged. Others, who were clearly literate, studied their books intensely.

  Fully veiled, I peered out of the tent but saw only a sea of fiberglass. Either everyone had gone to stand at Arafat under the midday sun or actually climbed the Mount of Mercy where the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had delivered his final sermon. Most male pilgrims would stand like this all day until sunset, an incredibly arduous task. And most women like us were engaged in intense supplications inside the shade and comfort afforded by tents.

  I sat next to the redheaded woman who once more was checking her blood pressure. She had brought her sphygmomanometer even here to Arafat. I saw her measure her pressure, 190/100 mmHg, but she seemed unalarmed at the reading.

  “Salaams,” I began, wondering if she spoke English.

  “Wa alaikum Salaam, Qanta.” She knew my name. By now I was unsurprised. She continued in cultured English polished by a colonial Cairo upbringing.

  “I am tired and my blood pressure is high. It's the strain, it happens at every Hajj,” she went on, smiling patiently. I tried hard to guess how old she was. Somewhere between fifty and sixty-five, I estimated, judging by the fading of her red hair at the temples and her crow's feet on either side of her deep-set blue eyes which sparkled intensely in a sea of freckles. “My name is Yehyia. Most call me Professor Yehyia, but you may call me Yehyia.” She popped a pill into her mouth and swallowed water from the plastic bottle she was clutching. In a few minutes she started checking her blood pressure again.

  “Where do you teach, Professor Yehyia? And what is your area of expertise?” I asked, anxious to know more. Perhaps like me she was a doctor of medicine.

  “I teach in Riyadh. I teach Arabic literature at the King Abdul Aziz University to the Saudi students there. But half of the year I return home to Cairo where I still teach my favorite course, nineteenth century English literature. I teach it at the University in Cairo.”

  I was amazed. “English literature was my favorite subject at school, Professor Yehyia,” I gushed. “I had wanted to study it further, perhaps even at University myself.” I babbled on, unable to stop. “Who do you teach, I mean which authors, in your classes?”

  “Henry James, among others. I have studied his work in depth, in fact, my PhD was focused on some of his work.” She waited for a response.

  Feeling ignorant, I confessed, “I have never read any Henry James. Tell me more.” And there, surrounded by a tent of orthodox Saudi Wahabis, in a valley eight miles east of Mina, Professor Yehyia instructed me on the finer points of Henry James. We must have talked for at least an hour, probably longer, as her vivid imagination and her perfect command of English led me through a compelling journey of James's contribution to consciousness and morality. I couldn't believe my luck at finding such a brilliant woman amid the confusion of Hajj. As we talked, everything else fell away from our attention. I was bewitched. I wasn't sure if it was proper to talk about Henry James at Hajj but am sure I was allowed a reprieve from the hours of praying. After a while it had become difficult to concentrate.

  “So you have attended Hajj before,” I finally remembered to ask in between our impromptu seminar in nineteenth century literature.

  “Indeed,” she responded, “Alhumdullilah, many times,” unwilling to divulge how many.

  Bluntly I pressed her, “How many times did you make Hajj, Professor Yehyia? Why do you still keep coming?”

  “A Muslim is not supposed to announce how many times he has been to Hajj, so I cannot tell you. But, Mashallah, it is many, and most times I have come like this, in a group, because I am alone. I have one son who remains in Egypt and my husband is dead many years now, but still I manage to come. Like you, I come without a man!” She threw back her head laughing with abandon. Some of the orthodox Saudis around us looked up, squinting sharply at the blasphemy of laughter, but they didn't intervene.

  “Inshallah, I shall keep coming as long as I can walk, as long as I have strength, and as long as God invites me,” she rested back,
rubbing her swollen ankle, glinting her charming smile of pearly teeth worn low and uneven through years of bruxism. “You will have to visit me in Riyadh, Qanta. I invite you! We will have dinner!” she decided, terminating our conversation. I quickly made a mental note to obtain her details when we returned to Mina. I had no pen or paper with me here at Arafat. Unwilling to leave her side lest my incredible discovery of such a brilliant Muslim woman vanish into the ether, I stayed next to her and returned to my prayer book. I squeezed her cool, freckled hand in mine, expressing my joy at discovering her. What a journey I was on!

  PRAYER UNDER THE STARS

  IAWOKE OUTDOORS TO THE sounds of Swahili. Around me on the hessian mat, the women in my group slept. Across the way, on a similar mat the men in our group dozed. We were separated only by a makeshift aisle in the dust.

  Latecomers to the plain of Muzdullifah (where we were to spend the night in prayer and rest under a starlit sky) were still arriving, hours after we had reached there by bus. Many pilgrims, tired after their almost twenty-four-hour-long foot journeys, now searched for a place to rest and water to drink. These tall Africans were among the latecomers. In the dark, luminous African smiles ripped incandescent rents of white in the velvet of night.

  I watched as one leaned over the water samovar placed in the center of our sleeping group and, with his calloused, arachnoid fingers, carefully poured cups of ZamZam. Balancing the water, he passed the precious liquid down a long, silent line of patient Africans stretching into the black shadows of night. Centipede-like, the waiting Africans reached forward with their sinewy right arms to receive the refreshing drink. There must have been three hundred men at least. Quiet as church mice, so as not to disturb our rest, they had edged toward our water tank in an attempt to slake their thirst. I lay still, enthralled by the amazing scene. My watch said 1:30 a.m. We were only a few hours away from water and eventually, back at Mina, we would have ice cold Pepsi to drink. I hoped there was enough for all of them.