Authors: Asra Nomani
MORGANTOWN
âUnlike me, my father was thrilled that Saudi law forbade me to travel alone to Mecca and required that I travel with a mahram. This meant he got to do the hajj. For my father, doing the hajj was the culmination of a life committed to Islam.
Born on June 14, 1935, in India, my father grew up in a traditional Muslim family with a strong matriarchal figure, his mother, Zubaida Nomani. Slight in figure, he is large in spirit, ready to drive cross-country at a moment's notice if I asked, my friends would joke. He talks with conviction until I, testing my limits, challenge him so much that he retreats to try harder. He is so prone to passion and dramatic flair when he talks that somebody once went to break up what he thought was a fight between my father and a friend. His friend joked, “No, he's just part Italian.” His intense gaze reveals his convictions and integrity. When he set off for his first job as a lecturer at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India, he laid his prayer rug toward Mecca and said a prayer to bless his work. Throughout his lifetime he would turn to Mecca for peace, salvation, and prayer.
He faithfully adhered to the five pillars that Islam prescribes for Muslims. The first is the proclamation of the
shahada
, or the “declaration of faith” that there is one God, with Muhammad as a prophet. My father was firm in this belief. The second pillar is the five daily prayers. My father did his prayers with devotion but wasn't fanatical about it. If he missed a prayer, he made it up later. The third pillar is
zakat
, or charity to the poor. Each year, my father calculated our household zakat obligation, not unlike figuring out a tax bracket, and signed a check over to the Morgantown mosque or to one of his sisters for charity work in Pakistan or India. The fourth pillar is fasting from sunup to sundown during the holy month of Ramadan, which shifts on the Western calendar year because its dates are based on a lunar cycle, with about 354 days in a year. As a professor of nutrition, my father had taken the commitment to fasting to heart by becoming an expert on nutritional issues related to Ramadan fasting. Before blogging ever became a part of modern society, my father wrote his own HTML script to create the
International Journal of Ramadan Fasting.
The fifth pillar is hajj. As I'd discovered in Pakistan, Saudi law requires that pilgrims arrive with a Saudi-sanctioned tour group to fulfill the fifth pillar. My father searched the Internet and scrolled through all of the options. Trip Advisor listed “Mecca Hotels” and “Things to Do in Mecca”: of two items, the Holy Mosque got top billing. (The second was the cave where the prophet Muhammad got his revelations.) First, we had to find a tour group. Who, we wondered, would give us the balance we sought of spirituality and scholarship? My father came to me with an answer: the Islamic Society of North America. I only vaguely knew about this group. They were sort of like the NAACP of American Muslims, but they seemed to represent the immigrant generation more than my generation. The Islamic Society advertised a hajj tour on its website, and its list of guides included scholars. I liked that.
As we were considering joining its tour group, my father excitedly called me to the TV. C-SPAN was airing footage from the society's recent national convention. I studied the footage. It seemed that all the women were wearing head scarves. That signaled to me that this was a more conservative crowd that believed women
had
to cover their hair. I didn't see women who chose not to cover their hair like my mother and me. I wondered whether head scarves were required, or whether the society passed them out at the door to any women who arrived with their hair bare. Either way, the lack of diversity made me feel uncomfortable. Still, the society's tour group seemed like the smartest one we could join. With some trepidation, I gave my father the green light to sign us up.
My mother decided she would accompany us to help me with Shibli. My mother is petite and striking, with strong cheekbones and proud eyes like a Cherokee Indian's. She cuts through ambiguity with precise analysis, sometimes to my annoyance when I'd rather waste time in nuances. She moves slowly, with poise and dignity, from the morning, when she sips her Lipton tea, to the night, when she studies Fareed Zakaria columns in
Newsweek
. Beneath her calm is a fiery spirit and independent mind that I inherited. She had had a wider experience with religion than my father. As a child, she was taught by Catholic nuns at a convent called St. Joseph's in a lush hill station in India. The puritans in Islam considered such an education corrupting. My mother considered it expansive (as well as irritating when the nuns got angry). She grew up in a conservative family that devoutly practiced the five daily prayers, the full month of fasting, regular alms giving, faith in the monotheistic creed, and pilgrimage. Although she had been a follower of Islam all her life, dogmatic adherence to faith and rituals turned her off. She had broken many traditions to
become an entrepreneur, running a popular boutique in downtown Morgantown.
In contrast to my father, my mother didn't particularly care about doing the pilgrimage. My father wept for joy at the thought of going to Mecca. My mother rolled her eyes. Although the pilgrimage is important to many, she saw solving the inequities and the injustices in the Muslim world as the real priority facing Muslims. For my own part, I wasn't sure about the hajj, but I wanted to experience it to decide for myself. For her, Islam was a private act of faith. She had never been a part of my father's community building. She believed in the shahada, the proclamation of faith, but she didn't consider Muhammad a greater prophet than Jesus or Moses, just the last in a line of men with monotheistic messages. This is what the Qur'an itself even teaches about the prophet, but distortions of Islam's teachings have established a religious pecking order, as happens with the fundamentalist expressions of all religions. Having grown up with prayer enforced strictly, my mother rarely unfurled the prayer rug, to the disappointment of my father. To her, prayer doesn't know a time clock or a prostration. Life is prayer. Moreover, zakat was always a source of conflict between my father and mother. She didn't believe my father had to send his money overseas when there were plenty of poor people in America.
“Are you excited about going on the hajj?” I asked her one night as she stood at the kitchen sink, where she seemed to spend so much of her life.
“Not really,” she said bluntly, turning a bottle of dishwashing liquid upside down on a sponge.
I fell somewhere about halfway along my parents' spiritual spectrum. I appreciated my mother's honesty. It was a refreshing alternative to blind faith and the absence of critical thinking. I had to admit, however, that her response disappointed me. I wished she were more enthusiastic. But I imagined she knew what was in store for her.
My mother was the buttress to the castle that was our home. My brother had married, and he and his wife and their two children lived with my parents in an extended family environment my mother kept running. After I had my son and returned home from the hospital with him, I was bedridden from the physical trauma of the C-section. Without my mother, who would lift my son from her bed in the room adjoining mine and carry him to me, I don't know how I would have been able to nurse him. Because my brother's wife was studying around the clock in her last semester of nursing school, my mother worked double time at her boutique during the day and then after 5:00
P
.
M
. started her second shift,
keeping the house in order, getting dinner on the table, and tutoring my brother and sister-in-law's eleven-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son so they could excel in school. That night as we talked she turned from the dishes to dinner.
My father joined us and spoke about the harassment and persecution the prophet Muhammad faced in Mecca when he started preaching Islam.
“Oh! The prophet,” he sighed. “How they all suffered!”
“Oh, Dad!” I exclaimed, irritated and embarrassed at his emotionalism. At that time, I had little clue about Islam's history. I didn't even know in which century Islam began (the seventh).
My mother watched my father and shook her head without sympathy for his tears. “That drives me crazy,” she said. She couldn't conceive of feeling anything close to my father's devotion to historical icons. Religion had largely alienated my mother because she had seen it used to justify acts that were devoid of kindness and human compassion. My mother looked over at Shibli, curled in my arms. To her, it would be a far greater act of devotion to care for my newborn son than to circumambulate a cube-shaped building. “I'll stay in the hotel room and do the rituals another time,” she declared.
I rolled my eyes and sighed, “Oh, Mom!” My mother had the notion that fulfilling the ritual would be dangerous and stressful. I disagreed, but she was more sensible. My mother also had more knowledge than I did of the extent to which people forsake good judgment in pursuit of religion and ritual. Growing up with a deep expression of Islam in her family gave her a broad understanding of Islam, but she was alienated by the cultlike power of religion. My father had gone to Mecca once in 1967 for the umrah, the pilgrimage done outside the time of the hajj. (It doesn't count as the required pilgrimage but does bring extra blessings.) When he returned, he wrote to my mother, who was in India with my brother and me, saying that he wanted to embrace religion more. But my mother rejected what she saw as the intoxication of religious devotion, to which the pilgrimage had made my father more susceptible.
Because my sister-in-law was going to be in school full-time, she suggested that my niece and nephew join us on the hajj. It thrilled me that they would join us, balancing our adult sensibilities and making our team truly intergenerational. Eleven years old, Safiyyah was in the sixth grade and wore Mudd jeans, danced to Queen Latifah, and patted her eyelids with eye shadow. Her brother, Samir, was nine and in the fourth grade. He hung a portrait of Buddha on the wall not far from an image of Nintendo's
Super Mario and rap star 50 Cent. Like Shibli, Safiyyah and Samir spent their early years at my mother's boutique on High Street, sitting in her armoires and playing hide-and-seek among hand-embroidered silk skirts.
The logistics were falling into place, but apprehension plagued me. I was a modern Muslim woman and new single mother, making the journey with my elderly father as my male escort; my mother, a successful businesswoman who was shuttering her boutique for the first time in two decades to make the journey; my newborn son, still suckling at my breast; and my hip niece and nephew. I was a postmodern woman in a religious culture with many premodern dispositions. Could I find a place for myself within my religion? My parents, in their different ways, had faith that I could.
JEDDAH
,
SAUDI ARABIA
âAs we stepped into the visitors' lounge at the Jeddah airport, a sea of poor, dark-skinned men and women from Sudan floated before me, a jarring vision in the first moment that I stepped into Saudi Arabia. We were in a bustling port metropolis off the Red Sea on the western edge of Saudi Arabia. My father looked around in awe. “
This
,” he said, “is
ummah.”
Ummah?
I didn't understand what this word meant. My father explained that it meant community. It's no wonder that I didn't know the meaning of this word. I had never felt a connection to the Muslim community in my hometown of Morgantown; they were so different from me in the way they lived their lives. With awe, I looked at the diversity in front of me. It was a window for me into the breadth of the Muslim ummah, and I was struck by its plurality. What I saw was people who were very different from each other coming together for a common purpose.
These particular pilgrims came from a place whose name comes from the Arabic
bilad al-sudan
, or “land of the blacks,” where Arabic is the official language and Islam the official religion. In contrast to American Muslims, Muslims in Sudan live under political, religious, and social repression. Lieutenant General Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir took power in 1989 in a military coup supported by the cleric-backed National Islamic Front. He oversaw the introduction of sharia law as well as the growing political and economic isolation of his country. But Sudan's large non-Arabic and non-Muslim population fought efforts to impose sharia nationwide. The country has been marked by civil war; tens of thousands have died, and Sudanese continue to die from war, famine, and genocide. Human rights activists allege one of the chief clients of
a slave trade from Sudan is Saudi Arabia; Saudi Arabia and Sudan deny the charges.
My father, who knew all of this, was usually depressed by the abysmal state of Muslim leadership in the world. But he was hopeful for a respite from human troubles during our journey into a holy land. “To me, it's not just Saudi Arabia,” my father said as we wove our way through terminal 4 of the Hajj Terminal. “It's the land where the prophet Muhammad walked.”
To walk in his footsteps, about two million of the world's estimated 1.2 billion Muslims were expected to enter Saudi Arabia during this hajj. At one-fifth of the world population of six billion, Muslims are the second-largest faith community after Christians, who number about two billion. Because of high birthrates and conversions, Islam is widely considered to be the fastest-growing religion in the world. Although Islam is rooted in the Arab world, fewer than 15 percent of the world's Muslims are Arab, and half of the world's Muslims live in South Asia and Southeast Asia. The countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Nigeria. The men and women in our tour group reflected this diversity. Although they now lived in America, they had come from Sudan, Palestine, Jordan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, and other countries. The prophet said that the ummah has a serious responsibility to be nurturing and to represent Islam well in the world. I had long wondered if I could find a sense of community in my Muslim ummah.
On the hajj we were equalized by what we wore: the men were cloaked in the same seamless white fabrics, and the women in simple clothes. My father and Samir shuffled their feet beneath this uniform, called an
ihram
, or “restricted clothes.” They changed into it when we stopped in Amman, Jordan, on the journey to Saudi Arabia. They wore one piece of seamless terrycloth wrapped around their midriffs to cover their bodies from the ankles to just above the belly button. They draped the other piece around their shoulders to cover the upper body. Straps can't be used to join the pieces together. Samir shuffled through the airport, looking like a little man, worried with each shuffle that his towel would slip from its precarious perch around his waist. He didn't want to go down in history as the first pilgrim to moon fellow hajjis. My mother and I had discarded our modern clothes and ornaments of our daily lives and now wore hajj uniforms that were like 1950s suburban Americana nightgowns with nun's habits. This modest uniformity marked our symbolic transition into our new roles as pilgrims and was also supposed to symbolize our entry into a
state of purity and spirituality. We were wearing white, the color of the shrouds that are supposed to cover us when we are buried as Muslims. White is the color of death in Islam. A group of elderly Afghan women from our tour group looked like hard-bitten angels in their immaculate white gowns.
This uniform reflected a Buddhist concept I had come to understand during my travels: non-attachment. In the summer of 2000, during a weekend retreat at a forest monastery in West Virginia, the Bhavana Society, a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk named the Venerable Henepola Gunaratana had taught me the concept of mindfulness honed through the practice of a brand of meditation called Vipassana, meaning “insight” in the Pali language. “We learn to watch the arising of thought and perception with a feeling of serene detachment,” he wrote in his book
Mindfulness in Plain English
. “We learn to view our own reactions to stimuli with calm and clarity.” In a great hall at the monastery, with bullfrogs croaking outside in a lily pond and my eyes closed, I learned to view my thoughts as clouds passing overhead as I meditated. “This escape from the obsessive nature of thought produces a whole new view of reality. It is a complete paradigm shift, a total change in the perceptual mechanism. It brings with it the bliss of emancipation from obsessions.” Islam calls this state of being
zuhd
, the Arabic word for an absence of attachment to matters of the world, or
dunya
. Zuhd is not an abrogation of responsibilities, but rather a deeper, more spiritual state of existence.
Around me, pilgrims were coming from the far corners of the world. The hajj is so important a journey that countries such as Indonesia and India, like Saudi Arabia, have a special area of their airports that is designated the “Hajj Terminal.” For our hajj, a Muslim insurgent in Kashmir had personally lobbied India's prime minister, his enemy, to intervene to issue him a visa to perform the hajj. The king and queen of Malaysia had sent off their pilgrims in a formal ceremony.
But when I looked around I was stunned. Poor people. Rich people. Skinny people. Fat people. We were all there together. All the men, except the airport officials, were in the sacred togas of the hajj. All the women were in nightgownlike robes. But we were all unique. Just these few hours at the Jeddah airport had expanded my understanding of the Muslim identity. I had grown up seeing Muslims as mostly brown-skinned aunties and uncles and cousins from South Asia. In my teenage years, I started knowing them as fairer-skinned Arabs. Occasionally I had met African American Muslims and Muslims from Turkey and Malaysia. For the first time, I was now among them.
One of the group leaders told us that a lot would go wrongâand a lot would go right. In both circumstances, our leaders said, there was only one comment to make:
Al-hamdulillah
. “Praise be to God.” Royal Jordanian lost our luggage. Al-hamdulillah. A woman tied Samir's shoelaces. Al-hamdulillah. Still hopeful, my father scoured the baggage carousel.
So much here was foreign. Between the baggage carousel and the passport counter, the sign marking the women's restroom depicted a woman with veiled gauze over her face. The man depicted in the sign for the men's restroom wore a beard. Here in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism meant practicing the most puritanical interpretations of the Qur'an and the Sunnah (“path”), which includes the reported deeds, words, and silent approvals of the prophet Muhammad. Because the prophet wore a beard, Muslim men are supposed to wear beards, according to the logic of Wahhabism.
Terminal 4 is part of a massive complex with vast open spaces surrounded on all sides by terminals. I saw rows of women in
nikab
, the long black gowns and veils that women and girls are required to wear in public, under canopies that rose into the darkened sky. I felt strange about the fact that having had Shibli as an unmarried woman made me a criminal here, and that my son was evidence against me. We stepped up to the immigration counter, and an immigration officer who looked as if he was in his twenties made me pause. The man passed Safiyyah's passport to her with a twinkle in his eye and then, playing cat-and-mouse with her, pulled it away as she reached for it. He smiled. She didn't. I respected young Safiyyah. She didn't smile just to please this adult. I wished I had her sense of self-containment. I was leery of men like him in Saudi Arabia. Did they see Safiyyah, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, with less than innocent eyes? Or was he just innocent?
I thought I was going to be disgusted being in Saudi Arabia, but ironically I felt just fine. In fact, I kind of liked it. I walked freely through the airport. I certainly didn't feel like a pariah because I was a woman. Waiting for our bus to Mecca, we sat at a table at Al Baiader National Restaurant with Pepsi signs splashed by the restaurant's name.
My mother looked around frantically all of a sudden. “Where's Dada?” she yelled, worried. (My niece and nephew called their grandfather Dada, which means “paternal grandfather” in Urdu. They called my mother Dadi, which means “paternal grandmother.”) My father turned up as quickly as he had disappeared. He was looking for our lost suitcase. He couldn't find it. Al-hamdulillah. Praise be to God.
Everywhere we turned there were packs of pilgrims from every country imaginable. A sign for pilgrims from the Philippines proclaimed,
WELCOME
PILGRIMS
. Another directed pilgrims from India in the direction we were walking. A dark-skinned man in bare feet stood near us. “Hajj Committee Bihar,” my father read from his bag. Bihar is one of India's poorest states. The joke in India goes that Pakistan could have the disputed Indian-controlled state of Kashmir if it took the state of Bihar with it as well.
Everywhere, the Pepsi logo stared at us, from tablecloths to banners. We gathered with our tour group, piled against our suitcases between rows of shopping stalls. There were so many inside tricks to pulling off the hajj. A Saudi vendor pulled a belt from a bin of belts he was selling and tightened it around the lower half of Samir's ihram. Samir seemed visibly relieved.
The call for the predawn prayer rang through the air. In a restroom, I found myself around the largest sink I'd ever seen, with women from all over the world: Iran, Turkey, Indonesia. It was lower than normal, so that we could comfortably prop our feet under the faucet, and ringed with a low wall on which we could sit. We were all there to do precisely the same thing: wash ourselves for the ritual
wudu
, or “ablution.” My mother taught me how to do wudu when she taught me to pray as a ten-year-old.
“Why do we have to do this before
every
single prayer?” I had whined, frustrated that I had to splash myself with water when I
seemed
clean.
My mother had looked at me, surprised that I would question a given that was tradition. But she humored my inquiry. “It's so that you will be clean before God,” she said.
So I grew up privy to the universal code of ritualistic washing in Islam. Islam is so precise: the purity of having done wudu stays as long as you don't pass gas or go to the bathroom. I had to admit, however, that I retained my girlhood skepticism. Still, I washed myself before prayers, if not with conviction about the necessity or even the symbolism of the rite. Wash each hand three times, starting with the right hand. Wash the mouth three times with a gulp of water from my right hand to swish around in my mouth and spit out. Wash the nose three times with touches of water up the nose. Wash the face three times, from the top of my forehead to my chin. Wash up each arm to the elbow with a touch of water from the hand on the other arm, starting again, of course, with the right arm. Wash behind the ears three times with my fingers, both ears at the same time. Wipe the hair with my hands, three times. Run the backs of my fingers over both sides of my neck, intertwine my fingers behind my neck, and run them forward with the fronts of my fingers swiping my neck. This was my favorite move. Move right foot up to the faucet in an acrobatic move. Wash three times. It wasn't required, but my mother had taught me to run my fingers through my toes. I had always loved that part. Left foot and done.
It's said that the prophet Muhammad declared, “The key to heaven is prayer, and the key to prayer is being ritually pure.”
I saw the woman beside me. She was shaking loose drops of water from her hand. She was from Iran. Even though we did not share the same language, we were privy to the same rites of ritualistic purity.
I stepped into the concourse to pray. The men were lining up in a massive space between shopping stalls crowded with glistening gold-colored water canteens, soft prayer rugs, and racks of
abaya
, the floor-length gowns that are the public uniform of Saudi women. I fell into prayer just behind them, a young woman directly beside me. For me, prayer was very much about going through the motions. I tried to get into it spiritually, but so many doubts interfered, not the least of which was why I had to pray
behind
the men and why my father
had
to be with me before I could enter this sacred space. I just hadn't fully surrendered to the faith. Still, there we all stood in the land of Islam, people of varying degrees of faith, all one in this concourse that was the Hajj Terminal, facing this effusive symbol of our faith, the Ka'bah.
I completed my prayer and lined up in a restaurant queue to get the family breakfast. The man behind the counter kept a lingering eye on me as I reeled off my order. “Half chicken with rice, chicken biryani, two apple juices, two mango juices, and two teas.” I remembered the immigration officer playing cat-and-mouse with Safiyyah's passport. I had to admit that the idea of sexual tensions in this country gave me the creeps. As I walked back to our pile of suitcases, I caught sight of my mother. She was a walking sharia violation. As she scoured the stalls, her hair slipped out of her hijab. To my horror, she pulled the cover off in the middle of the crowd to adjust it.