Sahara

THE SAHARA STARTS 100km south of Algiers, via the winding roads that slowly scale the wall protecting the Sahara from Europe. The Atlas Mountains rise out of the Mediterranean, like a great hand saying, ‘Thou shalt not pass!’ The mountains are fertile, cold and wet. I imagine it sometimes snows on the peaks. Once you pass the agricultural lands hugging the sea, you slip quickly into a mossy jungle, filled with deep caves seeping naturally carbonated water, where monkeys bathe or sit on the side of the road and jeer at those foolish enough to head south.

At the highest point of the climb up the Atlas, the jungle cleared, and way below us we could see a vegetation-free, dry plain that seemed to run south forever. We pulled over to survey the scene ahead. There it was: the gateway to Black Africa, the great desert far below us, glowing as if illuminated by a thousand suns. We were all excited – excited for a new adventure. An experience lived for the memories it promised. But that moment on the peak, something shifted in everyone. We pitched camp right there, dancing and singing, celebrating a renewed spiritual consciousness that awoke in us all.

Islam proclaims ninety-nine names of God, each extolling a characteristic of the Almighty. Many of the names refer to the beneficence of Allah, but in the Sahara there’s one name that echoes from the Atlantic to the Gulf: Al Azeez, The Defeater. In its arid hugeness, Al Azeez speaks in an angry and forbidding Old Testament voice. He delivers proclamations and rules. Rules that, if broken, have severe consequences. But like the songs that declare his names, new meanings reveal themselves in a perfect narrative sequence. This face of God loves adulation and as he is a God often missed for the sand, when noticed he responds generously. The names Al Wadood (The Loving), Al Mujeeb (The Responsive), slowly make themselves known.

To me, his presence was so powerful and evident I often missed the sand for God. Thus the name Az Zaahir (The Infinitely Manifest) became the face of God I saw every day, in every stone and grain of sand. In this way, the Sahara’s hugeness shrank for me, as it turned into a backdrop for considering the only thing that mattered. God. The enormous vistas of rolling dunes or the flat stony ergs, penetrated by sharp dry mountains, were cosy for me as I basked in the warmth of the arms of Al Wadood.

To me, North Africa wasn’t an exotic holiday or tourist destination. Here, God was everywhere and everyone felt him. In the towns and villages, five times a day, a boy in a minaret would wail out ‘Allah Akhbar!’, drawing the two words out over several anguished minutes in a way that somehow expressed both pain and love. The first of these calls would come as a rude shock – about an hour before dawn, to raise you out of your slumber and to prepare for prayer. It was too much for Mishka and me to resist. Whenever we heard the call, we also prayed. While the devout Muslims demonstrated their love of God in an elaborate practice of bowing toward Mecca, we kept our practice more humble. Sitting quietly. This caused some consternation among the Muslims we passed. Yes, we would sit five times a day, facing Mecca after wudu (washing) as all Muslims do. But our salat, our prayers, were otherwise all wrong, and as far as the locals were concerned, entirely confused. So they’d grill us about the other pillars of Islam.

‘Tell me, which God do you pray to?’

‘There’s just one. How can I pray to another?’

‘Do you pray for God’s benefit or for yourself and others?’

‘Why would I try to fill the ocean with a teacup? I pray because I wish to be with God. To know God, to feel God’s presence, not so God can feel mine!’

Our answers were all good – but somehow also wrong. Eventually, after long conversations, they’d usually give up on trying to establish what was wrong with our practice and simply offer to teach us the correct protocols. We happily learned them, only to be seen, hours later, meditating toward Mecca as usual.

We were in no hurry. We had nowhere specific to go, so we stopped often, to pray, to meditate, to eat, just to be there. In the Sahara, time became irrelevant so we lost any concept of it. None of us wore watches and there were no clocks in the cars. Hours were lost as the time of day blurred – time ceased to be divided into twenty-four crisp hours. There was morning, afternoon, evening and night, but each had fuzzy edges. And we dawdled through our days as leisurely as a herd of camels. We stopped at every oasis, every settlement, every tomb, whenever the vehicles demanded it or whenever the mood took any one of us. Perhaps the boundlessness of our Saharan lives loosened up my meditations. They were still a bit choppy, the odd anxiety mixed up with prayer and contemplation, but at least I could now sit still with my eyes closed.

Often I walked off far from the cars, took off every bit of clothing and offered myself to the universe around me. I would find a stone and sit naked and meditate on it and feel like a self-realised yogi. Nobody noticed or cared. The days of being chained to my possessions were long gone. In the Sahara I felt I could have misplaced my body and not cared to go back and look for it. It took Moses and the Jews forty years to cross the Sinai. Now I could see why.

At night we would lie down under the light of the stars to sleep. But the stars were so bright and profuse that sometimes it would be hours before sleep took us. There was nothing to look at, but so much to see.