Here a ninja
There a ninja
Everywhere a ninja ninja!
I hummed my made-up ditty in my head. I was surrounded by them. Ninjas. Not the combative kind, but the Saudi version. Some women on my flight were women no longer! Their Hajj gear—black sheaths covered every inch of their bodies. I understood that women in Saudi Arabia were commanded to cover their bodies, but why, oh, why, in the beating hot sun, were they forced to wear all black? Were these foreign women masochists, or did fear of retribution on Saudi soil compel them to suffer this way? The men looked comparatively comfortable in their civvies. They felt no need to change, at least not until they entered the area of Miqat (the many standing places outside Mecca where ihram needs to be worn) in Mecca. In addition, we were flying to Medina first. The Quran itself only called for modesty for clothing for both men and women. Nowhere in the book were there references to these tent-like black (or Taliban blue) sheaths, and this question of dress is subject to heated modern debate. Those who enforced the morality of the hijab quote from various parts of the Quran, like Ayah 59 of al-Azhab, Surah 33:
Oh prophet tell your wives and daughters,
And the women of the faithful,
To draw their wraps a little over them.
They will thus be recognized and no harm will come to them.
God is forgiving and kind.
There were curtained prayer rooms fitted right next to the toilets. Many in my party decided to pray. What time zone? Which prayer? I stayed where I was. I thought it was absurd to pray on a plane, but my TV screen reminded me, with its Mecca arrow, which direction to point my supplications should I be overcome with a need to show off my piety.
My Shia group leader, Shafiq, distributed pamphlets and prayer books. The Shia were entering a butchered land. The Wahhabis had destroyed broad swathes of Shia history and culture, most notably the graves of their ancestors. We were given maps that marked the names and locations of these burial sites. This was remarkable. It was a feat of diligent, secret cartography.
A week before my circumcision, I had emailed my friend Shahinaz in London and asked her to join me. Being adventurous, she agreed. Shahinaz was an old friend whom I also filmed for my first doc. She, like me, was gay. She was “Allah conscious,” like her Somali parents in Paris, but Islam’s strictures were not for her. They had emigrated to France when she was five. She was my Shia, African, and French cousin! I always introduced her as my London “cousin.” Later, we were destined to become husband and wife, Saudi style.
It was karma that a real cousin of hers in Birmingham was coming on Hajj the very same year with the UK contingent of my very same Hajj group—we would all become one big group upon arrival. What are the chances! We both felt it was meant to be. Especially because as her cousin he became her mahram, or male guardian—a practice that many Hajj groups still follow, to allow women to perform the pilgrimage. In some modern Shia and Sunni practices, it is not necessary, as the group leader becomes the mahram for “unaccompanied” women. I paid for Shahinaz’s Hajj—it only seemed fair. She knew I was planning to film and also write a book.
Shahinaz and I reunited at Doha International Airport where the British contingent had joined us. We were not able to sit together on the connecting flight, but we checked on each other often.
Medina Airport was dated and dingy, boasting only a few squeaky luggage carousels—hardly the ostentatious display of Saudi excess I expected. Men and women lined up separately to retrieve their baggage.
As far as I and many in my group were concerned, our Hajj began at touchdown. Even though the formal Hajj took only five days, my journey of the spirit started here.
A naked fear filled me as I walked toward Saudi immigration. I wondered if I was Muslim enough to be allowed in. I was at the doors of the nation I most feared and loathed: Wahhabi-land. Wahhabism is the cruel and puritanical form of eighteenth-century Islam the Saudis practice. In 1744, a struggling and ridiculed desert cleric called Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab made a pact with an also struggling tribal leader called Muhammad Ibn Saud. Wahhab would be allowed to make his version of Islam the law of the land that Ibn Saud was trying to create. And he and his followers in exchange would accept Wahhabi dogma as Saudi sharia. The land and country that would be created would be a monarchy composed of Dar Al Saud, “The House of Saud.” They reserve the death penalty for people like me. Beheading and being flung off a tall building were the punishments of choice.
Immense faith had brought me here. I was obeying my highest calling as a Muslim, to embark on the Hajj pilgrimage. This was my journey of the spirit. I prayed I would be allowed to finish it.
“Muslim?” said the balding border guard scrutinizing my Indian passport.
“Yes,” I answered with a confidence I did not feel. He typed into a tired-looking PC. Had he Googled me and already known who I was?
Stamping my passport with his grubby fingers he said, “Ahlan al Hag” (“Welcome, Hajji”). Premature, I thought. The greeting was reserved for those who had already fulfilled Islam’s highest calling.
“Inshallah,” I replied. He smiled. My response contained a reservation—I did not yet feel like a true pilgrim.
I had dreaded this moment for months, fearing that my status as an out gay man would prevent me from entering the holy land. I had built the moment up in my mind to such a degree that the actual event could only feel anticlimactic. I was not thrown in jail or barred from entry.
Instead, the guard’s warm greeting felt as though he had stamped the word “Muslim” on my forehead.
“Bonjour Monsieur! Welcome to the land of the unfree,” read a text from Adham.
“Inshallah, I will meet God!” I replied, tongue firmly in cheek.
“Inshallah, for everything! The best Muslim excuse there ever was!”
“Just put it all in God’s hands LOL!” I replied.
At the time, I thanked the late Steve Jobs for the iMessage function of my 4S. I got unlimited free texts riding on the kingdom’s largest network, Mobily. I created a Keith, Adham, and Shahinaz MMS group for general texts.
“It will all be fine. I love you,” Keith texted. He had dealt with the enormity of my fears preceding this pilgrimage. His love would sustain me in the weeks to follow.
“Have they taken your passports yet?” Adham asked.
A few minutes later, on our bus, they did.
The following morning, I overslept and missed Fajr, the first prayer of the day. Big mistake. I had already opened myself up to the condescension of my roommates with my careless disregard for ritual. These judgmental men in my room were forming a schoolyard-like clique at breakfast. I was subtly excluded from their camaraderie. Pretending to sleep, I would sometimes hear conversations. One of them, a hypochondriac called Abdullah, had a bagful of medication and Epipens. One morning he said that if he became a martyr in Mecca, he would consider himself and his entire family blessed. He had earlier looked disapprovingly when I prayed in the Sunni way. So I kept my eyes shut.
He audibly whispered to the others that he worked for the US military in Virginia, where he lived with his wife and newborn son. He operated drones over his native Pakistan.
“How do you know you aren’t killing your Shia brethren?” asked a roomie.
“I don’t know for sure, but I always hope it’s the evil Sunni jihadis and not one of my own.”
Shahinaz and I walked toward Medina’s heart, which was the Prophet’s Mosque right across the road. In the light of day, it felt otherworldly. It is impossible for someone of my generation not to think of Tatooine, the desert planet where a young Luke Skywalker discovers his destiny. The sand and heat did call Tatooine to mind, but it was also the architecture and the people.
A mutawa thwacked us. “Marry?” he said.
“Yes, of course!” we both exclaimed.
“Proof?” he snarled.
We made great show of searching our belongings and then said we had left them at the hotel. “You’ll just have to take our word for it, brother. Why would we lie in Medina?” Probably illiterate, he left us alone, and Shahinaz set off to find the women’s corrals.
A quarter of humanity is Muslim, and they all gathered here from every corner of the globe during Hajj season. Mecca and Medina are the United Nations of Islam, showcasing the diversity of the world’s fastest-growing religion. The rest of Saudi Arabia is a monoculture of “ninja”-style abayas for the women and the dishdasha or thawb, a long, flowing, usually white robe, for the men. Here, it was a rainbow of colors and styles. I saw Chinese men wearing teal vests and white caps, Kenyan women in bright pink scarves, and Somalis in dazzling block-printed fabric. Every group was color-coded so members could easily spot one another in the crowds. In a cosmopolitan place such as this, it’s not always easy for the Saudis to enforce a tight dress code. The immensity of the Hajj promises a strange freedom that can only come from strength in numbers and hiding in plain sight. There was an occasional all-black abaya-trapped woman floating around, but this was really the United Colors of Islam. I started taking photos surreptitiously, with the goal of documenting these styles on an imagined Tumblr I would call “Hajj Couture,” but then I remembered that I could be hauled to prison for taking pictures of women here. In a Twitter-obsessed country I was ironically afraid to send out tweets from my Hajj, because that would be a sure-fire way to invite the attention of the wrong kind of Saudis—in my case, their Interior Ministry and their Mukhabarat. Biggest concern of all: I was not a US citizen but an Indian one. Both the Saudis and the Indians would want someone like me gone. In retrospect, it feels like a small and petty fear, but the reality of it then seemed big. The chances? Fifty-fifty.
Massive retractable umbrellas bloomed over our heads from unassuming marble columns, shielding us mercifully from the mid-morning sun. We were periodically spritzed by mists of cool water. Just like I’d experienced in Palm Springs! All of this across miles and miles of pristine marble. Gulf excess was not new to me but this was quite the sight.
Did my fellow pilgrims realize that this comfortable microclimate came at a heavy price? In the two holy cities, the bin Ladens colluded with the House of Saud for the biggest reconstruction project in the history of Islam. Countless artifacts, burial sites, objects the Prophet loved, and historic structures were steamrolled to make way for the high-tech yet tasteless glitz and marble. It’s difficult to imagine a broader tragedy of cultural erasure in modern history. The Al Saud gave the Mecca and Medina reconstruction project, predictably, to one of the world’s richest construction companies, the bin Laden Group. One of the family’s many sons was called Osama. He worked briefly at the Mecca office, to oversee the destruction and would later lament about all that the Al Saud destroyed, never mentioning his own family who actually executed the destruction.
This was the Masjid al-Nabi, the “Mosque of the Prophet.” He was buried here, and Medina represented, for me, a student of Islam, the birthplace of Islam’s democracy. Exiled by his own tribe from Mecca, Muhammad had laid down the foundations of the religion’s first constitution. At its center was the principle of Tawhid, the oneness of God. This was al-Madinah al-Munawwarah, the “Radiant City,” primarily because Muhammad built Islam’s first society of peace and tolerance within its boundaries. In seventh-century Yathrib, as the city was called then, women had real rights. Jews existed harmoniously alongside Muslims. The first Muslims, the ones we’d always been taught to emulate, came from Medina. They called it the city of Sukoon (“Peace”). A peace of the spirit.
Inside the mosque, a maze of striped archways stretched out before me. The melodious, drawn-out call to Zuhr prayers echoed through the halls. This is the only semblance of music that is allowed in the entire country. All else is forbidden. A country without music? To many this would be inconceivable. But for young Saudis, music can be a dark secret whose volume is always set low.
I had not come to my Hajj unprepared. The history between Saudi Arabia and Iran and Sunni-Shia conflagrations through the centuries had been part of my research material all my adult life.
It was the night of the Shia prayer, the long Dua’a Kumayl, a supplication of a man who was, for them, the most devout follower of the Prophet’s son-in-law, Imam Ali. The latter for all Shia was the rightful successor to the Prophet because he was married to Fatima, the Prophet’s youngest daughter. She gave birth to the next two imams, Husayn and Hassan, as the Shia lineage progressed from the Ahl al-Bayt (Muhammad’s family). For Sunnis, the Prophet’s inheritor was a sahaba (close companion) called Abu Bakr. And that lineage rift would forever separate Shia from Sunni.
In this Shia prayer, Ali’s faithful servant Kumayl speaks for Ali. The faithful recite this prayer in order to seek fulfillment of “legitimate” desires, to request safety from enemies, to request the forgiveness of sins and to ask for wealth, and more. My new group-friend Hossein marched with me toward this redoubtable scene with a confidence I didn’t feel. He was Iranian and, as often happens, we bonded over a cigarette.
There is a political element to this prayer ritual. The Iranians deliberately gather in large numbers to recite the extremely long supplication near the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. It’s a Dua that can happen only on a Thursday night. That night there were, by my estimate, about 2,000 Iranians. Ironically a much greater number of Saudi riot police corralled them. Shia protest would be intolerable mobocracy. Post-revolution Iranians often used the Hajj for protests against many matters, including the Dar Al Saud. Iranians have been frequently banned from the Hajj, either by their own government or by the Saud who fear them.
Islam’s deepest schism is about who inherits the Prophet’s wisdom. He would not recognize the sectarian Islam of today. The most-visible symbols of this divide are the nations of Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. The greater Middle East has always been their playground. The fleeing colonizers in the mid-twentieth century left gore and hastily carved nations in their wake. To this day, both Iran and Saudi Arabia compete for hegemony in countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and more recently Syria and Yemen. Revolutionary Iran in 1979 married political power with religion, filling the Saud with terror. Their utopia was of a Wahhabi-Saud marriage, where the clergy were left alone as long as the monarchy stayed in power. The head honchos of that clergy even issued fatwas on command to enable the monarchy to continue wielding political power. Iran’s revolution turned logic like that upside down, because, most important, it toppled a monarchy—the shah of the Pahlavi dynasty that had ruled Iran since 1925. If this could happen in a nation that had had monarchy for 2,500 years, what would befall the House of Saud if the same winds of revolution blew Saudi-ward?
In the sixties, the Iranian shah sent a series of open letters to the Saudi king, Faisal. In one he famously said, “Please, my brother, modernize. Open up your country. Make the schools mixed women and men. Let women wear miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern. Otherwise, I cannot guarantee you will stay on your throne.” Miniskirts were forever banned from the Iranian mind just a decade later. In any case, the Saudis were skittish because of history. In winter 1979, as the Iranian revolutionaries were taking the US embassy hostage, the Masjid al-Haram (Noble Sanctuary) in Mecca was overrun by revolutionaries. They were led by one Juhayman al-Otaybi, who declared the Mahdi (Islam’s redeemer; in this case, his brother-in-law) had come.
Much blood was shed in this city where the Prophet had forbidden even the killing of an insect. The mayhem lasted two weeks and infidel French troops ended the siege. This seizure at the Kaaba while revolutionary Iran jubilated fueled eternal terror in the House of Saud.
The newly anointed Ayatollah Khomeini spoke out on Tehran Radio on November 21, 1979: “It is not beyond guessing that this is the work of criminal American imperialism and international Zionism.” He knew he was beginning a decades-long tirade against the “Evil Satan,” often represented by the US and Zionism. In Iran, anti-Western rhetoric grew. At the same time, Saudi Arabia solidified its ties with the US.
Not only was the ayatollah expressing the hatred his revolutionaries were carrying out at the US embassy in Tehran, he was also during that time of innumerable daily fatwas making the claim that monarchy like the government structure of Saudi Arabia was un-Islamic. The rise of the Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih (“Rule by the Jurists”) would be akin to Saudi King Khalid’s handing over power to the Wahhabis’ grand mufti.
In Islamic eschatology the arrival of the Mahdi signaled that the Day of Judgment was fast approaching. Both Shia and Sunni believe in this end of times, with the arrival of this Mahdi. But for most Sunnis, the Mahdi has not yet come and exists only as a theological and theoretical concept. For the “Twelver” Shia, the Mahdi (basically their twelfth and final imam) has always been there and can manifest at any time (with Jesus)—he just went into a state of occultation 1,200 years ago. Both Shia and Sunni call him Muhammad al-Mahdi, after the name of the Prophet. It is interesting that some Shia believe the Mahdi’s coming out will have several portents, including massive war in Syria, destroying it, and in Iraq fear and death for its people. I would love to see the faces of Wahhabi-inspired ISIS terrorists when they learn the despised Shia share their thinking about this critical truth we are actually living.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are the world’s most prominent examples of sharia law, and yet they couldn’t be more different. Iranian zealots have never let go of their idea of their utopian, pan-Islamic revolution, which is abhorrent to the Saudis. The fight is about both oil and ideology. In the Iran-Iraq War, the Saudis plied Saddam with $25 billion. Their temporary love of Saddam was disingenuous. He conveniently kept the country’s Shia majority in check, while retaining an important geographical and cultural divide between them and Iran. In 1984, the countries came to the brink of war as Iranian planes flew over Saudi soil. Khomeini, who was never at a loss for words, declared, “These vile and ungodly Wahhabis are like daggers which have always pierced the heart of the Muslims from the back.” Using the familiar and time-tested idea of takfir (Islamic excommunication, where one Muslim accuses another of being a kafir, a nonbeliever), he made the claim that Mecca was in the hands of “a band of heretics.” All Saudi kings took immense pride and earned most of their legitimacy by appending the title of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” to their names. The ayatollah was attacking that basic precept.
Since 1981, Iranians had held yearly Hajj protests against the US and Israel in Mecca. The Saudis tolerated this. But in 1987 troops arrived to stop them. This led to riots that killed 400. The Saudis conveniently blamed the trouble on shirk (idol worship). Angry protesters, always easily conjured up by the Iranian religious police (the Basij), ransacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran. All Iranian pilgrims were banned until a 1991 thaw.
Later in Mecca, our group’s mutawif (Hajj guide) would show us the exact overpass where the clashes occurred. As with their unusual maps of unmarked graves, the Shia would inherit the memory of what happened at this overpass.
Ayatollah Khomeini was the only reason Indian novelist Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses) earned worldwide fame. When the gang of Iranian jurists, with Khomeini as their leader, issued a death decree against Rushdie, the Saudis wanted a piece of the action as well. The Saudi Wahhabis pronounced that Rushdie would have to appear before a sharia-sanctioned tribunal before he could be sentenced. It was an exercise in foolishness—both countries trying to outdo each other as to whose Islamic condemnation of Rushdie was the valid one.
In 1988, King Fahd called for ceasing all anti-Iran media campaigns. Was it détente? It was clear that the Al Saud dynasty controlled what passed for Saudi media. They would later even go to great lengths to launch Al Arabiya, their reaction to the often anti-Saudi, Qatar-based Al Jazeera. In 1990, both countries rejected the use of force in the Persian Gulf and came out strongly against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Détente again? A brief one, yes, this time. Official ties between the two nations were even restored in 1991. Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, visited Riyadh. Flashbulbs popped and hands were shaken.
Real evidence of rapprochement would come from the Hajj. The Hajj operates on a quota system. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia claims that Hajj visas from different countries are directly proportional to their Muslim populations. Iran is a nation of more than 80 million Muslims. Saudi Arabia, in comparison, has about 30 million. In 1988, a determined King Fahd had allotted Iran only 45,000 pilgrims. Protesting this quota, Iran boycotted. Thus, with much fanfare the Saudis announced that they were letting in 115,000 Iranian pilgrims in 1991. The ayatollah smiled.
In Medina later that Dua Ku’mayl night, I couldn’t help but notice Iranian flags outside certain hotels.
“That’s where the Iranians stay. They put the flags so that they can find each other,” said my Hajj guide when I asked about it at a daily majlis (“gathering”). My group, like all Shia, regularly held these where they mourned the injustices brought upon them by the Sunnis and commemorated their greatest imams, including the Prophet’s grandson Husayn, the second in the succession line after his father Ali. Husayn’s butchering and death at the Battle of Karbala in the seventh century was mourned as if it had happened yesterday. In India, as in Iran, it was even a national holiday. I would sit on the side trying my best to visibly commiserate.
I wondered if the majlis of my Khoja group was the same as other Shia? The Khojas are yet another example of Islam’s great diversity. They are one of the many subsets of Shia Islam, with ancestry in Western India and East Africa. It seemed my group had both Twelver Khojas and Nizari Khojas. The former believed in twelve imams, with the last being in occultation and scheduled to reappear as a Mahdi who would rule for five, seven, nine, or nineteen years (according to whom you talked to) before Yawm al-Qiyamah (the Day of Judgment) and rid the world of all evil.
The Nizari Khojas in my group placed great emphasis on the Islamic principle of ijtihad, or independent reasoning. I was always drawn to their discussions throughout my Hajj. They seemed a reasonable lot and I wondered—would they also leave my homosexuality open to the ijtihad they so revered, if they found out?
As far as the Wahhabi-Salafi establishment was concerned, all Shia, including Sunnis like me who choose to travel with Shia, were infidels. Much had changed from those heady days in 1991, when the Saudis also agreed to an Iranian request to allow 5,000 relatives and friends of the 412 “martyrs” of the 1987 riots to attend the Hajj. Our group was told to stick together and march under the Canadian flag—to display a US or British flag during Hajj was unthinkable. Did Saudi BFF US presidents even know this? Every other nationality during the Hajj, including the (despised) Iranians, marched with its national flag.
To worldwide surprise, Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami came on a state visit in 1998, the first since the ’79 revolution. And in February 2007, the biggest surprise of all—the often-reviled Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad performed his pilgrimage at the invitation of King Abdullah. I had come on the Hajj as an educated pilgrim. My decision to be there in 2011, the year of the Arab uprisings, which I very openly reported about (especially from Cairo), and the death of Osama bin Laden, was a deliberate one. Less than a week before my departure, the FBI uncovered an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. “Operation Red Coalition,” as the FBI had named it, produced headlines. Stuxnet, the malicious computer worm, had struck Iran recently.
The political part of my brain wanted to know if the Shia upheavals in the eastern part of the kingdom had penetrated Mecca and Medina. For Saudis, it was normal to call 10 percent of their country the pejorative rafidah (“rejectors”), the most used anti-Shia Arabic slur in the region. Saudi Shia are concentrated in the east, inconveniently close to the major oilfields. In Saudi Arabia’s geographical curse, oil and the reviled Shia live in the same land. The Al Saud feel more in control of what used to be the western Hejaz region that contains Mecca and Medina, and even the neighboring Nejd. But it is the Shia in the Ash Sharqiyah (Eastern Province) that they fear. Even Adham texted that all Shia of Qatif, referring to the governorate in the Eastern Province, are “trouble-makers.” The indoctrination of this kind of internecine hatred went deep. Qatif’s geography is inconvenient, too close to Iraq, Iran, and the contested Persian Gulf for the often-jittery Saudi monarchy. By 2015, the Saudis had mandated that pilgrims had to state whether they were Shia or Sunni on their Hajj visa applications—basically religious apartheid, Saudi style. Post-Hajj I would come back home with both derision and disgust for the Saudi Wahhabi machine and devour every piece of news that came from the region. But on this night as all these historical milestones met in my brain, I walked determinedly with Hossein, eager to be a part of the Iranian Dua.
In 2011, when I entered Saudi Arabia, Shia youths protested on the streets in the east of the country. An ignored, maligned, super-connected, and majority-under-twenty-five populace is a highly combustible mix; even one event can ignite revolutionary fire. The release of political prisoners and an end to the years of a state-sponsored sectarianism were the primary demands of the protesters. I had seen protest videos and read about the restive Saudi Shia population. Pre-Hajj, I had visions of exploring Qatif and its dissent. When there I became a prisoner of the Saudi regime. As a passport-less pilgrim, I could go nowhere but Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah airport.
I knew of the Saudi Shia underground, strangely through friends in Tehran. Traditionally, many Shia follow a marja al-taqlid (exalted source of emulation). In Iran, that person is Ayatollah Khameini, who like his predecessor Khomeini makes Velayat-e Faqih the very fulcrum of governance and all foreign policy. For the Saudi Shia, their marja is the less-influential Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose penile fatwa had filled me with much fear. Preaching from Najaf in Iraq, he is uncomfortably close for the Saudis.
The influential Saudi cleric Muhammad al-Arefe had once called al-Sistani an atheist, un-Islamic, and debauched. The Shia world reacted with predictable fury. But the cleric the Al Saud really feared was Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, who preached from the Qatif-al-Awamiyyah region, their own soil. Imprisoned several times, Nimr had called for the end of the regime, free elections, and even the secession of the Eastern Province. Shia youths, who were his largest support base, saw him as a “secular reformist.” I had followed Nimr’s outspokenness on Twitter carefully, beginning in 2010. Riyadh feared he would generate fitna (the undesirable Islamic state of civil strife). In truth, he was a Quran-inspired pacifist, rallying protesters to “use the power of the word” rather than violence. The “word” in Islam always means the Quran.
In Medina, on the night of that Dua, as my Iranian pal/smoking buddy Hossein and I passed the Prophet’s grave on the way to the mass of Iranians, we were getting close to the Jannat al-Baqi (Garden of Paradise) cemetery—the setting for major Shia-Sunni clashes in 2009, when the mutaween were caught filming Shia women praying at the graves. The religious police denied it, arguing they did not condone filming of any kind, and filming women would be unspeakable. Many religious figures the Shia mourned were buried here and the Saudis had destroyed the graves forever.
After the clashes, Nimr gave a particularly inflammatory, viral sermon, saying, “Our dignity has been pawned away, and if it is not restored, we will call for secession. Our dignity is more precious than the unity of this land.” Nimr had become “a prominent Saudi Shia reformist.”
Two years after my Hajj, in October 2014, Nimr was sentenced to death. In 2015, the Saudis executed a record-breaking 157 people, most beheaded by sword. Nimr’s sentencing was a global Shia phenomenon. On January 2, 2016, the Saudis executed forty-seven people and casually mentioned that Nimr was amongst them. The shock caused global headlines and protests. In Tehran, using now-familiar tactics, protesters ransacked the Saudi embassy. The ever-growing number of what I call the Twitter Sheikhs of Saudi Arabia reacted immediately in different ways, depending on whose pleasure they served at. Protesters in Qatif dared to use a slogan they had rarely used, “Down with the Al Saud.” Nimr was a rallying figure. Many feared that the Shia youths will fall back into a predictable state of complacency. In Saudi terms that usually means not questioning the ultimate authority of the king, but openly complaining about everything else—usually on Twitter and YouTube. Filled with tweets and YouTube videos, my mind expected to see revolution erupting even that night as thousands of Iranians gathered. I was wrong.
This Dua Ku’mayl gathering of Iranians was close to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, surrounded by Saudi riot police. Hossein confidently walked right into the phalanx of security.
“Let us through. We’re Iranian,” he said in Arabic to one of the Saudi guards surrounding the praying mass of Iranians. He grabbed my hand and led me defiantly past the ring of Saudi police. I had spent months studying Shia Islam. It was almost like learning a new religion. But this prayer could take up to an hour. I was not sufficiently indoctrinated, so I mumbled what little I could remember of the prayer and bowed my head to avoid suspicious glances. I felt one with the Iranians. Like them, I was an infidel. Thankfully the Iranians did not know why, or they would have rejected me as handily as the Saudis rejected them. “We have shared something momentous,” said Hossein, “so I must tell you a secret—I was part of what you guys in America were calling the green revolution in 2009.” I squeezed his hand tight, knowing how much it would have taken for him to tell me this.
There was no point in sleeping that night. Saudis open the gates to the Garden of Paradise cemetery at 4:30 a.m. Was it called paradise because all its nameless occupants were firmly settled there? We waited with a bawling Shia supplicant soundtrack. These meek mourners were the “warriors” of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution that the House of Saud feared so much? I had to laugh.
“Pay attention to this,” said Hossein, swatting me with his map. “It’s places like this that we really need it.” I pulled my map out of my bag.
I knew the history. The cemetery had existed since the Prophet’s time. Many religious figures the Shia mourned were buried here and the Wahhabi Ikhwan forces of the Saudis had demolished all the graves by 1926. The desecrated al-Baqi lay in ruins. It contained the remains of many of Islam’s ancestors, including some in the revered Ahl al-Bayt (Muhammad’s direct family). Grave-marker destruction, as for Daesh today, has remained a favorite Wahhabi pastime.
Finally, the gates to “paradise” opened and thousands of pilgrims rushed through. It was hard to get past the formation of mutaween. These feared creatures blocked the wailing Iranians like a face-off. This was the front line of a divide that I’d previously only understood in theory.
“Bida!” they yelled, adding “Shirk!” to good effect. The former means “heresy.” The latter, “idol worship.” For these Wahhabis, the mere attempt at praying graveside is idol-worship. They point to Muhammad’s destroying pagan idols contained in the Kaaba. The Shia argue that they are not literally praying to graves. They are merely praying to God at the grave. This is an important distinction. But for the mutaween these reviled infidels are praying to graves. It’s kind of like how many modern Protestant Christians, unlike their Catholic brethren, avoid decorating their homes with crucifixes. But you don’t often see Protestants policing Catholic prayer. The mutaween take it a step further: Any depiction of the human form at all is considered un-Islamic.
About 4,000 of these illiterate guys are on the payroll, but thousands more patrol the streets as volunteers. This is what happens when years of Wahhabi indoctrination meet joblessness. Their goal is to ensure total compliance to Wahhabi ideology. Many are young and angry, and, given power for the first time in their lives, they predictably abuse it. It’s a dangerous combo. They fine and imprison people without evidence, and their accusations of apostasy can even lead to an execution. Their power seemed limitless, and I reminded myself to be careful, for my green card wouldn’t protect me in a sharia court. I would soon experience their terror. All these thugs really know are bits of the Quran. They direct much of their ire toward women going about their daily business who dare to display any skin or hair, intentionally or not. And thus my so-called ninjas.
I had Googled the mutaween and was already petrified. Their notorious barbarism is on full display on the web. You just need to type “Mecca school fire” as search terms. In 2002, a girls’ school in Mecca caught fire. Worldwide media also lit up. What followed was a global tragedy and an enormous PR fiasco for the monarchy. The mutaween barred the doors, preventing the girls’ escape, because they were not properly covered, and they barred the male civil-defense forces from rescuing the girls because they claimed that direct contact with the girls’ bodies would arouse the men sexually. And so, rather than risk such impropriety, the mutaween shoved girls trying to escape back into the inferno. Fifteen of them burned to death. More than fifty were severely burned. I find it difficult to imagine a more despicable example of a zealotry that encourages adherents to follow the letter of the law at the expense of its spirit. The subsequent global outcry was so loud that the incident marked one of the rare moments the US government publicly reprimanded the Saudis.
I had grown up with gender segregation. I had spent time in states that police morality. Even Iran’s feared religious police, the Basij, paled in comparison to the barbarism of the mutaween. In 2007, the mutaween beat a man to death when they caught him selling alcohol in Riyadh. In 2013, two men died when their car drove off a bridge, chased by mutaween for singing patriotic songs about their country. Videos of mutaween abuses proliferate on YouTube.
As dawn broke above the graves, the green dome of the Prophet’s grave appeared on the horizon. Saudis have tried to destroy this dome for years. Swarms of pigeons took off into the desert sky. The wailing mourners had moved on, and an eerie silence replaced the din. The prayers I now heard were whispered. My companions discussed the quality of the lighting for photographs of the unnerving landscape. I broke away, seeking a solitude more appropriate for this place of death. Some poor pilgrim, who must have died here, was being buried. At that moment it occurred to me that no one in this man’s family would ever know where to find his remains. This was no headstone land.
I had thought I had forever lost my ability to cry after my mother’s funeral. In part I had come to this strange land to look for those lost tears. I was glad to be alone.
Muhammad, for many Muslims, chose the spot where the vast Baqi exists today. Do the Saudis still mess with it? I wondered. That morning it felt like a city of the dead. Schools of Islam dispute where the Prophet’s daughter Fatima is buried near here. Muhammad had no male heirs, so Fatima’s presence in Islam’s lineage is central. For some, she is buried under the green dome. Others argue that she is buried in Baqi.
I walked back to the Prophet’s mosque. I prayed Fajr. I felt more in tune with my faith than I had for a long time. I was meant to be here.
After a nap, Shahinaz and I (luckily without incident) went to the mosque again for Zuhr (noon) prayers. Our happiness was short-lived. Soon a mutawa appeared, saying she couldn’t sit with me. Ignoring my protestations and Wahhabi law on not touching strange women, he scooped her up and dragged her away.
She texted, “It’s fine, let’s text after Zuhr and we will find each other again.”
In the Tatooine area, it seemed men and women could walk together. What looked like miles of ceiling closed in to shield the pilgrims from the morning sun with nary a squeak. More bin Laden gadgetry installed to ensure our comfort. Here, the discipline of Islam was on full display. Perfectly formed rows of supplicants stretched for miles. We were emulating the Prophet’s sunnah, his way of life, which all good Muslims are taught. The Prophet, or one of his companions, must have decreed that not even one believer should break formation, physically, and by extension, spiritually. At this time, I noticed that all the women, including Shahinaz, had suddenly disappeared.
I lingered at the green dome under which Muhammad was buried. Since the eighteenth century its existence had been contested, and yet it stood firm. This is the divine in action, I thought.
I reunited with Shahinaz and we explored our surroundings. This Prophet’s Mosque is Islam’s second-holiest mosque. The first obviously is the Masjid al-Haram at the Kaaba’s ground zero in Mecca. As a child, I knew there were secret messages and signs in the heavily calligraphed columns that surround Muhammad’s grave. This was Islam’s Da Vinci code. For the Shia, it was of utmost importance: The Prophet’s daughter Fatima, who would lay forth the lineage of Islam through her husband and their first Imam Ali, had her “room” here. The very foundations of the Prophet’s Medina home lay within this mosque.
Sunnis believe that the rightful inheritors of Muhammad’s legacy, the earliest two caliphs culled from his closest companions—Abu Bakr and Umar—were also buried there.
“For me, this is not a mere mosque,” I whispered to Shahinaz. It was where long-lost memories became sacred. It was where the first Islamic nation and community were built, as close to the concept of democracy as could possibly exist in seventh-century Arabia. During Muhammad’s life it was a home, it was a center for community to gather, it was a university, it was a place of refuge for the homeless, and yes, it was also a mosque.
Our Hajj guide described a fatwa from the nineties that came from the particularly cruel Saudi Grand Mufti ibn Baz. It partially decreed:
There is a specious argument put forward by those who worship graves (code for Shia), namely the fact that the grave of the Prophet is in his mosque . . . It is not permissible for a Muslim to take that as evidence that mosques may be built over graves, or that people may be buried inside mosques, because that goes against the traditions of the Prophet, and because it is a means that may lead to shirk . . .
Baaz came in a long, destructive ideological Wahhabi line. The father of the “third Saudi State,” ibn Saud, captured the Hejaz (that contains Mecca and Medina) in 1925. His ISIS-like ikhwans (“brothers”) used their brutality to demolish nearly every tomb or dome in Medina in order to prevent their veneration. The job was finished on April 21, 1926, on a day that some Shia mark as Yaum e Gham (“Day of Sorrow”). They never dared to touch the Prophet’s grave, which determined pilgrims were almost stampeding to touch.
Many Muslims believe an empty grave next to Muhammad’s is reserved for Jesus, who will return near the Day of Judgment to kill the Daijal (Antichrist, false messiah). Gold-plated Ottoman-style columns surrounded this area, with gold-inlayed Quranic verses. The grave itself was invisible because it was covered with gold mesh and black curtains.
Our Hajj guide also described a Grand Mufti al-Shaykh–signed pamphlet during Hajj 2007. It said that “the green dome shall be demolished and the three graves flattened in the Prophet’s Masjid.” The hypocrisy of the Sauds was clear. No bejeweled ornamentation, they said. But this was it: a mausoleum with a disagreeable medley of faux gold, marble, and more. Why would a Muslim not pray to his/her Prophet at such an ornate mausoleum? The bin Ladens claim they spent $6 billion here. Shahinaz and I snickered at their faux, gaudy results. We both knew the Sauds are petrified of the worldwide outcry the destruction of this dome and Prophet’s (mausoleum-like) grave would cause.
I lost Shahinaz as the orderliness broke into religious fervor closer to his grave. With their canes, mutaween whacked pilgrims who were daring a moment of graveside prayer. And yet they persisted. I felt peace in the pandemonium. Every believer wanted to get as close as possible to the grave. We were united in our forbidden longing. Even the incessant harassment of the mutaween could not take that away from us.
“Let’s meet after Baqi in the hotel. I am safe,” Shahinaz texted.
The crowd dispersed. The heat was unbearable. Over lunch at Al-Baik, a Saudi KFC, Shahinaz and I confabulated. A terrible incident had occurred: A woman in her tent had diarrhea and her period simultaneously. She had soiled her sleeping bag. With the exception of Shahinaz, who gave her Imodium, she was being treated like a pariah. Shahinaz helped her move and clean up. The sleeping bag needed to be replaced and the group leader had one. Where was simple compassion? Piety required it. No one except for Shahinaz seemed to possess any. And she said a few women were barely literate, probably products of “arranged marriage.”
Life in Saudi Arabia could be described in a sentence. Constant prayer, interrupted periodically for daily life and beheadings. But forcibly shoving religion down people’s throats never worked. I told Shahinaz what Adham had said. The majority of young Saudis hated prayer, and yet it was inextricably wound into the fabric of their lives. It was best not to be caught stationary outdoors during prayer time, anywhere. I had slept through Fajr on my first day, after all, and no storm troopers beat down my hotel room door. But we were experiencing judgmental fellow pilgrims. A woman had told Shahinaz to wear socks and gloves when she went out. Once, when I was praying just outside my packed hotel room, two guys said, “Praying in a corridor is haram.” This I knew: Laughing mid-prayer was haram—forbidden.
My desi-dar was going off frequently. Desi literally means “from the homeland,” which is South Asia. Many unskilled workers here were desi. Later, I sat down next to a younger man I immediately recognized as Pakistani owing to the shape of his close-cropped beard and his fairer skin. His skin tone matched mine. Muslim Indians, and by extension Pakistanis, generally have lighter skin than their Hindu neighbors.
“Assalamulaikum,” I greeted him in the Muslim way. Peace be with you.
“Alhamdulillah,” he replied. Praise be to God.
“Your name means merciful,” I said after we exchanged names. “Do the Saudis treat you that way?”
Rahman smiled. “I am lucky to work here so close to the Prophet’s grave.”
I probed further. “What’s it like to work for the Saudis?”
“Hell,” he said quietly. He told me they’d taken away his passport five years ago when he’d entered the kingdom. In exchange, he received an iqama, a work permit. This legal slavery permeates all Gulf monarchies. Rahman had not been able to visit his family for years. His employment was indentured servitude.
In this Rahman and other immigrant laborers were not unlike female citizens in Saudi Arabia, who need “exit visas” after receiving “permission to travel” from their male guardians—a husband, father, or son. They are prisoners in their homeland, victims of a patriarchal servitude. Many find a way around it. Saudi women hide in gated palaces. Rahman lived in a hovel.
“We sleep six to a room,” he said. “Often there is no running water.” Rahman slept at most four hours each night, working multiple shifts to make enough money to send home. At night he swept the marbled floors of the mosque, and by day he worked in a tiny watch-and-mobile shop. He would save almost a week’s wages to buy phone cards to call home. For me, he was proof of the dirty little secret of oil-rich countries. Despite the rampant displays of wealth and conspicuous consumption among the kingdom’s elite, many live below the poverty line. A majority of this demographic is composed of immigrants robbed of their passports, like Rahman.
I wondered if he had any glimmer of faith in political change. Had he seen any graffiti that hinted at dissent? He became taciturn. He must have feared I was an informant.
“Walk around your hotel,” said Rahman. “You will find what you need to see.” That’s all he would say.
I asked if he was on Facebook in this hyper-social web country. He had a mobile, after all.
“What’s that?” he replied. We said goodbye. I knew he knew.
My extensive reporting on the Arab Spring was easily searchable on the web. Was I naïve to hope I would find people eager to be filmed or talk to anyone who knew of Saudi dissent? My text bud Adham was the only real “source” I had here. With him and his web of contacts, I could easily film in Jeddah and Riyadh. But it would be harder to get to Qatif, where the protesting Saudi Shia lived. Passport-less I could do nothing outside of Mecca and Medina, and my lens was a religious one.
I did keep a watch on the Twitter feeds of Saudi sheikhs and opinion makers I followed. The kingdom had Twitter’s densest user base in the Arab world. As for Egypt, through my writing I had tried to clear up the misconception that Cairo 2011 was a “social media revolution.” Egypt is the poorest country in the region, with more than a quarter of its people living below the poverty line. Many of the revolutionaries were far too poor to own smartphones or even have access to social media. A significant number definitely used social media, but to make it the primary catalyst of the revolution was specious. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is the richest Arab country, and smartphone penetration is vast. The insurrection-terrified Saud tolerated Twitter and more. Most places, including both of Islam’s two holiest mosques, had wi-fi that occasionally worked. Twitter was a rare place where ikhtilat (“gender mixing”) “existed” freely. Men and women hung out as equals here. And the Sauds know the importance of keeping their country’s under-twenty-five majority happy. Princess to pauper, everyone is already on or trying to jump aboard the social web train.
A Saudi “Day of Rage” was announced on Facebook for March 11, 2011. It was deliberate because it was a Friday. As in Cairo, mosques were rightfully seen as rallying places for the mandated once-weekly communal prayer. Some reports said that only one protester, Khaled al-Johani, showed up in Riyadh. He was sentenced to eighteen months. Adham, who was in Riyadh, kept me updated hourly. Police presence was unprecedented, with helicopters in the sky. There were police checks on cars and individuals headed for mosques. Fridays in mosques were dangerous. So regimes from Tunis to Tripoli to Damascus rushed to police the Friday variety of devout thousands with potential to be incited. In Cairo, revolutionary imams had used Friday sermons to rally the faithful against the “un-Islamic” Mubarak regime.
Obeying the Al Saud, Riyadh’s grand mufti fatwa-ed, “Islam strictly prohibits protests in the kingdom because the ruler here rules by God’s will.” He invoked the familiar Fitna (“chaos”). Compliant ulema (religious scholars) also tweeted on point.
There were more protesters in Shia towns such as Awammiya in eastern Qatif. According to Adham, people were being fined, flogged, having their passports confiscated, and even being exiled in the Shia east. I would have given anything to go and film.
In 2009 and 2010, there had been huge floods in Jeddah, leading to a high death toll and a subsequent groundswell of anti-government sentiment. A hashtag went viral across Saudi Arabia: “#JeddahIsDrowning.” This term captured widespread rage against how the regime handled the floods; however, it never led to any street protests. Were the Saudis afraid or complacent? Soon, protests exploded in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Yemen, meriting worldwide media attention.
Saudi King Abdullah did not want Mubarak’s fate. As usual, he simply threw money at the problem, unveiling a $37 billion welfare program. Sycophantic billboards sprang up to welcome Abdullah returning home from a medical trip to NYC: “Welcome, King of Humanity,” “If you are well, we all are well.” The second of the powerful Sudairi brothers, Salman, became king after Abdullah died in 2015.
I did find some graffiti in an alleyway near our hotel. Nothing political. Perhaps the promise of the Arab Spring had faded into a bleak Islamist Winter.
We had been in Medina a few days, and sitting in the malodorous bus, I tried to drown out the sound of our Hajj guide with my headphones soothingly playing the melodious voice of an unknown qari. He was reciting Medinan Ayah 21 from Surah 33 (Al-Azhab, or “The Allied Troops”). I loved his intonation. There is music to be found in Wahhabi Islam, even if it lies only in prayer intonations and calls to prayer.
“You have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern (of conduct) for any one whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day, and who engages much in the Praise of Allah.” My mind wandered as the recitations lulled me into a space of quiet reflection.
In this parsed little portion of the qari’s recitation lay all the evidence any Muslim would need for emulating the Prophet’s life and traditions that the sunnah comprised. But those seeking perversion knew exactly where to look, even young Daesh types who didn’t know how to pray correctly. Jump to verse 64 of the same chapter, and you’ll find: “Verily Allah has cursed the Unbelievers and prepared for them a Blazing Fire.”
An overworked Fox cub reporter hopefully got a raise after finding a Surah like this. It must have taken a lot of Wikipedia-ing. Fox network’s Sean Hannity allegedly had claimed the Quran forbade Muslims from taking Jews and Christians as friends. Hannity, Trump, and Islamophobes in general treacherously provide endless recruitment fodder for the Daeshes and Boko Harams of the world.
My mind also wandered to the history I had studied. It was the Quraysh jahils (pre-Islamic ignorants) who worshipped idols (shirk and thus mushrikun, those who commit shirk) and who initiated war with Muhammad. He survived assassination attempts. His followers were routinely raped, killed, and tortured. They called him a madman, and as he walked the streets, they even threw human excrement on him. After Khadija died, a heartbroken Muhammad, then a pariah and not a prophet, was forced to flee Mecca, the city of his birth. He was a hunted man running away like a coward shamefully in the dark of night. This outsider and outcast survived years of hatred and ridicule. It was in Medina that he found shelter and started to build the earliest community of Muslims, whose numbers only multiplied. His enemies were nonplussed.
What of the book? Many claim the Quran only calls for conflict in self-defense. Arguably, Muslims historically fought monarchical, not civilian, armies. Is this emulated in part by the Saud-abhorring Daesh?
I had learned to carry my expanding bag of scriptural evidence to my speaking events. I always wanted to give my audiences proof of Islamic pluralism like in Ayah 62 from the Quran’s second Surah, Al Baqarah (“The Cow”):
Those who believe (in the Quran), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians—any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims are equally rewarded in the Quran.
The Medina bus on which I had allowed myself to wander jolted to a stop and my mind re-entered the present. We were in a logjam. Hundreds of immovable buses. For me, it was additional evidence of Saudi disregard for the comfort of the pilgrims.
Our mutawif was talking about how exemplary the life of Muhammad was. He serendipitously was using a Surah that I remembered from my childhood with Khala. Even though he gets only four direct mentions in the Quran, Muhammad lies at its heart. There would be no Quran without Muhammad. All of Islam’s rituals and traditions are based on ancestors like him. Muslims are required to try to emulate his life, thus the sunnah. The 21 Ayah of the Medinan Surah 33 says, “Ye have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern (of conduct) for any one whose hope is in Allah and the Final Day, and who engages much in the Praise of Allah.”
After hours, we reached Masjid Quba, the mythical first mosque built by the Prophet. This is not a sectarian entity, but is mentioned both in the Quran and the sunnah. It was said that just praying two rakat (“movements”) of prayer here amounted to the blessings of an entire Umrah, the lesser pilgrimage. The Saudis had destroyed the original mosque. This was an austere Wahhabi version.
A few stragglers in my group expectedly prayed to what looked like unmarked graves outside a shrine of some sort. The mutaween were quick to arrive and disperse these infidels. I was recording.
“Shirk,” he said grabbing my iPhone. “Password?” I had no choice but to give it.
These were early days, but this vicious mutawa went through my footage methodically and deleted every single video and photo. He shoved his right hand and the phone into my face forcibly, as if to make sure that I’d lose my balance. I did and fell backward, thankfully on a small dune, which cushioned the impact.
Our group leader rushed to me, pulling me up.
“Don’t ever mess with these guys. You will soon be able to spot them because their beards and dress are different. At all costs, stay away from them and their sticks,” he advised, adding, “And whatever you do, don’t ever record or take pictures at places like this!”
The violence of those moments had struck terror in my heart.
Adham replied after I texted him what had happened.
“Remember habibi this is not your lovely Cairo. Be careful.”
“Why?”
“You have to remember that those winds from the Nile don’t blow here. Nothing changes. We change nothing especially these fucker mutaweens, you have no idea Parvez. BE CAREFUL,” he ended in all caps.
To comfort me, Shahinaz sat next to me in the bus. The group leader whispered audibly, “Right now it’s OK, but most times you will both be separated.”
When the mutawa grabbed my phone and pushed me to the ground, he was giving me an early lesson on how cruel, rigid, and pervasive the Wahhabi control of this country was. And its feared foot soldiers of morality had the run of the land. The Wahhabi tenets forbidding depiction of the human form were clear. But later in Mecca it was impossible for them to control millions taking Hajj selfies. I hid in plain sight and yet got into trouble often. Recording a shot for a hoped-for film needs more lingering and deliberate “camera” movement than a quickie selfie.
Our next stop was Masjid Qiblatain, the fabled mosque where the Prophet changed the Qibla (direction of prayer) from Jerusalem to Mecca. Al-Aqsa (the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) had always been “the furthest mosque” in the world’s most-contested real estate, Al-Quds in Arabic and Jerusalem to those who acknowledged Israel’s existence. Muslims worldwide have always mourned the “loss” of Jerusalem. Politically adept elders when I was growing up blamed its forfeiture upon “the treachery of those corrupt Arabs.” For thirteen centuries, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims and the sites sacred to Christians, and Jews in the city were never willfully destroyed in the name of Islam. Was it the world’s best example of a religious plurality that did once exist between the three faiths?
I knew Al-Aqsa from childhood. In Jerusalem, in the year 621, the Prophet ascended to heaven several times and negotiated with God on a night Muslims commemorated as Lailat-e-Miraj (“the Night Journey”) and prayed more to get extra brownie points from Allah. Muhammad rode, on a heavenly steed called Buraq, from Mecca to Jerusalem (Al-Quds) and then multiple times to heaven. A flying horse? Wondrous to any child. There were always lots of tongas (horse-driven carriages of a very particular South Asian style) on the streets of Saharanpur, and as a child, I clamored for rides, wondering if they, too, like Buraq, could ascend into the heavens. I was always discouraged because traveling in tongas was what “poor people” did. Out of all of Islam’s stories I grew up with, this was my favorite. Muhammad’s job was to be our negotiator-in-chief with God, so he could bring down the number of required prayers from an unreasonable fifty to five.
“Fifty? Oh my god!” exclaimed Shahinaz when I told her.
On his way, it was said the pragmatic Muhammad met and discussed matters with Jesus, Moses, Ibrahim, and even Adam. Muhammad knew these figures were necessary. He needed them on his side. That day, I lingered at Qiblatain as long as I could, knowing that perhaps I would never get to visit the modern Al-Quds.
Muhammad was a man of skill, wisdom, and moderation and could be a crafty diplomat when needed. He did not believe in harm. His lifetime was a time of respect for the other monotheisms, and the Quranic revelations relied on them to build the Quran’s own expansive and poetic text. Jews and Christians were not hated—they were to be respected as “people of the book.” Muslim men could marry Jewish or Christian wives. And all Muslims could eat Jewish food. The Quran made kosher and halal monotheistic brothers. I wondered how the unhinged evangelicals back home would react if they knew Jesus gets more mentions in the Quran than Muhammad. And it’s all positive.
It was day four in Medina, and I was wary of filming. Spiritual-tourism shifts had been arranged, and Shahinaz and I, thankful to be reunited, had a lot to share. She told me a fight had broken out in her tent between two camps: One believed that full-face abayas were de rigueur. The other said faces needed to be exposed as the Prophet commanded. There was no détente. We disembarked at Uhud, where the reluctant warrior Muhammad lost. In his only other battle at nearby Badr, he won. The third, “The Battle of the Trench,” was or was not a battle, depending on whom you talked to.
An area the size of half a soccer field had been walled off. It contained what looked like a grave. All you could do was peer through crude latticework. Groups of Shia, both genders, stood lamenting. I felt one with the pain of the abaya-wearing women. It was more than 100 degrees. Important companions of the Prophet who were martyred in the battle of Uhud were apparently buried there.
“Film this,” my group leader, Shafiq, encouraged me, adding, “We need all the evidence we can get, because before long even this will be destroyed by them.” I promised to share the footage with him. Afraid to this day that someone would figure out it was I who made the pilgrimage with the group that year, I never ended up sharing it.
I focused on the women. A shirt-and-trouser-style Iranian pilgrim passed them with the boombox reminiscent of the extremely divided New York City of the eighties, where the racially charged slur “ghetto blaster” was used to describe these contraptions. And boom this one did: with recitations of long Shia lamentations. Out of nowhere, a group of mutaween approached the wailing women—one busied himself with grabbing the Iranian’s boombox. As one of them seemed to notice me, I hastily put the phone in my fanny pack, which would in a few days do double duty as an ihram-holding belt, and walked away as fast as I could. The other mutaween used their familiar wood staves to hit the abaya-clad women with gay abandon. Clearly these illiterate philistines had missed the many Islamic missives about not disrespecting women.
In spite of these barbarians, strangely, I had never felt safer. I texted my MMS group, “It’s hard to explain, but surrounded by millions of Muslims from every nation on earth gives me a sense of safety I never felt before. I am not even afraid of the mutaween!”
And then I got an unlikely text from Hossein, my pal on that Dua Kumayl night at Jannat al-Baqi. “Please never mention the green revolution thing to anyone, Parviz. It’s our secret.”
“Sure,” I replied.