Subject: URGENT!!! Tim Hortons!
I would like to thank a brother for giving me this information
Salam Alaikum, Brothers and Sisters.
I asked my owner a question about if the Ice Capp has alcohol or not. My owner gave me a specific number for me to call because he was not sure. So I called that number. It turns out that the Ice Capp does have “ethyl alcohol,” which is the same thing that is used in drinking alcohol. So the Ice Capp is now confirmed HARAM for us Muslims. They said that anything that usually contains any artificial flavoring at Tim Hortons will likely contain some trace of ethyl alcohol.
I also asked them about all other products like smoothies, lemonade, french vanillas, and hot chocolates. And they said that all of them have artificial flavoring, which will end up in all the drinks also having alcohol. So then I asked them about all the baked goods (donuts, timbits, bagels, etc.) so they gave me a list, please look at the list to see.
Al Hamdellah rubal alameen that inshAllah all of us will be granted a spot in paradise for following the laws of islam. InshAllah we will all be granted rewards.
Anything in can or bottle
Food:
12 Grain Bagel
Wheat & Honey
Sesame Seed Bagel
All donuts/timbits are HALAL except the following:
Lemon Cake Donut
Apple Cinnamon Donut
S’mores Donut
Red Maple Leaf Sprinkles Donut
Razia Sultana, the author of this edited email, was a newly married immigrant to Canada who had “forced” her husband Rashid to come on the Hajj. We had sat next to each other on the plane from Doha to Medina. Rashid made sure he sat in the middle. This friendly couple had already acquired the Canadian “eh” and the earnest jovial manner I had always admired in the people of their adopted homeland. He told me that he was a nonbeliever and that she had forced him to come so he could quit smoking. Seemingly possessed of only religious bones, and dressed in the opaque ninja body armor of her deep black abaya, Razia gently admonished him through her full-face niqab. I stared straight ahead.
When the plane had landed in Saudi Arabia, and as Razia moved to be processed in the female pilgrims’ line, Rashid asked if he could bum a few cigarettes from me.
“Don’t tell her. We will smoke in secret when the women are not around.” As if Shahinaz were not enough, I now had the added burden of another secret smoker and unfortunately one of the opposite sex who could face unthinkable consequences if caught.
As it turned out, for most of our Hajj, the women were corralled out of reach.
I told Razia she shared her name with a historic Indian warrior-queen, played to seductive perfection in a famous Bollywood film from the eighties. By this time Rashid and I had become smoking buddies and I knew he was fifty and had another wife and two daughters, as old as the much younger Razia. She didn’t know of their existence, he said. He had married wife #1 only for immigration reasons and then his parents found him Razia in Bombay. With a Canadian passport he was an eligible bachelor, a perfect match. I did not tell Razia. I also did not tell her that her famed namesake had taken on many women as lovers during her short but tumultuous reign in India. Thankfully, Razia had not seen the film or she might have remembered a provocative song sequence where the voluptuous Muslim actress Parveen Babi was bathed in camel milk by a harem of young women, who like their queen were in various stages of undress. Meanwhile the real Razia now wore black gloves, extreme even by Saudi standards.
Men and women are not separated in the Noble Sanctuary in Mecca, so-called because it contains Islam’s center of gravity, the Kaaba. Both genders get equal face-time with God in this, his “house.” During our Hajj, many women around the Kaaba chose to defy the Prophet’s own edict not to veil. Perhaps word had spread about the indignities women suffered from the underwear-less male pilgrims, most of whom had never been in such close proximity to so many women. Toward the end of our Hajj, Razia, like so many of the other women, would approach the Kaaba covered in the black sheath and even socks!
Six days after we left the holy land, I to America and Rashid and Razia to Canada, the latter started an email list-serve. Exercises like haram-halal studies of the Tim Hortons’ menu made her its most prolific poster and I perhaps her most loyal reader.
All Muslims know that Hajj is a pilgrimage that most of the world will never be permitted to make. For centuries, Mecca, sitting at an ideal crossroads between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, was the city into which desert tribes weaved their caravans to trade and to pray. The city had always welcomed the thirsty and the weary, the believers and the merchants whose primary religion was money. No one was turned away at the doors of Mecca, it was said. Not true in the Mecca I went to.
Muhammad did only one Hajj during his lifetime. Returning triumphant as the Prophet to the city he had been banished from, and accompanied by 100,000 newly minted Muslims, he spent the night in a desert oasis called Dhul Halifa, had a bath, and put on his own ihram. He then went straight to the ancient mosque and, on seeing the Kaaba, fell to his knees, proclaiming, “Oh Allah, You are Peace. With you is Peace. Our Lord, keep us alive with peace.” However, his next acts were not exactly peaceful, as he set about methodically destroying the idols that had been placed and worshipped in the cube for hundreds of years. He needed to lay down the foundations of Islam: The idols needed to go. He knew that the sanctity of the young religion he was bringing to this city’s inhabitants needed protection. Non-Muslims brought idols with them.
Preparing for my departure I was thankful that it was my mother’s courage that ran through my veins. But I had also spent most of my own adult life afraid of my own faith, tormented by what I believed was certain: I was just not Muslim enough to ever be allowed into the holy land. For me, Islam had always been a faith of fear. Perhaps I was here to conquer my fear of faith. Access to twenty-first-century Saudi Arabia is tightly controlled, and Mecca is perhaps one of the world’s most secret cities.
Large signs on all roads that led to Mecca warned “Muslims Only.” Well-marked exits to get off this Islamic highway to heaven make sure that all sensible unbelievers leave while there is still time. But I already knew that Chinese construction workers, for example, had become quick converts to Islam so they could be allowed to enter, just like the French soldiers who liberated the grand mosque in 1979. It helps that Islam’s testament of faith, the Shahadah, takes less than a minute to articulate: “I bear witness that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is his Prophet.” The five days of Hajj are all about Mecca and it is here that the keys to heaven are supposedly made available to each pilgrim. But for me, like many, the Hajj was every single moment we spent on Saudi soil including, especially, Medina.
Our Shia-filled bus sped toward Mecca. At the time, I thought I was the only Sunni in my Hajj group. I shared this secret with our group leader. My bigger secret I dared not share. That stayed in my Hajj closet.
“We Shia welcome you, brother Parvez,” said Shafiq. “But if it were the other way around, it would never happen. A Shia pilgrim in a Sunni group? Never!”
Shahinaz and I sat together at the back of the bus. As in Medina, I wanted to establish that she was my cousin. We shared our fears at what lay ahead. She was close to being ninja-like, but it was at least a practical white and best of all her face, as the Prophet had commanded, was uncovered. Her real cousin Abdellah from Birmingham snored softly next to her.
In the middle of the night, as my Mecca-bound bus had filled with fellow pilgrims, all of us announced our arrival to God at his own house by chanting, “Labbaik Allahuma Labbaik!” (“Here I am, oh God, here I am!”) As we smoothly passed through each of Islam’s checkpoints, my heart lightened. No one had dared to stop me entering Mecca.
The Prophet I knew, the Muhammad whom I came here to seek, would have fought valiantly to prevent the schism between Shia and Sunni, which violates every single principle of the united Muslim Ummah he had worked hard to create. As we chanted, I realized that, just as Islam belongs to nobody but its believers, Muhammad and his Quran thankfully belong to all Muslims. I was following in Muhammad’s footsteps, entering a city that in so many ways had been forbidden to all of us on the bus, just as it had been forbidden to him, to try to take back ownership of Islam. Perhaps our Hajj itself was an act of subversion? There was a strange comfort in knowing that these fellow pilgrims sharing my bus were, like me, Islam’s outsiders.
Many truths, though, were uncomfortable. It is clear to most Muslims that many of the September 11 hijackers, trained in the kind of Islam the Saudi monarchy ordains and survives because of, must have performed this very pilgrimage. Why? Because, they were Saudi, and that’s what (the religious) Saudis do.
I had been doing all five prayers for months, but that was hardly prep for what lay ahead. It was 3:40 in the morning when we arrived. We had been on the bus for a grueling eight hours. Under normal circumstances—not during Hajj—the trip from Medina took about five. After we deboarded, Rashid, Razia, Shahinaz, Abdellah, and I approached the Noble Sanctuary together, in the hopeless hope we would do this together. But within a few minutes it became clear we could not stay as a group, and the couples disappeared into an urgent mass of humanity larger than anything I had ever seen. I tried to hold Shahinaz as long as I possibly could.
And then I was left alone. My solitude amongst the millions who surrounded me was incongruous and immense.
I was wearing my ihram, Burmese-style. The ihram was about the democracy of Muhammad’s vision of the Ummah. The Saudi Hajj of the twenty-first century, however, is an unequal pilgrimage. For many it plays out in posh five-star comfort. As I entered the boundaries of the holy mosque that is home to the Kaaba, I felt a profound sense of accomplishment. I was here as a rebel, one who would never be allowed in by the Saudi brand of Islam, which thrives on inequality and oppression.
The image of the Kaaba is imprinted on every single janamaz (prayer rug) I ever saw. As with most Muslims, the image had been seared into my memory since childhood. For a religion that does not like images, that of the Kaaba is the most sacred.
My first thought was that I was not supposed to be here. And then, transfixed by the sight of the cube, I was reminded once again that it was just an empty room. Its geometry ensured that it had no direction. Instead, one-sixth of humanity was commanded to face it five times a day for their entire lives. Was this it, the center of my faith, of my prayers, of love, of life and death?
On this night as I looked at the black cube for the first time in my life, I wept. The tears that were stolen from me at my mother’s funeral returned in a violent and unstoppable tide. I wept like a newborn child. But here she was, holding me, breathlessly, in a complete and loving embrace of some kind of final acceptance. She whispered how much she loved me. In that moment of grief and of recognition, of loss and of discovery, I did not realize that I was about to begin the most violent night of my life. I declared my niyat, my formal intention of performing Hajj. And then, like a drop entering the ocean, I joined the moving mass.
The strict rules of Islam here in Mecca were enforced by several thousand mutaween. Post-Medina I could spot these orange-beards—some dyed their facial hair with henna—in their loose-fitting red headscarves, patrolling the crowds with their thin wooden canes, ready to arrest anyone they found breaking the rules—from dress-code infractions to sexual acts, alcohol possession, consumption of un-Islamic media, and various other forms of Western behavior including smoking. The last they merrily did themselves.
The mutaween also enforced the prayer times. I had seen them in action, prowling around, making sure that all the shops selling kitsch closed their shutters five times daily, and making sure that each of us was praying “the right way.”
They had to make sure we maintained proper posture during our daily prayers, and even during the sometimes hours-long wait times before those prayers. According to the mutaween, my right foot needed to be arched upright under my right buttock and my left foot needed to lie horizontal between the various ritual prostrations of prayer. This was a torment to my unaccustomed body, and the longer I knelt during my daily prayers, the more acute—and familiar—my pain became. I had recently realized that I was suffering from the recurrence of my old pilonidal cyst, developed two years earlier after countless hours sitting with bad posture at my computer. It was what they used to call “Jeep’s disease” during World War II, the painful result of prolonged rides in bumpy Jeeps. I needed a heavy course of antibiotics and some women’s sanitary pads for any bleeding, and most of all, I needed to keep pressure off my coccyx. At this moment, as I approached the Kaaba, built up in billions of Muslim minds like mine as a moment of lifelong immensity, I had none of those options.
In my right hand I clutched a tasbih, the prayer beads Muslims favor. It, too, was made in China. This tasbih had exactly ninety-nine ugly plastic beads. The tasbih that hung on the knob of my mother’s closet had 100 beads. The hundredth, she would say, just reminds you that you are a very good and blessed person when you come full circle after reciting the ninety-nine names of Allah.
I did not know the ninety-nine names of Allah. On a good day I could muster eight or nine. Today had not been a good day at all. So I decided to go with what I knew best. I mumbled Allahu Akbar with a ferocity I did not know I possessed. It was a whispered, almost inaudible ferocity. It would amplify and even reach screaming level, though that moment had not yet arrived. Sometimes you need to be at your loudest for God to hear your faith.
I was to perform seven rounds of tawaf as mandated. Because I was performing the Shia Hajj, I knew I would need to get as close as I possibly could within the first few circles, competing with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims jostling for space. I could see women getting molested and I even heard their screams.
My tasbih beads were soon slick with sweat. So was the rest of me. A dripping line of sweat seemed to have formed around my still-unhealed penis. On my lower back, I felt something dripping, slowly, incessantly, and shamelessly. I hoped it was not blood.
There could not be blood. It would stain my white ihram, turning it najlis (“impure”). The same ihram that is supposed to be the surest symbol of the ideal democracy of Islam. And then, once again, I would have to carry out the complicated ghusl, or ritual washing and purification. I would somehow need to find my way back to the hotel and re-do all of the many ablutions, each moment prescribed and written down. A prayer for every drop of divinely sanctioned and cleansing water on my body. I had spent weeks memorizing the right Shia prayers for the moment the right hand passes over my navel, for when I wash my arms exactly the right way. I had tried so hard to get this right, to get this just right so that later on, when my having been here became public, I could not possibly be questioned about my intentions or the legitimacy of my journey. But a bloody ihram would be proof of my dirtiness, my sin.
The ihram was not just two seamless pieces of white cloth. It was a state of mind. As Muslims we had been taught that this simple white clothing was intended to make everyone appear the same in the eyes of God. This teaching, of course, showed the much-vaunted democracy and oneness of the Muslim Ummah, the worldwide brotherhood of believers.
My mother used to say that the ihram was the kafan—the shroud. That going on this journey was a preparation for death. And if we were lucky enough to die in a state of ihram, then we would find a one-way ticket to heaven by being buried in the holy land. If a person returned alive, she explained, he was required to bring the ihram back with him and keep it safe, to be used only upon death and to be buried in. Blood would be shame greater than I could imagine.
It was the Allahu Akbars that helped me focus. They each formed a complete and extremely long moment, concentrating only on the immensity of God. That was how I had trained my mind in the last seven months of real preparation. Quietly, hopefully, and unobtrusively, I moved my left hand slowly to my backside. I was soaked with sweat. But there was no blood. The next few Allahu Akbars out of my lips quivered with gratitude.
My ego, which I was hoping to lose, forget, or leave behind someplace around here, led me to imagine that each pair of these millions of eyes could pierce through my sinning soul and read every twitch of doubt that clouded my carefully arranged face. I did not realize at the time that the business of getting the approval of Allah is busy and all-consuming and not conducive to much else besides a kind of obsession with only oneself. I did not realize that a mere demonstration of faith is never enough and that for many of the worshippers around me, the preoccupation with a lifetime of sin had been a full-time job.
In a momentary distraction from my focused repetitions, I remembered the feature filed by an intrepid reporter much before September 11, who had visited a US prison and found Muslim inmates being allowed to use their prayer beads for therapeutic effects. In the nineties, the meditative properties of clutching prayer beads had been used for the “successful recovery” of thousands of prison inmates, said the reporter. She added it had become controversial when gang members began carrying their differently colored prayer beads inside the prisons to identify themselves. The idea of Muslim prison inmates and gang members in the US using prayer beads, no doubt purchased from some Walmart in the meth-addled heartland, in some sort of Islamic cleansing ritual, brought a smile to my face.
My iPhone lit up. In a nation where women cannot even get into the driver’s seat and are pretty much denied any form of voice, the rather talkative Siri would be a revolutionary. The problem was, she had not been talking much lately—she required a Wi-Fi network to work. But now, suddenly, she had found a network: It was called “The Saudi bin Laden Group.” I busied myself trying to log on. I tried variations of passwords. Osama, Jihad, Jihad911, Kafir, Kafir786, Tawhid 1432, and many more, conjuring up all the weird Islamic combinations I could think of. None worked and much still needed to be done on this night. But I found another variation of the bin Laden construction group, which I joined and it was free. I missed talking to Siri, but, allowing more distraction to crowd my mind even as I continued to mumble Allahu Akbar, I wondered if the ever-so-smart Siri knew that that dignified feminine silence was just the way to behave in the holy land.
I texted my husband, “I am here, my love. It’s strange but the Kaaba is protecting me from now on. You may not hear from me for the next few hours but don’t worry. I will be safe.”
Keith replied, “I love you. So, so, so much.”
Perhaps only one New York minute had passed as I stood there with my crowded mind, typing on my phone. Not that a New York minute would ever mean the same to me again. Every second seemed to last a lifetime these days. I would probably, after this longest and perhaps most miraculous night of my entire time on this planet, measure my life in Mecca minutes.
And then I plunged willfully into this ocean of believers. On this night of magic and torment, I would not be alone after all. I clutched my mother’s hand with my right hand. In my left hand, I held a passport photograph of hers, with her hair defiantly uncovered. Tonight, though, she was wearing a bright red dupatta scarf wrapped tightly around her head. The cancer that had ravaged her once-proud frame had also taken away all of her hair. Even though she had no hair left to hide, the same hair that was deemed dangerously powerful enough to distract the believing men around us from their arduous tasks of faith on this long night, I took a breath and adjusted her scarf. She smiled knowing that I had finally embraced faith. I was the capable son bringing her to this place of faith, poetry, and longing. As she squeezed my hand back, I could feel the pride running through her own frail hand into mine.
I could see the black burqa, inlaid in gold with Quranic verses, that covers the door of the Kaaba. The unstoppable river of humanity that surrounded me heaved toward it, trying to touch it, to reach and kiss it. This was Islam’s mosh pit. And on that first night, for me it became a space imbued more with violence than with any notion of spirituality. I was going to lose so much on this longest of nights. I tried unsuccessfully to touch the Kaaba. The tears that I did not think I even possessed anymore returned as my breath almost touched the surface of the black stone. A surface made smooth by millions, each hoping for that touch that would cleanse the filth from their sinning hands and souls. The successful pilgrims around me were desperately rubbing their hands and often even prized personal possessions on the surface, hoping also to carry some of the power of this surface back home with them. We had worked very hard to get this close.
But my group’s Shia Islam of martyrs also dictates many acts of self-deprivation. In the nights and days ahead I would marvel at the amount of pleasure a Shia Muslim could derive from renunciation and denial. Martyrdom seemed so well suited to them. In this mosh pit of Islam, Shia jurisprudence seemed clear. We were to get as close as possible and yet, unlike the Sunnis, we were to refrain from touching the stone or even looking at it. My mother, who had always called the Shia “khatmal”—bed bugs, who reproduce prolifically in sinister and secretive ways—was still by my side and touched the black stone for a fleeting second. I couldn’t.
I simply faced the Kaaba and did my mandated istilam, a flying kiss-like greeting to the cube, as I began each new round of the tawaf. Dawn was breaking as I ended with my two rakats (movements of prayer) at the Maqam Ibrahim, the standing place of the Prophet Ibrahim, marked by a small golden kiosk. Mother and son, we prayed together. This was the only mosque in the world that did not separate its male and female believers. At this moment, bowed down in what should have been introspective prayer, I received an unholy thwack from the cane of a mutawa. I needed to move on.
In a manic stampede I was pushed toward my next ritual, Saee (ritual walking), at the hills of Safa and Marwah. Just like Hajjar, the desperate mother who centuries ago searched among these hills for water so that she could save her son Ismael’s life, I disobediently walked briskly between the hills, like women were commanded to do for “modesty.” Men were supposed to run in the same area of that section highlighted by green fluorescent lights. As my mother walked with me, I knew she, like Hajjar, was trying to save my life. Two kilometers apart, both hills were now encased in glass cages which pilgrims, especially the Shia among us, may no longer touch.
I felt her hand slipping away. As I lost my balance and fell a man stopped and helped me up, this time gently pushing me into the mandated jog. He and I jogged the stretch together. But I had lost my mother’s photograph.
Broken and haunted, I searched for it as I left. In that mass of humanity, I had lost one of my most treasured possessions, one which I had hoped would get to touch the Kaaba with me. Later, I wondered if this really was how it was meant to be. It belonged there and I left her there where she was probably trampled into a million pieces by the feet of the manic pilgrims. Perhaps she would have wanted that image of herself to be left right there, near the Kaaba that had haunted her.
I looked up at the sky, if only to escape the madness around me for a moment. I was searching for evidence to prove a childhood theory right. Elders used to say that even birds would never dare to fly over the Kaaba. Mecca’s many pigeons were waking up and taking flight. Just as they had predicted, they did not fly over the cube but rather, like us pilgrims, circled it.
Dawn was breaking, and with it rang out the azaan, the call to prayer, as melodious as I had been promised it would be when I was a child. Music is banned in Saudi Arabia, one of many prohibitions in a long list of what the authorities claim is “Islamically” forbidden. In that moment, I felt that these rather unmusical Saudis had managed to create a perfect song in the call to prayer. The voice of the muezzin was loud, clear, and beautiful, and he drew out each Arabic word into a melody:
God is the greatest.
I testify there is no God but God.
I testify that Muhammad is his messenger.
Come to prayer. Come to success.
Prayer is better than sleep.
The Wahhabis call music un-Islamic. Do they understand that calls to prayer and recitations of the Quran are music to millions of Muslim ears? Did they conveniently forget the rich history of music in these sands? I would kill to see a mutawa do the Harlem Shake at one of Jeddah’s thriving underground music concerts.