Abdellah Hammoudi
United States/Morocco
1999
Abdellah Hammoudi traveled to Mecca in 1999. Born near Marrakesh in 1945 and educated at the Sorbonne, he has been for many years a professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. His first two books, exploring themes of colonialism, Islamic ritual, and the symbols of power, were based on fieldwork in his native Morocco. His Hajj account brings a more personal treatment to these abiding interests. Hammoudi sets out two motives for performing the pilgrimage: to observe the Hajj in its present state and to examine his right to do so as a person born and immersed in Islam who may not be a practicing believer. His book is both a descriptive report and an emotional meditation on his lifelong relationship to Islam as an intellectual and a dual national. The book was composed in French and first published in 2005. It appeared in English as A Season in Mecca a year later.
Hammoudi’s opening chapters track a months-long encounter with the bureaucracy of the Hajj, including the many stages by which a would-be pilgrim of that time secured a place in Morocco’s 29,000-person annual quota. This forced pas de deux with a state bureaucracy proves numbing. At one point he describes himself as “going around in circles like a mule at an oil press,” amassing his official file of photos, copied forms, ID cards, medical stamps, and signed validations. As in most countries where Hajj visas are limited in number, red tape can be cut with influence and small bribes.
After attending a few official Hajj training classes in the capital of Rabat, followed by a farewell ceremony among friends in the Atlas Mountains, Hammoudi flies to Saudi Arabia in early March. Once in the Kingdom, he rides a crowded bus from the Jidda airport to Medina, the modern embodiment of Islam’s first capital. Hidden many layers below the modern concrete and neon-lighted city lies the buried town of fourteen centuries ago, the Arab desert trading post “that gave the Prophet Muhammad asylum, the one of his biographies, of his battles and his victories, the one . . . I had always lived in; or perhaps it had always lived in me.”
As Hammoudi’s analogy makes clear, this “buried city” represents a shared spiritual birthplace for the vast majority of traditional Muslims. It refers to the seventh-century city where Muhammad established the first Muslim society. This is the heartland Muslims return to in their sermons, in their literature, in their collective memory. Hammoudi finds this core location covered over by a disappointing namesake, the modern Saudi city of Medina: a remote facsimile in Hammoudi’s view, and an ethical travesty—that is, a city no longer governed by the compassion associated with the historical Muhammad but rather a shell of its former self, ruled by a brand of narrow religious literalism promoted across the Arab world by the Saudi government. Hammoudi’s strongest charge against this program is its formulaic denial of other expressions of Islam. Here he includes Shiite, Sufi, Ismaili, Ahmadiyya, and other historically and individually shaped “Islams” variously embraced by hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world. Elsewhere Hammoudi describes the Saudi version of Islam, popularly dubbed Wahhabism, as “this religion of the state, devoid of compassion and merciless to God’s creatures . . .” Some American critics seeking a loose theological analogy refer to their own seventeenth-century Puritans, calling up memories of the Salem witch hunts, fire-and-brimstone sermons, public-square punishments, and general inbred social paranoia.
Walking the Medina markets, Hammoudi hopes to pass beyond modernity and eventually reach the “old town,” some original remnant that might link him to the Medina of his religious imagination. In certain Moroccan cities, architectural time-travel of this sort is still possible. In Medina, no such link exists. The resulting displacement, loss, and personal conflict beset, and enrich, Hammoudi’s narrative. Occasionally, he even experiences real religious inspiration, as when one day in the mosque the beauty of the call to prayer and of the answering response by a million pilgrims dissolves the vanity of the ruling power and, in a kind of vocal Occupy movement, inhabits the enormous mosque and makes it their own.
Before leaving Medina, Hammoudi visits the Baqi cemetery, where many of Islam’s founding generation lie buried. In keeping with a centuries-old tradition, he wants to visit the graves of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions, “hoping to create a link with them and, despite the time separating me from them, to draw moral benefits from their virtue and knowledge.” Instead, he witnesses the Saudi religious police officiously dispersing a group of Iranians engaged in mourning Shiite heroes buried there. He feels ashamed and later commiserates with one of the victims.
Another aspect of Hammoudi’s Meccan sojourn brings us face-to-face with an often dysfunctional housing and pilgrim-guide service. Again and again in his account, cynical representatives of the pilgrim service industry promise their paying “Guests of God” physical comfort, reliable transportation, and informed direction through the rites, yet deliver nothing of the sort. Modern pilgrims of every nationality and nearly every economic bracket may recognize this sad state of affairs.
Like Jalal Al-e Ahmed (pp. 445–474), Hammoudi is an educated Muslim who turned away in his teens from a religious practice marked by fear and superstition and who nonetheless has continued to develop a personal relationship with Islam. Hammoudi has made a career of studying what he can’t in conscience practice. He claims the right to his experience:
So as not to lose heart, I told myself over and over that nothing kept a pilgrim from having other objectives, beyond religious obligation, and that nobody was interested in my efforts to explain my project anyway. I was sent back repeatedly to my intention and to my relation to God, the ultimate standard by which actions were measured. And in the end, Islam was my home. No one and nothing could forbid me from inhabiting and visiting it as I saw fit.
Hammoudi’s position may be complex, but it isn’t rigid. Often, at the point where disaffection threatens to overwhelm him, something seen or felt inspires him in a new, surprising way, evoking childhood memories of Morocco, for example, or kicking off a cadenza of anthropological queries as idiosyncratic as a jazz piano riff. To broaden the narrative register, he occasionally inserts on-the-spot diary entries. More often he couples his own experience with that of friends and fellow pilgrims, often Moroccans. His accounts of these interactions tell a lot about life as lived among early twenty-first-century hajjis, with its jolting shifts between the world’s largest mosque and cramped, down-at-heels dormitory dwellings.
Hammoudi arrives and departs the Hajj a conflicted observer. He is sometimes moved, sometimes disappointed, even horrified. He speaks early on of “risking” a change of heart about Islam, but the transformation he writes of most often is a visionary wish for the Hajj, and Saudi society, to reclaim authenticity. He objects to being managed by administrative powers, trading his disgust with a locally corrupt Moroccan bureaucracy for rage at the Saudi Hajj administration, but there is no escape. To be a hajji in the modern state is to be colonized, managed. One submits and perseveres.
The strength of Hammoudi’s account lies not in its bristling critiques of Saudi intransigence, or in its flights of anthropological analysis and visionary rhetoric. It is in his candor, in his talent for giving voice to the differing views of his fellow pilgrims, in a hopeful view that sees a future beyond the present, and in his poetic evocation of the rites.
This is the book of a questioning human being, a Moroccan-born Muslim educated in the West, a traveler disturbed by Princeton, Rabat, and Mecca—a hybrid pilgrim.
from A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi
DEPARTURES My departure for Islam’s holy sites was no easy matter. There were the time-consuming travel preparations, and then long weeks spent going through the procedures required for the pilgrimage—complicated further by my being a resident of both the United States and Morocco.
But this was the common lot of every pilgrim who in the same circumstances chose to undertake the trip to Mecca that spring of the year 1419 of the Hegira—that is, 1999. What took me by surprise was that a malaise engulfed me, and I couldn’t tell whether it would intensify or disappear. It turned out to be lasting, so coloring my life that it became my future.
As the date approached that the Muslim calendar fixed for the departure, I felt not that I was moving toward it but that it was advancing, coming to meet me, catching up with me. This surely was the cause of my malaise. I was floating, tossed and turned by contradictions. Who exactly was this man setting off like this, whose life and activities had for decades found their meaning elsewhere? For me, the Hajj had long ceased to signal salvation or a successful life. It was of course one of the famous five pillars of Islam—along with the profession of faith, prayer, fasting, and charity—established after the initial revelation, when the Prophet called for the teachings of Ibrahim (Abraham) to be restored, when as Muslim tradition has it, eternal Islam was rediscovered after the long period of decadence of pre-Islamic times. I had professed my faith, prayed, and fasted. I regularly gave to charity, and now I was about to go on pilgrimage. But all this was going on in a time frame that was not exactly mine anymore; it belonged, rather, to my identifying traditions, “beliefs and practices” attributed to the society I came from, which were objects of anthropological discourse—mine and other people’s.
It was in this mindset that I had begun to plan this project the year before. I had wanted to approach it as I had the subject of sacrifice in my earlier work—by reporting on every last detail of what was said and done. I hoped that in this first stage I would come to understand the meanings that pilgrims gave to their actions and to the sequence in which they would accomplish them. I wanted to understand the relation between each action and those preceding and following it. And I expected this first part of my work, yielding new theoretical perspectives illuminated by what pilgrims said about their experiences, to transcend mere description. I thought I could thereby understand religion through one of its concrete forms, and understand those who practice it today. From experience, I knew it would be with my difference that I would achieve this “first description.” As in my previous work on sacrifice and on masquerade, on rites of power and ritual power, my task would be to imagine Muslim religious life in the future tense, a religion in process whose traces I would follow in the past and present. And once again I knew my research would be very different from that of anthropologists who come to the study of Muslim tradition by other paths.
FROM A NOTEBOOK The closer the due date, the more tangible become the physical dangers I shall face on the Hajj. The cold, the heat . . . the risk of sunstroke especially. I tend to get heatstroke, and being bald doesn’t help. The pictures of pilgrims being trampled to death frighten me, too . . . Here, though, I navigate between anxiety and fatalism. I’ve traveled quite a lot: in Europe, Mexico, the United States, Canada, Tunisia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, Japan, not to mention my constant trips to and from Morocco since 1960. Each time, of course, I’ve felt apprehensive but always very excited about what I was doing. I went to Yugoslavia to find out about its experiments in self-management carried out against Stalinism and to garner its “heritage” of unconventional Marxists—Lukács, Axelos, and the people at Praxis (published multilingually in Belgrade then). In Papua, I had my first contact with people famously described in the old ethnographic literature as primitives. In Saudi Arabia, I was thrilled and very curious to see a country that is the virtual backdrop for Islam. And going to Egypt was like going home and rediscovering bits of my own culture there, the songs I had loved as a child and the “classical” art of Egypt’s musicians and singers, which I had absorbed so passionately when I was a student at the lycée in Marrakesh.
The trip to Mecca isn’t a trip like these others. It’s the performance of a ritual. It begins, as all travel does, when before you leave apprehension wins out over exhilaration. Still, I know that carrying out this rite of pilgrimage when I am so detached from its eschatological meaning is going to force me out of the self I have been constructing, with such great difficulty, over the years—a self that will not accept blind submission, persecution, ostracism, and that will therefore be able to gain access to certain types of knowledge. . . .
PRINCETON, 2 FEBRUARY 1999. The date of my return to Temara [Morocco] is approaching, Relief: to be leaving Princeton. Suffering: to be leaving my wife and children. Since I’m going to try to spend more time in Morocco, this dual sentiment will torment me for a good part of my life. Here I feel I’m walled in. I understand everything, but nothing speaks to me: not this magnificent, chilly campus, not my colleagues, not the trees everywhere, not this society, so often given to competition and violence. And on top of all this, contempt for Arabs. Alienation: I feel I am living more in the image of something than in the original. So, like a sleepwalker, I live between two images: that of Morocco and that of America, where I landed by chance and by necessity. . . .
The relief is mitigated this time, though. I have to prepare for the Hajj. This morning I was telling Miriam, “I don’t know how to behave in this piece of white cloth” (the ihram,282 and when I say the word, I think “shroud”).
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST’S HAJJ As an anthropologist studying my own culture and religion, I had always been protected by the postcolonial system prevailing in Muslim countries, since my academic specialty was left largely free of religious regulations and the conventions by which they were implemented. To the degree that the state operated along several different lines of logic, and inasmuch as its systems postulated several coexisting worlds—among them the world of scientific research—I as a researcher was always privileged in comparison to practicing believers. My activities were accepted, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm or resignation. But I knew that traditionalists despised me or, at best, placed me low in their hierarchy of human paradigms. Thankfully, my value varied from one world to the next, and thus I benefited from a kind of compensation in other spheres of my life.
Nothing could turn me into an anthropologist from Europe or America taking this trip so as to be initiated into Islam or edified by it. Since my coreligionists did not ask me for mere respect, I could not adopt a researcher’s posture toward them without transgressing their norm. I couldn’t possibly be an observer plain and simple, whether hostile and distant or friendly and admiring of Islam. And there was another divide, which my Muslim colleagues in anthropology and I never mentioned: the suffering caused by the distance we had to put between us and the communities we decided to study. Distance, translation, treason?
This reflexive return to religion and identity, with the suspicions and contradictions surrounding them, was subverting the participant observation I had planned on. The risk taking, the possibility of returning to Islam or being further distanced from it, was acceptable only to men and women who put themselves in positions like or near mine. I knew there were more of them every day, not to mention those who transgressed Islamic rules even though they could not imagine life without them, and, of course, all the skeptics. So the odds were that only a minority of men and women might feel authorized to call me to account—active and resolute, but still a minority. It was also clear that religious policies and the structures for managing religion developed by Muslim states forbade free individual initiative. Yet I no longer thought, as I once had, that only fear was holding me back or deterring those who, like me, felt their will to live in a different way atrophying. To think differently from other Muslims, deep within oneself, for oneself, whether alone or with others—this was common enough. In private, one simply denied tradition; but denial left it intact, living on in its burdensome, oppressive way. Could it be that my anguish stemmed from the confused feeling that somehow I could no longer avoid this issue?
THE PILGRIM QUOTA SYSTEM A new reality became clearer by the day: I was becoming the unwitting subject of a Hajj government. Unlike other governments, this one was present at every border, mobilizing the machinery of many nation-states to define a religious identity that nonetheless none of them could control—an identity situated not on a territory but in a holy land. And, as if a powerful, invisible hand had wanted to ensure the most extreme degree of complexity, that holy land and the gates to it belonged to Saudi Arabia, a particular nation-state: theocratic in appearance, totalitarian in actual fact.
To obtain a place in the Moroccan contingent of the Hajj, participating in the ritual cycle of the year A.H. 1419 (March–April 1999), I had to start procedures in the summer of 1998. My situation was a special one: I lived and worked in the United States, and I wanted to go to Mecca with my friends Lahcen and Fadma. Lahcen had helped me years before with my research among the Berbers of the Ait Mizane, a tribal group living in the western High Atlas, when I was studying ritual sacrifices and masquerades there. I had proposed this plan to them, and they had accepted enthusiastically. I had told them of my project to write a book about my experience; they had simply replied, “You must do as you like—intention is what counts.”
So I went to visit Lahcen and his family, planning to make a few treks in the high mountains and find out how to register on his region’s lists for the pilgrimage. Since the 1970s, the “guardians of the Holy Places”—in the present circumstances, the Saudi government—have imposed a quota for every country from which pilgrims might come to Mecca or Medina. In Morocco, this quota is shared out among the provinces, then divided all the way down to the smallest territorial units, which are managed by state administrators and comprise several subdivisions, each under the authority of a shaykh, one of the local notables of a village, tribe, or city neighborhood. Each shaykh, in turn, is responsible for several sections, run by the shaykhs’ deputies, muqaddims. It was to one of the administrators—educated in the modern school system (quite alien to the local populations and their native leaders)—that I had to address my request to register on the lists of Haouz province, a dependency of Marrakesh. His office was in the mountains, in a town where a market drew crowds every week.
We went there on market day. At nine in the morning we were at the door of this administrator, who bore, like his counterparts everywhere in Morocco, the ancient title of caïd. I hoped to benefit from Lahcen’s influence. In a few short years, he had done very well in the local tourism business; along with a European partner, he had turned the remnants of an old manor house into a “Field Study Center and Auberge,’’ which attracted many young tourists. Lahcen had also become a real trekking entrepreneur, with a flotilla of vehicles, a permanent group of guides, and a small stable of mules; he had opened an office in Marrakesh with a telephone, fax machine, email, and an agent responsible for liaising with travel agencies and airports.
Despite the aces I thought I held—Lahcen’s growing influence, my personal reputation, and my identity card that showed I was a professor at Princeton—I couldn’t quite rid myself of the inevitable feeling of helplessness that overwhelms me at the door of any government department, especially those of the Ministry of the Interior. That morning, on 9 July 1998, the feeling jolted me back to reality, with disturbing effects on my behavior. For a long time, I’d suffered from what seemed to me a powerful bureaucratic neurosis.
“The caïd is a nice young man from Casablanca,” Lahcen told me. Trained at the national civil service school, wearing a suit of vivid blue and a red tie, he not only ran his district but also adjudicated its civil cases in the presence of local leaders: he sat at his desk, and they sat in two rows in front of him, facing each other on either side of a low table. People were brought in by a guard under the gaze of this group and, standing, pleaded their cases. When they could not speak Arabic—Berber being the region’s language—the local leaders translated for them, and often intervened to ask questions, corroborate testimony, or challenge the plaintiffs’ claims.
We waited for a long time before being shown in, like the peasants around us. This was government by waiting, or waiting as a means of administration. Waiting meant, first, being made aware of difference: I was waiting because I had to understand, in case I hadn’t yet grasped it, that the person I was waiting for held the power, that he was everything and I nothing. The peasants seemed to have been waiting outside that office since the beginning of time, especially the poorest ones and the women. Many people waited in vain and went away without having had their business attended to, without even having seen the caïd. And then there was the guard, the shaoush, who that day, strangely, was accompanied by a young man in civilian clothes. The two of them officiated at the door; they performed triage, listened, asked questions, and ushered in whom they pleased: first important and powerful men, then those who paid up, and, at the end, the others if there was time. Lahcen was an important notable. As for me, wasn’t I one, too? As soon as the court left the caïd, we were shown in. His welcome was friendly and sympathetic.
“Lahcen is a friend,” he said to me. “We know each other well. But registering you poses a legal problem. As you know, there are provincial quotas, and often we can’t satisfy local demand. So to register someone who is not from the region poses a problem.”
To myself, I readily admitted that I was hoping for a sort of unfair privilege. Still, the discussion continued courteously enough: “What address do you have on your ID?”
I showed it to him.
“Ah! You’re a professor? You live in America?”
“Yes,” I replied. “And Lahcen is like a brother to me. And I have no relatives with whom I could go on this pilgrimage.”
“All right, we’ll see. Maybe the best thing would be for you to get a certificate of residency in the district. I’ll take care of it. Lahcen should come and see me two months before the date of the pilgrimage.”
I took leave of the caïd and went out. Lahcen stayed with him for a while, then joined me, having done “what I do every time I go to a government department,” as he explained. “The ‘fastener’ is indispensable.” In this way, he said, he did business peaceably, and whenever he needed something, like a passport for his son, he got it immediately.
So now Lahcen and I were future hajji (pilgrims), an ancient category. It instills respect and gives status and a role to those who occupy it. Still, I was not a little surprised to discover that it was far from incompatible with a certain form of corruption. True, it was not I but my companion who had offered the gift to smooth our departure. When I asked about this, Lahcen at first seemed not to understand. Later, when I told him I feared such an action might stain the rituals of devotion, he said he couldn’t do anything about it, this was “the way of the makhzan,’’283 and it was for God to judge these “cursed customs.” “Religion is clear and obvious for whoever wants to follow its path,” he concluded forcefully. Thus I caught my first glimpse of a tension line that I was to see often again.
FIRST DAYS IN MEDINA, MARCH, 1999 We went back to our lodgings to drop off our packages and wash for prayers. But as soon as the sunset prayers and prayers for the dead were done, we left the mosque and like thousands of other pilgrims returned to the markets. This time the women accompanied us: Abbas’s wife, who ran a hair salon; Salah’s wife, a lab technician; and Farida, a physician from a family of urban notables who was on the pilgrimage under the supervision of Salah, a friend of her husband’s. Farida soon left us for the elegant jewelers’ boutiques under the arcades; they reminded me of the great department stores in Paris and of specialized jewelry bazaars. Our group headed for the fabric shops, which took up an entire neighborhood not far from the mosque. The foursome looked at cottons, wools, and silks, compared textures, colors, the size of swatches. They went over their lists of recipients: relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues. The value of the gift had to be commensurate with the relationship. They talked of living rooms and bedrooms, of curtains and bedspreads. They considered what their children needed. Vendors assailed us constantly, shouting: “Worm! Worm! Worm silk!” I understood they were talking about raw silk, which, one vendor explained to me, Moroccans always wanted. “Do you know Moroccan Arabic?” I asked him. He said yes, and I heard his colleagues speaking it with my companions as other salesmen, too, attracted the attention of onlookers by mentioning “douda,” “worm,” the word that had drawn my compatriots. I soon discovered that Medina’s shopkeepers speak all the world’s languages—Moroccan, Egyptian, Persian, Farsi, Urdu, Turkish, Indonesian, English—but when I tried to continue any conversation, I was given a clarification I was to hear again and again: “My knowledge [of languages] is limited to business terms.”
After the initial surprise, it was clear that for centuries pilgrims had divided their time between mosque and commerce, that long practice had forged these techniques and rituals of contact, almost as formalized as those of “visiting the sanctuary.” I realized what kind of rapport I had to establish with people here during my stay: short, pragmatic, limited to questions of transport, lodging, security, and purchases. Medina was not Babel. There was no clamor of tongues. Everything had a price. Each transaction, it appeared, was clearly conceived and easy to express. We were at the height of the pilgrimage season, and the enormous number of pilgrims led to a spectacular increase in business. For that matter, weren’t we ourselves commodities in the hands of Saudi Arabia’s agencies? From now on, I could be only a worshipper or a customer.
Our steps led us back to the mosque for the last evening prayer, followed as usual by prayers for those who had died. Afterward, we walked along the city’s central avenue, looking for a place to have dinner. We decided on meat roasted in the Syrian-Lebanese style; after the meal, we went for an evening walk in the markets, men alone this time. We reached neighborhoods in the northwest part of the city, far from where we were staying. There, too, even at this late hour, an infinite number of shops were open, selling all sorts of accessories and instruments. There were also ready-to-wear clothes shops, bookstores, and people selling posters—of Mecca and Medina, always the same ones: of crowds praying or walking around the Kaʿba in its covering of black cloth embellished with gold. And in these shops, as elsewhere, prayer rugs were king. Medina’s markets never slept.
Day after day, our life followed an immutable rhythm: awake at dawn, before five o’clock; a long wait in front of the perpetually crowded bathroom; morning prayers at the mosque, entirely lit up at this early hour; back to our lodgings for a Moroccan breakfast of green tea with mint, biscuits with oil, butter, and honey; then sleep and rest before the noon prayers and lunch. As our sojourn continued, the countless comings and goings between our living quarters and the markets tended to take place in the afternoon and the evening. Prayers marked out the passage of time; with each one, we recited a further section of the Quran.
I gradually discovered other shopping malls in luxury buildings along the main avenue, with elevators, air-conditioning, restaurants, cafeterias, ice-cream vendors, all American-style: self-service, cardboard plates and cups, plastic forks and knives, menus and prices displayed on neon-lit boards. One day I had lunch in one of these establishments, where I was made to sit in the men’s section. When my eyes grew accustomed to the dim lighting, I noticed tables tucked away behind curtains. A man was eating at one of them with his wife. There were several couples, too, with and without children, eating in this reserved section, separated from each other and from the single men. Pervasive Americanism was thus accommodating men from the Gulf States and their wives. Other American habits were transposed to Medina, too, like the cigars a few husbands were quietly savoring.
After the long siesta time, which I devoted to writing, my companions asked me to go pray with them. We first endured the usual long wait for the toilet and showers, where the smells were growing stronger every day. Constant use of the sanitary facilities had damaged them, and we never saw the slightest effort at repair. When we finished our ablutions, Abbas, Salah, and I walked toward the mosque, Salah leading the way. As we moved through the crowd under a leaden sun, Abbas asked me if I prayed in everyday life. I told him I had ceased doing so when I was fifteen or sixteen, except for a few occasions like religious holidays or burials. “God forgive you,” was all he said.
We managed—this was now our habit—to arrive early at the mosque, and chose a corner after taking a Quran from the shelves of them available for that purpose. I was rereading a few passages I had selected and, occasionally, entire chapters, rediscovering the beauty of the text, its haunting images and sophisticated, supremely asymmetrical rhythms. I began to leave this world, walking into these stories toward horizons which pleased me with the intact freshness of all beginnings. We recited the canonical morning prayers, followed by prayers for the dead, by now a regular feature. After each service, two, three, or more deaths were announced—men, women, children. The ranks thinned slightly, and we performed the two customary prostrations.
Prayer and the presence of death did not, however, lessen anyone’s ardor for commercial transactions, which we plunged into as soon as we left the mosque. I was looking for a watch to give my wife. We went from one display to another around the mosque, through arcades where women were busy shopping. I noticed the Indonesian women especially, all in white but with their faces made up and their lips painted red, many of them wearing espadrilles or fashionable (Western) shoes. There were also many Moroccans, men and women easily recognizable from their clothes and the women’s predilection for the “gold shops,” as we call them. On the other hand, I rarely saw Turkish women and no Iranian ones at all: I glimpsed them only from afar, near the mosque, always entirely covered in black and surrounded by their menfolk.
THE AL-BAQI’ CEMETERY I decided one day to go alone to the Prophet’s shrine for another visit, once the mid-afternoon prayer was accomplished. After meditating there, I went to the big cemetery called al-Baqi’. I wanted to be sure not to leave Medina without stopping at the tombs of the Prophet’s companions, hoping to create a link with them and, despite the time separating me from them, to draw moral benefits from their virtue and knowledge.
The famous cemetery was surrounded by a high semicircular wall, along which ran a wide promenade. Enormous screened openings with vaulted tops somewhat broke up the monotony of the wall and, through their reinforced-concrete latticework, afforded a view of the innumerable black stones marking the graves. Women hung on to these pierced dividers to contemplate the interior of the cemetery, which they were not allowed to enter.
I paused for a moment near what I had been told were the tombs of several important Shiʿite imams, among them the particularly revered Ja’fur al-Sadiq. From this vantage point, one could see the whole vast place—circles, squares, or rectangles of large black stones in the foreground, beyond and below them, barely visible, other traces of tombs. I took a walk along the main path. An Indian pilgrim, who had a map with the key in English, showed me the grave of Ibrahim, the Prophet’s only son, who died in infancy; then that of Uthman, the third caliph, who was assassinated and left behind him a reputation for piety (and nepotism). Farther on was the tomb of Zaynab, who breast-fed the child Muhammad ibn Abd Allah in the desert encampments. At the gate, on the left, was Aisha, beloved wife of “God’s Messenger” and “mother of the faithful.” While pigeons pecked about for the seeds visitors threw them among the gravestones, religious policemen in white robes waited to stamp out the least sign of “tomb worship,” as Wahhabi idiom calls it.
I lingered near a group of Iranians with their mullahs. Gathered around graves of their imams, some seated, the others standing in a circle, they started to chant poems in Persian; then, imperceptibly, the declamations became songs of mourning and contrition, interspersed with tears and sobbing; the crowd attracted the religious police, who came over and abruptly dispersed them. A policeman ordered me to move along and to watch out for “these barbaric Shiʿite practices, this veneration of persons and all worship of tombs.” I left the cemetery, ashamed that one sect of Islam could with impunity repress other Islamic practices, could show such contempt for the religious sensibilities of other Muslims, could call them ajam, the Arabic equivalent of “barbarian.” I willingly agreed to discuss this with a mullah who came up to me in the shadow of the outer wall.
“You were there when they made us leave. Are you Shiʿite?”
“Yes, I saw. I disapprove. I’m not Shiʿite; I’m Moroccan.”
“Ah! Sunna. Maybe you don’t know. It’s the same conspiracy as it always has been against us, partisans of Ali . . .”
“Conspiracy?”
“Yes, conspiracy, today just as before; you’ve seen for yourself. In the time of the Prophet, the plot was already being hatched. Abu Bakr and the others twisted everything, set everything in the direction they wanted so they could push aside the legitimate caliph, Ali.”
Thus did I receive my first direct initiation into the history of “the dawn of Islam” from a Shiʿite perspective, and in classical Arabic. The mullah who delivered it invited me to visit him one day in Shiraz. I suggested that he might consider the caliphate and its quarrels as things of the past, that perhaps it might be better to evoke the caliphs as reference points for interpreting democratic institutions today.
“Do you really think so?” my interlocutor demanded, staring at me.
“Yes.”
“Well, we are awaiting the return of the [Hidden] Imam. The Well-Guided One is in his mother’s womb. As we wait for him, scholars must watch over religion. He will return with the mission of restoring justice. His return is certain. In Iran today, we have the vilayet-i faqih.284 That’s the most important institution; it protects Islam by its ordering of the Good.”
Before going our separate ways, we repeated to each other that there was no difference among Muslims. . . .
THE DATE MARKET I crossed the highway quickly so as to leave the dreadful vision behind me. Streets of the neighborhood we were headed for came into view. Oh, the peace and comfort of that date market! It was a vast space, a large courtyard with modest walls and pillars, divided lengthwise by a permanent row of stalls built on either side of an openwork fence. All around were open shops sheltered by a roofed arcade. It was both busy and peaceful. The dates, piled in generous heaps, were resplendent in the light and in all the colors they offered up to us: gold, honey, velvet brown, rust turning to aubergine, silky black, ivory turning to ocher. All their forms: long and slender, short, thick and faintly ribbed, fat and somewhat round, flat, wide at one end and pointed at the other like little peppers. All their textures: hard, firm, soft, sticky. What deliverance was in those dates, glowing with a thousand gentle sparkles! What relief! After the gold, the diamonds, the global electronic junk, the hamburgers, the shawarma, the self-service joints and restaurants, and the Saudi city. Pilgrims, hosts of Pakistanis and Indians, were buying dates both to enjoy their blessing and as provisions. Seeing their faces, peaceful and appeased, I forgot for a while about those who rummaged night and day in the galaxy of merchandise.
I tasted a date, then another, and a third: the perfumed sweetness woke my palate to dormant flavors it had first known long ago. They radiated like colors, and as I strolled slowly along an arcade, my eyes stopped on a sign that hung above an office door: “Shaykh of the date sellers”! I gazed into this face, framed by a keffiyeh held in place around his head by a black cord: a sensitive face with noble lines. The benevolent smile accentuated the delicacy of the man’s features. Like the market, this face exuded baraka.
Every thing and every being can possess baraka. Much has been written about the word. Perhaps it has not been said often enough that it refers to an active principle, which is dormant at times, alive and virulent at others, at times in decline or even failing in effectiveness. Nor has its ambiguity been emphasized enough: it is both noun and adjective, and has both transitive and intransitive verbal forms. Passive and active, then: through contact and friction, it can lodge itself in beings by sheer contiguity or just pass through. Beneficial, and dangerous as well. Such a principle moves about freely and is subject to no law. One can receive it only under certain conditions. Certain gestures and functions favor its transmission: touch, kiss, caress, ingest. Share and ingest.
Dates, barley, and milk—substances imbued with saintliness—are particularly recommended in these places. It was not this sort of contact I was seeking when I tasted the dates I admired in the Medina market, although this religiosity by exhalation, rooted in immemorial tradition, was more to my liking than the Wahhabi religion. Wahhabi zealots, pushing “God’s oneness”—of which humans, after all, know nothing—to absurd extremes, have transformed being into a simple abstraction. They have brought the Quran and the Prophet’s example down to the level of a recipe book and consigned its implementation to militias. Rather than God being a principle and a call, he becomes a general in white robes and keffiyeh, pitiless and solitary.
The Wahhabi reform, supposedly intended to restore vigor to Muslim creativity and rationality, has in fact expelled sacredness from the creatures on this earth. Nothing escaped its devastation: not the hills or the desert sands, not the palm trees of the oases, not the animals, not the sanctuaries, not even the cities of venerable antiquities. Not even Medina. The lands from which the fluids of life flowed were treated without compunction; sanctuaries were torn down, and old cities razed to the ground with their old mosques, their streets, their houses, all these creations that bore the trace of human gaze and feeling since Adam. Even the bones that prayed, in their silence, for resurrection by the Verb—even these were reduced to ashes. As if recognizing a God imprisoned in power alone required that beauty be banished from the cemeteries which returned by the slow work of decomposition to wilderness; as if one had to curb the energy of past generations that graves and cemeteries gave to us!
The dates and palm trees saved me; I took refuge with them. This was henceforth my place, the place where I could be, a place that totalitarian and policed urbanism could not disfigure. The palm trees and dates were a consolation for almost everything: for the mosque of Tuba, the oldest of those the Messenger himself had built; for the mosque called “one of the two-qibla,” where he pronounced that prayers should be said facing Mecca; for the cemetery of Uhud, which was now no more than a pile of stones enclosed by a rusty iron fence. They consoled me for having to visit all this in a rush, at the whim of a Hijazi taxi driver who was money hungry and obsessed by our female companions. Mosques: razed and rebuilt. The cemetery where the Prophet’s companions were buried, having died for their faith: closed to meditation and surrounded by merchandise. Later, I thought of these dates when, wandering again along Medina’s American-style avenues, contemplating the graceless neighborhoods where modern middle-class Arabs dwelled, I searched in vain for remainders of bygone eras, something that could stand in for origins and pathways. Wahhabi Medina was doing all it could to chase away my Medina and all those Medinas that had been. But these didn’t wholly disappear. They hid in a place whence their celestial irony will no doubt come and strike the new Medina with lightning.
Medina, my home. Not the Athens of Pericles, not the Jerusalem of the Temple or of Constantine, not the Rome of plodding divinities and of Saint Peter, not the Paris of the Concorde’s sacred square, where the sacrificed king was buried beneath an obelisk (in a grandiose ritual with revolutionary crowds gathered around the guillotine). None of these could displace Medina, my mythological home. It lived on in all of Islam’s cities. It will find its way around the city that forbade me even from seeing the Prophet’s tomb, that kept me from everything I wanted to see, touch, smell, everything that might have taken the prayer and the chanting of the Quran and connected them physically to the miracle of a tradition’s birth. In the absence of streets, buildings, or sanctuaries, in the absence of old Yathrib, only palm trees and dates led to this place. Palm trees and dates gave me what Islam’s charismatic community had seen and eaten, which I, too, in turn could see and eat. They also renewed the link with those who lived in these oases before my charismatic community: their language, religions, the temples, which I guessed at in reading the Quran and were returned to me as tangible objects by Ibn al-Kalbi, the famous writer of early Islam, and modern archaeology. So I tasted my dates, and now contemplated every palm tree I came across. It was as if I were conversing with people who had savored this fruit once and calmed their soul at the sight of the palm fronds atop the trunks, immobile, open, and stretching toward the horizon.
As soon as the visit to the market was over, toward the end of the evening, we returned to the mosque. It seemed to me to be hesitating between the sublime and a film set, with its Oriental minarets piercing the sky, its coppery domes, and its Andalusian doors. Yet the immense, calm prayer seized it and gave it a celestial beauty. I left it after the prayers, borne on the soft clamor behind me that faded as I walked back along the main avenue. I began to look distractedly for a place to eat.
MECCA AND THE MOSQUE After twelve hours of traveling, coming and going to find our lodgings, we hastily performed our ablutions again and headed for the Holy Mosque. We went down a wide boulevard lined with more or less undistinguished white buildings; the traffic was loud and heavy, the crowds very dense, becoming more and more compacted as we drew closer to the mosque. Then, halfway there, at a street corner, I saw two minarets dominating a large grayish white wall. I learned that this was the Gate of King Fahd ibn Abd al-Aziz. We went around it to the right to enter through the Gate of Peace. Taking advantage of a break in the ranks, we crossed the vast gallery covering the path between Safa and Marwa and reached the central court where the Kaʿba stands. At last, I could contemplate it at leisure. Like everyone else, I paused instinctively. We were between noon and mid-afternoon prayers. There was the imposing cube, its unusual dimensions, garbed in black, the frieze of gold calligraphy running along its four sides. The surprise was complete—despite the immediate familiarity, despite the sense of being reunited with a Kaʿba that had lived in our lives since childhood in Quran recitations, conversations, writing, drawing, painting, photographs, newspapers, television, cinema, poetry, songs, stories . . .
We began to pray—the two required prostrations to “salute the Mosque”—and then we joined the rotating circles. This first circumambulation into which we plunged was that “of the arrival.” We started off, as planned, at the south-southwestern quadrant, called the Yemeni quadrant. Crying “God is great!” and saluting the edifice with our right arms raised, we set off counterclockwise, at a slow run for men, a quick walk for women, and were instantly pulled into the immense, perpetually moving human circles. Prayers, invocations, and laments rose from all sides to the sky. A golden light bathed everything against the dark backdrop of the arcades, rotating in the opposite direction. The kinesthetic impression I received with each movement was one of winding something up, following an outline in concentric circles. Vertigo. Now and again I would move left or right to make room for formidable black workers who bore the elderly or the infirm on stretchers hoisted above our heads. I pivoted as I approached the Kaʿba. On my seventh time around, I managed to touch the silk sheeting that “clothes” it. The crowd, impressively oblivious, pressed toward the Black Stone. I went around once more, hoping to touch the glass protecting it, but was violently tossed away by the crowd. I didn’t try again but saluted it from afar and slowly felt the moving masses.
Men and women were relentlessly propelled, as if by a magnetic force, toward the Black Stone, which was guarded by apparently unarmed men. Others were plastered to the building’s walls, motionless and silent, under the sun’s rays. Supplications joined the prayers: for health, for the relief of distress and misfortune. I withdrew little by little to the back, where the arcaded galleries gave a little shade. I couldn’t take my eyes off the cube in silken black. Women around me were praying, pleading, sobbing, and begging for forgiveness. Facing the Kaʿba and surrounding it, we were tied to each other, denied to ourselves by ihram, which modifies the limits of bodies and identities. It was testimony to a condition I didn’t comprehend. Emotion flooded through me. Tears welled up in my eyes but didn’t flow, putting me in tune with the others. I will never know, I am sure, with what these tears were associated, but I was experiencing something concrete and precise: I felt I had been stripped bare by the sight of the “Ancient House,” with no hesitation and above all with no fear of the law. Religion communicated to me its power above the law or perhaps beside, over, beyond it. A plague on the courts’ authority! The great Sharia courthouses that had crushed me in Medina shrank and disappeared behind the black cube. Now I understood the meaning of certain statements I had often heard: “What happiness to be here! How good God’s grace is . . . What joy one feels at seeing all this.” Or, “Seeing the Kaʿba, I felt the most intense joy I had ever known.” Without presuming to know what others felt, I realized these phrases now meant something to me.
A PUBLIC PROTEST When we first arrived in Mecca, we had been taken to a building quite far away from the one to which we were later assigned, without anyone having consulted us. Our exhaustion, the walking about, and the bus going back and forth through the city had made us cranky. Yet we had promptly accepted the lodgings we were given, especially since they were very near the mosque, on Bir Balila Street. In any case, we had been ready to accept any shelter so we could escape from our cage on wheels. After a while, however, the building’s shortcomings became apparent, and they became more scandalous each day: dirt; putrid odors emanating from overflowing sewers; water shortages due to irregularities in supply (in Mecca, the trucks that fill the cisterns crowd the streets with noise and fumes); the water bottles on each landing covered in dust. Nor did we have any water from Zamzam, the miraculous spring near the Kaʿba, which shocked the other pilgrims.
One day, late in the afternoon, I ran into a small crowd kicking up a fuss in the street in front of the building. Men returning from prayers quickly joined in. Anger was rising. People were making protests against the owner, the Moroccan Hajj Mission, and the mutawwif—that is, the head of the charter company responsible for us.285 The mutawwif, who despite his title had nothing to do with rituals, was an invisible man exploiting his product —transportation, lodging, food—like a fairly unscrupulous businessman. I went up to meet my friends from the fourth floor. The narrow staircase made me claustrophobic. I had to negotiate past crowds on the stairs and squeeze against the walls to get around the refrigerators that cluttered the narrow landings. “If there’s a fire, God spare us! We’ll go up in flames, the lot of us!” some people said. Haj Ma’ati and his friends welcomed me and told me that a small group had been trying to alert the authorities since that morning, and that the owner couldn’t be found. On the ground floor, in the common room, the turmoil was coming to a head. Men were talking on phones. In the street, the crowd was fast growing larger, with people shouting and pointing at the sacks of garbage overflowing at the entrance. The Saudi police stood by, looking on. Some people were calling it a scandal, comparing our building in its deplorable state with that of our Algerian and Egyptian neighbors, who were much better off. “I paid three million! They know how to fleece you, all right. And they throw me here, no better than an animal!” a demonstrator was shouting.
The crowd pressed around an employee from the Moroccan Mission who had just arrived on-site. From the front steps, he gave a few explanations, which no one heard; his voice was drowned out by louder ones rising from the angry crowd. This anger could have been avoided had the young administrator chosen his words and used a vocabulary of understanding, restitution, and compromise. Instead, he lit a cigarette before starting in again.
“May God light your corpse with it!” The cry shot out from the crowd and provoked a moment of silence.
Then someone remembered: “We’re on pilgrimage.” In spite of that, the invectives continued. Clearly, they were not just targeting the fact that the man was smoking. Quite a few pilgrims were doing the same. My friends on the fourth floor, as I’ve mentioned, occasionally offered me a cigarette with tea, and in our street the Egyptians smoked to their hearts’ content. Tobacco was cheap, like other goods in Arabia, since taxes were low. Still, the image struck me: the comment had associated the fire of a cigarette with that of a tomb (i.e., hell), the smell of tobacco and the perfume of burial. It didn’t quite jibe with the mercy we had come to seek near the “noble sanctuary”; nor did it go with circumambulation or Hajar’s running back and forth. Furthermore, we only had a few days left before returning to God: the station at Arafat.
But there it was. Verbal violence had exploded like thunder in reply to a clumsy gesture interpreted as an expression of contempt. Something blew up—related perhaps to a feeling of powerlessness, and expressed as a call for punishment in the afterlife. Still, the functionary, puffing away, showed he wasn’t playing the game. He went on exhorting us to be understanding Muslims, invoking the mosque’s proximity and the imminence of the pilgrimage’s greatest moment. Bureaucracy’s habits were stronger than those of religion. Lighting a cigarette, for him, had seemed appropriate, even expected, in the context of his office and the administration’s power. But it had a different meaning in front of a crowd of less privileged pilgrims.
At any rate, we were in an extremely new situation. Not because we didn’t know what to do or how to do it. We had learned all the actions we had to accomplish. We had rehearsed them, as if at the theater, under the supervision of instructors appointed by political and religious authorities. But this was the first time we were actually close to the sanctuary where we were going to succeed or fail in our trial. This situation was new and risky—for me, too. We were all displaced, “guests of the Merciful One.” This must have been visible in our actions and reactions. We had been told many times, and reminded of the fact in words exchanged with the police: we were untouchable, and at the same time we were obliged to act according to the rules of divine hospitality. In Rabat, we had learned some of these rules: no quarreling, no violence; seek compromise and don’t insist on difference; avoid excess, especially in words and laughter; proscribe jokes. These obligations weighed on our relationships. In particular, they prevented conflicts with the Saudi people, “guardians of the holy sites.” We and all other Muslims were their guests. We had no other identity than that of “guests of the Merciful One.” But we had discovered for ourselves that the Saudis could be intractable and sometimes brutal.
The situation at our lodgings threatened to deteriorate. Someone said it might be possible to alert the Moroccan press, but the suggestion wasn’t taken up. The Saudi services were obviously experienced in receiving and monitoring pilgrims, and the latter were quite willing, incidentally, to “show each other the right path.” In many buildings, relationships were forged between certain pilgrims and members of the Hajj Mission—not to mention the officially appointed religious guides who trailed some of the groups. There were none with us, but if one happened to feel bewildered by the rituals’ complex nature, or were looking for exemptions and solutions to an unexpected incident, it was easy to find people who were keen to enlighten others, answer questions, and talk about the problem. Despite all this, the explosion of anger couldn’t be avoided, and in the end the Saudi authorities took care of things. The title “guests of the Merciful One,” which everyone brandished relentlessly, could resolve even the most radical differences. When the crisis died down that night, we asked each other for forgiveness and begged for divine clemency on behalf of the two men implicated in the cigarette incident.
Still, to me, the image of a person being burned with a cigarette in his grave kept all its violence. Perhaps there was in it also the idea of incineration, but it was especially the association of words that struck me: “cigarette,” “light,” “God,” and “tomb.” In the context of the altercation, where the bureaucrat had indeed put a match to his Marlboro, didn’t the phrase just mean fire—in other words, hell? Who was insane enough to think that the fact of lighting a cigarette could be one of God’s punishments? Of course, God is violent sometimes: there are torments and eternal hellfire for the wicked. These punishments abound in the Quran, the traditions, exegeses, and sermons. Not to mention the literature on the afterlife, which discusses these horrors in minute detail.
The actual commerce that religion has with violence is often disregarded in favor of a few abstractions. Vengeance by fire and destruction, justice through plague or the sword, annihilation in floods or attacks carried out by birds—these represent reparation and compensation through violence. The motives for divine violence aren’t always comprehensible. In the altercation I witnessed, God was called upon to use his fire against a man whose act had been perceived as a gesture of contempt. True, it was suffering, above all, that was being expressed. Yet no one was innocent here. The power to damn someone is a real power. Marx knew it well: religion is not ideology in the sense of the “German ideology.” It takes root in the reality of suffering. But between “opium” and pain, he forgot that religion is not a placebo.
Does this explain this implacable determination, this forward movement of the pilgrim masses, despite the obstacles? For many people, fatigue, disorientation, tension, and quarrels were insignificant in the face of this progress. For some, like me, there was a feeling of imminent danger. Was this because the source of the powers that moved us was not always religious?
WALKING TO MINA (A FEW DAYS LATER) At half past four in the morning on Thursday, 8 Dhu’l-Hijja, we finally accepted the fact that the bus wasn’t going to come, and we decided to walk to Mina. We stopped to pray at the Holy Mosque before going, taking a few things with us in small bags and leaving most of our stuff in the room. We walked along the highway for a while just outside the holy city. The buses, bumper to bumper, idly revved their engines. We left the inferno rapidly, and found other roads by chance. We felt sure that we were headed in the right direction, but didn’t know exactly where we were. Soon a small, half-full bus came up; when the doors opened, we hopped into the empty seats, relieved but with no idea of how long the trip would take. Within a quarter of an hour at most, going through a gap in the hills and then parallel to a chain of gray peaks, heading east, we found ourselves at the entrance of a campsite.
It wasn’t ours, however. We spent two hours wandering about looking for the place reserved for the Moroccan contingent. Then, when we found it, we learned that there was no more room and that our mutawwif wasn’t there. Almost everybody was of the same opinion about him: “Moroccan filth!” Saudi agents then took charge; we were divided into groups and settled in air-conditioned tents, men separate from women. We were out in the open, far from the noise and petrol fumes.
Thus did we leave Mecca for our quarters in Mina before going to the station of Arafat—an immense encampment that stretched all across a valley and up to the surrounding rugged hills, around a small urban center with a big mosque. Slightly to the west of this center and suspended over the road was the giant access ramp connecting the three pillars that in Muslim tradition mark the places where Satan appeared to Ismail. The ramp doubled the available access space and facilitated the circulation of the crowds during the stoning. Having gotten my bearings a few days earlier, I had no difficulty finding the main places of worship. The town was very simple, designed in a grid plan along the roadways, but pilgrims regularly got lost here. Their sense of time and space, like mine, had been weakened. Lack of sleep had a lot to do with it, too. Long siestas made up for the nocturnal activity but added to the confusion between day and night. Men or women often went off on roads that took them away from the encampments, and they would be found in the desert, or wandering in other built-up areas. People tried to stay together to offer each other support and keep from going astray.
We couldn’t count on the pilgrimage charter company for help. The manager, a Moroccan long settled in Saudi Arabia, still hadn’t turned up. We had paid quite a lot for his services, but he was content to send us his underlings, who would arrive at the most unexpected hours, only to vanish as soon as a pilgrim brought them a problem or demanded that the contract be honored. Since we no longer expected anything from either the company or the Islamic Affairs functionaries, we slept until late morning in Mina. When I awoke, my ears took a while to recognize the sounds of air-conditioning and helicopters. Security and the threat of fire were no doubt the reasons for these regular rounds, which were coordinated with teams of police, military guards, and firemen on the ground. The Saudi state claimed credit for keeping the peace and preserving security during the pilgrimage. Next to our camp were the Egyptian, Algerian, and Sudanese settlements, and so on. Every nation had its own space, with separate, guarded entrances. Ours, like the others, was protected by tall wrought-iron fences.
I went out in search of breakfast, which the company had not seen fit to provide. Walking along a street, I came to a small square teeming with people where there were shops and cafés.
ON THE PLAIN OF ARAFAT, MARCH 26, 1999 I couldn’t see beyond the camp, but, standing up, like everyone else, I could feel deep within me the astonishing energy of a worshipping people: dedicated, devout, devoted. The shouts and cries came in endless waves, followed by spells of silence. Collective invocations alternated with individual prayers and supplications, murmured and inaudible, when we sat down. These were moments of rest, moments of meditation that returned us to ourselves and turned us inward.
Unfortunately, this rhythm, which I liked so much, was interrupted. A new difficulty arose, this time about the invocations. A large group of young men came to join a Moroccan preacher who had begun to lead the service. They had brought their own list of prayers and invocations. We had to repeat these “selections” word for word, the officiant accepting no pause and no individual supplications. Sweating profusely, we repeated dutifully, stifled in our canvas shelter. We even repeated our guide’s linguistic mistakes. Then people couldn’t bear it any more, began to exchange glances, and even took the liberty of sitting down. The “guide” stopped; then, in a vehement tone, and backed up by his companions, he enjoined us to resume “the collective prayer, out loud and standing.” A terse response came back: “No! Would you kindly finish? People need time to say prayers for personal salvation, for the health and prosperity of their loved ones, for their leaders, and for the Muslim governments! No, sir! After the collective prayers, out loud, there is a time for contemplation, a review of our past actions, of our mistakes!” It was becoming clear that the texts he was trying to make us repeat did not come from the Maliki manual placed at our disposal by the Moroccan Ministry of Islamic Affairs. No: this was certainly not our official vulgate. It was fairly easy for some of us to recognize Wahhabi propaganda. The preacher retorted, “The Prophet pronounced invocations collectively, with his companions, and he led them!” “No!” a voice replied. “Sometimes they prayed as a group and out loud, and sometimes he let people withdraw and pray alone!” Most people wanted the young sectarians to withdraw, and eventually they did, making way once again for our country taleb, who returned unhurriedly to the center of things. We calmly resumed our binary rhythm, which dispelled the differences of opinion. For a long time, we alternated between prayers and silent, individual requests, phrased in the words each of us wanted to say to God. We stood for a long, long time . . . until the end of time.
We had been seated for only a moment when our imam signaled to us to rise once more. The afternoon was drawing to a close. After a long series of invocations and humble pleas, we remained standing in silence. Then, at a final signal, we broke ranks. Lunch was handed out, and we were told that we would leave right afterward. We ate quickly and, like everyone else, launched an assault on the buses. It was a quarter past five when our long battle to get seats began. After two hours of pushing and shoving, I managed to find a seat for myself and Farida, the young doctor whose husband wasn’t with her. Through a wall of bodies separating us, I extended my hand to help her climb in. A few minutes later, an elderly woman planted herself in front of me. Leaning on her cane, she ordered us to leave the two seats, claiming that she had reserved them shortly before my arrival. Amazed by her implausible argument, I didn’t know what to say. Then insults rained down: “Satan! God will punish you! You didn’t come here for the pilgrimage; you came for women! And you brazenly hold out your hand . . . Satan, you display your sins for all to see. I’m going to call the police, they’ll kick you off the bus!” This went on for quite a few minutes. I was stunned. Someone took the woman away, although I would gladly have given her my seat had she asked for it. I found it difficult to imagine what might have motivated her: her wanting the seat, or wanting to keep me from sitting there because she saw me as a demon and because, by berating me and simultaneously taking what was mine, she would have accomplished two pious acts? The second hypothesis would certainly prepare her well for the stoning of Satan, scheduled for the following day.
Around eight o’clock in the evening we left Arafat for Muzdalifa. We did so quite quickly, at a rate described as “overflow”—as if we were spreading like a flood. Millions of people on foot turned their backs on Arafat and ran toward Muzdalifa like a great river that had flooded its banks to spread through the neighboring valleys and ravines. Nothing could compare to this spectacle, which we watched through the windows of our boiler on wheels, moving in twenty-meter spurts, then stopping, interminably it seemed, in an uproar of motors, heat, and exhaust fumes.
When at midnight we arrived at Muzdalifa—the “halt” between Arafat and Mina—we were held hostage by our driver, who turned off the engine, closed the doors, and went off to have dinner, forgetting he had turned off our ventilation as well. All but fainting, we managed to shout loudly enough to alert people to go and get him—I don’t know how in the middle of the night—reminding him of our existence. He came and opened the doors, not seeming excessively perturbed, and we threw ourselves off the bus. We performed the prescribed prayers for this halt and, in the dark, gathered pebbles for the stoning. It was not permitted to gather them elsewhere or at any other time.
282 Ihram: the state of purity into which one enters by ritual ablutions; also the two pieces of seamless white cloth worn by men in ihram, one on the torso, one around the legs, with a belt tying them together. The footwear is sandals without buckles. The state of ihram includes, among other things, prohibitions concerning bodily functions, perfumes, sexual relations, and hunting.
283 Makhzan: from “magazine” in the sense of “warehouse” or “treasury,” as in “state treasury,” a term that many Moroccans use to designate the central government.
284 Rule of the Supreme Jurist. The lranian constitution of 1979, written after the revolution, gives supreme power to this religious authority, which supervises all aspects of the government to ensure its conformity with Sharia law as interpreted by the party of Ayatollah Khomeini.
285 Mutawwif, from tawaf, meaning circumambulation, was originally the designation of the person who guides pilgrims in their circumambulations in return for money, and who may also provide other services.