Qanta Ahmed
United States
2000
Dr. Qanta Ahmed undertook the first Hajj of the twenty-first century while employed as a physician in Saudi Arabia. British born, U.S. schooled, of Pakistani background, she explains in her opening pages how, while working at a New York hospital, the surprise denial of her visa-renewal application led to a snap decision to search for work in the Middle East, where salaries were high and Western medicine is widely practiced. A specialist in pulmonary disease and critical-care medicine, she was snapped up within weeks by a prominent Saudi hospital in Riyadh. Her lost post in New York is the reader’s gain. Her memoir, written over six years and published in 2008, tracks a two-year stay in Arabia. Her professional status as a female doctor there makes it unique.
Ahmed’s book is titled, In the Land of Invisible Women. Chapter One offers a perfect illustration by introducing her first Saudi patient, a Bedouin woman in her seventies who is comatose with pneumonia and on a ventilator when they meet, completely exposed except for a full-face veil. The masked woman makes for an iconic image, with the main ventilator circuit (a twist of plastic tubing) appearing to feed not a person but a veil. Ahmed stares entranced at this clash of technology and puzzling cultural imperative, to hide a woman’s face no matter what. The full-face veil, some atavistic incisions on the patient’s abdomen, and the shiny modern hospital where Ahmed feels at home form a set of short-circuiting contradictions that spark her narrative and drive it forward.
Ahmed’s memoir is a close analysis of urban-professional Saudi society in the anecdotal mode. She shows us a modern nation sprung from conservative, desert roots, where the sexes are strictly segregated and petro-dollars have fueled extraordinary advances while supporting a social system the author finds suffocating. Ahmed is both a Muslim and Western to the core, and many of the social strictures ingrained and enforced in Saudi society perplex and offend her. Whether she is at work in Riyadh, the high-octane Saudi capital, or on pilgrimage in the more tranquil and provincial Hijaz, the result on paper is a frequent clash.
At home in her judgments, aware of her human rights, Ahmed is also a sociable and curious Muslim woman on an adventure, ready to revise first impressions and explore the actual society she meets. We travel in chaptered layers through these encounters, moving from the ironic and superficial—Kentucky Fried Chicken vendors on the airport road—to her own complex reactions when faced with the difference between Western and Saudi women’s clothes.
Though I had spent all my life as a Muslim, my wardrobe lacked any burqa, or chador, or in fact any kind of veil. My family, my parents in particular, had never required me to dress anything other than modestly. I was firmly settled in the standard Western clothing of trouser suits or modest skirts. My hair was only covered when I prayed . . . I would quickly find Riyadh to be much more demanding than my family . . .
From the start, Ahmed refers to the required Saudi abbayah in the starkest terms: “polyester incarceration,” “my new armor,” and “my social suicide.” As the book unfolds, we see that she views the costume as a hallmark of Wahhabism: the neo-traditional interpretation of Sharia law enforced in Saudi Arabia but nowhere else. Ahmed describes it in withering terms as “a rigid movement that (has) dismantled centuries of careful pluralistic Islamic discourse and learnèd interpretations, denouncing it as ‘innovative’ and corrupting . . .” Nonetheless, if she intends to step out in public, it can only be in an abbayah. The goal of her first shopping trip is to buy one. “My oppression,” she writes, “had begun.”
In the months ahead, frustration mixes with admiration as Ahmed begins to meet local women of force and charm. She tags along on shopping sprees and attends afternoon teas and dinner parties, bringing us into a world Western visitors rarely see— the distaff side of the Saudi capital and the savvy, elite women who daily negotiate its warren of glass ceilings and trapdoor floors. As a visitor traveling in this severely restricted social landscape, she befriends the female nutritionist Zubaidah, and then Zubaidah’s friends. They in turn introduce her to “the lives of others inside this bell jar,” women who “cannot function as independent entities,” yet somehow remain exuberant day by day.
And then there are the men, with their “legislated male supremacy.” This group ranges from Ahmed’s mostly devout male counterparts at the hospital to the well-heeled, post-adolescent bachelors in S-series Benzes and Lamborghinis cruising Tahlia Street to hip-hop blaring from their radios. Alas, these upper-class joy riders chafing at Saudi society’s restraints often end up in Ahmed’s wards nearly dead from high-speed crackups on desert roads. At the other end of the spectrum stand the Wahhabi religious police, symbolized in Ahmed’s narrative by the standard-issue muttawa in his brown bisht gown and white peaked scarf. These are the guardians of public virtue, whom any pedestrian may encounter in urban Saudi Arabia today, with their long, thin switches in hand as if to swat you for one of a dozen minor infractions in their rulebooks, making certain no woman’s hair is out of place, no hemline rides above the ankle, and no one, man or woman, is out of line or lax in prayer. Ahmed typifies these middlebrow officials as “overbearing, dangerously arrogant . . . icons of intolerance . . . to which I could never become accustomed.”
One day, a colleague’s young child is killed by a passing car, and Ahmed, going with others to pay her respects, receives a short course in the salving qualities of faith. Soon after, she decides to perform the Hajj. Being resident and employed in the host country offers certain advantages where red tape is concerned. Because the hospital has a “Hajj office,” Ahmed is able to book a last minute “package tour” to Mecca. Later that day, she surfs the Internet for information on how to perform the Hajj rites.
Her fellow hospital workers, both men and women, are uniformly encouraging. Her lack of Islamic training is brushed aside. Her anxiety—“How will I know what to do?”—elicits smiles. “Nearly everyone who attends Hajj is going there for the first time,” she is told. “No pilgrim ever knows what to do.” With a shrug, she goes shopping for the right scarf.
Part of the Hajj’s enchantment resides in its quicksilver transitions. Ahmed’s Hajj visa materializes swiftly. Later, she easily adapts to the momentary stoppages and detours that are inescapable during the massive Hajj. One day, the call to prayer is sounded as she and tens of thousands of others stream toward the mosque. Muslim prayer is punctilious. Having run out of time, the people lay their prayer mats down on the pavement and pray in the street, a common occurrence, but one that may be arresting to the novice. Ahmed’s description turns poetic:
Like a magic organism forming out of ether, the Hajj crowds had become a parish. After prayer, we would again dissolve into the Hajj ocean, leaving no trace of an assembly.
The next day, inside the mosque:
As I looked up and surveyed the multi-stranded circle of humanity adorning the Kaʿba, a giant rich choker of pilgrim pearls, I found myself among them. In this diversity, I finally belonged. Islam was many-faceted and I was simply one.
The ten chapters concerned with Ahmed’s Hajj appear toward the middle of her book. By then, we have witnessed sharp complaints about Riyadh’s narrow-minded, male-dominated society, and we have frequently watched her seek refuge among local female friends. Now, far from the capital, in the desert pilgrim camps in Mina Valley, housed mostly among Saudis in a “Women’s Only” tent, it is female society that proves abrasive. Here Ahmed’s Hajj turns unpleasant. Her tent mates are not the sisters in oppression that previous experience led her to expect. Instead they are abruptly dismissive, critical of this stranger and her foreign ways. In the space of a few hours, her first night’s experience in Mina Valley threatens to mirror her frustrations with male Saudi society in Riyadh, where issues of racial purity, sex segregation, and religious bigotry pop up regularly.
Though Ahmed’s Hajj account is specific to her experience, it echoes the frustration reported by many turn-of-the-century Muslims, especially those from places where society is more porous and accepting. They arrive with the expectation of a spiritual experience, only to find they must wrest it from a society beset by prejudices and regulations that thwart and offend. To her credit, Qanta Ahmed’s account is not a blanket dismissal of Saudi society, nor a naïve embrace of All-Things-Hajj. Her fierce resistance to social repression, gender bias, and class rejection are tempered by a genuine religious humility, a wish to heal her own “broken life,” or at any rate escape it for a while in the larger embrace of a religion where she must struggle to find her place.
From In the Land of Invisible Women by Qanta Ahmed
RIYADH. SPRING, 1999 In a pool of shade cast by a hedge, a laborer sought shelter from the sun. An awkward bundle of desiccated limbs, the Bengali lunched from a tiffin. His shemagh cloth was piled into a sodden turban, meager relief from the high heat. Beyond, a hundred-thousand-dollar Benz growled, tearing up a dust storm in its steely wake. Behind my mask I smiled at my reflection. Suspended between plate glass, a woman in a white coat gazed back. Externally, I was unchanged from the doctor I had been in New York City, yet now everything was different.
I returned to Khalaa al-Otaibi, my first patient in the Kingdom. She was a Bedouin Saudi well into her seventies, though no one could be sure of her age (female births were not certified in Saudi Arabia when she had been born). She was on a respirator for a pneumonia which had been slow to resolve. Comatose, she was oblivious to my studying gaze. A colleague prepared her for the placement of a central line (a major intravenous line into a deep vein).
Her torso was uncovered in preparation. Another physician sterilized the berry-brown skin with swathes of iodine. A mundane procedure I had performed countless times, in Saudi Arabia it made for a startling scene. I looked up from the sterilized field which was quickly submerging the Bedouin body under a disposable sea of blue. Her face remained enshrouded in a black scarf, as if she was out in a market scurrying through a crowd of loitering men. I was astounded.
The scraggy veil concealed her every feature. From the midst of a black nylon well sinking into an edentulous mouth, plastic tubes snaked up and away from her purdah (the Islamic custom of concealing female beauty). One tube connected her ventilator securely into her lungs, and the other delivered feed to her belly. Now and again, the veil-and-tubing ensemble shuddered, sometimes with a sigh, sometimes with a cough. Each rasp reminded me that underneath this mask was a critically ill patient. Through the black nylon I could just discern protective eye patches placed over her closed eyelids. Gently, the nurse lifted the corner of the veil to allow the physician to finish cleansing. In my fascination, I had forgotten all about the procedure.
From the depths of this black nylon limpness, a larger corrugated plastic tube emerged, the main ventilator circuit. It snaked her breaths away, swishing, swinging, with each machine-made respiration. Without a face at the end of the airway, the tubing disappeared into a void, as though ventilating a veil and not a woman. Even when critically ill, I learned, hiding her face was of paramount importance. I watched, entranced at the clash of technology and religion, my religion, some version of my religion. I heard an agitated rustling from close by.
Behind the curtain, a family member hovered, the dutiful son. Intermittently, he peered in at us. He was obviously worrying, I decided, as I watched his slim brown fingers rapidly manipulating a rosary. He was probably concerned about the insertion of the central line, I thought, just like any other caring relative.
Every now and again, he burst into vigorous rapid Arabic, instructing the nurse. I wondered what he was asking about. Everything was going smoothly; in fact, soon the jugular would be cannulated. We were almost finished. What could be troubling him?
Through my dullness, eventually, I noticed a clue. Each time the physician’s sleeve touched the patient’s veil, and the veil slipped, the son burst out in a flurry of anxiety. Perhaps all of nineteen, the son was demanding the nurse cover the patient’s face, all the while painfully averting his uninitiated gaze away from his mother’s fully exposed torso, revealing possibly the first breasts he may have seen.
Each staccato command was accompanied by the soggy mumblings of Arabic emerging from behind the physician’s mask, asking the nurse to follow suit and fix the veil. The physician sounded unconcerned, yet the son was suspended in an agonizing web of discomfort. He paced in anxiety about his mother’s health, anxiety about her dignity, and anxiety about her responsibilities to God. The critically ill, veiled face and her bared breasts, pendulous with age, posed an incredible sight. I was as bewildered as the Saudi son.
I gazed at the patient, completely exposed except for her veiled face, and her fragile son supervising (why not a daughter, I thought). The veiling, even when her face slept, deeply comatose from sedation, was disturbing. Surely God would not require such extreme lengths to conceal her features from her doctors who needed to inspect her body? Did an unconscious sickly Muslim have the same responsibilities as a conscious, able-bodied one? Although a Muslim woman myself, I had never faced such questions before. My debate was internal and solitary; those around me were quite clear on their obligations. The patient was a woman and needed to be veiled. The physician was instructing the Filipina nurse throughout to comply with the son’s concerns. The Filipina was obviously inured to the whole spectacle. The son knew his duties to his mother. Only I remained locked in confusion.
I studied her more closely, trying to understand more. Thin arms lay flaccid at the side of her supine body, palms upwards, pools of lax flesh puddling under feeble triceps. She seemed very short, perhaps four and a half feet tall at most. On each palm, in the center, I could see bluish stigmata. These were the dark, circular marks of tribal tattoos. The nurse removed the veil to attend to the airway, suctioning out the frothing saliva which had collected in the last half hour.
Now that the limp black nylon was lifted, I could finally see Mrs. al-Otaibi. Her weathered, leathery face was in pain. Congealed tears streaked from under the taped eyelids. I called to the nurse for some pain relief, following the silent tears as they wound to her receding jaw. They pooled into deep wells in a face made ancient by sun-lashed desert winds. Proud cheek-bones climbed high above hollows where her teeth should have been. Her chin met in a defiant point, conferring a determined, dour look. I wondered what she was like when awake.
Her facial markings belied a woman of status. Now I could see complicated blue tattoos in cross-like formation. They centered on the exact middle of her cheeks, much like marks delineating fields of radiation in a cancer patient, but bigger. She had similar marks on her brow, centrally placed above her balding eyebrows, perfectly symmetrical. All this painful decoration only to remain concealed behind a veil? Wondering what the marks could mean, I asked my Arab colleagues. She turned out to be a senior elder in her tribe, the tattoos on her face defining her rank, they explained, already bored by my curiosity. Obviously, they had seen many such tattooed Bedouin women. To them there was nothing remarkable about Mrs. al-Otaibi.
Small brown hands were clenched in a sleeping fist. I unpeeled them and looked at the stubby, anemic, orange-tipped nails. This color I knew to be henna. I looked at my own hands grasping hers, my glossy, noired nails contrasting against her orange manicure. Mine were Western, hers Eastern, so different but both seeking the same folly: to change the color of our nails.
I smiled in silence at the first similarity I could draw between us. Saudi Bedouin women would wear this cosmetic coloring often, placing a viscid blob of the dark green henna in the palm of their hand and then holding it tight in a fist, burying the tips of their nails into the pool of thick dye. The women would often sleep like this, securing their hands with string, to wake later with orange-tipped fingernails. This is what Mrs. al-Otaibi must have done, some weeks earlier, when she had been well. I looked up at her straggly, sweaty hair and saw the streaks of henna there too, slowly losing the battle against a burgeoning mass of white roots.
On her rotund belly, several inexplicable scars, small, puckered, and paler than the surrounding skin, peppered the surface. They were evenly distributed over the right upper quadrant of her abdomen. They were in the wrong place for laparoscopic surgery, but I knew of no other tool that left such marks. I looked up at my colleague, puzzled.
“She went to the shaman, the Bedou healer. They all do that. We often see these marks on our liver patients.” He went on, “The shaman uses a branding iron to treat pain which the patient probably had months ago.”
Later I would observe that many patients carried these same marks, often seeking relief from the pain of enlarging, inflamed livers. Hepatitis is common in Saudi Arabia and indeed my new workplace, the King Fahad National Guard Hospital in Riyadh, was a center of excellence for treating liver disease. There we saw hundreds of patients with liver failure. The poorer patients had avoided the many public health centers in the Kingdom, instead choosing traditional healers; by the time they came to us, their diseases were often too advanced.
So, in the midst of the familiar, shiny, high-tech intensive care environment in which I was so at home, I encountered the unfamiliar. I was deeply perplexed by the active ancient practices which this woman’s body disclosed. Even more disturbing, what role did shaman and other pagan healers have in a world which subscribed to Islam, a religion which enshrines the advancement of knowledge?
I wondered about the lengths to which the son continued to veil his mother, even when she was gravely ill. Couldn’t he see it was the least important thing for her now at this time, when her life could ebb away at any point? Didn’t he know God was merciful, tolerant, and understanding, and would never quibble over the wearing of a veil in such circumstances or, I doubted, any circumstances?
Somehow I assumed the veil was mandated by the son, but perhaps I was wrong about that too. Already, I was finding myself wildly ignorant in this country. Perhaps the patient herself would be furious if her modesty was unveiled when she was powerless to resist. Nothing was clear to me other than veiling was essential, inescapable, even for a dying woman. This was the way of the new world in which I was now confined. For now, and the next two years, I would see many things I couldn’t understand. Even though I was a Muslim, here I found myself a stranger in the Kingdom.
MARCH 2000 Inside the Kingdom, Hajj season was upon us. Something approaching national fervor was beginning to take hold, quickly erasing the somber weeks of Ramadan, which had just elapsed. Each year, Hajj draws millions of Muslims from around the world who descend upon Mecca into an unparalleled pandemonium of worship. In Riyadh, several hundred miles northeast of Mecca, I could already feel the reverberations of Hajj. I wondered if I would glimpse some inkling of this extraordinary mass migration washing over the Kingdom.
Early one morning, I entered the doctors’ office in the ICU and walked into a discussion on scheduling. I looked on with disinterest as colleagues negotiated leave for Hajj holiday. Most had already booked trips with Hajj agencies for their families and would be making Hajj themselves. Within me, the slow stirrings of a new curiosity tugged into life. Before I could investigate my thoughts any further, an emergency halted the meeting.
Forty-five minutes later, Imtiaz and I looked at each other with the intense release physicians know to follow extreme pressure. We had just pulled Halima (at sixteen, our youngest patient in the ICU) back from the brink of death. Thankfully she would get to live another day. We joined Mobeen, the other physician on duty, and together headed toward the South Indian’s stall to buy ourselves tea. As I was leaving the ICU, pulling me to one side, Mobeen stopped me just inside the steel doors.
“Qanta, I must talk to you about Hajj.” His urgency stopped me in my tracks. We had hardly had any conversations outside of patient care. I leaned against a cool wall. Beads of perspiration slowly evaporated from between my shoulder blades. An air-conditioning vent whirred directly overhead, dissipating the last remnants of my adrenaline. Intent, I listened, still keen from the recent crisis.
“Qanta, you must go to Hajj. You must.” Taken aback, I listened. I hadn’t been thinking of going to Hajj at all.
Mobeen’s soft voice was unexpectedly impassioned. The room contracted to a single, shared moment. Conspiratorial, he urged on:
“It is every Muslim’s right. It is your right, Qanta. No one can stop you from going because of the schedule. This could be your only year in the Kingdom. Who knows when you will get a chance to attend Hajj again, Qanta? You must take this chance. You are a Muslim and this is an Islamic Kingdom. It will be impossible for anyone to deny your request to attend.”
Triumphant that he had made his point clear, he left, looking suitably pleased. He had made an indelible impression. I was slightly shaken. In a bland instant, amid the humdrum of critical care, I had stumbled upon my niyyat (intent). I had clasped the fleeting Muslim within me and started a journey which would carry to the innermost sanctum of Islam.
Mecca is the place on earth where a Muslim can meet his Maker in this lifetime. Until now, the force field of my Maker had escaped me, but since I had moved to the Kingdom I was beginning to feel His rumbling magnetism. Now, with my own Hajj days away, I realized I had never been so badly planned nor so spontaneous. I was a mixture of elation and fear as I began to find the edges of my ignorance.
I hurried to arrange leave and find a means of getting to Hajj. Mobeen had read the situation precisely. When I told him, my chairman was surprised but coolly complied with my ill-timed request. He couldn’t deny a Muslim the opportunity to visit Mecca. The ICU would have to manage without me. I needed to find a carrier who would take me to Hajj, a Hajj agent. I soon realized that most had made arrangements months earlier. Helpful colleagues advised me to speak to the hospital’s travel office. As soon as I could, I went to the hospital’s Hajj office and booked a last-minute package.
Later that afternoon, I made more tea. Switching on the computer, I surfed the Internet for information on how to do Hajj. On the verge of the most fundamental pillar of being a Muslim, I found myself an imposter. I didn’t even have a copy of the Quran here in the Kingdom, let alone a book about how to do Hajj.
At last, I found a diagram explaining the stages of the journey. Designed for children, it was one of the few explanations I could find in English. I gathered up the pages as they unfurled from the printer. Fat arrows depicted steps that would soon be mine. I read hungrily. . . .
I called my astounded parents in England. My mother sounded remote, bemused, but I could sense my father’s thrill. I emailed friends, family, colleagues, mentors. I wanted them to know! I made a list of friends to remember in Mecca. On a piece of paper I assembled a list of those I loved. I wrote the names of my beloved, recording them carefully in pairs: husbands and wives; parents and children; families, friends, and relatives. I wanted to forget no one in my prayers.
The next morning at work was a busy one. I chatted easily with Nadir, the surgeon who was my assigned resident for the month. Nadir was a Hijazi Saudi, an officer in the National Guard and a recently divorced father of a small daughter. I watched Nadir as he placed final stitches in the patient we were working on. “Nadir, I didn’t tell you, I am going to Hajj on Saturday!”
A wide smile splayed Nadir’s beard, carefully maintained at a straggly religious length. “Mashallah, Doctora! That is great news!” I was surprised by his genuine joy. He hardly knew me, yet he seemed so pleased. Saudis could be so spontaneous and warm, but I never knew quite when to expect this.
“I am worried about Hajj, Nadir. How will I know what to do? It all seems so complicated, and I am going alone, with no one to ask.”
He threw back his head and laughed out loud, a rather shocking sight in Riyadh where I had already seen that public displays of joy were rare and looked upon oddly. Nadir stopped laughing, discarded his surgeon’s hat, and smoothed his glossy black hair. I was glad of the glass isolation doors. While we could be seen in the patient’s room, at least the laughter would be muted behind soundproof panes. Saudi relatives of other patients were already glancing toward us askance, wondering about this fraternization between a Saudi man and a Western woman.
“Please don’t worry, Doctora,” Nadir said. “Nearly everyone who attends Hajj is going there for the first time. No pilgrim ever knows what to do. Everyone takes small books with them, books of prayers and instructions.” His face lit up. “I will bring them for you!” Pleased with his plan, Nadir turned on his Birkenstocks and left, squeaking quickly along the hallway.
RIYADH TO JIDDA TO MECCA IN A DAY The short flight passed quickly. The seat belt sign came on and the 350 pilgrims prepared for landing. Internally, I braced. In a few minutes, I would be delivered into a Niagara of humanity. A squeak of rubber on burning hot runway and we landed in Jidda. Minutes later the door of the plane opened, admitting a torrent of noise. Sounds of a million men swarmed into the cabin.
Hajj was here.
We disembarked the plane in a tumbling mass, slamming into a sweltering wall of moist heat. The humidity from the Red Sea was staggering. Like a live beast, it traveled insidiously under my abbayah, entering at the wrists, snaking over my body, leaving a sticky trail of perspiration in its wake. I peered for Qudsia. Spying her a few steps behind me, I went to join her, and abreast we walked from the runway into the terminal ahead. . . .
It would take us the better part of half a day to reach Mecca, normally a forty-minute journey from Jidda. We creaked forward in suspended animation, the scenery barely changing, the angle of the sun descending imperceptibly, and around us a cacophony of buses, trucks, and vans, an interminable growling, which even thick plate glass could not obliterate. As the day lengthened, the bus grew no cooler even with the air vents fully open. My fellow passengers passed time engaged in prayer, some reading the Qurans they had brought with them, and others following the Hajj Imam in loud prayers. Eventually I could see the mountain ranges circling Mecca, dull brown, baking in the intense heat, remote and impassive to monumental traffic trickling by.
We were approaching a subterranean tunnel, hewn out of a mountain. Instantly, at its threshold, we joined a turbine of noise spinning on the cumulative growl of thousands of engines. Drawing the curtains back, I saw we were now pitched into darkness. Arabic letters on the license plate of the vehicle ahead of us were all we could see. The pallid light of our headlights cast a feeble beam in smog thick enough to bite. Tailgating, we made a giant articulated caterpillar; our bus a tiny segment of the gigantic mechanical centipede oozing its way deeper and deeper into the center of Mecca.
Already I was losing track of time. As I approached my Maker, all dimensions were magnified. His vastness was beginning to overshadow man-made measures of reality. I was entering a new universe where all human landmarks, whether of time or place, began to fail, pushed away by the spinning vortex of force that lay only a few miles way. We were in the central rip currents surging towards the Kaʿba. I could feel a tide pulling us forward.
Our driver, already fragile from his ordeal, sweated silently at the wheel, all the while the Hajj Imam standing at his side praying for Allah to open a route forward. We entered an eight-lane underpass and still we ploughed ahead. A couple of male pilgrims hurried to the driver and, after several minutes of discussion, the bus stopped in the tunnel alongside the curb. Parallel to our bus I could see the mouths of four escalators swallowing pilgrims whole and sucking them upward. All escalators were going up, none descending. Further along the tunnel I could make out other escalator entrances, peppered along the roadside, each surrounded by a static knot of white-clad male hajjis enclosing their female folk. This seemed an impossible place to stop, rather like getting out in the Midtown Tunnel in rush hour. I turned to ask the woman next to me, Randa, for an explanation.
“Oh Qanta, they want to stop here to go immediately to the Kaʿba. They can’t wait to go to the hotel first and then come here; they want to go now. Those escalators led directly to the Masjid al-Haram Mosque (the Grand Mosque). The Mosque is directly above. We are passing underneath the House of God!” She stopped, smiling at me. “We are underneath Hajj!”
THE GRAND MOSQUE At the very perimeter of the causeway, lines of wooden cubby holes no more than two feet high contained the shoes of pilgrims. Muslims remove their shoes to recognize the purity and cleanliness of any place of worship. Most were wrapped in small bags and stashed carefully away in the white wood pigeonholes until the pilgrims returned for the footwear when leaving the mosque. I kept my shoes with me in the small plastic bag, knowing well I would never be able to relocate them in the massive mosque.
As we descended yet another set of steps, the pilgrims ahead of us came to an abrupt standstill. Quickly we halted. I strained to see the cause of the delay ahead. Sounds vanished into silence. Thousands melted from vision. I found myself alone, standing at the gate of God.
I gazed upon the Kaʿba, eyes widening with wonder. The unobstructed view blurred with salty, unexpected tears. I was overwhelmed. A lump constricted my throat, then released, dislodged by a torrent of undammed, silent emotion. Tears were now flowing freely across my face, dampening the shabby veil around it. Unashamed, my feelings were vibrant with a divine energy.
I continued gazing. I was unable to peel my eyes from my Maker. He was here. He was everywhere. He had gathered me. He had forgiven me. My shoulders straightened, relieved of a heavy burden. My head lifted, unbowed without the weight of perpetual shame. My heart ached as it lurched open, stretching, suddenly swollen with relief. Inside me, the force chased away debris accumulated within once narrow, dark corners. I could hide nothing from Him and found myself no longer fearful of discovery. All my follies were exposed to my Maker and yet He loved me still.
In these brief private moments, I placed the burdens of my broken life aside, discharged of shame. I stepped forward lightened, free, absolved. In a cast of millions, in that moment of electric intimacy, my Maker welcomed me. As the Prophet had said, “If you take one step toward God, He takes ten steps toward you.” I could feel Him hurtling toward me, a colossal, joyous Father. I stood before Him, at last, His child.
It was full minutes before I returned to my surroundings, to my senses. Other pilgrims were in a similar state of ecstasy. None was aware of any other pilgrim. I reminded myself of the effect of group dynamics in such a huge crowd, but no rationalization could explain what I felt. I stared and stared at the cuboid building, bewildered at the energy emanating from its black-draped walls that beckoned me closer. It radiated light that even its sooty blackness couldn’t extinguish. Here, there could be no shadow, only light.
My eyes strained to see something, anything, to explain the phenomenon. The black building reverberated with animal vitality as though a heart pumped within it, or a soul stirred under the black Kiswah. The Kaʿba actually seemed to throb. My eyes were liars. While I could see nothing, I knew what I felt: palpable Divinity, proximal Grace. God was very near.
MINA VALLEY We hurried to prepare for the journey to Mina, where we would stay with millions of others in the Tent City. After hours of traffic jams and mayhem, the bus finally entered the Tent City, a settlement consisting of hundreds of thousands of tents and, for the brief days of Hajj, a population of two and a half million. (A week from now the entire city would be vacant for the rest of the year.) I checked the leaflets and found I would be staying in tent 50007. I memorized the number printed in Arabic; this would be my home until the end of Hajj.
Looking at the Tent City through the dirty pane, I could see it would be easy to get lost here. Awkwardly the bus negotiated the narrow tarmacked roads between terraces of tents. Like a searching sea monster, the huge vehicle prowled through acres of fiberglass canvas. Eventually we found our section.
As I stepped into the large and airy tent, sixty pairs of scanning eyes turned to assess me. None smiled in greeting. I ignored the cool scrutiny, accustomed to it after months of living in the Kingdom, where I was always watched both by men and by women. I moved quickly to find a relatively unoccupied place in which to settle. The hours of cramped proximity since Riyadh left me craving space.
I began to disrobe. It was a relief to unwrap myself from the noisy rustling prison of my abbayah. As I released myself from the tangle, the familiar freedom of discarding it still rushed back to me. Wearing it continuously since I had left Riyadh, the longest period of continuous veiling I had experienced, still was not making the adjustment to veiling any easier. As I shook my head free of the veil, I found I could hear again.
I looked at the women around me in various states of dishabille. Some continued to wear their abbayahs fastened closed and, retaining most of their headdresses in place, they pushed back the facial veiling to the top of their heads, securing it back with a small ribbon under the chin or a deft twist of cloth. While their faces were exposed, their hair remained fully covered, reminding me of Holbein’s Elizabethans who dressed in coifs. Literally, these Saudi women covered their hair indoors around women, much as the Tudors did in the 1500s. Already the medieval flavor of Wahhabi Islam was intensifying. Others had decided to take off their head coverings entirely. Against the far wall of the tent, a row of women sat on the floor leaning against the tent wall, their fleshy backs sagging into the curve of the canvas. Unmanicured fingers combed their long tresses intently, a row of strange mermaids unexpectedly washed ashore.
I was glad to be uncovered, even behind the scenes. I wondered why all the women didn’t immediately disrobe their outer garments entirely. Surely, they were just as hot and irritated from the long journey. Yet still they were compelled to maintain a forbidding boundary, even from women, distinguishing themselves as ultraorthodox. Overhead industrial-size air conditioners suspended from aluminum beams blew gales of icy air. For the first time since landing in Jidda, it was actually cool. Elsewhere, a row of women were dressed in their daytime clothes, having discarded their external clothing, and sat together, in various states of repose, one massaging her meaty foot, her ankle edema giving away a heart condition. Next to her, a Caucasian woman with short, wavy hair, almost ginger in color, was rubbing the nape of her neck, easing a knot of pain. These women were not native Saudis; if I could guess they seemed Lebanese or Jordanian.
In time, I began to unpack a few essential items. I glanced up, meeting a hard stare. A woman, perhaps forty-five years of age, was watching me intently.
She was already settled in a spot just across from me. Her thin daughter cowered just behind her left shoulder, flinching from attention. The mother assessed my attire, revealed now that the abbayah lay crumpled on the ground. Across my chest, a snug Guess T-shirt gave away its American origins and my Calvin Klein trousers, secured at the waist with a shiny Italian belt, divided my legs, identifying me as an unmistakably Western woman.
She visibly grimaced. Physically, I offended her. I tried to ignore her disapproval, wondering if I had somehow made a faux pas of some kind. As I was reaching for an item deep in the back of my case, stretching my torso and arms bared by short sleeves, I looked up at her and smiled casually, trying to be friendly.
“Hi,” I said, rummaging around in the case.
‘‘You say ‘Hi’ to me? Hi?” she snapped, immediately, as if primed for an angry response. Her English was precisely enunciated. Her face flashed. She was Saudi for sure, probably also Najdi and maybe even from Riyadh but obviously, by her English, she had studied overseas. “As a Muslim at Hajj greeting another Muslim, you say Hi!” she went on, practically spitting with fury.
I looked at her, nonplussed. There was such latent energy in her rage.
“You say to me: ‘Salaam alaikum,’ as a proper Muslim deserves!” she hissed, exhaling in annoyance. By now, I had completely abandoned the search in my bag and was staring at this woman who, while absolutely correct, was surprisingly angry for one performing Hajj herself. I decided to hold my tongue, partly because that was my job as pilgrim, and partly because she was correct. I should have greeted her as a Muslim deserves. I met her flashing eyes with a cool stare and held it, feeling guilty even for this defiance, but she had infuriated me. Her mute teenage daughter remained behind her mother, voiceless, irrelevant. . . .
Again it was time for food. Rashida and her crew of maids arrived, bearing trays of food for the tent. As they shyly offered the rice and lamb, the young ladies barely met my eyes. Some of them watched me askance, giggling with their scarf-endings held up over their mouths, muffling the offending sounds of laughter.
Rashida’s bustling bonhomie diffused the tension that had spilled from the angry woman opposite me. Rashida didn’t seem offended by my person even now that she could see my Western clothing. I was silently grateful to Rashida for her acceptance. I found myself more confident when she was in the room. I thanked her for the tray of food, “Shukran, Rashida.”
“Afwan, Qanta. Maalish.” (You’re welcome, no problem.) She responded, revealing a perfect set of strong, white teeth framed in her huge booming laugh. Even though she was raised in Mecca, and veiled life-long, never traveled, and married at an early age, her spirit remained indomitable, confident, downright brassy!
Touching nothing of the main meal, I peeled and ate an orange. My appetite was already waning; by week’s end, it would be gone. The late lunch ended in time for Asr (late afternoon) prayer. Women began readying themselves for worship. It was time to make a trek to the bathroom facilities. Before I could step out, I had to put the abbayah back on again. Haneefa and Rashida waited for me patiently, until at last I was ready. I took my toiletries and a small towel with me in a plastic bag. Like a visor, Rashida pulled her veil back down over her face, peeped out of the canvas door, and signaled to us to follow. I stepped into the incredible heat of a Hijazi afternoon.
I began to sweat almost immediately, especially at the surprisingly brisk pace that Rashida was keeping. She moved swiftly, her veil inflating behind her like a cape. Haneefa followed behind me, a thin bundle of nerves. We walked between rows and rows of tents, making several turns in sequence. I was utterly disoriented because at every turn the tented tarmac avenues repeated themselves endlessly in a kaleidoscopic confusion of symmetry.
Completing my ablutions quickly, I returned to my veiling. This time we positively rushed back to the tent in time for prayer. Rashida moved like a motorized mannequin. Boy, could she move! I stumbled to keep up to the best of my ability and was already dying to get out of the hideous veil.
Flinging back the canvas door, we again entered Tent 50007. Most women were relaxing after prayer, some folding up their prayer mats having just finished. . . .
I went to my corner, removing my shoes and hurriedly oriented my prayer mat to Mecca based on the direction of the women praying around me. Disrobing my abbayah but keeping my head covered, I began the short afternoon prayer.
“Allahu akbar,” I began softly, speaking the words just under my breath. I bowed my head, folding my arms, and tried to block out the surrounding chatter, surprised that the pilgrims were not more respectful to the few of us who were still praying. They were chatting noisily.
I bent forward at the hip immediately before descending into my first prostration. As I kneeled, the ground was hard and stony underneath the thin durries. It was distinctly uncomfortable. As I sat at the end of the first rakat, I prepared to rise to complete the second. I began to hear some clucking from behind me, the sound of pursed lips snapped in disapproval.
I frowned trying to concentrate, reminding myself that I stood in front of God while in prayer, yet even here in this holy land I was still so distracted. I descended again, flexing first at the hip, then standing, then descending into my second set of prostrations. As I held my forehead flat to the ground, my palms either side to my ears, supporting my weight as I kneeled in front of my Maker, I heard a rising chorus gain momentum.
“Haram! Haram!”
“Wa Allah, Haram! Haram!”
I was increasingly alarmed. In Islam, haram indicates the most heinous, disallowed substances or behaviors for Muslims: alcohol, swine flesh, sinful actions like murder, blasphemy, or suicide, among many others. What could be going on behind me? It was a monumental effort to stop myself turning to see what was unfolding in the tent. Something atrocious must be happening to trigger such an outcry. I couldn’t imagine what it was. I rushed through the rest of my prayers at breakneck speed. Then I remained seated this time, gabbling the requisite one hundred chants, a combination of Allahu akbar (God is Great), Subhan’allah (all Grace belongs to God), and Alhumdullilah (all thanks be to God). Bowing my head as I marked off my chants with the creases of my fingers, I was breathless, but I had to know what was going on. The sounds of “Haram!” were coming from somewhere near me in the tent.
At last I finished. Before I could completely straighten myself, a Saudi woman came straight up to me. Her Holbein hat framed her fury. I shrank from her.
“Haram!” she said, touching my exposed ear, which was peeping out of my headscarf.
“Haram!” she repeated defiantly, her chin upturned, scanning the room for any who could have been unsure of my disgraceful ways. I colored with shame, though only the puce tips of my haram ears could indicate it. I had deliberately pushed the headscarf behind my freshly washed ears immediately after entering the tent. The exposed ears allowed me to listen more clearly and formed a useful anchor for my slippery headscarf, which could stretch tightly behind my ears to keep the whole scarf secure during my various movements in prayer. Because I was surrounded by women, I was sure this was acceptable.
I had no response for her. She spoke no English and I spoke no Arabic but, my pride getting the better of me, I managed some defiance.
“Mafi Haram!” (Not Haram!) I answered her, gathering indignation from the remnants of my shame.
“Mafi Haram?” she mimicked, provocatively. “Mafi Haram?” and she stamped off muttering to herself, as if to say, “We’ll see about that.” Around me the noisy tent had fallen into an uncomfortable silence. Randa’s row of Palestinian and Jordanian moderates didn’t enter in the fray. No one wanted to anger another pilgrim, even if she was unjust in her comments or behavior. No one wanted their own or anyone else’s Hajj defiled, but already I had offended two of these women deeply, women who seemed to have no regard or fear of defiling my Hajj.
In the rising heat of my deepening chagrin I returned to my isolation. All I had to rely on was the knowledge of lslam my parents had passed on to me. I was not formally educated in an Islamic school. Instead, my family had always instructed their children in the home. These women were correcting me in ways I had never experienced before—severe, categorical, critical. There was no softness in their guidance. I was disappointed for myself and yet also for them. The spirit of unity among pilgrims seemed to have been left behind in Mecca.
After an hour or so another Saudi woman approached me, waving an olive branch. She smiled at me. “Salaam alaikum,” she offered. She sounded friendly.
“Wa alaikum salaam,” I responded, afraid to be hopeful.
She paused beaming at me, as though choosing her words. In carefully constructed English, she ventured a question. “When you converted to Islam, Mashallah?” she smiled, thrilled at the courage of her curiosity. I was dumbfounded.
“I have always been Muslim,” I began, not sure if she knew what I meant exactly. She continued to smile, revealing uneven, stained teeth.
“And your parents,” she asked, “also they converts?” I laughed, startling her. If only my parents could have heard this!
“No, Alhumdullilah, we are all Muslim.” I smiled at her confusion. Her question answered, she retreated back to a clutch of Saudi women and translated for them in Arabic. It seemed she was their spokesperson. They digested the new information and appeared to discuss me at length, finally sinking into a silence. Dissatisfied with my answer, they followed my every move with their cumulative gaze.
I hadn’t convinced them. They genuinely believed I was a newcomer to Islam, so alien was I in appearance, dress, and yes, so obvious my mistakes. I was just as enigmatic to them as they were to me. Like wary predators in a forest, we were circling one another, each creature assessing the other in the undergrowth of the huge jungle of Islam we had found ourselves in. Within myself I admitted their observation of my naïveté in performing my prayers was a sign of my poor practice and observation. Though born a Muslim, the fountainhead of my faith had just begun to flow. Inside I knew, these strangers were right: my conversion had actually begun.
CALLING DOCTORA! The day passed punctuated by regular prayers, food, and private supplication. I spent time burying myself in guidebooks, which Nadir had given me. I was constantly grateful to him for helping me. I wanted to know more about the women in my group, but my stumbling follies had subdued my curiosity.
Night fell, sleep overwhelmed me, and as soon as I could after prayers, I unrolled the bedding and stretched out on top of it. The room was semi-darkened though external lights penetrated even the heavy canvas, casting figures outside in a ghoulish glow. Somehow the Saudi pilgrims seemed more animated than during the day, whereas the rest of us were exhausted. Regardless of their chattering and snacking, I slipped into a deep sleep.
The ground was shaking, then seemingly the tent. Regaining consciousness, a stubby hand shook my shoulder awake.
“Doctora! Doctora!” a voice called to me. Out of habit, I was immediately alert. I rubbed my eyes, returning to my surroundings. The tent quaked to a cacophony of snoring. Perhaps it was time for an additional prayer of which I was yet again ignorant. I struggled to see my watch: two a.m. Feeling for my glasses, an anxious face came into view.
“Doctora! Doctora!” The Saudi woman seemed in distress, perhaps she was ill.
“Fi wajja?” (Is there pain?) I asked her, an attempt at the broken Arabic I had learned from Afrikaans-speaking South African nurses in my ICU.
“La, burra, burra.” (No, outside, outside.) She responded. Gesturing to me to rise, I had no option but to follow. Rashida appeared from behind. Even more alarming, she had lost all signs of joy. Something must be wrong.
“There is someone in another tent, Doctora Qanta, she needs an injection. Please, we need you to do this. Come.”
I didn’t have time to think how they could have known I was a doctor or how news of someone’s distress could travel from tent to tent when cell phones were still rarities in the Kingdom. I slipped on my shoes and pulled on my abbayah. I followed Rashida and the other Saudi woman out of the tent into the night. I had never imagined I would see patients at Hajj. I regretted coming unprepared. I hadn’t even packed Band-Aids.
Outside, the night was balmy with a delicious sea breeze. The darkness was impenetrable. We relied on the tiny beam of a flashlight Rashida was carrying. As she hurried, it stabbed a jagged path of light through the velvet night. Like miners, we carved our route forward. We walked past the tent avenues of the previous morning. I began to recognize some of the turns, but this time we were leaving our section.
MY HAJJ PATIENT Rashida was disappearing, around a corner. I ran to catch up for fear of being lost in the labyrinth of Tent City forever. At last she stopped at a tent exactly like ours. We stepped inside, again pulling back the canvas curtain. Even this late at night these tents were open to anyone to enter. They couldn’t be locked, and all pilgrims trusted they would be safe among the millions of pilgrims at Hajj.
Inside, forty or fifty women were in deep slumber, lips fluttering with soft snoring, some moaning as they changed position, aching in their sleep. We followed the beacon of light, careful to tiptoe between the carpet of bodies. There was almost no room for our footfalls. In the back of the tent, Rashida led us to one woman who was still awake. In the dark, I could see she was writhing in pain, her face furrowed in distress.
Judging by her black abbayah which was still fastened while she was trying to sleep, this woman was Saudi also, though her features looked Palestinian. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, though her obesity was aging. As I kneeled at her bedside, trying not to fall on my own abbayah, the overweight woman looked up at me with pleading eyes. Instantly, her frightened gaze transformed us both. We were now doctor and patient.
I turned to Rashida, asking her to translate when I needed help. Rashida nodded in acquiescence.
“Ana Doctora.” (I am the doctor.) I offered to her the Muslim greeting to other Muslims, “Salaam alaikum, Khaala.”
“Wa alaikum salaam, Doctora,’’ she replied trying to smile. She winced with an acute onslaught of pain. I noticed she was gripping her back. I was relieved she did not point to her flank. From afar, as she lay writhing, my first impression had been renal colic. For that she would need hospital transfer and who knew how that could be accomplished.
“Fi wajja, hinna?” (Is there pain here?) I asked, placing my hand gently over hers. It felt warm and dry though the knubbly joints of her fingers were deformed with telltale signs of osteoarthritis. At least her chubby hand, alabaster pale, didn’t feel febrile to my touch. I was reassured. I didn’t have the means to take vital signs.
She directed my hand lower, towards either side of her lumbar spine. I palpated her spine through her thin clothing. I could feel her muscles tensed in spasm on either side of her spinal column; paravertebral muscle spasm, common after hours of back pain. Possibly she had needed pain relief hours earlier, which would have prevented these painful knots. Judging by her weight and the signs in her hands, she probably had arthritis in the vertebral joints as well. The hard, stony floor underneath was doubtless agonizing for her crumbly spinal column.
Rashida talked to the woman and reported to me she did indeed have a history of severe arthritis. She had brought her usual medications, one of which was an injectable pain reliever, an anti-inflammatory. I raised my brows in surprise. This was not typical at all. There were far better ways to take these drugs. An intramuscular injection was usually reserved for those too ill to swallow tablets, patients who were normally hospitalized for more serious illness. Normally, the woman explained, her daughter would administer the injection for her, but here at Hajj she was traveling only with her husband, who couldn’t possibly enter the tent and who didn’t know how to inject the medicine anyway. She had made inquiries, but no one in the tent knew how to give an injection either. News had traveled that there was a woman doctor with a group of ladies from Riyadh, and so I had been sent for. I was amazed anyone could know anything here, but here at Hajj, just like everywhere else, women talk and try to find solutions for problems by networking! If only I could speak Arabic, I thought to myself.
The patient struggled to sit up and began searching through her bag. At last, with a flicker of triumph in her hazel eyes, she pulled out a packet of glass vials still encased in their plastic packaging. She also produced a syringe, thankfully still in its sterile packet, and soon a packet of alcohol swabs followed. I smiled. The patient was well-prepared. Looking at the vial, it was a large dose of nonsteroidal, just as I had expected. The labeling of the medicine and the dose was in English. I checked the expiration date. It looked fine, though I would have to give it even if it had been outdated. Old habits die hard even when they are impractical.
Without being able to wash my hands immediately before the procedure, I carefully wrapped the tear-dropped tip of the glass vial in the end of my abbayah scarf and, with the familiar satisfying yield of thin glass, I snapped it open at the neck. I unraveled the fractured glass from my scarf, shaking the tiny splinters into the dusty durries where they glinted in the dark. I instructed Rashida to hold the opened vial still, without spilling any of the precious liquid. Gravely Rashida assisted, while I next readied the syringe. Before drawing up the liquid, I instructed the patient to prepare for the injection. Because the dose was so big, it was best to inject her in the gluteus maximus muscle (in her rear) but the patient, so well-practiced at her role, was already prepared.
When I looked up, she had struggled onto swollen feet and turned to face away from me. Her dimpled right buttock, gleaming white in the dark, was already exposed, waiting patiently for the shot. In her right hand she had gathered her abbayah and dress, lifting them high around her waist, while her left hand clutched at her lower back. She wore no underwear. Perhaps she had removed them for bedtime, or perhaps this was the norm for the hot weather and difficult conditions of Hajj. I didn’t know the details, because in Riyadh I had been treating only critically ill patients, who arrived mangled from car wreckages or so gravely ill that they were covered in cloaks of equipment, rendering clothing impossible. I didn’t know these details. When I returned to Riyadh, I would have to ask my nurses about the customs of underwear in older matron Kingdom dwellers. For now, I finished aspirating the medicine, squirting a tiny amount out of the needle to avoid injecting any air into the patient. Drops of medicine glinted in the torchlight.
“Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim! Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim!” (In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate!) recited my patient, loud enough for both of us to hear.
With my left hand, I gripped her buttock, raising a meaty fold of flesh. The shot had to be intramuscular, not subcutaneous. I would have to dive through a lot of fat to reach the muscle tissue. Satisfied I was finally pinching her muscle rather than the layers of fat encasing it, I briskly plunged the steel needle into a fold. The patient winced but luckily did not move. Drawing back for a moment to check for the absence of blood, I emptied the syringe. The drug was in. Removing the needle, I wiped over the tiny puncture wound with an alcohol swab that Rashida had torn open in anticipation. We had no Band-Aid, so after it dried in a few seconds, I touched the patient’s hand, and she allowed her clothing to fall, covering herself once more. She turned around. Her face was tired, but the relief was already evident. She hugged me tight and thanked me.
“Alhumdullilah! Alhumdullilah! Shukran, Doctora! Shukran!” (Thanks to God, thanks to God! Thank you, Doctor! Thank you!) I struggled to emerge from her heavy embrace. I was embarrassed at her profuse thanks and blessings, which Rashida excitedly translated. All tension among the three of us was instantly gone, leaving us with euphoria.
Taking responsibility for a woman who wasn’t my patient, administering a drug I had not prescribed, trusting the patient who guided me to give her this medicine, all this was novel for me, and scary. But I was glad I could still be useful at Hajj, where so far I had felt woefully incompetent.
We bid farewell to the patient who was already relaxing back onto her bedroll, easing herself into a much-needed sleep after many restless hours. Retreating the way we came, we returned to our own tent-home. I nodded to the sleeping, squatting army of pilgrims who lined our route, still swaying on their haunches. I couldn’t be sure how long we had been gone. Inside, the women remained unrousable. Rashida retreated to her separate tent where she slept with the other maids, leaving with her flashlight. The Saudi woman who had guided us to the patient returned to her bedroll against the near corner of the tent and I went back to my spot, slumping against my suitcase. Covering myself with my angora cardigan (the only warm clothing I had) I lay down, sinking into a deep sleep myself. Looking at my watch, it was 3:45 a.m. Soon I would be waking up for Fajr (morning prayer).
A CHANGE OF TONE “Salaat! Salaat!”
I opened my eyes, heavy with fatigue. It was the same woman who had cried Haram. Now she peered at me intently, bending her arthritic back low, to see if I was awake. Today her eyes had lost their hostility. I almost detected affection. I wondered why. Seeing I was awake, she began to straighten up. Before she left, gruffly, she greeted me with salaams. This was a first! I quickly got to my feet, pulled on my abbayah, and hurried to make my ablutions.
Returning to the tent I prayed, this time (following the custom of the women surrounding me) I covered my ears. There were no catcalls of “Haram.” I was pleased. I was learning to be a better Muslim and perhaps, maybe because of my eagerness to improve, so too were others. As I sat counting off my “Alhumdullilahs,” my “Allahu’ akbars,” and my “Subhan’allahs,” a Saudi woman passing by corrected me, signaling me to keep count on my right hand, not my left, which in my distraction I had forgotten. This time I didn’t take offense but accepted the corrections. This was part of Hajj, to be allowed to improve and develop one’s skills of worship. I finished my prayer and readied myself for breakfast, which was already in progress.
I noticed Randa walking in from her morning ablutions. As she wandered the tent, she dried her hair with sporadic rubs from her towel, leaving her damp red locks standing awry. She returned to her place in the tent and waved a friendly hello.
As I returned the greeting, I couldn’t help noticing all eyes were on me. A line of teenage Saudi girls followed my every movement. In a silent row, still wrapped in their full-length scarves, which they wore, as though mummified, while praying earlier in the morning, they tracked me with their dark eyes. Each smiled at me shyly. One bespectacled girl even called, “Salaam alaikum, Qanta!” I responded, unsure how she could know my name. Elsewhere, older Saudi matrons nodded to me in acknowledgment, showing signs of actual approval. Overnight, something had triggered a volte-face.
“Salaams, Doctora Qanta!” Rashida sang, beaming even more than usual.
Randa grinned, explaining. “We all heard about your midnight rounds, Qanta,” Randa called out, “Rashida told us. Everyone has been talking about it since early this morning! News travels fast. They are impressed you are a doctor!”
“Once you have finished your breakfast, Doctora, there are some other ladies who need you. They are waiting for your help. You are so kind. I told them you would know what to do for their pains.” Rashida gestured to a row of Saudi women patiently awaiting the end of my breakfast.
I couldn’t help but smile at the age-old appeal of a doctor. The orthodox Saudi women sharing my tent valued the woman doctor and didn’t want to miss an opportunity for an opinion. Somehow my failings as a Muslim, one who in their rigid opinions wasn’t even expert in the execution of her prayers, were more than compensated by an ability to treat patients.
Islam places a great emphasis on easing suffering and the privilege of being a doctor. The Quran says it best in chapter 5:32: “If you save one life it is as though you have saved all mankind,” explaining the universally high regard Muslim doctors are held in by their fellow Muslims. Perhaps these women were not able to consult women doctors themselves. Unlike the grandmothers and mothers of Saudi Arabian National Guard military personnel who presented at my hospital in Riyadh, most of these women would have to rely on the local facilities, where fewer personnel were Western and even less likely to be female. I knew the lack of a female doctor was a deterrent to seeking medical care for Saudi women, just as it is in Pakistan or Afghanistan. No wonder they were so excited about sharing a tent with a woman doctor.
Randa had a different explanation, however. “They are impressed with you, Qanta, because you are a doctor. Until they found out about last night, they thought you were just a Pakistani maid.” She went on, even more bluntly. “They look at your dark skin, Qanta, dark as an Indian, and they noticed your friendliness to Rashida and Haneefa, the Hijazi maids, and assumed like those black girls, you were also a servant. They probably think you serve a family in Riyadh. They looked down on you because of your Pakistani blood and the fact that as a servant they didn’t think you belonged in this tent. Don’t worry, Sherief, my husband, gets this all the time too. He is dark-skinned and he is constantly mistaken for a Pakistani or Indian too. When they find out he is Egyptian, it’s not much better, though.
“You know the Saudis hate the Egyptians the most and vice versa. It’s to do with the economic inequality in our countries. Most Egyptians come to work in the Gulf countries like the Kingdom for economic reasons, so Saudis regard them as poor. And on the other hand, the Saudis like to vacation in Egypt, where they unfairly get a reputation of womanizing and drinking, so the Egyptians look down on them as very unhealthy.286 But in your case, you being with Qudsia doesn’t help much either. Because she’s black, I mean. I think most women here don’t know that she is a nurse, and anyway she is very difficult to talk to.”
Randa went on. “Last night when they heard about your trip to the other tent, they were quite shocked to discover you are a doctor. But they are pleased about that now! Now you will find they will all want to talk with you! They don’t care about your race!” She laughed, returning to apply more unscented lotion287 to her drying limbs.
I was shocked. I had indeed noticed that while I felt terrible about Rashida and her helpers waiting on us in the tent, like maids, retrieving cutlery, serving food, tidying up, serving drinks, preparing our beds, no one else expressed the same concern. I tried to be as helpful as possible, unused to being waited upon. After eating I always returned my plate and utensils to the bucket in which everything was collected and taken away for washing, and would just get up to retrieve my own cold drink from the refrigerator cabinet in the corner of the tent, rather than ask a maid to fetch me one. I had noticed the Saudis dropping half-empty, crumpled cans on the floor of the tent, leaving their litter for the maids to remove. Or worse, signaling to the maids to bring them another soda with a contemptuous and dismissive wave, not even articulating the words, let alone pleasantries like “please” and “thank you.”
This arrogant behavior made me feel uncomfortable and seemed unnecessarily unkind, especially by pilgrims at Hajj towards fellow Muslims who were trying to ease their Hajj. I had wondered why no one else in my tent seemed eager to help the overworked maids to clear away each meal; and now I understood: it was beneath my fellow pilgrims, who had paid top dollar for this “VIP Hajj.”
To me “VIP Hajj” meant I was able to travel in buses between the holy sites and stay in air-conditioned comfort in Mina, but to these other Saudi women it meant being waited on hand and foot and enjoying a sense of superiority over these dark-skinned maids from Mecca, poor women who had to work for a living and chose to make a few extra riyals in Hajj season. I felt disgusted. The entire point of Hajj was to remind Muslims of our equal status in the eyes of God and that only God determines if one Muslim is superior to another in matters of the purity of His believers’ hearts. Hajj was not an exercise in dominating the weak because of some form of economic power which, unlike each maid attending us, few other women in this tent actually earned for themselves. Worse than this, these women in my tent were feeling racially superior, to the maids and perhaps even to me.
I shouldn’t have been stunned. I had already uncovered some racism during my time in the Kingdom. I knew Randa was probably right. Skin color, previously something I had never considered in my years of living in the United States or England, had somehow invited discomfort to me in Riyadh already. It was while I worked among them that I first noticed how some Saudis discriminated, first among themselves and then among the expatriates. Discrimination in fact is how many of the Saudis define themselves. Saudi Arabia is about separation of gender, race, tribe, fiefdoms. I had developed a theory based on my crude observations, which explained the Wahhabi Saudi ecosystem surrounding me in Riyadh. Perhaps it reached here too, in a tent full of Saudi orthodox Wahhabi women from Riyadh.
The highest position in the Kingdom’s racial food chain was occupied by the “pure” Saudi who was from the Najd, the central region, the province of which Riyadh was the first city (and therefore the nation’s capital). The Najd was also the historical, geographical, and political node to the current powerbase: the rabidly orthodox Wahhabi clergy. I use the word pure as they, the pure Saudis, did. I had never heard anyone describe themselves as Pure English, Pure French, Pure Nigerian, Pure Indian, or any such. “Pure American” of course was an oxymoron, an impossibility which endeared America so much to me. “Pure Saudi,” however, I heard repeatedly; first when I stumbled across a gorgeous Saudi woman, settling a check at my beauty salon and “undercover” luxury gym in Riyadh, Al-Multaqa.
Ahead of me in line, I had watched the extraordinarily beautiful Saudi woman at the counter. Her creamy skin, enormous eyes, regal stature, and slim, muscular figure were a breathtaking combination, even for another woman to behold. I surmised her to be of Palestinian origin. By now in Riyadh, I was learning Palestinians are a physically beautiful race. I couldn’t wait to tell her this and triumphantly expose her origin, a testament to my growing sophistication and insight in this unusual world.
She signed her bill with an elegant twist of her slim wrist, weighed down by the obligatory Chopard “Happy Diamonds” watch, de rigueur for the cultivated Saudi lady. She placed her gleaming red cell phone, shiny like nail polish, into an oversized Fendi handbag, and started to fasten her elegant, tailor-made abbayah. She covered her eyes with Dolce & Gabbana shades. Her languid, lean, perfectly manicured, unpolished fingers quickly fastened the jeweled cords to her costly abbayah. Elegant heels, probably Balenciaga, completed the ensemble. I was bewitched by this beautiful creature. I had never seen anything more elegant.
“Are you Palestinian?” I remembered blurting out to her. “You are so beautiful,” I told her, simply. She smiled a self-possessed smile, which slowly curved open, revealing a mouthful of pristine teeth, made perfect with expensive West London orthodontics. It was a dazzling smile. Compliments on her beauty were evidently commonplace, even here in a veiled Kingdom. She responded coolly, “No, I am Pure Saudi. I am not a Palestinian.”
Brushing past me, she exited, leaving me puzzled.
At the time I barely gave it a thought, watching the rich woman leaving in a cloud of fragrance. This was hardly so very different than many Western societies, I thought, recalling frosty, pooch-carrying, anorexic cadavers scuttling up and down Madison Avenue. So Saudi Arabia had a similar culture of frosty exclusion, a claim to superiority based on economics and tribal origins. The purity that the mysterious woman mentioned was actually an expression of Saudi aristocracy.
Later I realized this was my introduction to the Saudi self-perception of purity. Purity (and the froideur that usually accompanied it) was, in a few short months, already a powerful, recurrent theme in my time in the Kingdom: either one had it or one didn’t. I even learned this was a problem for Saudi men, who were forever seen as hybrid races, doomed forever to be migrants because of grandmothers from elsewhere in the Arab world where three generations in the country was “off the boat.” This hybrid breeding would actually limit their ascent in organizations. Men, while Saudi nationals by birth, were of “impure” blood, their races were mixed, and they were excluded from the highest positions of power. “Oh yes, but he is an Iraqi Saudi,” would be a common lament.
I would discover my observations were not unusual. Ziauddin Sardar observed something similar about racial hierarchy in the Saudi philanthropic culture when he wrote about the “Saudi Sandwich” in 2006. He had noted deep-seated preferences based on race as well. I realized the algorithm of racism I had encountered in Riyadh had intruded even on the Hajj.
Here at Hajj, I was experiencing a taste of the same poison. While the women in my tent weren’t nearly as wealthy or polished as the bewitching woman at Al-Multaqa, they subscribed to the same view, deciding (based on skin color and ethnicity) that I surely must be a handmaid or at best nanny to a poor Saudi family who couldn’t afford the much better Filipina maids, having instead to resort to Pakistani or worse, Bengali help. In fact I did remember one Saudi woman in the tent asking me if I was Bengali.
Yet I couldn’t connect this racial purity with the warmth of the toothless, lined Bedouin women who showed me such affection in the hospital. I thought about the Bedouin patients I had attended in Riyadh and what they had taught me of acceptance. Surely these Bedouin were the purest Saudis of all, Daughters of Arabia, borne of tribal forebears who had roamed Arabia before the slick of oil wealth suffocated their culture, washing them up like half-dead seagulls into the new urban metropolis of modern Saudi Arabia. I decided it had to be wealth which made the stark difference. All I had to do was think back to the “real” Saudis I had met in Riyadh, so different than the women sharing this tent with me.