Standing Alone (14 page)

MECCA
—One afternoon my father and I ventured through the streets of Mecca to find a first cousin of mine who was on the pilgrimage with her husband.

After much searching, we found a dingy, narrow stairwell in the lodging house where they were staying. As the fat-cat pilgrims from America, we had pristine and immaculate accommodations at the Sheraton. They stayed in the accommodations that the government of India had secured in Mecca for its pilgrims. Most countries had similar accommodations, with buildings designated by nationality. I crept inside, gingerly. Oil streaked the walls near a gas stove that pilgrims used to cook meals. Here there were no Sheraton buffets. My cousin stood in front of the fire, frying an omelet. “As-salaam alaykum!” she cried out, pleased to see us.

“Walaikum as salaam!” we answered.

She led us into a small room with half a dozen cots lined up at different angles to each other. To my shock, men and women, unrelated to each other, were sleeping in the same room. Her husband sat at the edge
of one bed, while a woman pilgrim lounged on another cot. The other men were in various stages of getting up from their sleep. Everyone sat up to welcome us into their space. My cousin introduced the pilgrims to us. The men were certainly not her mahram, but somehow, under the circumstances of the pilgrimage, it was halal for them to sleep in a mixed-gender room. Everybody seemed comfortable with the arrangement, and the women talked freely with their faces uncovered and only their hair loosely covered with scarves. Seeing my cousin accept this kind of living arrangement in Mecca was even more meaningful to me because she and I shared the same cultural programming. She was my ancestry. She would never have lived in the same room as male strangers in Bombay, but somehow she transcended all of her programming to do so in Mecca.

My experiences with my mixed-gender tour group, my forays into the Sacred Mosque where men and women prayed together, and my look at my relatives' pilgrimage accommodations revealed to me the inherent contradictions in Muslim society. Men and women mingled comfortably in Mecca. How could men and women be equal and interact without this burden of sin in Mecca but not elsewhere? This question had a profound impact on me. Places like Saudi Arabia strictly segregate men and women, but in the West Saudi men and women freely circulate in mixed-gender situations. Even where Muslim women are allowed to work in the West, the attitudes of segregation still prevail in traditional communities; even at dinner parties in Morgantown, working women accept sitting separately from men.

Religious dogma reaches into the most intimate corners of our lives. Most religions have repressive rules about sex except in marriage. Muslim leaders translated these attitudes into rules about women's behavior in public, and now sexuality has become repressed in Muslim societies. This association of sin with sexuality makes women feel a shame about their sexuality and sensuality that is yet another factor in the inability of Muslim men and women to intermingle innocently.

I believe this repression creates fears that are manifested in dysfunctional ways. A renowned twentieth-century Syrian poet, Nizzar Kabbani, noted the sexual double standards that emerged with the idea that women must be protected while men are free to wander. From the perspective of a woman, he wrote, “My brother returns from the whorehouse proud and strutting like a cock. Praise be to God who created him out of light and us out of vile cinders and blessed be He who wipes away his sins and does not wipe away ours.”

I saw too that a hypersexuality emerges with the strict segregation of men and women. I saw that in India, where men and women don't mix as freely as they do in the West. Sexually repressed young men went out of their way to grope any woman walking through Hazrat Ganj, a bustling business corridor in the city of Lucknow. India has even established laws in recent years to prosecute men for “Eve teasing,” its slang for sexual harassment. Traditionalists claim that strict segregation of men and women protects women from this kind of harassment. But I consider segregation a cop-out and not an effective response to the challenge of creating societies with healthy gender dynamics.

If men and women can pray together in the Sacred Mosque of Mecca, why can't they do so elsewhere? Surely, it seemed, if gender equality was good enough for Mecca it was good enough for far-flung places like my hometown of Morgantown.

ON THE ROAD FROM MECCA TO MEDINA
—The prophet's early preaching at Mecca met with limited success: during the first three years he gained only thirty converts, a modest beginning certainly. His own tribe of the Quraysh persecuted him and his followers because of the revolution he was fomenting. Meccans attacked Muhammad through a fierce smear campaign designed to tarnish his reputation, and Muslims met in secret for fear of torture or even death. The followers of Muhammad, known as his
sahaba
, or male and female companions, practiced their religion for thirteen difficult years amid constant physical and mental torment. They couldn't build houses of prayer, and they didn't dare to pray at the Ka'bah. When they did, they were immediately punished. To the people of Mecca, Muhammad represented a threat to the status quo. He was preaching new rights for women, including their right to inheritance, political assembly, marital respect, and divorce. He was delivering sermons rejecting the polytheism practiced at the time and leading followers to believe in a monotheistic religion of faith in one God.

But Muhammad persisted, and gradually his following grew. Indeed, it grew so much that the powers-that-be in Mecca started to get alarmed. They sent a delegation to Muhammad and promised him great riches if he would just stop preaching. But Muhammad wouldn't be bought off. “Woe unto you idolaters,” he told the city's officials.

The authorities realized they were going to have to take more definite action if Muhammad was to be stopped.

In 622, the Quraysh decided to move against the Muslims with the force of arms. Muhammad and his followers fled to Medina, about 277 miles to the north, where the prophet had been invited by city officials to mediate a civil dispute. The prophet and his close companion Abu Bakr climbed a mountainside outside Mecca to a cave where he hid from his enemies. In Islamic history it is recounted as a moment of divine protection. A spider is said to have spun its web quickly over the entryway, fooling the enemy soldiers into thinking the prophet Muhammad could not have crossed through there.

For me, the hajj was much deeper than religion and faith. It was like living history. I had never understood the concept of the Islamic calendar until I set off on the journey from which it started. Muhammad's migration to Medina fourteen centuries ago marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. The Islamic Society of North America advertised its 2003 hajj itinerary as “Haj 1423
A
.
H
. Program”;
A
.
H
., or “after Hijrah,” means after the emigration of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina. The year represents an important turning point in the history of Islam: Muhammad left his hometown defeated for a new beginning.

Like those first Muslims, we headed north to Medina, pulling away from the Mecca Sheraton as the crowds flooded to the Ka'bah for the early afternoon prayer. As our Mercedes Benz bus wound along the road to Medina, Tom and Jerry waved to me: the Saturday morning cartoon characters fluttered on a blanket hanging from a balcony. I dozed off and awakened to see the splendor that is my son. He was curled up in my arms, playing gently with his own lip. The name of the explorer Marco Polo stretched along the side of our bus, and I thought about the historical journey on which Shibli and I were embarking. We were following in the footsteps of the prophet when he went on the
hijrah
, or “migration,” from Mecca to Medina.

At a rest stop a Chevrolet Suburban with bedrolls and canvas bags tied to the roof pulled in beside us, and a group of African pilgrims tumbled out. Back on the road, an open pickup truck glided by our bus, with camels inside. “Camels!” I whispered to Shibli. Nearby, the mountains unfolded like bodies reclining. Farther away on the horizon was a hazy purple silhouette of rocky mountains. Coming from the lush green Appalachian hills of West Virginia, I was stunned by this landscape. It was endless rocks.

Soon we were reminded once again of the exclusivity that defined this culture. A green highway sign like the one that greeted us on the road to Mecca appeared over a lane to an exit.

FOR NON-MUSLIMS

Travel into Medina was also restricted for non-Muslims.

Safiyyah and Samir were asleep as we entered the outskirts of Medina, but Shibli was awake. I propped him on my lap to see the distant lights of the city. At this moment, we pulled over quickly into a gas station, a silhouette of the mountains in the horizon.
LAND AND AIR PILGRIMS RECEPTION CENTER
, the sign read.

“We're pilgrims,
jaan
!” I whispered to Shibli, invoking the Urdu word for “life,” an honorific similar to “dear.”

I read a sign with a missing
s
in the middle of it:

THE GOVERNMENT CUSTODIAN OF THE HOLY MO QUES HAS THE HONOR TO SERVE YOU.

I remembered a journalist friend joking about the Saudi government's choice of the word
custodian
to describe its role toward the mosques of Mecca and Medina. Coming from a culture where the word has become the politically correct alternative to
janitor
, it struck me as a little odd too.

Although we hadn't entered the city, it felt as if we'd completed our hijrah. “Al-hamdulillah, we've reached Medina.” I could feel the pulse of the prophet's mission to create a better society as I followed in his path. But I realized that I hardly felt the resonance of his life in our modern-day Muslim world. It seemed as if we had lost the passion for a better world that drove the prophet to risk death to realize his vision. It seemed to me that there were great lessons in the birth of Islam that our communities would do well to learn.

The moon hung over our left shoulders as we pulled out of the reception center and into the city of the prophet's first community. I was curious to find out what I would feel there.

MEDINA
—We entered this city, like the prophet, in the dark. Before Muhammad arrived there, the city was called Yathrib. The prophet entered
the city after sunset, and after his migration it became al-Madinah, “the City,” because it became the model for the ideal Muslim city. It also became known as al-Madinah Munawwarah, “the City of Illumination.” Most of all, it was known as al-Madinah al-Nabi, “the City of the Prophet.”

Far away from the persecution he had faced in Mecca, the prophet was able to build the first house of prayer, in a small town outside of Medina called Quba. The mosque of the prophet was built in the center of Medina. That was where we were going—to Masjid al-Nabawi, the Mosque of the Prophet. It was a simple place made of mud bricks with a roof of palm leaves, balanced on wooden poles and illuminated with torches at night. A stone marked the
qiblah
, or direction of prayer, and a tree trunk had been the platform from which the prophet preached.

The mosque had been like a community center. Muslims met in the courtyard and discussed social, political, religious, and military matters. By the time he migrated to Medina, the prophet had remarried and in fact had more than one wife. Islamic scholars said his marriages were culturally accepted for political and social reasons (many of his wives were elderly widows). I had to admit that was something I was still trying to reconcile. The prophet and his wives lived in huts around the edge of the courtyard. The mosque wasn't just a place for prayer. Karen Armstrong, a renowned religious scholar, wrote in
Islam: A Short History
that “in the Qur'anic vision there is no dichotomy between the sacred and the profane, the religious and the political, sexuality and worship. The whole of life was potentially holy and had to be brought into the ambit of the divine. The aim was
tawhid
(making one), the integration of the whole of life in a unified community, which would give Muslims intimations of the Unity which is God.” It was there that the prophet reformed the community so that it was a model for social justice. The prophet had a freed black Abyssinian slave named Bilal sing the call to prayer at his mosque. Bilal's emancipation and position of honor marked Islam's principles of equity.

Medina was the model for the kind of community the prophet envisioned, including women's participation and leadership in everything from the big issues of the day to the seemingly mundane. Importantly, the prophet created a community that was built on feminist ideals. The principle that women's rights are equal to men's rights defined Islam and the life of the prophet Muhammad. He was a social reformer who believed in justice, equity, and tolerance. Asma Gull Hasan, a young American Muslim lawyer, wrote in her book
American Muslims
that the prophet was Islam's first feminist. After all, he accepted as his first love and first wife a
woman who was savvier, wealthier, and more successful in the world than he was. Few men, Muslim or not, would accept that kind of strength and worldliness in a wife. Based on the revelations the prophet received, the Qur'an gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before women gained such rights in the West.

What truly touched me were the accounts of the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina. During the prophet's time and for some years thereafter, women prayed in the prophet's mosque with no partition between them and the men. Historians record women's presence in the mosque and participation in education and in political and literary debates, as well as in asking questions of the prophet after his sermons, transmitting religious knowledge, and providing social services. When the prophet heard that some men were positioning themselves in the mosque to be closer to an attractive woman, his solution wasn't to ban the women but to admonish the men. The mosque was not a men's club when the prophet Muhammad built his
ummah
, or “community.” Nothing in the Qur'an restricted a woman's access to a mosque, and the prophet told men: “Do not prevent the female servants of Allah from visiting the mosques of Allah.” The prophet himself prayed with women. Umm Hisham (“mother of Hisham”) memorized the Qur'anic chapter “al-Kahf” “from no other source than the tongue of
rasulullah
,” the messenger of Allah, “who used to recite it every Friday on the pulpit.” Zainab, a wife of the prophet, strung a rope between pillars in the mosque to rest upon when she tired between prayers. Another hadith says the prophet greeted women seated in the mosque.

There was a porch for conducting civic affairs, and each corner had a different purpose. In one corner Islam had an early Florence Nightingale, the Italian nurse who pioneered new respect for nurses in the modern day. Rufayda set up a medical tent on the mosque porch to hospitalize and nurse men and women injured in war; the prophet had delegated this responsibility to her, and it was a tradition that continued for centuries in mosque activities.

When some of the young girls of Medina showed interest in participating in the Battle of Hunayn, a place between Mecca and Jeddah that would require a journey of several months, the prophet took fifteen girls with his army to help in the war effort. Another time the prophet consulted a woman named Umm Salama during the signing of the Treaty of Hudaybiyya with his opponents in Mecca and heeded her advice.

At home the prophet empowered his wives to express themselves and appreciated independent-minded women of strong will, such as a woman
named Ramlah, who rebelled against the patriarchal constraints in her life. She was the daughter of a man named Abu Sufyan, a leader in the prophet's tribe of the Quraysh and a passionate foe of the prophet. She defied her father's wish that she remain within the religion of the tribe and converted to Islam with her husband. To escape persecution for their decision, she and her husband started a new life in the African empire of Abyssinia, which was led by a Christian ruler, Negus. There her husband converted to Christianity and insisted that she do so also or face a divorce. Ramlah's options were limited: relinquish her right to determine her own religion by either returning to her father's home or remaining in her husband's home, or leave her husband and live alone. She chose to live alone. Ten years later the prophet sent a proposal of marriage, and Ramlah married him happily.

A strong woman in the prophet's life was his wife Aisha. Although her age when she married the prophet is of some confusion, she was most certainly a virgin child bride of perhaps the age of nine when she went to his house. As with the issue of the prophet's multiple wives, I didn't know quite what to make of her youth. It, like polygamy, was most certainly a part of the local culture, and feminist Muslim scholars say the prophet vastly improved the rights of women at the time and encouraged their self-expression. In the case of Aisha, she was a firecracker. She spent her girlhood devoted to her husband's theological mission, even though she was often immersed in the melodrama of reality. She battled her own jealousy over the beauty of the new wives the prophet married, such as a Jewish woman with the same name as my niece, Safiyyah. However, Aisha secured her place in history as the prophet's favorite wife when he died with his head on her lap. After the prophet's death, she related extensive anecdotes about his life to scribes in the mosque. In my estimation, she was Islam's first journalist; though her work didn't appear in anything like a newspaper, it filled the historical record. She relayed direct quotes, chronicled detailed narratives, and delivered rich political, social, and religious commentary. Today nearly half of the Islamic jurisprudence of the Hanafi school of thought, which is followed by 70 percent of Muslims, is based on the theology and jurisprudence communicated by Aisha to her students.

She became the transmitter of the fourth-largest number of hadith, or sayings of the prophet. To do so, she met with male scribes in the mosque. She also earned respect as a profound critical thinker and great expert in law, history, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. She corrected many hadith, and her corrections became the subject of an eighth-century book
on jurisprudence that is considered mandatory reading for any student of hadith.

After the prophet's death, Abdullah bin Umar, a leading companion of the prophet and a son of Umar bin al-Khattab, the second caliph of Islam, reprimanded his son for trying to prevent women from going to the mosque.

A profound Iranian Muslim thinker, Ali Shariati, appreciated the feminist spirit of the prophet and told his students:

I was reflecting on these lives in part because in Medina I was surrounded by reminders of the living history of Islam. The experience was having a profound impact on me, even though I had no idea where it would lead me. Muhammad turned to women as his political, spiritual, and religious advisers. He treated women as they should be treated. Like Jesus, he honored women. The legacy of male rule after the prophet's time was becoming clear to me: the spirit of Muhammad had been betrayed by centuries of men who instituted rules to protect their power. “The women of the first
ummah
in Medina took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle,” wrote Karen Armstrong in
Islam: A Short History
. “They did not seem to have experienced Islam as an oppressive religion, though later, as happened in Christianity, men would hijack the faith and bring it in line with the prevailing patriarchy.”

Being on the hajj, I thought about the role of women in the history of Islam. It made me sad to realize that people—most often men—had made up rules that not only defied logic but also were not theologically and religiously grounded. As women, we have to stay alert and refuse to be subject to the edicts that deny us our rights. As I was trying to reconcile my
identity as a Muslim, I couldn't help but think about the life of the prophet. In what I read about his life, I saw a respect for women's status that couldn't help but inspire me. And what I saw in Medina was much more in line with what I felt about being a Muslim woman.