Stranger to History (14 page)

We left Jeddah in Hani’s Lexus on an elevated highway. The city’s poorer areas were visible below, an expanse of single white lights punctured by dozens of green, tube-lit minarets. Once the road cleared Jeddah, it levelled into a wide, multi-lane highway. The Kingdom’s unlikely fusion of grim desert mountains and American chain restaurants gathered close to the road. When their coloured signs grew fewer, we were left with the darkened shapes of hills dotted with floodlights. There was hardly any traffic and the desolation the desert brought on emphasised the security of the fast-moving, air-conditioned car. It was strange, in this prudish country where one could be pulled up for wearing shorts, to be out and about wearing little more than a towel.

On the way, Kareem asked for the story of the tattoo. I told it to him and Hani, complete with details of beer consumed, the little Goan hut besieged by monsoon and the drug-addict tattoo artist who was now dead. Then the solemnity of our present purpose intervened, and I felt uneasy. Hani and Kareem seemed near to me in many ways, but there were aspects of the religion that were written into their cultural framework, such as the visit to Mecca. And, as my exclusion grew, I felt like I implicated them in my discomfort.

My unease must have been apparent because Kareem soon asked the question that had hung over our undertaking since it began. ‘So, do you think of yourself as Muslim?’ he said, the question’s seriousness masked by the lightness of his tone and an artful smile.

‘Well, I’m not sure if this is the best time to get into it.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘Well, sort of,’ I answered weakly. ‘Culturally.’

A cultural Muslim: a term my father gave me when I asked him the same question. I used it now, not fully knowing what it meant, more as an out than as an honest answer to Kareem’s question. I had learnt from my experience with my father that the term meant more than just a lax approach to religion: it contained political and historical allegiance to other Muslims. In the Kingdom, I could see how cultural Islam on the sub-continent would once have been something quite apart from the Islam of Arabia, but I was also aware of a changing balance. In a world that was less local, less particular, Islam, to the detriment of cultural Islam, also became more global, more homogeneous; men in Beeston and men in Istanbul, less far apart.

The journey to Mecca took less than an hour, and before the city, the highway split into two: one was for ‘Non-Moslems’, known as the Christian bypass, and the other was the one we took, for ‘Makkah-Moslems only’: an exit for the faithful.

‘Where does the other go?’ I asked.

‘Off a cliff,’ Kareem laughed.

The car passed under two vast intersecting concrete slabs that formed a cross.

‘What was that?’

‘Oh, that’s just for tourists,’ Kareem said.

It was only when we drove a few hundred metres past the overturned concrete cross that I could make out its shape: it was a colossal Koran stand.

Soon after, Mecca’s hills and skyscrapers came into sight. A curved road brought us into the city with unexpected speed. The skyline I saw was nothing like what I imagined. Even though I was prepared not to see an old city, I had imagined a lower city, more scattered. But the city we entered was like the financial district of a metropolis. There were cylindrical, tin-can skyscrapers, with little balconies; white apartment buildings, many storeys high; hotels, with reflective-glass windows; and twin-tower office buildings. I imagined businessmen in hotel suites surfing the web while looking down on the Grand Mosque, or Meccan executives swivelling in chairs as they planned development deals and handled pilgrim tours: their food, their lodging, buses to the different holy points, an apple and a soft drink as a morning snack. We passed one mountainside covered with low, expansive dormitory housing, a sprawling shanty rising from the base of the mountain and reaching close to its summit.

‘Many of those houses will be demolished by companies such as Jabal Omar,’ Kareem pointed out. ‘The whole mountainside has been bought over. Development in Mecca is proving problematic.’

As we got nearer to the centre, Mecca’s commerce – dozens of little restaurants, religious bookshops, clothes stores, shopkeepers sitting idly outside them, airline offices, a sign for Pakistan International Airlines – cluttered the bases of the towers. Some of the buildings had Islamic touches, a colonnade of little pointed arches at the base or geometric designs on the façade while others were Marriott-style fronts of blue glass and beige stone. Much of the architecture was from the seventies and eighties: heavy, four-square buildings that gave off a whiff of damp carpets, dim lighting and plywood furniture. At this evening hour, even though it was low-season, there was bustle and bright lights. Men ambled across the road freely and robed figures queued at a fast-food restaurant with a bright yellow and red sign. Descriptions of the old Mecca suggest a similar clutter of tall buildings, but of stone and more along the lines of Jeddah’s old houses, narrow with little windows. I felt some sadness at not seeing that old city gathered tightly round our destination, the city’s nucleus and main public place.

The other surprise was how African Mecca felt. Everywhere I looked I saw African figures in white, sometimes with skullcaps and sparse, kinky beards. Their sudden presence in Mecca expanded my notion of the Arab world, reminding me of countries like Chad and Mauritania, and Sudan, only a narrow strip of sea away. I felt I entered the deepest sphere of Arabia, where the peninsula faced Africa rather than Asia. It was this proximity that allowed members of the Prophet’s family and early Muslims, persecuted by the pagan Meccans, to seek refuge in Abyssinia. There were so many Africans that at last I asked Kareem about it.

‘It’s a big problem,’ he replied. ‘They’re west Africans who come for
hajj
and stay. Half the domestic help are
hajji
s.’

We drove into a plaza of humbling proportions, composed of white light and marble. Behind us, cranes hung over the skeletons of partially completed towers, their unfinished silhouettes vanishing into the night sky.

‘Bin Ladin.’ Kareem grinned, referring to the construction empire the al-Qaeda leader’s father founded. Relishing the surprise that name brought to the face of a foreigner, he added, ‘See? You need to be very close to the royal family to be given a job like that.’

Once the car had driven away, and we were half-naked specks on the marble plaza, Hani said, ‘I’ll read and you repeat after me.’

The Prophet of Islam was born and lived his entire life in what is today Saudi Arabia. There was so little that was old in what I’d seen of the Kingdom that I had to remind myself of that fact. Neither Islam nor the Prophet ventured much further than Arabia during his lifetime. In fact, the entire orbit of Islam in those early days was concentrated within a radius of a few hundred miles from where I stood. The details of the Prophet’s life, unlike Jesus’s and the Buddha’s, are rich and well documented. He was born in Mecca. He worked in the caravan trade with his uncle, Abu Talib. When he was twenty-five, he went to work for Khadija, a rich, forty-year-old widow, married twice before with children, whom he soon married. The young man without means and the rich, middle-aged woman spent the early years of their marriage trying to have children; the boys died in infancy. During this time, Abu Talib’s son, Ali, came to live with the Prophet and Khadija. Ali, the Shia hero who later married the Prophet’s daughter by Khadija, was also his cousin and the Prophet himself had lived with Abu Talib when he was a boy.

When the Prophet was forty he had his first revelation. Five years later, he received divine instructions to become a full-time Prophet. The twelve years that followed the first revelation were spent in Mecca and the verses revealed in this period are very different in content from those that come afterwards in Medina, a town a few hundred miles away. The later verses are more specific and grounded in the particular concerns of seventh-century Arabia while the earlier ones concern the universal questions that men face. The years in which these verses were revealed were not easy for the Prophet. The pagan Meccans persecuted his small band of followers and they were beset by financial troubles. In 619, the Prophet lost his wife and his uncle-surrogate father, Abu Talib. Over the next couple of years, his life was threatened and he was driven from his hometown and took refuge in the oasis city of Medina. Ten years later, after another set of revelations, a triumphant return to Mecca and the consolidation of an Arabian empire, he was dead. The glorious years of victories against the world’s great empires came later. In the time of the Prophet, the champions of the faith were a small, rag-tag group on the run. The world of Islam was confined to oasis communities, desert valleys and battles between warring tribes.

All this for me was a revelation. Many of the hard facts from the Prophet’s personal life make their way into the Book and Traditions. ‘Islam has many rules about this world,’ Abdullah had said to me in Turkey. ‘We say that for a person who is a Muslim, the religion will have something to say to him at every second of his life.’ This was one aspect of the faith’s ‘completeness’, its detailed control of the believer’s life from his personal habits to his food choices.

In Arabia, it was possible to see these commandments as organic, suited to the place, the way Hindu ritual can seem in India. And it was their old tribal past that the Prophet had in mind when he gave the Arabs their religion, a well-balanced reform of the existing way of life and of which the pilgrimage to Mecca, a pre-Islamic custom common to all the warring tribes of Arabia, was an abiding symbol.

Even though the Prophet’s family had been custodians of the Kaba, it was not his first choice as the new religion’s direction for prayer. Thomas Patrick Hughes wrote, in the nineteenth century,

At the commencement of Muhammad’s mission, it is remarkable that there is scarcely an allusion to the Ka’bah, and this fact, taken with the circumstance that the earliest Qiblah, or direction for prayer, was Jerusalem, and not the Ka’bah, seems to imply that Muhammad’s strong iconoclastic tendencies did not incline his sympathies to this ancient idol temple with its superstitious ceremonies. Had the Jews favourably received the new prophet as one who taught the religion of Abraham, to the abrogation of that of Moses and Jesus, Jerusalem and not Makkah would have been the sacred city, and the ancient Rock and not the Ka’bah would have been the object of superstitious reverence.

But the Jews did not welcome the Arabian prophet. Mecca itself only came in the last years of his life. In 629, the idols were still there and the Prophet, according to a treaty with the Meccans, was permitted a visit of three days. At noon, on one of the days, his companion, the slave convert Bilal, climbed on to the Kaba and sounded the first Muslim call to prayer. The next year, the Prophet and his armies occupied Mecca and destroyed the idols in the Kaba. It was then – two years before the Prophet’s death – that the ancient pagan pilgrimage common to all the tribes of Arabia was recast in an Islamic mould. Hughes continued, quoting Professor Palmer’s Introduction to the Koran:

Here, then, Muhammad found a shrine, to which, as well as
at
which, devotion had been paid from time immemorial; it was one thing which the scattered Arabian nation had in common – the one thing which gave them even the shadow of a national feeling; and to have dreamed of abolishing it, or even diminishing the honours paid to it, would have been madness and ruin to his enterprise. He therefore did the next best thing, he cleared it of idols and dedicated it to the service of God.

This was another revelation about the pilgrimage to Mecca: it had very little to do with Islam and everything to do with Arabia. It was a pre-Islamic Arabian custom refashioned by the Prophet to unite the Arab tribes and celebrate the fathers of their race, Abraham and Ishmael.

And, just as it was possible to imagine Islam as organic in Arabia, it was possible to imagine it as alien in places where the faith went. Hybrids would have formed between Arabian Islam and the cultures of the places to which the faith spread. Cultural Islam was the result of these mixtures and it was this, rather than the letter of the Book, that was followed. This Islam, with its mysticism, its tolerance, its song and poetry, its veneration of local saints, often common to Muslim and Hindu in India, was the religion that gave me the string I wore round my wrist.

But in modern Saudi Arabia, this type of worship felt like a religion apart from the literalism that was followed. The dark, fleshy pilgrim had approached Hani and Kareem expressly to state his objection. Hani had replied to my weak defence: ‘Don’t say that. That’s even worse. The Wahhabis hate Sufis.’

But even in Arabia it wasn’t always like that. The historical events that had made our short exchange possible were also behind the growth of a more global, literal Islam.

In the first years of the nineteenth century, the Wahhabis invaded Mecca. Most of the Hejaz region at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire and the Sultan was perturbed by their success in the region and by the doctrine they propagated. Its founder was Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, who had made a religious and political pact with Muhammad ibn Saud, a local chieftain and ancestor of the present Saud family, half a century before. The objections of the Wahhabis were to the excesses they felt had come into Islam, indeed to cultural Islam, and taken it away from the pure simplicity of the Prophet’s example. In the years they controlled Mecca, they attacked sacred shrines, superstitions, idolatry and luxuries, such as silks, satins and Persian pipes. They attacked shrines like the one from which my string had come, places of music, dance, amulets and comparatively tolerant, flexible doctrines. At the time these attacks were taking place, a large part of the Muslim world would have known faith of this kind.