I wandered, not aimlessly, but in a state of confusion and disorientation, until I happened upon a boulevard that seemed devoted to the tourist trade; modestly luxurious restaurants, souvenir shops, cafes, bars, stores displaying the signs of international brands I well knew from Paris, airline ticket offices and travel agencies; a street such as might be found in any city of the western world, with advertisements in English, French, German, Arabic, Greek, and signs in shop windows proclaiming what languages would be understood within.
Here I was able to find a tourist agency catering to prospective hadjis, easily enough to tell by the photo-mural in the window of the Al Haram Mosque crowded with hadjis even if the availability of “Complete Hadj Packages” had not been proclaimed in signs of several languages.
Even here the men behind the line of desks all wore western clothing. Each had a computer terminal and small sign telling what languages he spoke. I chose one who spoke both Arabic and English.
I was offered a “Complete Package.” A round trip airline ticket. A room in a hotel in Mecca. A visa obtained from the Caliphate consulate. The services of a tour guide. Even an ihram, the mandatory white robe for hadjis, which one kept to use as a blessed funeral shroud.
When I inquired as to the price, I had a rude shock.
4500 euros, which I was assured was a bargain not to be found elsewhere.
Such a “complete package” was the last thing I wanted, and not just because it would use up half of my funds. Travelling on a Caliphate passport, I would need no entry visa, and a hotel room booked by a tour agency could leave a computer trail, and who knew what other services a tour guide might provide to whom.
“I don’t need an entry visa or a round-trip ticket,” I told the agent, showing him my Caliphate passport.
He raised his eyebrows. “Even so, you will need a hotel room, and they’re mostly already booked, except for the rooms blocked by agencies.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You’ll end up sweltering in a tent with a dozen men you’ve never met.”
“Is not mingling with brother Muslims from all over the world part of the experience?” I told him. “How much for just the ihram and the plane ticket?”
The tour agent frowned. “1750 euros with a round trip ticket,” he admitted grudgingly.
“I don’t need a round-trip ticket, I’m going home.”
“The planes are already booked-up. There’s nothing available without the full package.”
“Not even with a…special expediting fee?” I said, palming two 50 euro notes.
“For 150, I’m sure I can find something available,” he told me, and we had left the world of the west and were back in the souk.
“How much for a one-way ticket?” I asked, producing the additional baksheesh.
“2300 euros.”
“But that’s more than a round-trip ticket!”
He shrugged. “Mysterious are the ways of the airline companies. But another 50 will buy you advice that will save you 600.”
I handed over yet more baksheesh.
“Buy the round-trip ticket and throw away the return,” he told me.
* * * *
I had to wait two more days for my flight to Jedda, and I spent them trying to explore and fathom Istanbul. It was a fascinating city to explore, but difficult to fathom.
There were quarters, with their old dwellings, little open air souks, and local mosques, that would not have been out of place in any city or town of some size in the Caliphate, were not the Turks dressed in western clothing to a man. There were quarters which would not have been out of place in central Paris. The Palace of the Ottoman Sultans with its domes and towers rivaling anything in the Caliphate as a monument to the glories of Islamic Architecture. The sterile glass palaces of Coca-Cola and Sony. A heart-breakingly beautiful waterfront looking across the Bosphorus to the Asian shore. Malodorous restaurants nearby. Bars. Cabarets. Flea market souks and the enormous Grand Bazaar.
And the great Mosques, the Blue Mosque most lovely among them with its plethora of domes, and its minarets done in masterful tilework. Yet I could not bring myself to pray in any of these, for, like the palaces, the main streets, the squares, the monuments and the parklands, even they were overrun with tourists.
They removed their shoes before entering but did not ablute themselves, nor did they pray. I remembered how I had felt as an interloper in Notre Dame, the uneasiness, the shame even. These infidel tourists had no such scruples and showed no such respect upon entering a house of Allah. They were there to gape and gawk and babble their marvelment at the artwork and that was all. It was a desecration.
A desecration in which the guardians of the mosques had surely collaborated. As Ali would have said, they had turned the grand mosques into disneys of themselves.
Indeed much of Istanbul seemed to be a disney of the “quaint world of Islam,” a Muslim city maintained by the Turks who counted themselves Muslims as a series of museums within a European city for the custom of the tourists, much like the beggars and street urchins who swarmed around them.
I could not understand these Turks, who prayed in the mosque but dressed like infidels, who scorned the Caliphate, the righteous guardian of holy Mecca, but turned their holy places into tourist attractions. What sort of Muslims were they? Certainly not Caliphate Muslims. And yet not like the French beurs either, who longed to be fully accepted as Muslim Europeans.
Only when I visited the Hagia Sophia did I begin to understand.
This mosque had once been a Christian cathedral. When the Turks conquered what had been Christian Constantinople, they had renamed it Istanbul and in triumph they had cleansed the magnificent cathedral and turned it into an even more magnificent mosque, turning this temple to the infidel god into a holy house of Islam.
The Hagia Sophia then was a monument to the triumph of Islam over Christianity in Europe. The tourists who swarmed through it did not seem to take it as a desecration of what had once been their temple. To them it was another “museum,” not a monument to their defeat on their own continent. They accepted the Hagia Sophia as simply one more architectural marvel of Europe.
In that was this victory of Islam over Christianity on European soil made total.
And when I understood that, my opinion of Istanbul and the Turks reversed itself. The beurs of Paris were Muslims in a city in Christian Europe.They would always be French Muslims. But Istanbul was a city in a nation of Muslims. The government might be aggressively secular, the nation might not be under Islamic rule, but it was ruled by Muslims.
Istanbul might prostitute itself for the tourist dollar and euro but here the infidels were guests and outsiders and always would be. Here the Turks had accomplished what the beurs never could.
Istanbul was the only great city of European Muslims.
In everything but their Faith, the Turks were Europeans. They were not Arabs, but they were Muslims. And was that not what truly mattered in the eyes of Allah? Was that not what made Islam the one truth faith and the light of the world?
I did not know it at the time but my hadj had already begun.
* * * *
The ticket to Jedda was on an A-380 Super Jumbo, with the galleys and first and business class seats removed so that almost a thousand passengers could be crammed into the plane like a herd of sheep. And as it was the custom for hadjis to arrive all dressed alike in their identical white ihram robes, a herd of sheep is what we resembled, down to the smell in the overcrowded airplane.
This made for an unpleasant flight, but it well-suited my purpose. The customs post would be clogged with anonymous hadjis, most of whom did not speak Arabic, the agents would feel themselves overworked, and such a situation would enhance the chances of anyone with a Caliphate passport being waved through with only a perfunctory check.
Mecca had no airport of its own, the Jedda
airport was the port of entry for hadjis arrived by air. It had been built for that purpose, and so it was huge, the largest airport in the world. From the air it seemed larger than the city of Jedda itself, with something like a dozen runways, and at least an equal number of terminals, all with planes hooked up to every mobile boarding ramp, and more backed up on the taxi-ways.
One of the terminals was surrounded by military aircraft in dun and brown camouflage paint; jet fighters, helicopters, transports, and other planes whose military purpose I could not discern. The man sitting next to me was a Turk, glowering out the window at this sight, but he had passable French, and he sourly explained that a few years back the Caliphate had decided that the Jedda airport might as well serve as its main military air base the rest of the year.
We circled the airport for the better part of an hour, and it took another hour to arrive at a gate. By this time, the air inside was foul and steaming, and so was the mood as we debarked with agonizing slowness through the single jetway provided into a passageway that led directly to a vast hall of baggage carousels as crowded as the grandstands at a football match. I had only my carry-on suitcase, but I made myself wait around in this melee of white-robed hadjis until I saw that the customs and passport stations at the far end were thoroughly mobbed and backed up well into the carousel area.
I joined the rear of this crush of people lugging large suitcases, bags, cardboard cartons, and other unwieldy encumbrances, and managed, without attracting undue ire or attention, to slither into the middle of it with my single carry-on suitcase, as yet more hadjis piled up behind, taking up a strategic position in front of a man struggling with an immense wheeled steamer trunk and three pieces of hand luggage and behind a man dragging a thick roll of carpets secured with knotted rope.
When he finally reached the long table with two harried customs agents behind it, they constrained him to untie the thing and lay out the carpets one by one to search for contraband, which took an exasperating eternity as far as they were concerned, and likewise in the eyes of the man behind me, sweating, groaning, and apparently cursing in Turkish.
As the carpets were being rolled back up and tied, I opened my single suitcase to be as helpful as possible, and laid it on the table as soon as the heavy roll was removed. Seeing as there was nothing in it but clothes and a guidebook to the Hadj in Arabic, I was waved through with grateful little smiles.
There was another mob scene at passport control. Fortunately for me, though the crowd of Turks I was caught in would no doubt have counted it my misfortune, there was no separate short line for those holding Caliphate passports, since such holders were far too rare to waste an idle agent on them under these conditions.
I waited patiently until it was my turn and then as soon as I handed the agent my passport I began engaging him in a good-natured smiling wide-eyed conversation I hoped he would find tiresome.
“May the blessings of Allah be upon you, as they have been upon me to return at last from the lands of the Infidels and as a haji, perhaps you will be so graciously kind as to direct me to a hotel that a hadji of such modest means might afford to—”
“All booked up,” he muttered at me gruffly.
“I have never been here before, and I have no idea of how to get to Mecca from—”
“Take the monorail, it’s—”
“And how might I find it in all this crush and—”
“Follow the signs!” he told me in a tone of patient exasperation. “And if you can’t read, follow the pictographs on the signs!”
“And once I arrive, where may I find—”
“Please!” he grunted, glancing at my passport perfunctorily and handing it back. “Can’t you see that there are about a million Turks who don’t speak Arabic waiting? Not to be rude, but can’t you see that you are being rude keeping them waiting with idle chatter?”
“A thousand pardons,” I told him shamefacedly, turning to the man behind me, “and to you, my brother!”
“Please, in the name of Allah!” the agent sighed, motioning me to be gone with a peremptory wave of his hand.
* * * *
The monorail station was another sea of people, rendered more placid by learning that the ride was provided by the Caliphate free of charge. The long trains came, loaded, and went swiftly, one after the other, and it took less than twenty minutes for me to board.
There were no seats and we stood packed together like grains of white rice in a sack, but the mood was quietly jubilant and reverent, like Friday prayers in a thronged mosque, only much more so, for we were hadjis on our way to Mecca!
The monorail paralleled a broad highway, zipping by the cars and trucks and buses bumper to bumper, forming a traffic jam inching the entire length of the road through the desert from Jedda to Mecca. On either side of the highway, seas of white-robed pilgrims marched afoot under the sere sun-bleached sky. It was breathtaking, soul-soaring, a mighty continuous river of the Faithful flowing unbroken under the broiling sun towards the Holy City.
And while I could hardly count myself the most pious and reverent of Muslims with the deaths that weighed on my soul, surely I was one of the most jubilant among these hundreds of thousands, these millions.
I had heard it said that the Hadj was the journey, not the destination, and as I stood there shoulder to shoulder with my brother hadjis in that monorail car as it crested the desert pass through a rocky defile and I beheld Mecca nestled in the bowl below surrounded by low and hardly-vegetated mountains, I understood the truth of it.
I realized that my hadj had begun on the morning after that terrible slaughter in Paris, and it had been Saddam’s bungled bank robbery and the practical advice of Ali, which had set my foot upon it.
My hadj had been an escape across the lands of the Infidel from the police, an abluting swim across a river to evade possible Caliphate assassins, a safe return to the Caliphate by guile.
It had hardly been a hadji along the path of righteousness, nor had it been undertaken for purely righteous reasons, and yet the most Merciful Will of Allah had allowed it to take me here. And if the Hadj had not yet purified my soul of whatever wrongs I may have committed in His service, it had already purified it of any doubts in Him.
The Hadj is a journey, and as the train descended the heights into Mecca, I understood that its destination was but the beginning of a life-long journey to wherever surrender to His Will might take me.
In that thought I found peace.
In that sense I had already arrived.
CHAPTER 19
The monorail unloaded its cargo of hadjis into a huge ground station where a sea of pilgrims was already flowing out of it through at least a dozen exits. Knowing little or nothing about the city save the name of the Grand Mosque, I chose the one marked “Al Masjed Al-Haram Street.”
While the minarets of the Al-Haram Mosque were visible above a surprisingly modern cityscape apparently a not-arduous walk away, I found myself on a boulevard lined with hotels; gleaming four star towers, more modest ones, a dozen or more in immediate sight.
The street had been closed off to traffic and the roadway as well as the sidewalks were clogged with a wide river of newly-arrived hadjis making their way to the mosque to perform the umra, the rite required of all Muslims entering the Holy City, though the Hadji itself would not begin for another two days. But since this direct route to the Al-Haram Mosque passed many hotels, I decided to to secure a room along the way.
I failed utterly. Grand or more affordable, I was turned away at all that I tried, and I tried at least a dozen as I made my way towards the mosque. All of them were full. The last one I tried had a kiosk in the lobby with a connection to a central booking computer. There was a long line before it, and each hadji who consulted the agent before the terminal walked away lugging his baggage and frowning. When it was my turn at last, I was told that no rooms at all were still available in Mecca n
or even in distant Medina.
All I could do was proceed to the mosque to perform my umra and pray along the way that Allah Himself would somehow provide. And so I joined the tide of hadjis flowing towards the Mosque, one more white fish in a school of thousands upon thousands moving as one towards a single purpose.
Al Masjed Al-Haram Street was beyond crowded; we were packed together, rubbing against each other, smelling each other’s sweat under the hot sun, and the march moved slowly. Yet it was nothing like being packed in a sweltering rush hour Metro car, for we were not a crowd but a community, praying, chanting, making way for each other, a procession that was hardly stately, but joyously tranquil.
There was no god but Allah, we were His hadjis, and there was no time but the unhurried now. My worries about lodging were forgotten, the dire event in Paris, the French police, Caliphate assassins; all that seemed to have existed in a false world outside of this, the only true time, Allah’s time. I was a hadji among hadjis, nothing more, and praise be to Allah, nothing less. I realized how alone and isolated I had felt in Paris even as a caid among caids, even as a boy in this same Caliphate yearning to be elsewhere.
Now I understood what the “Umma” really meant. I had been taught in the madrass that the Umma was the world-wide community of all Muslims everywhere, a simple political definition easy enough for a small boy to grasp with his mind. But now I was within it, rubbing up against it, hearing its voice, smelling the sweat of Arabs, black Africans, Asians, Europeans, mingling with my own, the magic of the Meccan sun transforming otherwise noxious body odors into a perfume become sweet in my nostrils. Now I was one with the Umma. Now I understood it with my heart.
* * * *
The Al-Haram Mosque was shaped like some outsized sports stadium, low but vast and with many entrance gates, but with five minarets towering above it, and clad in green tiling. Two of the minarets flanked the largest and most ornate gate, the Fatah Gate, and there were several other major gates only less impressive by comparison. Hadjis pressed tightly together entirely surrounded it, waves of us surging inward toward it like a sea of white breaking against an island’s shore from all sides.
Osama the Gun Page 14
