Stranger to History

by Aatish Taseer

  The hijacking brought my father into the long fight against General Zia, and soon after, our small, makeshift family felt the first tremors.

  Mecca Reprise: ‘Muslims Only’

  I left Syria in the aftermath of the cartoon riots and took a car and driver south to Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom’s border was a vast complex of warehouses, a mosque with a white minaret and a high shelter with square pillars, also white, which cast strips of welcome shade on the blinding tarmac. The flat, arid land was dotted with barbed-wire fences and tall, stooped steel lights. The glare seemed to suck the colour out of the landscape, and the painted yellow and black paving stones that ran round the square pillars stood out as the only shred of colour. A mid-morning quiet prevailed. Since Syria, the land had turned to desert. Almost everyone was now in full Arab dress, the women heavily veiled, and the Levant’s racial mixtures had faded. It was more than a border: it was the ancient boundary between the classical world and Arabia. Visible beyond a narrow stretch of brilliant sea was Egypt.

  But for a few men in white robes and pickup trucks – familiar with the routine, arms outstretched with papers – there was hardly anyone at the border. Our SUV drove up to the immigration window as if it were a tolbooth. A man, with a boyish face and a light beard, looked hard at my passport, then glanced at me. Saudi Arabia was a closed kingdom and I was lucky to have the visa. The immigration official seemed impressed and called a colleague to take a look.

  ‘Riyadh?’ The colleague smiled.

  ‘No, Jeddah,’ I said, smiling back.

  He stamped an inky black oval with a little car and the Kingdom’s sword-and-palms crest into my passport and waved us through.

  ‘Saudiya,’ the driver whispered, as the SUV rolled out of the shade of the border.

  My first view of the Kingdom was a hard, arid mountain on whose gritty surface the words ‘La-il-la, il-allah’ – there is no God but God – were written in huge white chalky letters. Soon after a sign read ‘Makkah 1171 km’.

  Jeddah was the historical gateway city to Mecca. I waited for Hani in a square in its old city. I hardly knew him, but a mutual friend had put us in touch, and when he heard of my plans to go to Mecca, he offered to take me. He also arranged a guide for old Jeddah. ‘You don’t have to touch the stone,’ the old guide advised, after I told him of my purpose that evening. ‘People push and shove, but it is enough to salute the rock.’

  Around us the maroon and black rugs of the Grand Mosque in Mecca hung outside shops. Jeddah’s old city lacked the bustle of markets in other places. The afternoon pall that I now associated with the Kingdom in general prevailed here too. There was also the conspicuous absence of Saudis and women. The men carrying boxes or wheeling carts were Pakistanis in grubby salwar kameez. The only woman I saw was a large African, covered, but for her face, entirely in black. She sat in the shade of a neem in the middle of the square. Her head was in her hand, and her elbow rested on her knee. She was dusty and her stricken expression spoke of destitution. The complete, virtually enforced absence of women made her, with no male escort and exposed to the gaze of all the men who walked past, seem still more wretched and alone.

  A breeze from the sea made its way through the square. Among the tall old buildings and the semblance of trade, it was possible for the first time to think of old Arabia in the Kingdom, and of Jeddah as it had been before the discovery of oil, a major Arabian port and the gateway to the holy city.

  The guide said I would enter the mosque from the southeast gate. But first I had to announce my intention to complete the umrah, an off-season pilgrimage to Mecca, and to wear the pilgrim’s clothes. For this, I was meeting Hani within the hour.

  Like many young Saudis, he appeared in his national dress, an off-white robe without the scarf. He was well-built and handsome, with a prominent jaw and cheekbones. His slightly gapped teeth gave him a fierceness unsuited to his warm, friendly nature. He had just finished work at a bank and said that we had to make a few stops before we prepared for Mecca.

  The first was at his family house, which, like many, was in a compound where different members of the family also had their houses – low bungalows, spread out over a big lawn. Hani’s grandfather’s bungalow was a dim, spacious place with a sparsely furnished drawing room, and large windows, overlooking the garden. It had the decorum that elderly people’s houses sometimes do, of old upholstery, furniture and framed photographs. No one was at home and the reason we stopped there was so that Hani could pray. I wouldn’t have thought this about him, this strict adherence to the hours of prayer. Earlier, he had produced two neatly rolled joints from his pocket.

  The prayer stop made me a little unsure. We were going to Mecca, but we hadn’t discussed my religious credentials, and it would have felt strange for me to join him as if I, too, kept the hours of prayer. Besides, I was still unsure of my co-ordination, especially without the security of other worshippers. So I wandered into Hani’s grandfather’s study, a comfortable, well-lit room of dark wood and leather, its walls covered with books, many on politics, energy and religion. Through a crack in the door, I caught sight of Hani, his large frame and classically Arab features, kneeling and submitting, muttering the prayers. His ease as he prayed, his comfort with the faith’s liturgical language, set against my own unfamiliarity and the impending pilgrimage, gave me a pang of exclusion.

  The pilgrim’s clothes, a stack of white towels, were already in the car. When Hani had finished praying, we drove to his friend Kareem’s house to put them on. It was turning out to be a cool February night.

  Kareem was unusually good-looking, in a pale, wolfish way, with light eyes and hair. He had a cynical manner and a mocking smile. The house’s high walls were painted a reddish-orange colour. It was modelled on a Spanish hacienda with stone arches and a swimming-pool. Kareem’s little brother was at home and sauntered past in shorts and a sports jersey. The house had all the comforts of life in the Kingdom – flat, wide-screen televisions, large refrigerators, low, comfortable sofas. We made our way through a den of sorts into Kareem’s room, which seemed unchanged from his childhood.

  ‘Should we have a last cigarette?’ Kareem asked.

  The state we would be assuming was called ihram, which literally meant ‘prohibiting’. Once we were in it, it was unlawful to do a whole list of things, of which I thought, mistakenly, that smoking was one. As I finished one of Kareem’s Marlboro Lights, I had a strange feeling of adolescence. I don’t know if it was Kareem’s pre-college room or the pleasure of a stolen cigarette or, in a deeper sense, the fraternal connection the faith inspired. There was some current of macho comradeship and familiarity that I’m sure I didn’t exude, but felt obliged to slip into when I was with Muslims. That fraternal feeling, whatever it was, was amplified now by the generosity of the two men I hardly knew, who had opened their houses to me and were taking me to Mecca.

  This feeling of adolescence was reflected in my awkwardness. I felt a fraud: for not being versed in the meaning of the prayer and rites we were about to perform, but also for being curious, rather than believing. I had a fear of being exposed, which turned out to be well-founded. A few moments later, after we had washed ritually – faces, part of the scalp, hands to the elbows and feet to the ankles – in Kareem’s bathroom, we dressed in the pilgrim’s clothes, two seamless white garments to be worn with nothing else. One was tied round the waist, the other thrown loosely over the left shoulder. It was important that the right shoulder was exposed as this followed the Prophet’s own example. The problem was that, from another far more adolescent experience in Goa, I had a tattoo of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, on my right arm. Kareem and Hani looked at it in shock, and then with some amusement. Tattooing was not only forbidden in Islam – ‘Muhammad forbade the custom of the idolaters of Arabia to prick the hands of their women and to rub the punctures over with wood, indigo, and other colours’, Mishkat, Book 12, Chapter 1, Part 1 – but to have a tattoo of a Hindu god would spoil more than a few pilg
rimages and possibly land me in trouble with the religious establishment. It was decided that I would make the pilgrimage with the second white garment wrapped round both shoulders, closer to the example of an old woman in a shawl than the Prophet.

  When we were dressed, we prayed together, announcing our intention to make the visit to Mecca. I fell into an easy rhythm in which I paid no attention to my movements in relation to the others’. I took as long as I wanted for the submission, which I liked, and though I had no prayers to say, I enjoyed the privacy so soon after the anxiety the tattoo had caused. By the time I sat back on my legs and felt the ligaments at the top of my feet stretch painfully, my breathing changed and I was aware of a new undeclared ease that had formed between the three of us.

  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 hajjis.’

  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 Pr
ophet 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.