A Sinner in Mecca
PRAISE FOR A SINNER IN MECCA
“Parvez’s heroism is rare and his courage well documented. Putting his own life at risk, he takes us on a surprising and compelling journey through the frontlines of his much-contested faith. A brilliant follow-up to his films, A Jihad for Love and A Sinner in Mecca.”
—Reza Aslan, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zealot and host of CNN’s Believer
“In our lives, we face a choice of whether to live with judgment or reach deep within ourselves to find an inner moral compass that leads us to a metaphorical Mecca of unconditional love. With his powerful, brave book, A Sinner in Mecca, Parvez Sharma takes us on his hero’s pilgrimage, teaching us of an ethereal truth: the Qibla, or direction of Mecca, resides within each one of our hearts.”
—Asra Q. Nomani, author of Standing Alone
“Sharma’s gripping journey unfolds with cinematic splendor, giving those of us who will never experience the Hajj firsthand the next best thing. This book examines modern Islam’s beauty and its ugliness with an unflinching gaze and a hopeful vision for its future.”
—Cole Stryker, author of Hacking the Future
“Parvez Sharma’s Hajj pilgrimage is not only a journey to Mecca but to his deepest self. Both a Muslim and an out gay man, Sharma writes bravely and brilliantly. His religion is ancient. His story is timeless.”
—Kevin Sessums, New York Times bestselling author of I Left It on the Mountain
“As a gay man and a Muslim, Parvez Sharma’s unique personal journey is reflected in this powerful examination of faith, sexuality, and gender. In a divided world, Sharma fearlessly crosses the boundaries and barriers that separate us from each other and finds common ground in the search for love and truth.”
—Cleve Jones, author of When We Rise
PRAISE FOR A SINNER IN MECCA (THE FILM) (ASINNERINMECCA.COM)
The New York Times Critics’ Pick: “Mr. Sharma has created a swirling, fascinating travelogue and a stirring celebration of devotion . . . we emerge from his film more enlightened.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “Wrenching . . . gritty . . . surreal and transcendent; visceral and abstract . . . an undeniable act of courage and hope.”
The Los Angeles Times: “Challenging his own faith in the face of adversity.”
The Washington Post: “Complex . . . Revelatory . . .”
The Village Voice: “Next time you hear politicians or right-wing broadcasters asking why ‘moderate’ Muslims don’t denounce terrorism, show them this movie.”
Thompson on Hollywood: “Combines the political, personal and spiritual in a remarkable way.”
The Guardian: “With poetic simplicity . . . a delicately personal story and a call to action.”
NBC News: “The talk of the documentary circuit . . .”
New York Daily News: “Takes its audience where no movie has gone before.”
The Daily Beast: “Goes undercover . . . A rare look . . . Sure to be controversial.”
Vice: “Brilliant . . . Rare . . . Takes aim at Wahhabi Islam . . .”
Slant Magazine: “A work of vital political and social import.”
Paper Magazine: “Surreal . . . Bold . . . An incredibly rare insight . . .”
Yahoo News: “A rebuke of Saudi Arabia.”
Indiewire: “Powerful, illuminating . . . a remarkable examination of contemporary Islam.”
BBC Persian: “Shocking and courageous.”
Screen International: “Unprecedented . . . surreal.”
Globe and Mail: “A first-hand look at the Amazing Muslim Race . . .”
The Toronto Star: “A deeply personal film about faith and forgiveness.”
DocGeeks: “Moving . . . Brave . . . Visceral . . . Insightful . . .”
Screen Daily: “Meaningful . . . A testament to courage . . .”
The Daily Mail: “Powerful.”
Jahan News (Iran Govt.): “An attack on Islam.”
* Also visit http://nyti.ms/1gRQPhl for a full-feature profile on the filmmaker in the New York Times.
All the events and people in this book are real and told accurately to the best of the author’s memory and ability. Many names and identifying details have been changed for the individuals’ safety and mostly per their request.
Copyright © 2017 by Parvez Sharma
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
BenBella Books, Inc.
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Send feedback to feedback@benbellabooks.com.
First E-Book Edition: August 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Sharma, Parvez, author.
Title: A sinner in Mecca : a gay muslim’s hajj of defiance / Parvez Sharma.
Description: Dallas : BenBella Books, Inc. 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008521 (print) | LCCN 2017021631 (ebook) | ISBN 9781944648404 (electronic) | ISBN 9781944648374 (trade paper : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Sharma, Parvez. | Muslim pilgrims and pilgrimages--Saudi Arabia--Mecca. | Homosexuality--Religious aspects--Islam. | Wahheabeiyah--Saudi Arabia.
Classification: LCC BP187.3 (ebook) | LCC BP187.3 .S5155 2017 (print) | DDC 297.092 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008521
Cover and insert photography © Yousuf Zafar
Copyediting by Brian J. Buchanan
Proofreading by Kimberly Broderick, Amy Zarkos, and Rachel Phares
Text design and composition by Aaron Edmiston
Cover design by Sarah Avinger
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For Dan, my very life, and for a magician called Andy Tobias.
“Whoever performs Hajj and does not have sexual relations with his wife nor commits sin, nor disputes unjustly, then he returns from Hajj as pure and free from sins as on the day on which his mother gave birth to him.”
—A hadith attributed to Prophet Muhammad and compiled in Sahih Bukhari, arguably the most influential book in the Sunni canon
CONTENTS
Map of the Middle East
Map of the Indian Subcontinent
Prologue
Chapter 1:Li Beirut
Chapter 2:An Alien with Extraordinary Ability
Chapter 3:Pube Face, Towelhead, Camel Fucker, Cave Nigger
Chapter 4:The Garden of Paradise
Chapter 5:Shoot Me in Here
Chapter 6:The Naked Believer
Chapter 7:The Satanic Verses
Chapter 8:Mecca Vegas
Chapter 9:Muslim Boot Camp
Chapter 10:Mecca’s Many Muhammads
Chapter 11:My Passage to India
Chapter 12:Islam 3.0
Glossary
Bibliography
Thank Yous
About the Author
Map of the Middle East
Map of the Indian Subcontinent
PROLOGUE
“What’s his name?” I asked my more-awake husband on a Sunday morning as he told me about the carnage in Orlando, Florida. It was a little less than five months, almost to the day,
before America would elect Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States.
America’s largest mass shooting—and it was a deranged lone-ranger, again. The target? A gay nightclub, Pulse, in Orlando. Odds were it was yet another psychopathic white male with the typical easy access to guns Americans unfortunately enjoy. But my instincts were different this time.
“It’s going to be a Muslim,” I said. It was similar to the certainty I had been expressing for months with friends and Keith, angered by my belief that a Trump presidency was inevitable and imminent.
“Why on earth would you say that?” said Keith. “The majority of these shootings are carried out by unhinged white guys.” I just repeated my sad premonition as we swiped through various websites on our phones. Hashtags like #Orlando, #OrlandoStrong, and others were spreading faster than the Zika virus, and Facebook “stati” were rapidly changing. The tweetology of Orlando was building up fast.
“I am doing it for ISIS,” or a similar statement, is what this mass murderer allegedly claimed in a call to a stricken night-shift producer at the local News 13 of Orlando. The CIA would later debunk the theory of any connection between the shooter and the Islamic State. It was said the gunman even managed to call 911 in the middle of his massacre. He lay dead at 5:53 a.m. according to this tweet from Orlando police: “Pulse Shooting: The shooter inside the club is dead.”
Hours later, I was proved right. It was a Muslim name, Omar Mateen, a probable self-hating gay Muslim who some claimed had a profile on Grindr, a gay-hookup app. Heavily armed, he had walked into Pulse at 2:02 a.m. After three hours of absolute annihilation, forty-nine lay dead. And fifty-three were seriously wounded. I remember thinking to myself that we Muslims in the West bore some responsibility. Our time for victimhood, as far as I was concerned, was over. More Islamophobia post-Orlando? And why not? Butchery in the name of Islam has been carried out almost every single day in the years following 9/11. History will forever mark our times as a period of a violent Islam.
My pledge of allegiance was just a year old and America’s rightward spiral was well underway. This fascist American summer was a mere foretaste. Trump had built a coalition for whom a “Muslim registry” was just one of many hateful battle cries.
“There will be scores of new Mateens,” I said to the printed press that called, saying no to cable producers. I just didn’t know how to make a case in pithy soundbites.
Using an ugly-face Kimoji, oversize blue teardrop falling from exaggerated false eyelashes, I texted Adham, my friend in Saudi Arabia: “Trump will win. And now it will be years of Muslim psychos saying they killed for ISIS.” Sitting in his Jeddah home, he too replied with a sad-face Kimoji.
To my husband that morning, I said, “Muslim check. Daesh check. This is a war that will never end. They can all invoke the Quran for violent jihad and they do and they always will.”
“But don’t you espouse reading the Quran in context? Isn’t that hypocritical?” Keith asked. He had lived through years of my making a very public case against Islamophobia, using the Quran as my primary tool. I had always been a Quran defender. Had I changed so much?
“Not even nearly,” I replied, “The Quran is an almost schizophrenic text.”
“What on earth is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
I told him about how the book that took twenty-three years to reveal was not revealed sequentially and to some could even seem discombobulated. I told him how its Surahs (chapters) were seen as either Meccan (revealed in Mecca) or Medinan (revealed in Medina). The latter, some said, were more “violent” because the Medinan Muhammad had tasted war. Pre-migration, the Meccan Muhammad had been a haunted and broken man. A pacifist, and thus the nature of those revelations.
“It’s almost as if there are two different Qurans all mixed up,” I said. “And I would even dare to add that it’s almost as if there are two different Muhammads in the Quran and the later canons of Islam.”
“Stop saying that in public. I think that’s dangerous,” he said, hugging me tightly.
Was there safety in my little island of Manhattan? “It sits off America’s coast and should be an independent nation,” I used to joke. In this changed America, would I dare to publicly wear that T-shirt I had once bought in a Southall shop in London? The T-shirt was Saudi-flag green and in bold letters proclaimed: “Don’t Panic. I’m Islamic.” I treasure it to this day.
Trump’s spooky campaign was racist and misogynist. It made PC obsolete. Millions of American tongues were suddenly untied. America’s dark side was becoming its visible one. On this June 12, 2016, massacre, Trump tweeted twice. One tweet went, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” Neither tweet had any state of grace or condolence. We were going to “elect” a cold-blooded monster. His voters preferred brown, dead gays anyway.
The nihilistic ISIS allegedly celebrated his ascent. Almost five months later as Trump won the US presidency, USA Today quoted an entity called “the al-Minbar Jihadi Media network,” affiliated with the “Islamic State,” saying, “(We) rejoice with support from Allah, and find glad tidings in the imminent demise of America at the hands of Trump.” For other Islamic anarchists, Orlando, Brexit, and finally the US election were all “proof” of the “demise of the West” that would bring “civil war” and “destruction.” As I continued to troll the dark web, I found others claiming affiliation to ISIS, saying this would all fuel “recruitment.” Islamophobia is a real thing, and I continue to live it. But the more “moderate Muslims” invoke it, the greater the power ISIS gets to recruit against what it sees as the Christian West, the enemy of Islam, against whom violent jihad is a religious duty. Trump, for ISIS, is a blessing like none other.
I wondered if Trump knew that his idea of a violent, misogynist, and offensive Islam was eerily similar to how ISIS or Saudi Arabia’s ruling Wahhabi ideologists interpreted and presented the faith. This felt like the beginning of the Talibanization of America. Like the Taliban, Trump and his followers would turn the clock back.
If there had never been an Obama, there would not be a Trump. The profound hatred of the former by the racist supporters of the latter was finally naked. This all-white bigotry actually started in 2008. The line that runs from Sarah Palin through the birthers and the Tea Party to end up with the Trumpsters is a straight one. Mostly everyone ignored the fact that a significant percentage of White America never accepted a Black man as their president. They never accepted a Black family living in what had always been a very White House, which Michelle Obama eloquently reminded us was “built by slaves.” For some it was as if the Obama years didn’t even happen. Did that percentage vote for Trump? Absolutely. But even they probably could not have foreseen a near future where strange phrases like “the alt-right,” “fake news,” and “alternative facts” would enter common vocabulary.
Barack Obama was not allowed to create a post-racial America. The “Black Lives Matter” campaign was only one example. Trump made racism and all flavors of intolerance acceptable again. The white majority in this country knew that by 2020 the majority of children under five would be from a racial minority. And in mere decades America would be a majority-minority country. For now, the fearful and intolerant parts of Trump’s white-male majority clung to power as ferociously as they could.
As Trump headed to victory, an almost forgotten affliction called the “alt-right” grew insidiously stronger. This white-supremacist fringe movement that preferred Nazi salutes, shouted Hail Trump! at his rallies, and flashed other Third Reich–style accouterments was part of Trump’s winning coalition. Even the traditional Republican right had never seen anything like it. Initially on the shoulders of his right-hand man and alt-right hero Stephen Bannon, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and hate in general would all become unlikely brothers in Trump’s Nixonian Oval Office. This was the (viciously) Separated States of America. Europe was keeling rightward and there w
as no reason for America not to do the same. Like millions I felt it strongly. This crowd was entering the White House to alter history and maraud our future. At the same time I reminded myself that Islamic supremacy was but a mirror of white supremacy. A few months post-Mateen and during the Trump transition, a friend who is on the senior staff of a prominent senator reminded me, “Be careful. What you say. What you write. You are Muslim. The registry will probably never happen. But it’s a time for vigilance, Parvez. We feared it and now it’s here.”
At public events, I said that I, too, was a “radical” Muslim but of a very different kind.
Radicalization had been the word of the moment for a while. Orlando had attacked my core. I was a devout Muslim. And I was gay. I ended up writing an op-ed for the American news site called The Daily Beast, which it unfortunately titled, “Gay Muslim: Islam Is No Religion of Peace.” Thankfully there was a sub-headline, “Like the two other monotheisms that precede it, Islam has blood on its hands.”
A burden had been lifted. The apologetic “Islam is a religion of peace” was forever wiped from my vocabulary. After years of getting my hands dirty throughout the Muslim world, filming guerrilla-style in dictatorial regimes with no government permission, after literally risking my life to complete and film the harsh and ultimate Muslim journey, the Hajj, I finally had earned the confidence to say this. I had battled for the truth of my words. For Islam, I had literally put my life at risk more times than I could count.
“Read it. Loved it, man! For the first time imo you are speaking the complete truth. I told you all your Islam stuff is bull-shit!” reliably texted my Jeddah BFF Adham.
I texted him that a reread would tell him that I was not damning Islam. I was just asking for necessary self-contemplation amongst all Muslims—a generalization, but not one without precedent within the faith. Are all Muslims “terrorists”? No. But are all terrorists Muslim? The majority seem to be.