A Sinner in Mecca Read online

  “That’s Martyrs Square.” He pointed to a gravesite with marked graves. Many bodies were dumped in mass graves, but some of the important PLO functionaries were buried here. “Hizbullah controls this gravesite now,” said Fouad, unverifiably. I could see one flag, perhaps used only as a territorial marker. There was no memorial except a lonely red-painted concrete column that misspelled the word “massacre.” The alleyways of Shatila grew smaller, and we were soon walking single-file past many Palestinian flags and posters of Yasser Arafat with the backdrop of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which Muslims know as Al-Aqsa, “the furthest mosque” and Islam’s third holiest. It is said to contain the stone (thus “Dome of the Rock”) where the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) placed his son Ismael for divinely ordained slaughter. There was even an Arafat with the Kaaba behind him, direct proof of why Palestine unified the ummah (the worldwide “community” of Muslims) even beyond sectarianism. There was no dearth of Stars of David oozing blood.

  There were newish posters praising Turkish President Erdogan. I thought about how my newfound love for Beirut felt like my love for Istanbul. The latter was way more familiar. Turkey was the “stable Muslim democracy” of the region. At the time Erdogan had “heroically” challenged Israel and the US about the former’s attacks on a flotilla on a humanitarian mission to Gaza.

  We passed a little school where unsegregated boys and girls engaged in a drawing class. I bought a bottle of water at a store, which had a prominent display of a variety of condoms. Right next to it was a small mosque.

  “See, here is proof that Islam likes sex! Condoms and mosques right next to each other,” I said, trying to lighten up the somber mood. The shop played Fairuz, one of the Arab world’s greatest chanteuses, as she sang her fabled ode to this city that had created her, Li Beirut. This time we came upon yet another massive mural of Yasser Arafat with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) spread behind him. The gold-plated Islamic dome is the Empire State Building of Jerusalem, making the city’s skyline recognizable worldwide. Massive Arabic letters said, “What is more worthy of battle than this, which is ours.” The message in Sabra and Shatila was clear everywhere I turned. Israel was the biggest enemy and its existence was contested. And Jerusalem belonged to Islam. I remember thinking how religions and civilizations are always built atop each other—historically destruction has always predicated construction.

  Slipping away from my group, I came upon an entire wall of handsome young Palestinian men, painted as a giant mural. “Shaheed,” read part of the text, the Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi word for martyr. I wondered how many intifadas (often translated as “uprising”) remained. How many wounds would forever fester? For the Palestinians, the second intifada had ended and the third was yet to come. But the Nakba (literally, “the catastrophe”) of the 1948 war when almost a million Palestinians were forever uprooted from their homes by the new nation-state of Israel had never ended.

  I would have loved to find a T-shirt version.

  On my last afternoon in Beirut, I visited the newly built, “fake,” “plastic” downtown. It was built with the assassinated Rafik Hariri’s fortune, to the chagrin of the Beirut intelligentsia, who seemed unanimous in their disapproval. The call to Maghrib (evening prayers) began. I felt drawn to the nearby Mohammad al-Amin mosque that dwarfed all else. It reminded me of the Blue Mosque in Turkey. I later learned that it was deliberately built in the Ottoman style, with two blue domes and Ottoman-style minarets, with their sharp conical ends.

  Indoors the mosque was spotless, with gold calligraphy and soaring ceilings. An enormous chandelier hung at the center of the carpeted praying areas, with a beautifully appointed mihrab, a niche found in every mosque that points to Mecca. The mosque, like many, was named after the Prophet Muhammad. But even in its transparent efforts to replicate centuries of Islamic architecture, the mosque felt like a hastily built twenty-first-century Taj Mahal.

  I prayed with an intensity I had never known. We formed just one line because there were so few of us. It was peaceful. A bearded old man came and sat next to me. He said I didn’t look like I was from here. I told him I was visiting from America. He offered no invective.

  “I only pray here because it is close to the shop where I work,” he told me. “Otherwise, it is ugly. You should have seen all this in the seventies. It was much grander.”

  “Yes, many people have told me that,” I said.

  “Have you been on Hajj? You should see the wonders of the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. That is true Islamic history. You should go. It’s sunnah.” I wish I could have told him how the Saudis were actually the most destructive force upon Islamic history. I shook his hand and sat there for a long time, making a quiet resolution that would forever change my life.

  That evening our raggedy bunch, including David, Mo, Fouad, Safa, Aisha, and I, reunited and arrived at an allegedly Hizbullah-run restaurant. The smell of za’atar was everywhere. And an enormous buffet filled with ful, tabouleh, hummus, falafel, labaneh, baba ghanoush, plus all manner of mezze. South Asian waiters scurried around. Entire families were breaking the fast with dates, Coke, and appletinis. Women in hijabs filled their plates right next to women dressed like the skirt-wearing Safa. Was this Lebanese-style pluralism? My phone lit up. Safa, who shared my black sense of humor, burst into laughter when she saw the email. My request for an interview with Nasrallah had been denied, citing a “heavy travel schedule.” It was signed off with “The Media Relations Department of Hizbullah wishes you a productive stay in Beirut.”

  “Where on earth would he be able to travel?” I whispered to Safa.

  “Tel Aviv, of course! They are waiting to welcome him!”

  Muhammad Saad al-Beshi raised his slender sword. Four feet of steel, gently curved at the end, gleaming in the merciless sun. Muhammad squinted at the sky, as if seeking approval from the Almighty. He then looked down at the figure, shrouded in white, kneeling beneath him. Muhammad commanded him to recite Islam’s testament of faith, the Shahadah: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” The scene unfolded outside Medina’s Mandarin supermarket in a dusty plain roughly the size of a football field. A hundred yards away, a hushed crowd of about fifty men watched.

  A white-robed figure with a red-checked head cloth read out a long sharia sentence, including “engaging in the extreme obscenity and ugly acts of sodomy.” Six long-bearded men recited Quranic verses. One of them nodded at Muhammad, who stepped back and took his position to the left of the condemned, stretched his right leg forward, his left leg back and raised both arms in an elegant, almost yoga-like posture. And then, a clear, efficient blow, cleaving the neck swiftly. His head fell with a hollow thud that ricocheted across the entire field. Done with the macabre deed, Muhammad shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is great”) and wiped his blade on a white cloth, which he tossed away. Some of the assembled witnesses murmured, “Allahu Akbar,” in response. The headless body swayed forward before momentarily snapping up, as if to attention, and then slumped finally to the right. My hand trembled. I dropped my iPhone onto the sand. I stifled a scream. A mutawa turned and headed toward me.

  “Let’s run and get lunch,” said my companion, picking up my phone. “There’s an Al-Baik nearby.”

  I awoke to soaked sheets. Keith, my husband, the man I loved more than life itself, snored softly beside me. His warm breath startled the hairs on the nape of my neck. His hand moved to my shoulder as if to comfort me—even in sleep he could sense my nightmare. I gently extricated myself. Another sleepless night? I walked to my laptop. Dozens of windows were already open from my last session. Google searches from the prior night: “Homosexuality, Saudi Arabia,” “Beheading Saudi Arabia,” “Hajj Saudi Arabia,” “Camera, filming Mecca,” “Shia prayer, Sunni prayer,” “Beshi, Riyadh,” “Hajj, death, stampede,” “Wahhabi, punishment, Hajj.” Beirut was six months ago.

  “You should call me Mo,” Muhammad had said in a chatroom window, “like all my friends.” Friendship seemed impossible on this
page of naked selfies that would put Anthony Weiner to shame.

  Buttfuck11 also reached out, “Want my pussy? Im in Hamra and u?”

  “Not in Beirut,” I typed back.

  “Where r u then?”

  I clicked block. Buttfuck11 died an instant death on my Manjam—a hookup site gay men in the region used. I looked for Mo786. He was not online.

  I walked to the kitchen and lit a cigarette, recalling the second-hand events that inspired my nightmare, which seemed to have traveled into the surreality of a sleep-walk. Muhammad had walked away while sheathing his sword. Men in blue jumpsuits scurried from the sidelines and threw the bodies onto stretchers, grabbing the heads by the all-white cloth tubes that covered them, and carried the executed to two waiting vans. The crowd dispersed, and a lone man hosed the blood down a drain.

  My hands shook violently and the cigarette fell. I considered brewing some coffee. It was 3 a.m.

  A twenty-six-year-old Saudi man lingered. He was an accidental witness to the slaughter. Born and raised in Medina, Muhammad al-Din knew to avoid this place on Monday mornings, the designated time for capital punishment. But this was a Friday, when usually only a list of the condemned was published in the papers. His mother sent him out to buy groceries, but when he arrived at the supermarket, the shops were shuttered. He had become distracted while texting friends and was soon swept up in the crowd headed to the mandatory Friday afternoon prayers. In Saudi Arabia, the unfaithful have nowhere to hide at prayer time in public; the disobedient go to prison or are sentenced to public lashings. Five times a day, in every Saudi city, town, and village, the baton-brandishing religious police patrol all public places to command that all business stop and all shops close until the prayers finish.

  I had met Mo in a chat room on Manjam two years before. I was using the site for grassroots promotion for my film. I had to get the word out to the closeted Muslim world. These chatrooms were the only places they could “congregate,” assuming a false sense of safety. Mo had recognized me from my profile picture and told me how he had watched my film, A Jihad for Love, on a smuggled DVD with a few friends in Riyadh. We stayed in touch. He wanted me to help him get enrolled in a US university—“Anything to get the fuck out of here.” One night he told me of the execution. He seemed strangely calm and expressed surprise about the choice of executioner. Muhammad Saad al-Beshi was Saudi Arabia’s executioner-in-chief and normally carried out his beheading or amputation duties at the infamous “Chop-Chop Square” in Riyadh.

  In an Arab News interview that Mo had also sent me, al-Beshi crowed that as Saudi Arabia’s lead executioner he was “proud to do God’s work,” and that he kept his sword, “a gift from the King,” razor-sharp with nightly polishing sessions, assisted by his seven children. In the interview he had boasted, “People are amazed how fast it can separate the head from the body.”

  “Parvez,” said Mo, “most of the world will not learn about this one. They chose al-Beshi for this execution, so it must be important, but doing it on a Friday in Medina, it’s all very strange. I was not meant to see this man. No announcement, nothing. I need to get the fuck out of here, man!”

  Back at the computer I searched our chat history and found the execution conversation with its links. I found phone footage of the execution, or a similar one, on LiveLeak. I could not find the QuickTime file he had sent me. I played and replayed the video. Daesh, known to some as IS, ISIL, or ISIS, though it had existed even before 9/11, was a while away from worldwide beheading-and-massacre infamy. For now, this is what the Saudis did and I would soon be their unwelcome guest.

  Still sweating, I returned to the bedroom. I was consumed by anxiety. I reached to my nightstand. Not my old friend Advil PM. No, it was an Ambien kind of night.

  CHAPTER 2

  AN ALIEN WITH EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY

  Islam’s story went like this: Four thousand years ago, the Prophet Ibrahim (known to Jews and Christians as Abraham) was asked by God to bring his Egyptian wife (some claim slave) called Hajjar (Hagar) and his firstborn from her, Ismael (Ishmael), to the barren deserts near Mecca. Ismael’s name means “God will hear.” Clearly, God had heard the need for Ibrahim to have progeny. What he might not have heard were Hajjar’s presumably unstated (because they are not well documented) desires not to be an abandoned mother and spouse.

  We were told that the Jews and the Christians believed Hajjar was dumped in the desert because Ibrahim’s first wife, Sara, wanted to get rid of her. For the Muslims, Hajjar is allowed to understand her own misery because as Ibrahim is leaving her and his infant firstborn basically to die, he informs her that it is God who has commanded him to do so. And this is supposed to make her feel better. Many Muslims also believe that both Hajjar and Ismael are buried right next to the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest place on earth.

  Hajjar is central to Islam and, for my adult self, is one of the most sacred, compelling, and mysterious figures in the faith. However, she is conveniently left out in many narratives and in our childhood stories. Her only purpose is that she gives birth to Ismael, who crucially would father the tribe (the Quraysh) that would give birth to the Prophet Muhammad. But her legacy is vast.

  When first dumped, Hajjar ran between two hills called Safa and Marwa, desperate for water to save her suckling infant’s life. After the seventh run, a sacred, life-giving spring called Zamzam appeared. The story is told in many different ways, but this is what I was taught. Zamzam flows to this day, and the Saudis have with great fanfare brought in global “experts” to testify its purity and “extraordinary” mineral content.

  Only as a young man did I learn that Hajjar was in fact “the Mother of Islam.” One of Islam’s greatest Shia scholars, Ali Shariati, even exclaimed, “See how special she was. God chose a black slave woman from all humanity to be buried next to the Kaaba! Not even our Rasool (messenger) gets a place there. God gave one of his most humiliated and weakest creatures a room in his house. Never forget her!”

  In Mecca, I would realize that some of the primary rituals of the Hajj are a memory of Hajjar’s difficult life. The word hijrah (“migration”—the Islamic calendar begins with Muhammad’s hijrah from Mecca to the city called Yathrib, later Medina) has its root in her name, as does the word mohajjir (“immigrant”). It was even claimed that the Prophet said, “The ideal immigrant is the one who behaved like Hajjar.”

  But it was mostly men who wrote the canon of Islam, like its two predecessor monotheisms. It helped these misogynists that Hajjar was not directly mentioned in the Quran. They were constructing a patriarchy. They have tried to diminish her. In truth, this woman is the very center of Islam. To obliterate her is impossible.

  If women wrote the history of Islam, Hajjar would get credit for what she really is: Islam’s matriarch, a monotheistic first. If Ibrahim’s behavior were analyzed in present times, many would say he was a deadbeat dad and a sadistic husband.

  Ibrahim was also an authoritarian father, who never took no for an answer. He forced Ismael to divorce his first wife but was happy with the second. He was an absentee parent. Yet, when commanded by God again, as he often seemed to be, it was this son he ordered to help him build a cube-shaped room right next to his well at Zamzam. That room, the Kaaba, would become the center of a flourishing trade capital called Mecca and today the central point of my religion.

  Ibrahim famously dreamt that God had commanded him to sacrifice Ismael. He recognized the urgency, because only prophets received divinely inspired dreams. Even Shaitan (Satan) attempted to dissuade Ibrahim from carrying out this brutality. Ibrahim hurled seven stones at him thrice, driving him away. The pious Ismael agreed to be sacrificed. Just as Ibrahim raised his knife to kill his own firstborn, God intervened in very timely fashion. He told father and son that they had aced this test of faith, and Ibrahim could sacrifice a goat instead.

  This father’s readiness to murder his son was heartbreaking to me as a lonely child, craving parental affection. This mental image, alongside the bl
oody streets, contributed to my anxiety before and during the festival of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, that commemorates this act.

  For so many men who control the narrative of Islam, a Muslim woman’s body is a contested space. The women who shaped my life and my mind at different points in my life tried in their own limited ways to reclaim their bodies from the men who claimed ownership over them. In this, these women were all rebels. But in the ridiculous logic of the Wahhabis, for example, there is nothing more dangerous and distracting to the obedient (male) armies of the pious than an exposed strand of female hair.

  In the early eighties, the center of my favorite Eid al-Fitr was a distant aunt we called Khala, which literally means “aunt.” She was wise and wrinkled and funny and really thin—her bones would peek out of her modest and plainly colored clothing. In this quality of an almost emaciated, bony scrawniness, she was the opposite of my voluptuous mother, whose curves were never quite hidden by any dupatta (a long, multipurpose scarf) she would drape over them as a nod to propriety. And this, perhaps, in my mother’s case, was by design. There was little about my mother that was not a carefully considered detail.

  Khala is the greatest storyteller I ever knew. She brought a world of adventures and brave (Muslim only) heroes alive to the motley crew of kids sitting around her. On top of that list was the Rasoolullah—that’s what she called Muhammad. We knew already that this meant “Messenger of God,” and this is how we were respectfully to mention him, avoiding the utterance of his name. And then we were to append the tongue-twister Salallahu Alaihi Wa’salam (“Peace be upon Him”).