The five of us—Abouya, Mama, Muna, Muhammad, and I—lived in a neighborhood of downtown Mecca called Al-Utaibiyyah. Just outside the city, in a nearby cave, the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) received the first revelations of what would become the Koran, which to Muslims is the final word of God. If you tell almost anyone in the Islamic world that you are from Mecca, they will exclaim, “You are a neighbor of God’s house.” Even the water that bubbles up from the Zamzam spring inside the Grand Mosque is said to have traveled to Mecca directly from paradise. We were a quick twenty-minute walk from the Grand Mosque, a mere five minutes by bus. But almost no one would want to live in our neighborhood. Our section of Mecca was ringed by slums, and some of what happened there—foul language, bad manners, and trouble—spilled over onto our streets. It was commonplace to hear an insult, followed by a frenzy of beating and punching, biting, and pulling hair. Inside the slums, more serious fights could spark in a second. A brief argument, a flash of weapons, and then one man would inflict a deadly injury upon another right in front of anyone passing by. As a result, my parents would never allow my sister and me to wander the streets. My brother could only go out to buy food and then had to come right back. And the entire time, my mother would be waiting by the window for his return, afraid.
There were about sixty-six slums in Mecca when I was growing up. They had nothing: no running water, no basic infrastructure, no real sanitation, no schools, just makeshift places to study the Koran. One of my good friends from school lived on the edge of one of them. I was never allowed to go into her house; instead, I could walk with Mama to meet her to exchange something like a schoolbook or schoolwork. Even as Mama and I walked toward her neighborhood, we could smell the horrible odor of the common toilets and waste in the gutter. The kids and teenagers in the streets said all kinds of vulgar things, although my friend was very polite. Many of these teenagers would buy small bottles of cologne for about five riyals and then drink them for the alcohol. There were also drugs. Every time I went with Mama, she would walk very fast, rushing past the awful sights, sounds, and smells. Sometimes we brought food from our kitchen to the family, and when it was date season, they would sometimes tell us to bring our date box, which they would fill with lush, plump dates that they had picked on a date farm. But we never stayed.
Although non-Muslims are forbidden to enter Mecca, the city is the most diverse in the entire Saudi kingdom, home to untold numbers of Muslim immigrants, legal and illegal. There are parts of the city where you will not hear one word of Arabic spoken. Each nationality has its own community and its own varied reasons for staying. Some arrived to build buildings and study the Koran. Others came as merchants or even refugees. There are enclaves of people from Egypt, Syria, Nigeria, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Burma, Turkey, and Yemen, all trying to get by. In various corners of the city, Nigerian men wash cars and Nigerian women sell dried seeds, stored in huge turbans on their heads, or come and work in houses for next to nothing. We had a Nigerian woman who cleaned and did washing and ironing for about 400 riyals, or about 105 dollars a month, and we were a family that didn’t have running water all of the time.
A sizable number of immigrants came because they wanted to study Ilm (which translates as “religious knowledge,” a key concept in Islam) and the Koran, in the place where both began. Generations ago, before the kingdom was founded, these people were able to remain, and eventually they became Saudi citizens. But in the decades since, hundreds of thousands more have come for the annual hajj or for study and then have simply stayed behind, melting into the city. It is possible to have two families from the same country, and the one that arrived earlier might have Saudi citizenship, while the later arrival must retain its original nationality. Yet many pilgrims still want to stay: even the people who are deported seem to find a way to return. When I was a child, one house in the city might hold forty people, all crowded in together. In some ways, the Dammam Women’s Prison was like a microcosm of the underside of Mecca, a cacophony of languages and nationalities all wedged together inside a single, tiny space.
We couldn’t afford to move to a nicer section of the city; the rent there would be at least two or three times more. So we stayed indoors. The apartments we lived in were always small. We would have a sitting room for eating, studying, and watching TV, which was also where we slept, on mattresses that we stacked up against the walls in the daytime. In one apartment, my brother, sister, and I slept on the sitting room floor, my dad slept on a bed in the sitting room, and my mother slept in the hallway. In another, my father had a bed in the bedroom, my brother and I slept on the bedroom floor, my mother still slept in the hallway, and my sister slept in the guest room. But compared to some families, we had plenty of room. My uncle, who was wealthier than my father, had nine kids, and they all slept together. We couldn’t believe that there were places in the world where kids had their own rooms like we saw in the movies. Private space was largely unheard of. If you fought with a sister or brother, you couldn’t go off to your own room and close the door. If I wanted to be by myself, I might go to the balcony. When I got a little older, I had a portable, plastic storage closet. I used to put it together in the middle of the sitting room and cover the top with sheets to make a curtain, so I would have part of the room for myself. I could write and read and be by myself, until my brother would come along and demolish it.