Circumcision is not common in Saudi Arabia, although the number of girls forced to undergo it has risen in recent years. Its practice largely occurs only in certain areas: southern Saudi Arabia and the cities of Mecca, Al Qunfudhah, and Lith. Saudi sheikhs neither command it nor forbid it. The daughters of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)—whose practices Muslims look to for much of their everyday guidance—were not circumcised. Rather than drawing on religious sources, advocates of circumcision adhere to social customs and scientifically unproven beliefs, which state that the procedure protects the girl from “deviant” behavior by removing her desire for sex. They also point to the existence of hadiths, sayings from Muhammad (PBUH), which supposedly mention a woman in Medina who performed circumcisions on girls, and whom the Prophet did not prevent from doing so. Yet when I searched for these hadiths and studied them, I found that the actual evidence is very weak and cannot support such a harsh conclusion.
So it was that a few minutes on a single summer morning forever altered two young girls’ lives in about as much time as it takes to unlock a car door, slide into a seat, pull a seat belt tight, engage the engine, and back out into the street.
4
* * *
* * *
Mecca under Siege
* * *
* * *
It was the day of Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice, the holiest of all Muslim holidays, held to commemorate the willingness of Ibrahim (PBUH) to sacrifice his firstborn son, Ismail, to submit to God’s command. Eid al-Adha falls during the period of the hajj, the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam and a religious duty required of every able Muslim adult. We were already in Mecca, but my mother was performing the customary pilgrimage circle around the granite Kaaba. I remember clinging tightly to her, my hand tugging on her white ihram clothes. Mama’s face was uncovered as we completed our seven circuits around the Kaaba. Even in the crowd, my mother stood tall and broad, with a pure, fair complexion and a long, full face. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat, and her body drenched with sweat. I was wearing a hijab over my dress: I was probably eight or nine. We were two drops in a sea of jostling bodies, clothed in white and circling barefoot on the cool marble sanctuary floor. The smell of sweat filled my nostrils: my ears were overwhelmed with calls of Allahu Akbar, spoken in accents from every corner of the globe. The sun was blazing, and some of the pilgrims poured cold Zamzam water over their heads, leaving faint trickles on the floor.
Then my mother reached down, pulling me by my small hand toward the Hijr Ismail, a rounded white marble wall adjacent to the north side of the Kaaba. Muslims believe that Hagar, the Egyptian wife of Ibrahim (PBUH), and their son Ismail are both buried there.
The days of hajj are heavily focused on purity. Men are required to dress in two sheets of seamless white cotton. The first of these, the izār, is wrapped around the waist, while the second is wrapped around the upper part of the body leaving one shoulder exposed. The head, too, is left bare and is shaved after a ritual sacrifice of a ram. The women are bound to the same standard of purity, and usually wear simple white robes and a white head covering. Even the Kaaba is returned to a pure state by lifting the black cloth—the kiswah—that usually protects the black stone structure.
My mother and I looked for a spot in which we could perform two raka’as of Hijr Ismail, the ritual recitation of phrases from the Koran accompanied by a combination of bowing and prostrating ourselves before the ancient Kaaba. All around us, people moved close to the uncovered wall of the Kaaba, touching it and seeking God’s blessings. We could inhale the Kaaba’s distinctive scent, a result of its daily anointing with Indian aloe and attar of rose (ward al-Ta’ifi). My mother pointed out a hole in the wall of the Kaaba to the woman praying beside us. “The aftermath of al-Mukboor Juhayman,” she told her. (“Mukboor” translates as “put in the grave”; it is a harsh slur to speak upon a dead person.) I didn’t understand what Mama meant, but I knew the word Juhayman. It was spoken many times in adult conversations, but always in a whisper, as if it were a bad or dangerous word.
I would later learn that the hole was from a bullet. The actual hole was relatively small, but the suffering carved out from it and from all that it represents has been much, much greater. It is a suffering that dates back to the year I was born. In November 1979, Juhayman al-Otaybi led a two-week siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca; I was not yet seven months old. Juhayman al-Otaybi, whose name in Arabic means “angry face,” was an Islamist militant and prominent member of the radical fundamentalist organization Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba, “the Salafi group that commands right and forbids wrong.”
The Third Saudi State was still very young, just forty-seven years old, and under the reign of its fourth monarch, Khalid bin Abdul Aziz, when the siege occurred. It began on November 20. As dawn started to break that morning, which marked the first day of the year 1400 according to the Islamic calendar, Juhayman and a band of his followers, some Saudi, as well as others from across the globe, including even the United States, captured the Grand Mosque. It was just before 5:30 a.m., at the moment when the day’s opening prayers and wishes for peace had just concluded. Brandishing high-powered rifles, pistols, and daggers that they had smuggled inside coffins—many Muslim families bring the coffins of their dead relatives to the Grand Mosque so that they may perform the most merciful funeral prayers, one prayer in the Grand Mosque is the equivalent of one hundred thousand prayers offered elsewhere—the attackers chained shut the Grand Mosque’s fifty-one gates and scaled its seven minarets. Looking down nearly three hundred feet, Juhayman’s men had a nearly perfect view of the city and a precise vantage point from which to train their guns.