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My Travel Writing Scholarship 2011 entry - My Big Adventure

WORLDWIDE | Monday, 28 March 2011 | Views [533] | Scholarship Entry

The Vegas of Worship

Getting through customs takes me three hours. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has combed through my backpack to make sure I am not carrying anything that could jeopardize the nation's exacting moral sensibilities. 

Ramzan has started. A million faithful have already flocked to the holy city. Over the coming weeks, two million more will follow. After a few hours of jet-lagged non-slumber, I wrap a white cloth around my waist, throw another over my shoulders, and then climb into a bus. 

The bus is filled with the stale breath of fasting pilgrims. The women are wearing black. The men are in white, with one shoulder uncovered. I bare one of mine. The bus zooms through the city and climbs onto the highway, only to meet an unending herd of vehicles running all the way into the horizon, reluctantly lulling forward. Desert heat swirls up from the macadam. Lazy honking, gasoline fumes from idling vehicles, and calls to Allah- both exasperated and expecting, fill the highway. 

The bus arrives at Makkah in the minutes before sunset. A religious and a construction fervor compete with each other in the city. Steel skeletal jinns of construction and illuminated exquisite minars rise up into the pink sky. The faithful have been hungry and thirsty since dawn, and giddily chant their arrival. Slowly the vehicles crawl their way to the masjid through steep streets and giant tunnels blown into the hills. Their passengers have been dulled into a stupor from hunger, thirst and the slow, swaying traffic. 

Getting off the bus, I am suddenly caught in a stream of a million pilgrims and jolted awake. I smell their sweat, taste their glee, hear their several excited languages. The mass pulls me towards the masjid. As soon as I catch sight of the masjid, the azan rings through the air. The pilgrims quietly break their fasts with dried dates and water drawn from the holy well near the Kaba. 

I enter the cavernous masjid and start walking towards the center. The air is humid with exhalations and chants. Twenty-feet-chandeliers hang from a ceiling covered in intricate Thuluth calligraphy. The sunset prayer starts and the pilgrims arrange themselves into rows. I join the congregation. I bow, I prostrate, I chant. After the prayer ends, I resume walking to the center, looking for a glimpse of the cube. 

The straight rows of worshippers start slowly curling up into unfamiliar circles. And abruptly I realize that the rows of worshippers, required to face the cube, would naturally converge into concentric circles the closer one gets to the cube. The air clears up, is no longer stuffy. I feel a cool, dry breeze. I am in the open, and above me is the nighttime desert sky. Pitch-black and spread with brilliant stars, more than I remember ever seeing . I look past the worshippers. I catch sight of the black cube. I am at the center of the Islamic world. 

t�.I��П�ool, dry breeze. I am in the open, and above me is the nighttime desert sky. Pitch-black and spread with brilliant stars, more than I remember ever seeing . I look past the worshippers. I catch sight of the black cube. I am in the center of the Islamic world. 

Tags: #2011writing, travel writing scholarship 2011

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