Mecca. Part one. Prestanding

Mecca is a city in Saudi Arabia.

Mecca is the center of the Muslim world. It is home to the main mosque of all Islam, and in the mosque stands a huge black cube called the Kaaba.

Every time Muslims pray, that is, perform salah, they turn to face Mecca. A prayer is not considered heard by Allah if a Muslim was facing the other way.

Mecca has another peculiarity. Only Muslims are allowed into the city. The roads leading here have signs: “Muslims only beyond this point.” On the approaches to the city, a patrol may stop you and ask you to prove your faith. If a non-believer is caught in Mecca, at best he’ll be pelted with stones, jailed, and deported.

That’s why Mecca is considered the Holy Grail of travel. Many non-Muslims would like to visit the forbidden city, but in all of history only a couple dozen people have dared. Even fewer have written about it.

So, shall we go?

How a non-Muslim can get into Mecca

For a Muslim, there are two ways to get into Mecca. You either get a Saudi visa or go on a pilgrimage.

Either way, the visa application asks you to state your religion, which is then printed on the visa itself and pasted into your passport.

If the reader is a Tatar, a Chechen, or an Uzbek, there will be no problem. Just write “Islam” in the religion field. The embassy will see a Muslim surname and issue the visa.

But if the reader has a Russian, European, American, or Chinese surname, he’ll be asked to confirm that he really is a Muslim. For that, you have to go to a mosque and get an absurd document: a certificate of conversion to Islam.

By the way, converting to Islam is very easy.

The first Islamic marketers reasoned sensibly that it’s not worth narrowing the sales funnel too early. Converting to Islam requires neither circumcision nor knowledge of the Quran. To convert, you just go to a mosque and ask the imam on duty.

The imam won’t ask any questions. He’ll give you a tired look and ask you to say the shahada — the famous phrase, the testimony of the Muslim faith.

Any educated person these days should know the shahada in Arabic. In English it goes: “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger.” But Islamic marketing is such now that you don’t even need to know the shahada. The imam will say it syllable by syllable. You just repeat after him.

After you pronounce the last letter of the shahada, you instantly become a Muslim, and all your sins are forgiven. Even if an hour ago you ran over an old lady with a truck.

Now all that’s left is to go to the heavenly office at the mosque and ask for a certificate. On letterhead, in two languages, it will say that you have converted to Islam and undertake never again to eat with your left hand.

But have you really converted to Islam? Of course not. In Islam, even a prayer isn’t accepted without a sincere intention, clearly stated to oneself. So for you, the certificate is just a piece of paper, a visa supplement.

And once you know what the certificate looks like, you could even make one yourself and print it out — I don’t think anyone checks.

With this “supplement,” the road to Mecca is open. But before going to Saudi Arabia, you still need to learn at least two or three prayers in Arabic and learn how to perform namaz.

It’s not that hard. In non-Arab countries, 86% of Muslims themselves don’t know what they are saying during prayer. They have simply memorized a set of sounds. As for the technique of namaz, every Sunday the mosque runs a free coaching session called “Namaz in an Hour.”

That’s it. Now you can buy a pilgrimage tour and go to Mecca. There are two kinds of pilgrimage: hajj and umrah. Hajj is too hard even for devout Muslims and takes place once a year in an incredible crush, while umrah is the hipster version of hajj, which can be done at any time of the year.

For the 10 days of the pilgrimage, you’ll walk, eat, sleep, and live in one room with three Muslims and a guide, wear strange clothes with no underwear, and pray five times a day, banging your forehead on the floor.

Told you: it’s all very easy. Easy game.

The ban that never existed

Now listen.

The ban on visiting Mecca is written in the Quran.

The ban seems to be stated clearly and precisely, but don’t jump to conclusions.

The Quran is considered a book of absolute truth that contains the answers to all questions. Sharia, the legal system of Islam, is built on the Quran. But there’s a problem. Although the Quran answers all questions, the answers are written in complex verses scattered throughout the book. These verses can be understood in different ways.

So by the 10th century, differing readings of the Quran had piled up, and four schools emerged: Hanafi, Hanbali, Shafi’i, and Maliki.

The largest school is the Hanafi. It includes Turkey, all the countries of Central Asia, and Russia except Chechnya and Dagestan. The schools aren’t hostile to each other. Each school recognizes all the others as legitimate.

So the founder of the Hanafi school, Abu Hanifa, understood the verses about the Grand Mosque in his own way. He taught that non-Muslims may visit Mecca as long as they are not performing the pilgrimage. And that is the official position of the Hanafi school, which all the other schools are obliged to recognize.

So the ban on visiting Mecca is nothing more than a local law of Saudi Arabia.

Miqat

Morning in Medina.

Along the city streets, dozens of pilgrims gather at the door of every hotel. They are dressed all in white, ritually pure and perfumed. The strange outfit is called ihram and consists of two towels. There’s no clothing under the towels, just the naked body. The garment is woven without a needle, and that is what makes it sacred.

In their costumes, the pilgrims look like departed righteous souls crowded in heaven waiting to be received. But what opens before them is not the gates of paradise but the doors of a bus to Mecca.

A pilgrim can’t enter the forbidden city without performing a special ritual. Mecca is surrounded by a system of “checkpoints” called miqats. These are sacred places where one must perform a special prayer and enter a state of spiritual purity. The bus turns off the highway and pulls into the miqat of Dhul-Hulayfah. It lies north of Mecca and is meant for pilgrims arriving from the north.

At the miqat, my nose starts bleeding. Horrified, I run out of the hall, pinching my nostrils so as not to drip on my snow-white garment.

A believer would call it a bad omen. I know the bleeding was caused by the temperature change. The bus is freezing, and outside it’s unbearably hot. Five minutes later the burst vessel heals, and the bus moves on. Now straight to Mecca, with no stops.

However long a pilgrim’s road to Mecca, he must repeat the talbiyah all the way — another strange Islamic incantation. The guide takes the microphone and starts saying the words in Arabic. The people on the bus try as best they can to reproduce similar sounds.

“Here I am at Your service, O Allah, here I am!” — the pilgrims around me recite this prayer aloud, gradually falling into a trance.

The scale of the madness reaches its peak, and now I imagine Buddhist monks chanting mantras. Outside the window is desert, an earthly vacuum. The sky fills with thunderclouds. Will it rain in Arabia? Will it rain in my honor?

I move my lips in rhythm, but in this graceless desert another prayer drowns out my thoughts. Kashmir. Led Zeppelin. “I am a traveler of both time and space, to be where I have been.”

The Kaaba

“When you open your eyes and see Her for the first time, you’ll want to cry. Don’t hold it in. It will be a good sign.”

The Kaaba stands in the very center of the Grand Mosque, which, like a citadel, keeps growing around itself and devouring Mecca.

A forbidden anthill! A network of exits and entrances is tangled inside Al-Haram. The way to the Kaaba runs through basements that look like hospital corridors. Narrow and low, lined with greenish tiles, with icy floors and dim lights, the corridors of the ground level feel like a morgue.

“Everyone close your eyes and hold hands! I’ll tell you where to go.”

For the last minute, the pilgrims are led in a chain, blindfolded by their own eyelids. A date with a dream must be special. At last, my feet feel warmth. The cold floor has ended. We have come out somewhere and stopped.

“Open them!”

All sounds are muffled, as when you dive underwater. My vision narrows to the size of a film frame. A black cube strikes my eyes with light.

For fifteen hundred years, if not more, a round dance of pilgrims has been circling the Kaaba without a break. It began when Arabia was still pagan and continues to this day in long-Muslim Mecca.

Day after day, around the clock, thousands of Muslims come to the Grand Mosque to walk around the sacred Kaaba seven times counterclockwise. This ritual is called tawaf. It is an essential part of the pilgrimage, the hajj.

I forget to take off my shoes and immediately dive across the endless stream of people. At the edges of the round dance, the stream isn’t as dense, and it’s easy to get through. But the closer to the center, the harder it is to break through the ring of pilgrims. The crowd becomes too dense, and you can no longer cut across it. You have to give in to the current.

For several laps I’m carried along in the general flow. Prayers come from all sides, each group of pilgrims reciting them in its own way. The cacophony of “Allahu akbar” shouts and snatches of prayers is like the Doppler effect. Here comes one group. The singing grows until it reaches its peak as the group passes me. The group moves away, its prayers drop in pitch and gradually fade. But the next group is already approaching.

Insane crowds and crushes are normal for Mecca. Thousands of people are constantly walking around the Kaaba. And all year round Mecca suffers unbearable heat of up to 50 degrees with one hundred percent humidity. The white marble tiles that cover the floors everywhere in Arabia overheat in the sun. You could fry an English breakfast with halal sausage on them, and your feet burn at the slightest touch.

But the crowds swirling around the Kaaba block out the sun. The sun’s rays hardly get through the dense stream of bodies, heads, and legs. The tiles under the pilgrims’ feet are always in shade and don’t have time to heat up.

It’s the head and body that take the heat. There’s nothing to shield your head from the sun. The closer to the center, the more tightly people press against each other. Near the Kaaba, Muslims walk on each other’s feet, and you can’t raise your arms. There’s no oxygen left above the endless crowd: the pilgrims have breathed it all up over a thousand years of their round dance.

People faint. From sunstroke, from heatstroke.

I’m on the second turn of my spiral in the human whirlpool. A woman floats past me, lying unconscious on the floor. Pilgrims stumble over her, step around her, and walk on. Two people rush to help. They sit the sister up and pour holy water on her from the barrels placed all over the mosque.

Ten minutes later she’ll come to and, staggering, go on circling the black cube. The pilgrims can’t be stopped. Fainting is a test from Allah. Dying during the hajj is the greatest gift and a direct ticket to paradise.

I’m carried around for several laps. I try to move diagonally and slowly get closer to the Kaaba. Its walls, covered with a black cloth, come nearer and nearer. The crowd of pilgrims grows tighter. The crowd weeps and sobs. Pilgrims howl and moan. They are a centimeter away from the Kaaba, the Divine Kaaba, toward which they have prayed every day for decades. There she is! Crying and weeping, they stretch out their hands, dreaming of touching her cloth with at least a fingertip.

I have a different goal: I take a miniature Leica out of my waist bag, which none of the guards at the mosque entrance noticed.

“Hey you, people come here to pray, not to take pictures! Touch her and pray!”

Having managed to take a few shots, I hide the camera and touch the Kaaba.

The cube is covered with a thick black silk cloth. An Arabic pattern with the shahada is embroidered all over it. At the very top, around the perimeter, the fabric is stitched with gold thread spelling out prayers from the Quran. The cloth plays and shimmers in the sun.

Were the reader, of whatever religion, to find himself in Mecca, he would admit it himself: the Kaaba is incredible.

Pressed against the wall, I walk around the Kaaba. On the other side is the entrance, closed by magnificent golden doors. Here the cloth is embroidered with gold from the ground to the sky, and there’s a slanted cut in it around the doors.

Pilgrims’ hands reach for the doors. Even more people want to touch the threshold — this spot is considered special for prayer. Getting close is too hard. The crowd presses and throws you back.

I manage to force my way to the doors and touch the entrance. Under the Kaaba’s cloth is a stone building. The stone feels rough and soft to the touch. Basalt?

In the hysteria of prayers and happy weeping, no one notices as I take out the camera again and take pictures I never even dreamed of.

The policeman standing at the doors notices me. He won’t get through the crowd anyway, but I hide the camera again and pretend to pray.

There’s a ledge by the doors. The policeman stands on it as on a pedestal, his left arm through a special loop that comes out from under the cloth. He looks at the crowds of believers like cattle, pushing them away with his baton. A patrol walks nearby, dragging away the most brazen fanatics by the scruff of the neck.

I need to go against the stream to the corner, but you can’t beat the crowd. It carries me off again, and here I am in another turn of the human funnel.

On the other side of the Kaaba is a semicircular fenced-off area. Inside this pen is a dense clot of people falling down in prayer. A policeman guards a small gate, letting everyone in in small portions. The semicircular wall around the pen is called the Hatim. Muslims believe the prophet Ishmael and his wife are buried here, so every pilgrim wants to pray in the Hatim.

But the little pen of the Hatim is packed like a subway car at rush hour. There’s nowhere even to put your feet, and yet the task is to fall to the ground and pray!

So people fold themselves in three and try to perform namaz. There are a few techniques for praying in the Hatim. If the person in front of you is standing with his feet together, you can bow slightly to the left and fall onto his shoes. If his feet are shoulder-width apart, you’re in luck: you can stick your head between his legs. The main thing is to watch your hands. They can get trampled.

I float past the Hatim. An unconscious man is carried out through the gate. Praying in this pen is like diving underwater. You need to fill your lungs with air and only then sink to the bottom. There’s nothing to breathe down there. People lose consciousness, and nobody notices them right away — you can’t see someone lying down in the crowd.

From outside the human tornado, a policeman appears with two bottles of water. Seeing the messiah, the pilgrims stretch out their hands for the water. With a smile, the policeman throws first one bottle into the crowd, then the second. A battle for the water begins. Less than a minute later, both bottles are empty.

The crazy Hatim is left behind, and I complete a full circle around the Kaaba.

Once again the discordant choir of thousands of Muslims cries out. Only one thing unites the cacophony. Passing the corner of the Kaaba next to the doors, a whole radius of people simultaneously kisses their palms and blows the Kaaba a kiss, saying:

“Bismillahi, Allahu akbar!”

The Black Stone

The Black Stone is set into that corner. Muslims believe the stone fell from paradise and was once white but turned black from human sins. Scientists believe it is a meteorite.

In pagan Arabia, the Black Stone was the main idol that united all the Arab tribes. After the victory of Islam, it was decided to keep the stone and set it into the Kaaba. It was so important to the polytheistic Arabs that it remained a relic in Islam too.

The hajj requires the pilgrim to kiss the Black Stone. But the crowd around it is twice as dense as in the Hatim, so it’s almost impossible to do.

The Black Stone is surrounded by a clot of true fanatics. One of the pilgrims decided to touch the stone no matter what and climbed onto the policeman’s pedestal. He quickly got a fist in the forehead, which left a scratch. Then the poor man was grabbed by his arms and legs, like Jim Morrison diving off the stage, and thrown into the crowd.

I tried to get close to the stone. Kissing it wasn’t part of my plan: I clearly remember the biological analysis of church icons. But I did want to touch it with my hand.

It was impossible to get even within arm’s length. A meter from the stone, the crowd squeezed me so hard that it became difficult to breathe. My chest started to ache and sting from the pressure. The lowest, thinnest, and softest ribs bent inward. The crowd’s grip became a bear hug. It felt like my ribs were about to crack and break. Spreading my elbows out with all my strength, I managed to push the crowd apart. The recoil bounced me toward the stone like a ball.

I reached for it. Touched the silver frame. Began moving my hand down. It seemed that one more centimeter and I would touch it.

But inside the frame was someone’s head. Realizing that a little more and the crowd would sweep me to the edge of the mosque, I began gently pulling the head back by the forehead, but the head had attached itself to the stone so tightly and for so long that it seemed the Black Stone was being not kissed but given cunnilingus.

My shirt tore in half. I realized that I was next. Immediately the crowd threw me back several meters. My whole body was shaking from the effort. I never did touch the stone.