Memories of My Pilgrimage to Makkah in 2002

Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Makkah, Saudi Arabia, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Muslims who are physically and financially able must make the pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime. The annual event that draws close to 3 million Muslims from around the world has been scaled back this year due to the global coronavirus pandemic. No more than 10,000 people already residing in Saudi Arabia will be permitted to perform the Hajj, which begins on July 29 this year and lasts for five intense, demanding days of rituals, prayers and devotional acts. I performed the Hajj in February in 2002. The previous September, fanatics claiming Islam as their faith forced jetliners to crash into the World trade Center in New York, claiming close to three thousand lives. As an American-Muslim, I was shaken to the core by this horrific act of terrorism. I felt a desperate need to travel to the birthplace of Islam, to reflect on what my faith meant to me and what lessons it had for me to navigate through a world that had changed overnight. As member of an already-maligned minority, I was unsure how my fellow-Americans would act toward me, how much their opinion of Islam would influence their perception of me. This is an account of my Hajj, published in the San Jose Mercury News on Saturday, February 8, 2003. --- About 2.5 million Muslims from around the world - 45 percent of them women - are expected to congregate in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, this month to perform the Hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime obligation for Muslims. Approximately 10,000 American Muslims will be among the pilgrims seeking to turn over a new leaf in their lives through the demanding rites of the Hajj. During Hajj, Muslims affirm the centrality of God in their life. Hajj rituals include wearing special clothing, standing in the Plain of Arafat seeking forgiveness and renewal from the Creator, and walking around the Ka'ba. I performed the Hajj in 2002. I had meant to perform it earlier, but one thing or the other always came up, suggesting that my intention was perhaps flawed. In the summer of 2001, however, I made up my mind that I would be Makkah-bound the following February, no matter what. Then came Sept. 11, 2001. Terrorists claiming Islam as guidance struck the United States, taking 3,000 innocent lives. The attacks brought rage, resolve and a vivid sense of mortality. Life, we learned anew, was fleeting. Be grateful for what you have - health, family, freedom. Fulfill your obligations before it's too late. The events of Sept. 11 injected an extra dose of urgency into my planned pilgrimage. I had to travel to the birthplace of Islam to understand what my faith meant to me and how I, as a moderate Muslim, could help reclaim it from my radical co-religionists. Nothing less than the soul of Islam was at stake. On Feb. 9, 2002, I was among about 70 American Muslims at the Jeddah airport on the coast of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. We had changed into ihram (Arabic for purification), two pieces of unstitched white cloth, one wrapped at the waist and the other draped over the left shoulder. The women wore simple white dresses with head coverings but no veils. The modest clothing, one of the requirements of Hajj, signifies our equality before God and the leaving behind of all worldly ties. The formal pilgrimage was still 10 days away but we arrived early for familiarity with the ancient rites and extra time for reflection and remembrance of God in the hope that we would be at the peak of our spirituality during the Hajj. (The Hajj takes place on the same five days of the Islamic lunar calendar, from the eighth through the 12th of Dhul-Hijjah, the last month of the year. Because the lunar year is shorter than the solar year, each year the Hajj occurs about 11 days earlier than the previous year in the solar calendar). A new day literally dawned by the time we cleared customs and boarded the buses to take us to Makkah, 50 miles away. Approaching the holy city, we began to recite the unique talbiyah (invocation) of pilgrimage: Here I am at Your command, O God, here I am. Here I am at Your command. You are without partner. Yours is all praise and grace and dominion. You are without partner. We were to chant this refrain throughout the pilgrimage. After checking into the hotel, I made ablution and, still in ihram, headed for Masjid al-Haraam (the Grand Mosque) nearby. Skirting a teeming sidewalk bazaar, I soon stood at one of its many entrances. A few more steps and suddenly there it was before me, the Ka'ba (cube), a 40-foot high cubical structure of stone covered with black brocade in the center of an open courtyard inside the mosque. For over 40 years and from thousands of miles away, I had oriented myself toward this symbol of monotheism and bowed in prayers to God. Now I was no more than a hundred feet away from it and was overcome with emotion. Surging forward on a human wave and buoyed by a sense of transcendence, I joined a circle moving counterclockwise around the Ka'ba. This was the tawaf (circumambulation), another requirement of Hajj. The reflection of the blazing sun off the marble floor was blinding, but no one faltered as we went round and round murmuring supplications; men and women, young and old, firm and infirm, fast and slow, a river of humanity charged by the palpable presence of the Divine. With every completed circle, as I affirmed the centrality of God in my life, I felt a longing so deep that I thought my heart would burst. It was not until I was in my seventh, and last, circumambulation (seven implies infinity) that I dimly understood the origin of my longing: Without the physical presence of the Ka'ba and the demands and distractions of normal life pulling me this way and that, could I still hope for God to dwell in my heart always? Could an inner Ka'ba from this moment on become the focal point of my life? Only a desperate yearning for God's grace could bridge the gap between my hope and an assurance of its fulfillment. The tawaf completed, I walked to a covered arcade at the eastern edge of the mosque and walked briskly between the hills of Safa and Marwah seven times, commemorating the frantic search for water by Prophet Ibrahim's wife Hajar for her newborn son Ismail. The 1,300-foot distance between the hills was dense with pilgrims. I was surprised by the large number of Hajis in their 70s and 80s in wheelchairs performing this ritual called sa'y (effort). Looking at their radiant, tear-stained faces, it was easy to understand the significance of sa'y: Never despair of God's mercy and never stop striving, even when life appears at its bleakest. Entering a marble chamber near the Ka'ba, I drank from the cool waters of Zamzam, the spring that God brought forth for Hajar and her son, and which continues to flow to this day. Then I sought out a secluded cloister and made the supplication that was pent-up in me: I prayed for the souls of the 3,000 people who had perished on Sept. 11, 2001, and for God to grant them paradise, and I prayed for the well-being of the families they had left behind. Then I prayed for my loved ones and for all those who had asked me to remember them during my pilgrimage. After four days, we left for Medina, about 300 miles north of Makkah. It is not a requirement of Hajj to visit Medina, but most pilgrims do because of its historical association with Islam: It was the city that welcomed the prophet Muhammad when he was being persecuted by the Makkans for preaching monotheism. After a week, we left Medina for the valley of Mina, a few miles east of Makkah. We arrived the following day - Feb. 20 and the first day of Hajj - and spend the night praying and meditating in our tents. The following morning we set out for the plain of Arafat, six miles east. It is slow going as the roads are choked with traffic and many pilgrims are on foot. The wuquf (standing) in Arafat from noon until sunset represents the high point of Hajj, its emotional and spiritual climax. Two-and-a-half million pilgrims have massed here for a foretaste of the Day of Judgment. From where I stand, I can see the Jabal Rahmah (Mount of Mercy) in the distance, from which the prophet Muhammad delivered his last sermon over 1,400 years ago. Standing in ihram under a fierce sun, I reflect on my life, thanking God for all the undeserved blessings, asking for forgiveness for my sins and praying for renewal, particularly renewal in Muslim thinking. Another mass movement begins after sunset, this time for a place called Muzdalifa, midway between Arafat and Mina. We offered our evening prayers there and collected pebbles from the roadside to use on the following days. Drained physically and emotionally, I fall asleep in the open over uneven terrain under a first-quarter moon. When we reached our tent in Mina the next morning, it was time to pelt Satan with pebbles, a repudiation of evil commemorating Prophet Ibrahim's rejection of the devil when God asked him to sacrifice his son. We walk to a nearby place called Jamarat (which means stoning) where the crush of massed pilgrims around the symbolic Satan - a stone pillar - is physically daunting. I barely manage to throw seven pebbles at it, one after another, before hastily retreating. This is also the day of Eid al-Adha (feast of sacrifice) when Muslims all over the world commemorate Ibrahim's faith by sacrificing a sheep. Like most pilgrims, I had earlier paid $100 to a local organization to sacrifice a sheep on my behalf and distribute its meat among the less fortunate. On the flight home, I try to reflect on the most spiritually absorbing two weeks of my life, but my mind is blank, and I can only think of my wife and children and returning to them. But slowly the thoughts drift away, and in my mind's eye I see the Ka'ba and the concentric circles that I trace around it and realize that while my pilgrimage has ended, my journey into renewal has only begun.

The Joys of Observing Feisty and Playful Hummingbirds

I make it a point to keep the hummingbird feeder in my porch filled with bright-red nectar. I am not sure how much it helps the intended recipients who nest in the shrubs around my home. There are plenty of myrtles, oleanders and honeysuckles to offer an unending source of energy to these hyper avians.

No, the reason I frequently replenish the feeder springs from a selfish motive: I find the hummingbirds an unending source of joy. Never a dull moment when they are around.

In this time of house arrest forced by the coronavirus, I find more time than usual to observe Anna’s hummingbirds. These birds are a common sight in the Bay Area, particularly during Spring and Summer.

And what I find during the hours of the day surprises me. Pleasantly, I must add. These little bundles of energy are fierce, feisty, and territorial, ready to go to war at a moment’s notice when others intrude into what they think belongs rightfully to them. Opinionated, unpredictable birds are clearly more fun to watch than the meek and predictable kind.

There is this one male Anna that seems to dominate the brood. I see its iridescent pink throat patch (a “gorget” for purists) as it looks up and around stretching its neck. It sits on a perch next to the feeder and looks for intruders tempted to alight on the feeder for a quick sip. There is no mistaking its intention, in the way this neighborhood bully surveys its domain with a glare: “Thou Shalt Not Drink From My Well!” It makes high-frequency chirps – chik, chik, chik - designed to strike terror into the hearts of other Annas. The perch is a loop I wove from wires stringing together decorative holiday lights from the past.

So this is what I see as the sun climbs the sky and then slowly, languorously, begins to descend in the lingering summer days.

The aggressive (but with a benign side as well, as I was to find out later) Anna surveys its surrounding from its perch. Suddenly it takes off in a blur and attacks two Annas hovering near the feeder. Its “do or die” aggression is too much and the two beat a hasty retreat.

Just as suddenly and inexplicably, there is peace and three, sometimes even four, hummingbirds sip nectar from their slots, their long sword-like bills deep inside the feeder.

Within seconds the truce is broken, and a war erupts, with astounding acrobatics and aerial assaults and piercing sounds livening the show.

And so it continues throughout the day, friendship and enmity alternating between Anna’s hummingbirds for reasons hidden from me, and I suspect, from bona fide ornithologists as well.

Why do birds do what they do? It is a profound question to ask, even though the answer will always remain elusive. It is perhaps wiser to observe birds for the sheer pleasure of them, to listen to them, whether singing their hearts out or warning interlopers with high-frequency threats.

In time, some patterns will emerge – some avian variation of Fibonacci Numbers, perhaps - and we will experience a thrilling sense of discovery. 

I can see a pattern emerging for the Anna’s hummingbirds that I am lucky to observe, although I cannot articulate it yet.

No matter. Birds make the earth more hospitable and life more livable. That’s a gift that’s a source of gratitude and grace.

We Must Be Free of Fear and Full of Hope

A pandemic more lethal than Covid-19 is convulsing America now. It is the pandemic of weaponized racism. 

We have all been traumatized by the video of life seeping out of George Floyd in real time as a Minneapolis policeman pressed his knee on his neck and cuts off his air supply. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd pleaded in his dying moments. In response, the white police office casually put his left hand in his pocket, adjusted his knee for maximum force, and kept the pressure on until George Floyd literally breathed his last.

In just the last few years we have seen several African-Americans paying the ultimate price at the hands of police and vigilantes for no fault other than having the ‘wrong’ shade of skin. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Amadou Diallo, Freddie Gray, Sam Dubose, Terence Crutcher, Jamar Clark ... the list goes on and on.

Tommie Smith (won the gold medal in the 200-meter sprint finals in 19.83 seconds, first time the 20-seconds barrier was broken) and John Carlos raised their black-gloved fists during the medal ceremony in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as symbols of Black Power and Human Dignity.

Statues of Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the Campus of
San Jose State University, their alma mater. Photo by Hasan Z Rahim

Fifty two years later, not only has nothing changed, it has become worse for African-Americans, particularly after Trump's rise to power.

How many of us can really feel in our guts the existential threat African-Americans experience every time they venture out to go the grocery store, to the local Starbucks, or to watch birds in a park, wondering, "Will I return alive from this outing?"

We have regressed to the extent that we keep asking ourselves, Is this America?

Police and vigilante brutality against minorities, particularly African-Americans, has reached par with the Apartheid at its worst in South Africa six decades or so ago, even though white supremacy was written into the South African constitution, not in the U.S. Constitution.

But words are cheap. What happens on the ground is reality; hallowed words are not.

Will Gandhi's non-violence work in America? Will Martin Luther King's? Will Thoreau be our guide?

That we are forced to raise these questions show the depth to which America has fallen under Trump and his enablers. The status quo has got to change.

The knee against the neck, against the jugular veins of an entire race, cutting off oxygen, surely cannot continue indefinitely. Something's gotta give. George Floyd was not an anomaly. He was the normal.

Fear has gripped us all. But fear can only create flimsy institutions. If whites band together for Trump because they fear "others" will become majority and take over everything, well, almost everything, that was "rightfully" theirs, then we will end up with a fractured country so stark that it will consist of nothing but bits and pieces, shards that are easily weaponized.

I am brown and Muslim and I say, along with millions of my fellow-Americans irrespective of color or faith, that we must be free of fear and full of hope for America not just to survive but thrive.

If we can aspire to that, we can say George Floyd did not die in vain.

May we all wake up to the light of decency and good governance on 4^th November, 2020. 

Uncertainty of the Coronavirus Pandemic: Humility Before Nature

William Goldman, the talented Hollywood screenwriter (1931-2018), summed up the impossibility of predicting which movie will be a hit and which not, with this pithy perspective: “Nobody knows anything.” (He qualified his statement with “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.” But no one quotes the long qualifier when three words do a far better job than thirty.)

William Goldman - "Nobody knows anything"

Goldman’s 3-word phrase springs to mind when we hear all the punditry and stupidity (the latter emanating mostly from the clueless, ignorant liar-in-chief narcissist in the White House) surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. Nobody knows anything. Well, some experts in the field, mostly researchers who have studied pandemics all their lives in the field or in the lab, probably know something but what they do not know - and they will be the first one to tell you - is so much more than what they do that, even for them, the ratio of the known to the unknown is practically zero.

What is worth reflecting on is the rate at which the killer virus is leaving death in its wake. One word that sums it up is “exponential,” a mathematical concept many of us are familiar with from such media phrases as “CEO compensations are increasing exponentially” or “Many species of the world are decaying exponentially.”

If the coronavirus infects 1 person today, who in turn infects 2 tomorrow, each of whom infects 2 the following day to make it 4, and so on, it is an exponentially increasing (doubling) function. It is base 2 raised to d, the number of days since the 1^st infection, that is, 2^d. What if the 1^st person infects 3 rather than 2, and those 3 each infect 3 the following day, and so on. In that case, it is 3^d, the base being 3 (tripling) rather than 2.

You can see what we need to do to make the infection rate decay: Make the base less than 1, until the number of infections “asymptotically” (that is, very close to but not exactly equal to) approach 0.

But that decay rate is nowhere in sight.

For example, on Tuesday, March 17, it was reported that there were just more than 5,700 confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States. That number climbed above 11,500 on Thursday, March 19, and officials indicated the number will continue to rise sharply as more test results become available.

The number doubled in 2 days. The exponentially increasing function is now (5700)2^d/2, where 5,700 is the initial count and d is the number of days since the initial count.

If somehow we could replace that base 2 (doubling) with say, 0.7, then (5700)(0.7)^d/2 will rapidly “approach” 0.

One way to understand the numbers is to take this paragraph from a recent opinion piece by the NY Times columnist Tom Friedman:

“One of the hardest things for the human mind to grasp is the power of an exponential, something that just keeps relentlessly doubling and doubling, like a pandemic. The brain just can’t appreciate how quickly 5,000 cases of confirmed coronavirus infection in America can explode into one million if we don’t lock down now. Here’s a simple way to explain the exponential threat we face, in a way an oft-bankrupt real estate developer like Donald Trump might understand. It was also offered by Bill Joy: ‘The virus is like a loan shark who charges 25 percent a day interest. We borrowed $1 (the first coronavirus to appear here). We then fiddled for 40 days. Now we owe $7,500. If we wait three more weeks to pay, we’ll owe almost $1 million.’”

Let’s do the math.

A loan shark charges me $0.25 per day compounded on a $1 I borrowed from him (I am not aware that there has ever been a woman loan shark. It's always men!) So, at the end of the first day, I, the borrower, owe the shark $1.25. At the end of the 2nd day, I owe the shark interest on interest, which amounts to (1.25)² (1.25 raised to the power of 2.) So, at the end of 40 days, I will owe him (1.25)⁴⁰ = $7,523.16, which rounds off to $7,500. After 3 more weeks, that is, 61 days later, I owe the shark (1.25)⁶¹ = 815,663.05, which is close to 1 Million Dollars!

The way to win this battle, and also the war, is to make that 1.25 LESS than 1, say, 0.8, so we experience exponential decay. In that case, after 40 days of decay, the number reduces to (0.8)⁴⁰ = 0.0001329, which is one-hundredth of 1%! It's in the math. We need to make that number in the parenthesis less than 1 before we can resume normal life.

So how do we make the base of the exponential function less than 1? That’s the trillion-dollar question facing us today. Social distancing, better-equipped health workers and hospitals, proper hygiene, and a combination of many more yet unknown factors can perhaps force the killer virus to be on the decaying curve. But again, we just don’t know! No matter how much fancy statistics and solutions we weave and spin, we just don’t know!

While the mathematics of increasing and decaying exponential models are known with certainty, the nature and the destructive power of the coronoavirus pathogen is unknown. We only know that unchecked, it grows exponentially, but if somehow checked, will decay and eventually, for all practical purposes, disappear.

Consider Hemingway’s insight in this dialogue from his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises”: “How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The initial increase from 1 to 2 to 4 seems gradual when suddenly, before we know it, the virus has infected over 65,000 and then more, and yet more, with its limitless, voracious appetite.

People who spout certainty when life is fundamentally uncertain are the real ignoramuses, no matter how powerful or wealthy or apparently smart they may appear be. In contrast, those with real knowledge are humble when confronted with the unknown. They know that nature’s imagination is superior to human imagination. To glimpse into the inner workings of nature, whether of physical laws or of pathogens, they know that first they must acknowledge, “I don’t know.” This is also true from a theodicy perspective. Priests, Rabbis and Imams afflicted with religious chauvinism who think they know how God’s mind works with certainty are as guilty as arrogant scientists and political leaders in misleading us.

“Doubt is an uncomfortable condition,” said Voltaire, “but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

In the next year or two, brilliant but humble researchers will undoubtedly have made slow but significant progress in deciphering the working of the killer coronavirus and ways of neutralizing it. The rate of their progress will be anything but exponential. Yet they offer us hope that one day this virus will have met its match in their ingenuity. If you were to ask one of them what the catalyst was for her breakthrough, she will unhesitatingly tell you, “I began by acknowledging that I didn’t know.”