Mecca: The Sacred City

Introduction

The Lure of Mecca

The pilgrim bus was stuck in an almighty gridlock. Through an early morning haze I surveyed the snarled jumble extending for miles. The buses, the standard yellow American school bus variety, were distinguished by large Arabic and English lettering on their sides. Around each bus lapped a churning tide of white cloth draped over countless pilgrim souls. The only sign that this ocean contained individual forms came from the varying hues of human flesh. Male pilgrims all wear the same traditional dress – two pieces of unstitched cloth, known as ihram – in such a way that one shoulder is left bare. This vast seething mass of humanity, between 2 and 3 million people, is drawn from every corner of the world, all rushing at the one appointed time to this one place: Mecca.

Once gathered, pilgrims move en masse around the city and its environs progressing from one sacred site to another. This particular tide was to take them from Muzdalifah, where they had spent a night under the stars, to Mina, some three miles away, where they would symbolically humiliate Satan by casting stones at three pillars of rock. But like some powerful bore attempting to force its way up a narrow channel, the onrush had backed up, a white-crested wave as yet unable to generate any hint of forward motion. From my vantage point it was not the fluid dynamics of this impasse that fascinated me. The jostling stasis before me was becoming as traditional as the pilgrim garb has always been. Frequent congestive interruptions are modernity’s answer to manoeuvring multitudes of people from place to place by the most up-to-date means. Already I found these hiatuses at odds with my exalted expectations and cherished ideas of the experience offered by this place at this time. Perhaps it was the detachment of ideal and reality that captured my mind. Perhaps it was something in the power of this place. As I surveyed the scene before me I was drawn through the myriad host to just one bus and just one face.

The bus was stuck in a colossal traffic jam. Through one of its windows, I saw one pilgrim sitting perfectly still. A wrinkled face illumined by eyes whose resolute gaze was focused beyond the horizon. Mesmerized by that look, I transported myself through the hubbub as if floating timelessly towards this old man. As I inveigled my way through the crush I understood that he was aware of me, though his gaze had not shifted nor had he made any movement. Only when I got close to the bus did he move. With the deliberation of age and infinite effort he negotiated his way against the tide to leave the bus. It seemed to take for ever. I watched each tottering step until he stood before me. Face to face, I knew what had drawn me to this one old man. Serenity emanated, a blissful calm surrounded him. Without a word, he stretched out his hand and gave me the two pieces of bed linen he had been clutching. Instinctively I took hold of his bundle and followed. He led me beyond the crowds.

At a quiet spot beyond the roadway he indicated that I should lay his sheet upon the ground. It billowed like a sail in the morning breeze. When I had smoothed it out, he lowered his frail body onto it and settled himself down. As he lay there at rest he nodded to me and I understood his gratitude. I sat beside him – I don’t know for how long. We did not talk. There was nothing to say. And then I knew he had traversed the horizon. Gently, with reverence, I spread the second sheet to cover his body. Only then did I become concerned. What should I do next? What memorial, what procedure, who to tell, how to keep his body from being trampled by some sudden eddy of the crowd? I was left with questions. He had his answer, his final destination.

It was 16 December 1975. I was fulfilling one of the most important religious duties of a Muslim: Hajj, or pilgrimage, to the sacred city of Mecca. I was excited, enraptured, and somehow connected to over 2 million other pilgrims who were performing the Hajj. I hoped to return spiritually uplifted. Yet the old man had come to die. I felt that he understood the inner meaning of Hajj better than me.

Mecca, birthplace of Islam and also of the Prophet Muhammad, is Islam’s holiest city. It is a city that I, in common with almost all Muslims, have known all my life. A once-in-a-lifetime visit to Mecca is a key obligation. Most Muslims, however, will never see Mecca, and yet will have learned, perhaps even memorized, its geography from the moment they were taught to pray. The first lesson for any Muslim child preparing to pray is to identify the location of Mecca, and then to prostrate in the direction of the city, not once, but five times daily.

Our house in Dipalpur, Pakistan, where I was born and spent my infant years, had one tattered old calendar on the wall. In fact, it was very likely the only item of decoration in our house. The calendar had a picture – rather gaudy, I now realize – of the Sacred Mosque that stands at the heart of Mecca with its soaring minarets amid the encircling hills. The heart of the Mosque, the centre of the picture, was the Kaaba. The Kaaba drew the eye. It was an abrupt, arresting presence, a simple cuboid structure enveloped by a drapery of gold-embroidered black cloth. If you peered intently at the picture you could just make out that the streams of white swirling around this focal point were a mass of pilgrims. The word ‘Allah’ was written in bold Arabic letters just above the minarets.

Time has moved on, but the image of the Kaaba on our decorative calendar is fixed, burnt into my memory. The very first picture I ever saw confirmed in me the certain knowledge that, while God is everywhere, in some special sense the divine power is focused in this one place; that the Kaaba is quite simply God’s House. This picture so clearly indicating God’s presence formed a primal bond that I knew connected me, inseparably, for all time to this one place. It was a childish innocence, and yet everything I learnt was to strengthen this conviction. It grew up within me as I added new layers of understanding. This sense of personal attachment is not mine alone. It is a love and devotion, a yearning and a dream that I share with more than a billion others. It is a common bond between Muslims: Mecca and I is at one and the same time Mecca for all. To be at Mecca is the taproot of individual identity and the common link of an entire worldwide community.

My first religious lessons were all about Mecca. When my mother taught me to read the Qur’an as an infant, I learned that the Sacred Text of Islam was God’s Words first revealed to Muhammad at Mecca. The stories I was told about the life of the Prophet Muhammad made Mecca and its environs more familiar to me than the country in which I lived: the cave at Hira, on the outskirts of Mecca, where the Prophet received his first revelations in 611; the town of Medina, which was called Yathrib during the days of Muhammad, where the Prophet sought refuge from persecution in Mecca; and the well of Badr and the mountain of Uhad where the Prophet fought his battles. But in Islamic tradition the history of Mecca long pre-dates the seventh century. The holy precincts around the Kaaba contain stories stretching back to the very beginning of time. Adam, who in Muslim tradition is the first Prophet, visited Mecca and was buried there. Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, the father of monotheistic faiths, built the Kaaba with his son Ismail, or Ishmael. Every Muslim child grows up with these stories, internalizing their geography as a personal landscape whose contours and history define who they are.

But Mecca is so much more than a place where things happened once upon a time in history. Mecca matters because, as my mother often explained, it was there that God revealed to the Prophet Muhammad his guidance on how to lead a moral life. So what the Prophet taught, what he said and how he did things provided the examples that I was told I should try hard to follow in order to grow up to be a fine human being. What happened in Mecca was alive in the simplest daily activities of my life, in all the strictures with which adults seek to tame youthful exuberance and the knotty deliberations that a gregarious youngster like me encountered in determining whether I was being naughty or not so nice. There was never a doubt that I must always look towards Mecca if I was to amount to anything worthwhile in this world.

When I was sent to more formal religious lessons the supple sympathy of my mother’s approach was replaced by the sterner discipline of the madrassa. The lessons I was required to master fed my fascination with Mecca. Like all Muslim children I learnt that one of the five pillars of our faith was an obligation to visit Mecca, if I was able, at least once in my lifetime to perform the Hajj, to be part of the great annual pilgrimage that is the highest expression of Muslim existence. I drank in all the details: one had to walk around the Kaaba – for real. The other stations of the pilgrimage became landmarks in my growing sense of geography: the hamlet of Mina, where the pilgrims were required to spend a few nights; the plains of Arafat, at the foot of the Mount of Mercy – here pilgrims prayed the noon prayer in unison; the parched landscape of Muzdalifah, where pilgrims spent a night under the open sky. What an adventure it would be – to cross continents and stand where the Prophet had stood, to walk in his footsteps performing the same rituals he established and be part of that ocean of brotherhood that united people of every race and nation. And ultimately to stand with this vast gathering to ask God directly for His mercy and blessing – of course I was determined, like Muslims everywhere, that one day I would go to Mecca. I would be a pilgrim, Mecca would not always be a picture: one day I really would be there.

My family did cross continents, though we bypassed Mecca as we journeyed from Pakistan to settle in London. We changed the course of our lives in many ways – but Mecca remained a fixed point. We had of course to locate it from a new direction, but it was still central to our shifting identity. Our new home raised complex new questions, from the existential to the utterly practical, in which Mecca was a vital feature of the choices we made. A moral compass does not cease to function because one’s surroundings are new and strange, or else it is no compass at all.

As I grew up in London, Mecca continued to be my lodestone and objective. I studied the glories of Muslim history, I read about other cities – Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, Fez, Samarkand, Granada and Delhi, the source of my own Mughal heritage. They encompassed the birth of science, the glories of architecture, literary achievements, subtlety of debate, the history of ideas, legacies that enriched the whole of human history as they were appropriated far beyond the confines of Muslim lands. Wherever these achievements occurred, they emerged only because of Mecca, the progenitor of their values and virtues. Obviously, this was why the Hajj existed, the perennial annual return to the source that should spiritually replenish and rejuvenate Muslims everywhere.

And then, as I dreamt about Mecca and planned to visit the city during my mid-twenties, Mecca actually came to me. It came as an offer of the job of a lifetime. This was to become part of the team at the newly established Hajj Research Centre, based in Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah. The Centre was located on the campus of the newly established King Abdul Aziz University, and my job was to study and research the logistic problems of Hajj, as well as the past, present and future of Mecca.

From the birth of Islam to just before the discovery of oil, Mecca would host on average 100,000 pilgrims each year, arriving on foot, by sea, or riding on the backs of animals. But that world has now vanished and modern transport links mean that up to 3 million Muslims perform the pilgrimage each year, making it the greatest gathering of humanity anywhere on earth. The sudden influx of oil wealth created the possibility of meeting this immense logistical challenge in entirely new ways. Plans were afoot to transform Mecca, I was told. Modernization, however, brought consequential problems and threatened collateral damage. Everything was happening fast. There was little time to learn how to manage the coming change with a better understanding of the dynamics of pilgrimage and appreciation of the historic significance and environment of Mecca. How could I refuse? I would walk within the primal image I had cherished from childhood, be part of the greatest adventure I had ever conceived – and be paid for the privilege!

I was going to Mecca. And that’s how I came to be in Mecca in that momentous December of 1975.

I worked at the Hajj Research Centre for some five years.¹ I took part in the Hajj itself for each of those five years, studying the comings and goings of Hajj pilgrims, and also those who would come for the year-round ‘lesser’ pilgrimage that is known as Umra. The rituals of Umra are a subset of the Hajj and can be performed at any time of year outside the designated Hajj season, which falls in the twelfth and final month of Islam’s lunar calendar. During those years I became intimately familiar with Mecca and its environs, I watched them change, almost never according to the ground plans and advice we devised at the Centre. In those years, and since, I have travelled to and from Mecca many times, by various means to and from many places in the world. And still nothing quite prepares you for the experience. Nor is there anything I can compare to the very first time I entered the city of my heart’s longing and found myself within the Sacred Mosque.

It was late afternoon. I went through the main gate, Bab al-Malik. I began to tremble as I walked through the cool shaded building upheld by innumerable archways and approached the final colonnade. The light beyond the shade rebuffed me. It was not daylight. It was some intensified glorious glow, a luminosity peculiar to this place, contained within the open plaza at the heart of the Mosque. The oxygen drained from my lungs. ‘I am here.’ The thought reverberated through my body with each gulp for air. ‘I am here.’ The words struggled to emerge from my open mouth. My head was spinning, yet my eyes were focused on the Kaaba. I stood in awe and wonder, reverence and astonishment, elation and perplexity; a profound sadness and an irresistible smile of infinite joy took possession of me simultaneously in a moment that seemed to last for ever. I felt an urge to spread my arms and embrace everyone, enfold everyone in my exultation. And yet I was blissfully unaware of other people here in this place. It was me and the Kaaba. How could it be here? How can I be here? How can it be here before me? It was beyond imagination, beyond comprehension, more than reality. It was the point at which there is only prayer.

I was rooted in humility, standing stock-still before the sight of the Kaaba, humbled by the feelings overpowering me, struggling with all my might to take hold of the sensations I felt, to keep possession of every aspect of this experience. The sight, the light – and gradually there was a smell. What was the odour of sanctity? It infused this atmosphere. I could identify the lingering grace notes of incense, mingled with a miasma of dust, the infinitesimal fine particles of airborne sand mixed with motes of woollen fluff stirred up by the throng of feet traversing a bed of carpets. This melange blended with the effusions of human bodies. And there was something else. Some edge, some sharp, acrid something. Suddenly a flight of pigeons took to the air in the open space before me. The beating of their wings startled me, jolting me back to time and place and a simple realization – the added ingredient was pigeon droppings. Out of slime we all came, the Qur’an says, and though we can ascend higher than angels the footprints of humanity remain in the mud. So why should the odour of sanctity not include the savour of pigeon droppings?

I needed no thought to know what must happen next. Automatically I took my place, merging into the flow, becoming part of the stream of people moving ceaselessly around the Kaaba. One is required to complete seven circuits, round and round that fixed point. Counting was beyond me. I could have walked for ever. I had become one with my earliest image, one with the tide of history, with all those who had walked here before me, and one with myself. ‘I am here.’ It is the pilgrim’s phrase, ‘Lab-baik.’ ‘I am here.’ It is the only statement that makes sense, the only thing one can say in this place at any time.

I have stood before the Kaaba many times since. I have seen it at all times of day and night in every season. It is not true of course that there are actual sharply defined seasons in Mecca. There are enormous differences of temperature and changes in humidity, which can be experienced in a day as well as over the course of a year. At the height of summer temperatures soar to well over 40 degrees Celsius. When the sun sets, the heat rapidly recedes and the nights can be chilled, even feel bitterly cold. Summer nights begin by being as warm as a hot summer’s day in northern Europe, and end with a dawn that has a distinct autumnal chill. The contrast between the intense heat of the day and the cold of late evening can make you reach for a woolly jumper or wrap up in a warm shawl.

Life in Mecca, however, is regulated, not by climate, but by the rituals and rhythms of the Islamic calendar. In Ramadan, the month of fasting for example, the city sleeps during daylight hours when fasting is observed, and awakes at evening and night, when fasting comes to an end. During each Ramadan night, the Grand Mosque teems with pilgrims attending special prayers known as tarawih in which all of the Qur’an’s 114 chapters are recited aloud over the course of the entire month. These days, tarawih prayers from Mecca can be watched by anyone with a TV or computer, but back then you had to be there to behold the experience.

Ramadan moves through the varying temperatures of the year, like the Hajj season. The Islamic calendar, based on the Moon, is eleven days shorter than the Gregorian, so the fixed dates in the Islamic calendar move through the seasons in a stately progress. The Hajj officially lasts for ten days in the month of Dhu al-Hijjah. However, many pilgrims arrive perhaps a month before and linger in the city for many more weeks afterwards. They have dreamed of coming to Mecca all their lives, and find it hard to say ‘Goodbye’ to the city. It takes time to acclimatize to the enormity of becoming a ‘Hajji’, the honorific title for those who have made the pilgrimage. Just as the pilgrims are transformed, so is the whole of Mecca during the Hajj. Its visual appearance and structural features are altered. What was essentially a small town is suddenly crowded with people everywhere, people in constant motion, in a hurry to be here and then there, and never a moment when everybody sleeps.

The Sacred Mosque is crowded at all hours of day and night. White becomes the predominant colour as pilgrims jostle in their enthusiasm and fervour to experience everything Mecca has to offer from the highest moment of their life to the ceaseless bustle of gathering mementoes. Bottles, even jerrycans of water from the eternal well of Zamzam are essential, as are dates, prayer beads, prayer-carpets, copies of the Qur’an; anything to take home to share the blessing; things that no matter how ordinary will have special meaning for those back home because they actually come from Mecca. There is never an end to people coming to Mecca; like the temperature the numbers just vary in intensity through the year. Nor is there any way to describe the utter diversity of colours and languages of this gathering of so many different people, rich and poor, the educated and sophisticated mingling seamlessly with simple rural peasants barely, if at all, able to read or write. A world community with all its distinctiveness and differences subsumed in a common purpose and shared euphoria. The immensity of the experience is all that does not alter.

To stand before the Kaaba is a moment beyond change. And yet, I watched Mecca, the city that surrounds it, change almost beyond recognition in the years I lived in Saudi Arabia. By the time I left, the Sacred Mosque had been expanded, almost completely rebuilt, changed utterly from the image I carried in my heart from childhood. Perhaps it was this sense of the passing away of something I had always considered enduring, perhaps it was the hippie environmentalist in me – even some tinge of the romantic that made me determined to make my fifth Hajj the old-fashioned way, on foot. The sense of detachment between ideal and reality that I had felt on my first Hajj had increased each year. More people, more congestion, more exhaust fumes, more traffic and more lags of churning stasis. I wanted to know what it must have been like in the days before motorized transport. Certainly it ought to give me better insight into the experience of pilgrims of earlier centuries.

What would it have been like for ibn Battuta, for example? The fourteenth-century author of one of the world’s great travel classics had become something of a hero of mine.² He set off from his home in Tangier on 14 June 1325, aged twenty-two, intent on performing the Hajj. It turned out to be no return journey. Like so many great luminaries of history his journey of a lifetime lasted most of his life. He performed the Hajj five times in all. Travelling to Mecca he picked up the travel bug that was so much a part of the historic Muslim experience. Being well educated he was able to work his way not only to Mecca, but all around the Muslim world, finding employment as a judge or attached as a valued scholar to the court of one ruler or another. He stopped in Egypt on his way to Mecca and then journeyed on to the Maldives, India, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and China before eventually returning home via a detour into West Africa. I loved the sense of belonging to a borderless world that his life and writings exemplify – quite a few centuries before modern technology and communications made the term a cliché. Yet his writing also makes clear that the world was by no means all the same to ibn Battuta. He was an interested observer, curious and open to all the subtle and not so subtle differences of customs and practices of the people and places he encountered. He was a citizen of the world, his outlook a distinctive consequence of the Hajj.

The travel bug, an interest in and respect for the diversity of humanity, the urge to learn and write about one’s experience – these I regarded as Mecca’s gifts, not merely to the Muslim world but to everyone. They had made ibn Battuta the man he was, and I thought that perhaps sampling something of what he experienced would do the same for me. He had made five pilgrimages, I was about to embark on my fifth, too, and it seemed like the perfect plan. I would retrace the last leg of the old caravan route that made its way from Yemen to Jeddah, from where I would set out, and on to Mecca. For me it would be a three-day walk, some eighty kilometres as the crow flies.

First, however, I needed a donkey.

Why not a camel, you might ask. A camel would have been the most appropriate way to retrace the past, but the advent of the pickup truck has made this an impossible dream. True, I worked in Saudi Arabia on an expat’s salary, but I did not earn a king’s ransom, and the erstwhile utility beast of burden (aka the camel) was now a pampered aristocrat whose destiny was the camel-racing circuit, changing owners for exorbitant sums. A humble donkey, therefore, seemed a more feasible choice to carry our vital water and other supplies for a modest re-enactment of a historic pilgrimage.

I had thought it should be possible to find a donkey in Jeddah or its environs, but after several weeks of diligent search and inquiry my search had proved fruitless. Then one particularly stifling afternoon, another of those days afflicted by the power cuts that, in those days, were a regular feature of the building site known as Jeddah, I made my way to my favourite cosy quawas (traditional coffee house) in what remained of the old town. Here the tall houses, whitewashed or painted in subdued pastel colours with their overhanging louvred window screens, were perfectly suited to the environment. Inside they allowed air to circulate and cool while the glare of the sun was filtered through the fretwork of the window screens. Outside the relationship between the height of the buildings and the narrowness of the alleyways meant one could walk around bathed in cooling shade. The old town was the coolest part of Jeddah. It was, I knew, a setting that would have been familiar to ibn Battuta – and none the less humane and friendly for being historical.

By now the regular clientele of the quawas knew I was set on buying a healthy donkey. An animal blessed with good health was an important qualification, as most in Jeddah were either too thin, too hungry, or covered in an even layer of whatever the external atmosphere had to throw at them. On this afternoon I was greeted warmly by the sergeant of the local police station, with whom I would often share a cup of tea and water-pipe, known locally as shisha.

‘I was hoping you’d come along,’ he said. ‘I’ve found a Bedouin willing to sell his donkey.’ Without wasting any time, I accompanied him to the Bedouin’s house. Sure enough he had a reasonably healthy donkey to sell. ‘How much is it?’ I asked eagerly.

‘Ten thousand riyals’ (about £2,000), came the reply.

‘It’s outrageous,’ I said. ‘It’s only a donkey.’

‘For over a month,’ replied the Bedouin, ‘I’ve been hearing about this man who is desperately looking for a donkey. I figured if he’s so desperate he’d pay a good price. This is a fine animal and there’s much life in it.’

The old fox had me cornered, and I suspected the sergeant was getting a cut too. Nevertheless, I put in a good haggle and eventually secured the animal for half the asking price.

‘There is one thing I must tell you in all honesty,’ said the Bedouin before handing me the lead. He was strictly observing the appropriate Islamic etiquette that is innately the Saudi way. ‘While I’ve fed him well, I have not been able to look after all his needs.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, somewhat confused.

‘Well, there aren’t as many donkeys in this city as there used to be. So it is difficult to mate the animals. I’ve been trying for over two years, but alas.’

At this point the sergeant cut through the Bedouin’s diplomatic pretence. ‘What you have here,’ the policeman declared, ‘is a sex-starved donkey. But as this is the only donkey there is, you may as well buy it.’ There was little else I could do. I grabbed the lead of my new companion and we set off through the winding streets of old Jeddah.

The following week, on the sixth day of the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah, the month of the Hajj pilgrimage, my small expeditionary party assembled in front of the Hajj Research Centre. My companions in this long walk to Mecca included my friend Zafar Malik, our Yemeni guide Ali, and our prized donkey, who we named Genghis after the great Mongol king, famed for his temper and propensity to lash out and kick people for no rational reason. Genghis, we were soon to discover, intended to live up to his namesake.

I had known Zafar from my student days in London. We were buddies, had committed most of our youthful sins together, so when the Jeddah job came up, Zafar joined me at the Hajj Research Centre working as a designer and publications manager. Zafar’s distinguishing mark was (and is) a luxurious but precision-trimmed beard. This was Zafar’s way of telling the world that he was neither a mindless dogmatist (who let their beards grow long and unruly), nor an extremist (who support bushy stubbles). Zafar also had an infectious sense of humour, which I thought was an essential requirement for this journey.

Our local guide Ali, in contrast, was a lean, short man in his late twenties. He lived in Sanaa. Whenever he or his family needed money he would cross the border into Saudi Arabia and work till he had collected enough for his needs, returning to his hometown. Ali had come to the Centre looking for work, and given his knowledge of the terrain, we thought he was a gift from God. Although he looked rather fragile, he had tremendous stamina and could move, as he said, ‘like a lizard on sand’.

Zafar and I, prudently, took our positions at the head of our convoy, leaving Ali to handle Genghis. Initially, we walked along the Jeddah–Mecca motorway. A few miles outside the city we veered off towards the Hijaz mountain range. Every now and then we would hear Ali encourage Genghis, a grudging participant in our adventure, to move a little faster. We walked till late at night, and on Ali’s advice camped in a valley.

Early the following morning we set off again and had walked over fifteen kilometres by the afternoon when Genghis started to misbehave. Ali admitted the beast was growing more and more cantankerous. At which point Zafar spotted an animal standing on top of a small hill in the distance. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I bet that’s why Genghis is excited.’

Ali thought it advisable to frighten off the itinerant donkey and, leaving Genghis in our care, he sped off determined to shoo away the interloper, shouting to us: ‘Hold Genghis as tightly as you can.’ But Ali’s efforts seemed to have no effect. He hooted and yelled, threw stones, even tried to catch the beast. All to no avail. Yet he seemed not in the least crestfallen by failure when he returned. ‘It’s all right,’ he announced. ‘That other donkey is a male.’

Relieved, we loosened our hold on Genghis. The other donkey nonchalantly sauntered a little nearer. Genghis brayed with what sounded like a loud victory declaration, bucked, offloaded his burden, and ran off in ardent pursuit.

Zafar surveyed the spilled water as it rapidly spread, before evaporating into the sun-baked earth. Genghis meanwhile caught up with the object of his desires, and the two moved closer. Zafar pressed his lower lip between his teeth, looked reproachfully straight at me and said: ‘I think Genghis is making inappropriate physical contact with the other donkey. I suppose,’ he added, ‘that the old Bedouin who sold him didn’t tell you that Genghis is gay.’

I began to wonder what to do, and at the same time sensed the arrival of a strong hostile presence. Almost simultaneously, Zafar and I looked at each other; and then we both looked at a group of rather surprised Bedouins who were now surrounding us. Were we, indeed, inhabiting the past when pilgrim caravans were regularly hijacked en route to Mecca?

‘What are you doing here?’ asked a rugged-looking young man.

‘We are going on pilgrimage,’ Zafar answered.

‘Pilgrimage?’ The man looked puzzled. He reflected for a moment. ‘You should be in a pilgrim bus with other pilgrims. This is not the way to Mecca. There are only mountains and desert patches here.’

‘We’re walking to Mecca,’ Zafar explained. ‘We’re trying to trace the old caravan route and perform the Hajj as it used to be in the old days, like ibn Battuta.’

‘Walking? Walking? Ibn Battuta? Ibn Battuta?’ The young man neither understood nor believed what he heard. ‘Why do you want to walk? The government has spent millions and millions of riyals to provide the pilgrims with transport. What’s wrong with the bus? Or the car?’ he demanded.

It was time, we felt, for the Bedouins to benefit from some of the Hajj Research Centre’s top experts. The Hajj, we began, is a journey of spiritual enlightenment, the very word Hajj means to exert and the Hajj must be a journey of considerable spiritual exertion. The modern Hajj, in contrast we said, transports pilgrims like cattle along a complex of roads, bridges and spaghetti junctions that have ruined the natural environment. ‘We would rather walk than see our holy environment bulldozed to build roads and flyovers,’ we declared.

The young man turned round and looked at the other Bedouins. They were gazing at us as though we were aliens from another planet. I now decided to use a more drastic approach.

‘Do you know, brothers,’ I said, ‘that some fifty tonnes of exhaust fumes are produced every day by all the cars and buses in Mina? Most pilgrims spend more time coughing than praying. A car or a bus takes over nine hours to cover one mile in the holy areas during the Hajj season. And the noise! Sirens. Hooters. Engines starting and stopping. The well-off pilgrims flit around in the exclusivity of their cars, seldom meeting anyone from different countries. The poor spend their time dodging cars and suffocating from the exhaust fumes. Where is the brotherhood the Hajj is supposed to express?’

The new approach seemed to work. The young man nodded as though he agreed. Encouraged, I continued.

‘You see brother, our research has shown that if everyone walked there would be an orderly flow. No congestion, no pollution, the pilgrims would have the sublime spiritual impact of the Hajj as it has always been.’

‘Research? What research?’ An older Bedouin who had stood expressionless suddenly sounded alarmed.

I noticed the young man had disappeared.

‘Do you have permission for this research from the government? Do you have permission to walk? And what are you doing with that donkey? He has abused my animal in front of my eyes. May God forgive me!’ The old man roused himself to anger.

Before either of us could reply, two police cars with flashing lights and blaring sirens pulled up beside us. A helicopter loomed and hovered above us. Two policemen, accompanied by the young Bedouin, leapt out of one of the cars and demanded to see our papers. I looked at Zafar, who was smiling. He took a letter from his pocket and handed it to one of the policemen. The other policeman peered, intrigued, over his shoulder.

Quite soon the policeman turned to the assembled Bedouins and announced imperiously: ‘Go back to your dwellings. These people have the permission of His Majesty to walk to Mecca.’

Seconds later the helicopter whirled off over the horizon. The Bedouins departed as silently as they had appeared. ‘Good luck,’ the policeman shouted as he drove off.

It took us more than three hours to track down and catch Genghis. A couple of hours later we arrived at the outer limits (the Miqat) of the holy area, known locally as the haramain. Knowledge of this point is important, as tradition demands that here pilgrims have to wash and put on the ihram, the two unstitched pieces of cloth. The ihram, however, is not just the pieces of cloth, it is also a state of mind. To enter the haramain pilgrims have to be in a condition of ihram: a continuous state of prayer and meditation, in harmony with and respectful of the environment and its natural and wild life, while they abstain from all worldly desires. We decided it was now inappropriate to speculate on whether this applied to Genghis and whether, or indeed how, he might have sublimated his needs and desires.

We walked late into the night and after a meal of nuts and dried fruit, we slept in the desert in a tent. We awoke just before dawn to discover we had been visited during the night by a number of snakes and lizards. The reptile population of the desert around Jeddah and Mecca is extraordinary, with over fifty species of snake, including cobras and horned vipers, and more than a hundred species of lizard. From the tracks on the sand, I deduced that a family of Saudi vipers, which resemble puff adders, were nearby. They have beautiful brown skins with round black spots. An inquisitive posse of lanky and delicate lizards, which I thought were Toad-Headed Agama, were still running around. They moved so fast that all one could see was their long tails. Zafar spotted a beautiful gecko family: grey and only three or four inches long, they seemed to be guarding and patrolling their territory.

After breakfast of bread, cheese and olives, we set off once again towards Mecca. By noon we had crossed the desert. Desert sand has the softest, finest texture. Wind-borne, almost silky, it can easily insert itself into clothing fibre. Its colour and that of the landscape changes hue with the sunlight, from the wan creamy yellow of early morning, through an intense golden glare of bright daylight to a soft peachy blush at evening. Wherever one turns the sand is sculpted into sensuous rounded forms. The only harsh lines are provided by the jagged outcrops of sunburnt rock. As if tormented by heat, these piles of stone are twisted into ungainly shapes. Their innards turn to liquid that seeps out and forms a blackened crust on the surface. They seem, literally, to have a bad case of dried skin that only in some lights gives off an iridescent glimmer, like the surface of coal.

Now we were ready for the next phase of our journey. Before us stood the rocky outcrops that litter the desert and form a mountain curtain that envelops the barren valley of Mecca. We started our arduous climb of the first peak. Genghis proved to be the slowest and most reluctant of climbers. Every few steps, Ali had to intimidate him into movement. At one point Zafar stopped and turned accusingly to Ali: ‘What are you doing? We are supposed to be in ihram. In a state of peace, love and grace. You can’t beat that donkey,’ he told him. Genghis seemed to have caught the drift of this statement and now simply refused to move. He stood motionless. We tried to coax him with nuts and dried fruit. He ate the food but stood his ground. Zafar tried to pat and cajole him. It merely incited Genghis to turn and go into reverse, and he began to descend the mountain. We followed him. Once off the mountain, Genghis started running towards the motorway. We ran after him. The harder we tried to catch him, the faster he ran. Eventually he ran straight into the Mecca Intercontinental Hotel.

Located on the Old Jeddah Road on the outskirts of the city, Mecca Intercontinental was the only five-star hotel in Mecca in those days. It has a theatrical tent-like structure modelled on Bedouin marquees. There was an old well inside the front enclave of the hotel that was preserved as a site of historic interest. Genghis ran straight past the well into the crowded lobby. The staff at five-star hotels is trained to deal with any eventuality: everything from late checkouts to natural disasters. A donkey running wild in the lobby was something quite different. They dropped whatever they were doing and ran after Genghis, trying to catch him, while the guests looked on aghast. Eventually, several porters managed to overpower our rampant beast and proceeded to evict him and us from the hotel. Zafar tried to plead with them. ‘It is the Hajj season, brothers. Time to show friendship and love to all creation,’ he argued.

‘You love the donkey if you want to,’ replied the head porter angrily. ‘But do it outside the hotel.’

We duly removed ourselves from the inside of the hotel and tied Genghis to the ancient well in the courtyard. I knew it was the right moment for us to part company. This latter-day Mongol marauder in donkey guise was slowing us down, caused too many problems and seemed to have no appreciation for the higher purpose of our adventure. Donkeys just don’t do ihram. Ali suggested he should take him to our camp in Mina in a pickup truck. Making a reluctant pact with modernity seemed our only option.

We negotiated with several unwilling drivers of pickup trucks before Ali found one driver prepared to do the job at an astronomical price. ‘Look at it this way,’ the driver explained. ‘I take up to fifty pilgrims in one trip. Now with a donkey in the back, I am not likely to get any other passengers. Who’d want to share his seat with a donkey? You must pay for the full load.’ We knew we had no choice.

The pickup truck reversed into the hotel. The driver joined Zafar, Ali and myself to install Genghis; but as usual Genghis was having none of this. We pushed. We pulled. We even tried to pick him up. Genghis would not be budged. Then Ali asked all of us to stand back. ‘Hajj or no Hajj, there is only one way to deal with a donkey,’ he announced. He rolled up his sleeves, spat on his hands and rubbed them together. His face a picture of determination, he picked up a large walking stick and made his way to where Genghis stood. Zafar made as if to stop Ali, and then changed his mind. I became the personification of the three monkeys – simultaneously saying, seeing and hearing nothing.

A few minutes later Genghis was standing in the pickup truck. Ali sat next to the driver and waved goodbye. First slowly, and then swiftly, the truck made off towards our research camp in the hills of Mina.

As we drew a quiet breath, we reflected on our journey so far. ‘Stuff ibn Battuta,’ declared Zafar. ‘I am going to