January 20, 2005
Islamic Pilgrims Bring Cosmopolitan Air to Unlikely City
ECCA,
Saudi Arabia, Jan. 18 - The two-hour panel presentation on "Mecca: The
Cultural Capital of Islam" was pretty dry but things got rolling in the
question and answer session, in a way that was quintessentially Meccan.
One by one, audience members, a surprising number of them women, came to the microphone and tossed out questions that few others would dare ask publicly.
"How will we deal with the issue of terrorism?" asked one woman.
"Why do we look only into the past and not to the future?" another woman demanded.
The session soon grew into a raucous series of debates about the critical issues facing Muslims - disunity, extremism, leadership. And soon the meeting's organizer, Abubaker Bagader, a sociology professor at King Abdul Aziz University, had to step in to admonish them - not for being too argumentative but for veering from the subject.
Rare in most of the Muslim world, the willingness to debate and raise seemingly taboo questions is standard here in the birthplace of Islam and the site of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage beginning Wednesday that attracts about 1.5 million Muslims from all corners of the world for five days of meditation, prayer and, often, vigorous debate.
In workshops and meeting rooms, at schools and mosques in the city, the freewheeling discussion of theology, history and politics lives on. And if this intellectual melee was any indicator, the debate is quite civilized - no raised voices, no threats, no personal attacks.
In Mecca, Dr. Bagader said later, that is the way. "This city is a stage where people from all over the world can come and find an audience to listen to them," says Dr. Bagader, a Meccan native. "There is an acceptance of being different here."
It is a city where spirit, not ritual, rules the day. Typically, in conservative Islamic societies like Saudi Arabia, men and women are strictly separated during prayers, and they are here. But with the enormous crowds that gather for meditation around the Kaaba - the small temple in the center of the Grand Mosque that Muslims believe was built by the prophet Abraham and consider the defining symbol of Islam - men and women are jammed in side by side. Saudi Arabia's normally relentless vice officers often throw up their hands, their usual tactics of harassment overwhelmed by numbers.
But what really makes Mecca so open is its diversity, a product largely of the hajj, which for 1,425 years has been attracting believers from all over the world. Many stay on.
Far from the strictness of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's ascetic capital, and the homogeneity of most other Muslim capitals, Mecca is by far the Muslim world's most diverse city - some 100 ethnicities are represented here, and almost every sect and creed lives in peace, whether Shia, Sunni or Ismaili.
The average Meccan is just as likely to be Asian as Arab, just as likely to be light-skinned as dark-skinned, just as likely to speak English as Arabic, and almost everyone who lives here is bilingual or better. (Openness is not absolute; no non-Muslims are allowed in the city.)
Some elderly Muslims come simply to die in a divine city. But countless others stay to seek refuge, to seek higher learning or simply to make some money.
These days, many are from Africa or the Arab world. But in generations past, many were Chinese, Malay, Turkish, even Albanian. Some came for spirituality and others came to escape subjugation.
"Other cities claim to be melting pots, but this is the original melting pot," says Salah Abdel Jalil, an educator who heads a program for gifted students. "You feel a certain level of peace and openness here that you won't find elsewhere."
Mr. Abdel Jalil is one of those average Meccans. He is a third-generation Chinese-Saudi whose grandfather, a general under Chiang Kai-shek, escaped the Communist takeover of China and came to Mecca for solace. The general raised a family that has thrived, and whose members now see themselves as native sons. But he also has cousins and relatives in the United States and Taiwan, a completely different bridge.
"I am Saudi," says Mr. Abdel Jalil. "I was born here, raised here, and educated here. I belong to this soil."
Mr. Abdel Jalil rose through the ranks at the Ministry of Education and soon joined a unique but obscure nationwide effort to find and cultivate gifted students in Mecca and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia. "In Mecca, we used to focus on graduating numbers, now I focus on graduating quality," he said.
And as part of that quality, he seeks to exercise both lobes of his students' minds in ways few educational institutions in the Arab world do. It is the kind of work that can bring on major change in future generations in this city.
"It is all about the lifestyle here," he said. "In the Najd," the region around Riyadh, "you find a closed society. Here you have so many races and nationalities that you have to keep an open mind and be able to give and take."
All that has resulted in an unlikely liberalism - not quite a Berkeley-style liberalism, but still a striking oasis of open thought and discussion in a world of hardened politics and interests. Increasingly, Meccans see themselves as a bulwark against the creeping extremism that has overtaken much Islamic debate.
It was in Mecca in the late 1980's that some of the first warnings about extremism were sounded, by Seyed Mohammad al-Maliki, among the last of Mecca's homegrown scholars and a generally liberal voice in the city.
It is little surprise, then, that Meccans still bristle at the description of extremists as "fundamentalists." In this city, the fundamentals are neither militancy nor dogmatic intolerance, but openness and free thought.