crying in God's house
the ebbing of time in the 10 middle days of Ramadan
When we go to Saudi Arabia, the clocks go back an hour, and since the duration of the flight is less than the time difference, we arrive before the time we depart. We enter the metal tube and go back in time, which makes me think that Dad is a frequent time traveler. Twice a week, he flies between Abu Dhabi and Dammam. His transition from workdays to weekdays and vice versa requires a stint in the clouds. Since Wizz Air Abu Dhabi started operating, he is not alone in his inter-Gulf commute. He knows the names of the other men who do similar, frequent journeys to his. It is practically a bus ride.
The flight attendants have become regular faces in my dad’s life, he does not know them by name but knows the Tunisian ones. The flight attendant, wanting to switch me to an emergency seat row, asked me how old I was and I asked her to take a guess. The shock on her face when I revealed I was 24 was priceless. I let her know I do not travel well. Just by looking at the men in office attire on this flight, I am certain that most of these men will go straight to work instead of dropping off their things at home first. Dad usually goes straight to work, but I am the thing he has to drop off at home. I walk across the cabin. Sitting at the front of the aircraft, Dad has his head against the window as he sits cross-legged. Most of the other passengers are asleep too. I feel like a ghost haunting the plane, or a zombie trying to find signs of life amongst the clouds. I have not been awake this early for months, but to be fair, I have yet to sleep. Ramadan has made me nocturnal, but I already had my issues with sleep.
Dad and I reached King Fahd International Airport in Dammam around 8:30 am. Mom rang us a few times, but we still have not gone past the border. Border patrols stress me out, in my adult years more so. 15 years of being engulfed in the Gulf brings me but the precarity of my existence here, which is based on paperwork and bureaucracy. My worry is always how I will interact with the thick borders of nation-states, and this morning, my interaction with the state was with very kind Saudi men. My temporariness in the Gulf would be easier to occupy if it weren’t for my green passport. I flew to Saudi with Dad to ensure I could enter the country and to extend the handwritten visa on my passport, which was set to expire in a few days, ahead of a trip to Medina. Even when it became clear that I would most likely be able to enter the country easily, I decided to stay with my dad to keep him company, during the forty-eight hours I spent at his place in Khobar. I did not do much at that time, Dad would come back from work around the time I would have woken up. By the time my body was fully awake, and he had a short nap, we would head out to whatever place we were grabbing iftar.
My first iftar in Khobar was at the apartment of family friends that we have known since 2008 when they moved to Libya. I used to love this family when I was young, they have three kids, including a boy my age (now a man) who must have been my first real crush. On our way to their place, Dad signaled some of the emblems our my time here between 2004 and 2007. He pointed at the French school in Khobar, since it is in Saudi where my parents chose school my siblings and I in French schools. We lived in Oasis Compound. It was common for “expatriates” to live inside gated communities, these communities have their historical roots in Saudi Arabia from the oil boom when Westerners and non-Saudis were moving to the country. The gated community makes separate geographies, it creates lifestyles that can only exist within the confine of walls. Mom used to drive when we lived in Saudi, even if women weren’t allowed to back then, she did so inside the compound.
I wanted to drive around the compound, but security was tight, and they would not let us pass the gate unless we knew someone living there. But we did circumnavigate the compound, and I noticed the crackled paint.
“Why does the compound look so abandoned?”
“The owner went to jail, and since then, the place has been decaying” Dad replied.
I wanted to go back inside. There was a bowling alley and ice skating rink. It felt so large then but I do not even remember what it looks like. Seeing the crackled paint on the outside walls of the compound, I do not think going inside would make much of my memory.
The trickling of the years changed this family, particularly the parents. The father, who has recently become my dad’s boss, patronizes me at every chance he gets, he might have always been like that, but when I was a kid, I did not know much about thickly disguised misogyny and superiority complexes. The mother, whom I remember as much more smiley and talkative, has become quiet in a way that concerns me and only gives faint smiles. I still went to their place, and tried my best to speak to them, although I am usually met with interruption from the man, and with silence from the woman. I still went to their home, but around them, nostalgia dies. Without their kids living abroad, I am met with two adults part of my irretrievable childhood in Libya, not much else. I still went to their apartment, and the chicken she cooked that night was lovely.
Dad lives in the same area we lived in then. He was transferred to Khobar in 2018, ten years after we left Saudi Arabia. Mom did not want to move here, and since the Eastern Province is so close to the UAE, my dad started commuting between both countries, in hopes that at some point, he would get transferred to the UAE, or elsewhere. In writing this, I realized it has been six years since my dad’s body has been suffering from this arrangement, of being in a different country between weekends and weekdays. Elsewhere, I have told you about the white hairs that emerge from my mother’s scalp but I have yet to tell you about my father’s white hairs.1 Lately, he has been asking me if I would write his biography, and when I do not reply quickly enough, he will ask me if I do not think his life is interesting enough for the page. I still have not gotten around to writing about Dad’s side of the family. Everything has had a matrilineal focus. I hope soon enough, I will also tell you about Sfax, the city where my dad grew up, about my paternal grandparents, and my father more, outside of the confines of his two-bedroom apartment in Khobar.
Part of Dad’s weekday bachelor lifestyle is an apartment that my mom does not feel at home in. It is a home my mom did not make. It is bare in decoration. It does the job for my dad’s daily life and when my mom, siblings and I visit. But what always stands out to me is how little it changes. The last time I was here was almost exactly a year ago, it was during Ramadan. I had bought a tube of henna and left it on the table in the living room. A year later, it is still there, in the same place I left it. In the bathroom, there were facial cleansers that if my memory serves me well, have been here since my last visit before the last one, in December 2019.
On our way back home, Dad stopped to get his dry cleaning. It started raining very thickly. I know his dry cleaning place, but a vivid memory came to me whilst I looked out the window. I must have been six years old, sitting in the backseat of Dad’s car, and Ameni, nine years old, was sitting at the front.
Dad returned to the car, putting his laundry in the seat behind me.
“Papa, is the place where we used to get the Afghan bread?”
“Mashallah, you remember.” he replied“It is now replaced by the chocolate bar”
Then, when he came back to the car, Ameni and I ripped open the flatbread filled with Kiri cheese. He would caution us that the bread was hot, so we would not burn our hands. We would eat some of the bread, and it would hold us over for the rest of the ride until we got home for lunch. Now, he and I unite in silence in the few minutes drive to his apartment. He locked the apartment and closed the door of his bedroom to sleep. I opened my laptop and wrote to the faint sound of his snores.
In Khobar, I return to the irretrievable dimension of times deeply sedimented in my memory. I return to a place that confirms my fear of forgetfulness. Khobar is part of my foundational story even if I do not remember it. It is of the slower rhythms of my childhood. It is of a time when French found its place at the tip of my tongue. It is the place where my awareness of the Arab World developed. It is here where I came home from school and let my parents know that “something terrible happened in Lebanon today”. The event in question was the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in February 2005, which my Lebanese teacher, in the French school in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, informed me of. I was nine days away from turning five years old. I understood something, early on, that my life was intertwined with the Arab World, and that regardless of anything, my future would always be attached to it. That I will always return, sometimes by choice, sometimes by obligation.
A brief stint in Abu Dhabi is invisible between this paragraph and the previous one. Not even 48 hours back in Abu Dhabi, we flew to Medina, the second-holiest city of Islam. In 622, Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) fled to Medina (formerly called Yathrib) from his native Mecca as a result of religious persecution. That marks the start of the Hijri (Islamic) calendar, a new way of measuring time, based on the prophet’s migration, each new month starts with a sighting of a new moon. Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that, even administratively, use the Hijri calendar. Turkey used to, until 1923 when Kemal Mustafa Attaturk founded the modern nation-state and transitioned to the Gregorian solar calendar. People alive during that change became bitemporal, as their lives experienced a new flow of time.2 When I go to Saudi Arabia, I become slightly bitemporal. My passport is stamped with the date from the Hijri calendar, and whenever I google anything, the dates are given to me according to the Islamic calendar. Bitemporality makes me travel across time, between 2024 to 1445, and when I leave, I go from 1445 to 2024. I do not think that nostalgia is about the feeling of longing itself, but it is also a rejection of time as linear. Svetlana Boym argued that nostalgia and progress are alter egos of each other since both concepts are the result of radical transformations of time as progressive and irreversible. Nostalgia relinquishes the impermeable thickness of time and embraces its porous elasticity.
Landing into Medina seemed like we were flying onto Mars. This part of Saudi Arabia, the Hejaz Strip, is very mountainous. I started our pilgrimage in reasonable spirits, even though I was sleep-deprived. On our way to our hotel, Dad conversed with the cab driver, letting him know we decided to go to Mecca using the new train, instead of what pilgrims usually do, which is to traverse from Medina to Mecca by car and stop at Mount Arafat. The mountain is where the prophet, accompanied by his companions, stood and delivered the Farewell Sermon when he did Hajj towards the end of his life. But the mountain is also referred to as the “Mountain of Mercy”, since some Muslims believe that there is where Adam and Eve reunited on earth after falling from heaven, and that is where God forgave them.
“I don’t understand why pilgrims are taking the train and no longer following sunnah (the teachings of the prophet). The train does not even pass through the mountains, whoever made it could have at least made that happen” The cab driver said
Dad made a face that I could see from the rearview mirror. It was a face of religious guilt. After we were dropped off, he turned to my mom and said the driver was right.
I passed out on the duvet of the hotel room bed, but I was woken up by some men yelling in the corridor. It was time for Maghreb prayer, so I went to the bathroom and performed ablution.
Khadija and I met our parents and two family friends who were on pilgrimage with us at the hotel lobby. We walked towards the prophet’s mosque, built shortly after he arrived in Medina in 622. We walked through the marble floor courtyard, stretching between the street and the entrance of the mosque. There, people sat down, and others distributed dates, water, bread rolls, and as we walked towards the mosque, people were inviting us for full meals laid out in the open, set to be eaten in the time between the call for prayer, and the prayer. The generosity there was a beautiful thing. Everyone wanted to give there, even pilgrims, passing around dates and whatever they could. Feeding someone who has fasted reaps reward in the thereafter. I watched the sunset, and when I prostrated in prayer, knowing the thousands of people who were praying at the same time as I was, my heart felt full. The unity I felt was short-lived. Since I have yearned to feel the same way I did in Medina. Of being in communion with something larger than me, whilst in prayer, and frankly whilst doing anything.
You would think New York is the city that never sleeps, but you should see how Medina or Mecca are, they would overthrow New York at any time. The city is always bustling. In the commercial areas, someone is always trying to sell you something, whether at 3 pm or 3 am. People are awake, and moving. There is no moment without prayer either.
I felt exhaustion hit my body when we reached Mecca. I slept throughout the three-hour train ride that connected Medina to Mecca, the two holiest cities of Islam, but I felt far from holy. I felt far from God’s reach, and at the risk of sounding blasphemous, I felt forgotten by God. I had dreams I do not remember because they followed each other consecutively, but I woke up wishing I was elsewhere. I woke up feeling the pain of years accumulate as if they had just caught up with me. As if for years I had turned off the switch to feel, and that suddenly, it had been turned back on.
My body felt paralyzed, but I had to walk. We left the station, and as I was going down the escalators, a man was going up the escalators. I took a double take, he looked familiar, and before I could react, he was out of sight. I looked at Khadija:
“Was that Fahad from Dubai bling?” Khadija asked
“Yes it was” I replied
I was numb enough to not react to finding a reality TV star in Mecca. We dropped our things at the hotel. Mom noticed the sudden shift in my mood, asking me why I was ungrateful, and why I could not just crack a smile at them. I stayed silent.
We reached the outskirts of Al-Haram mosque, and the tears went loose. I tried holding myself because I did not want to cry in front of my family, but I was overwhelmed by one of the busiest places in the world. I felt myself collapse in a way I hadn’t before. If I had sobs that were repressed deeply inside of me, they were all making themselves known to me.
The last time I was here was six years ago, and I did not want to come. I had a deep-seated guilt for my lack of desire to go on pilgrimage, for many Muslims, this is a dream, one that is difficult to accomplish. It is believed that only Allah invites you to his house by his will, and if He willed you to come, then you will come. Then and now, God willed me to be in his house, but I do not feel at home in this world, to fully embrace the place I am in, or to allow myself to be embraced by the place. I was in God’s house but struggling with my faith.
We circumambulate the Kaaba seven times in a counter-clock direction. Tawaaf is the name of this ritual, and it is done since a circle has one center, in circling, in community, believers unite in the worship of God, moving in harmony around the Kaaba and supplicating to God. We revolved around the Kaaba and in each revolution, I tried praying as much as I could, but my mind kept going elsewhere.
The last time I was here, I had a spiritual awakening of sorts when we circumnavigated the Kaaba seven times. Towards the end, I felt my body shutting down, so my dad rented out a wheelchair so I could finish the ritual. I prayed for all the people and things I loved. I prayed to be better. And I think God heard those prayers and did what he willed. I was better, but I am not healed, at least, I do not feel that way in my time of writing. The last time, I went on pilgrimage I thought I was going to die, this does happen in some years due to poor crowd control. The death might have been metaphorical, an earlier version of me stayed in Mecca, that I never looked back at. But I was questioning my progress as a human being in the same way history had engrained the idea of linearity. I do not know why I am so preoccupied with progress as a concept. Am I better than I was last time? Were my prayers answered?
I cannot remember what I prayed for then.
This year, the mosque was so packed, that it was hard to move harmoniously. When we turned around the Kaaba I held onto Khadija who held onto Mom, and Dad held on to me. I would do anything to protect my younger sister, but I know there is only so much harm in the world I can protect her from. She has known sadness, and the world made her experience it without my permission, because if it were up to me, it would not happen, it would never happen to her.
I left Mecca the same way I arrived. Feeling broken. Broken by something I cannot tangibly describe yet. Feeling broken by the world I live in now. I made a list of who and what I would pray for and I crossed off every name and thing on that list. I did not know how to pray for my future, pray for my loved ones, or pray even for the afterlife, when hell already exists, and we are living in it.
I cried in God’s house. I cried in God’s house since living and dying equally scare me, so I live in a liminal space of not knowing what to do with myself. I cried in God’s house even if some believe that the world is ending soon, I feel it ending every day. I cried in God’s house because I do not know what to do with myself when I struggle to imagine a future, or how to build a better tomorrow. I cried in God’s house because I remembered that God is merciful. Before anything, God is merciful. What kept me there, what grounds me in the time of writing, is that God is merciful.
I cannot forget that God is merciful.
to know more about the white hairs that emerge from my mother’s scalp, refer to the first piece of this project “dear Maman”
Reading Esra Özyürek’s Nostalgia for the Modern made me think about bitemporality as a concept, she discusses it in her first chapter.