A Woman Walks to Mecca
MECCA, Saudi Arabia — “Sister, where are your socks?” one of the women I was sitting with demanded. “Don’t you know you have to cover your feet?”
We were in the sprawling Grand Mosque that surrounds the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site, during the hajj, the five- day pilgrimage of rites and rituals that took place earlier this month. I could not decipher which of the four Saudi women in identical billowing black robes and black gloves was speaking to me because their faces were covered with not one but two veils, something I had never seen before.
They made space for me. I discreetly covered my offending feet with my own long, black robe, which I bought specially for the hajj, my first. These women poured me golden Arabian coffee from their thermos and fed me crunchy yellow dates while we waited for Friday Prayer to begin.
There it was again. I was at once frustrated by Islam’s nitpicky strictures on women’s dress and embraced by its warm sisterhood. Over and over again during this journey, I was confronted by how the faith I was raised in deals with gender, the very thing that had made me take off my hijab in college.
At its founding, 1,400 years ago, Islam was revolutionary for its time in seeing women as spiritual equals. But the day-to- day gender roles are what trouble me.
My testimony in some Islamic court matters would count for half that of a male witness. Men can take four wives, women one husband.
Yet Muslim women have a right to an education, to be scholars and in some cases jurists.
Each day in Mecca provided powerful reminders of a religion that seems to simultaneously embrace women and push them away.
Another day at the Grand Mosque, I met Saraya, a middle-aged woman who is from South Africa but lives in Australia, where I grew up. She had longed to make the hajj for years but was unable because she lacked a mahram, or male guardian — usually a husband, brother or father — to accompany her; male pilgrims can come alone.
She got here only because the Saudi government allows some women over 45 to come with an older female companion. (I got around the mahram requirement because I came on a journalist visa, which included a different kind of guardian, a Saudi minder who accompanied me during all my reporting.)
Once women overcome the obstacles to getting here, they are required to perform all the same rituals as men. The only real gender difference on the hajj is that men are supposed to wear two white sheets with nothing underneath (women have no specific dress requirement beyond modesty), and at the end, men shave their heads and women simply cut a lock of hair.
Men and women mix freely during hajj rites: walking together seven times around the Kaaba; climbing together to the top of Mount Arafat, where supplications to God are believed to be answered; throwing stones together at the Jamarat, the three pillars that symbolize the devil.
But segregation— and unequal treatment — come back five times daily with the call to prayer.
One night at the compound where my 500-person V.I.P. delegation was staying in Arafat, I was working when the men suddenly started kneeling in a large, air- conditioned, carpeted room. I asked where the women should pray, and various officials kept directing me back through a parking lot crammed with buses until I realized there was no space set aside; we were meant to bow alone in our rooms.
Another night, as I tried to find room between worshipers, a security guard shouted that I was taking space where men needed to walk.
Among other special rules around the hajj, there is a relaxation of some of Islam’s modesty strictures: Women are not supposed to cover their faces. But I met several female pilgrims who still shrouded themselves.
Beneath the veils, though, were hardly oppressed chattel. One woman I met, Mervat, works as a cardiologist in war-torn Yemen.
Then there was Raghdah Hakeem, 27, a Saudi assigned by the Ministry of Culture and Information to care for the women in our delegation.
When Ms. Hakeem was ordered to sit at the back of the bus one night, she refused and stayed in her seat, a Muslim Rosa Parks. “I can sit wherever I want,” she recalled telling the elderly, bearded official. “All the men around me said, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t go.’ I stood for my opinion, and they supported me.”
Despite dire warnings from my mother and sister, who had done the hajj before me, I did not experience sexual harassment in any form — no groping, no gestures, no untoward or unwelcome comments. I felt safe. But also, too often, second- class.