On the bus before we departed from the Jeddah airport, our guide, Mr. Mansour, gave us a three-minute prep for hajj. All of us are here early enough to make what is known as hajj tamattu’. That means as soon as we can, we follow through in irham to the Kaaba and make umrah. There’s the ihram, then we do tawaf around the Kaaba, sa’iy between Safa and Marwa, clip the hair, and we are done. We get to leave ihram until we take it up again for hajj proper, which will be about a week from now. Mr. Mansour then gave us some logistics about finding our way back to the hotel. Find a marker to help you go out of Door Number One, the King Abd Allah Aziz door. He said, “there 101 doors in and out of the Haram”—so this meant we really needed to make note for simplest return.
Later, when I took my circuit around the outside of the mosque and took photos of quite a few of the doors, I also made a mental note of some of the names. (Next time I’m in the mosque, I will find out for you if any of them have women’s names.) I remember things like one of the four battles the Prophet engaged in after he left Makkah following 13 years as a nonviolent protestor: bab al-Ubaydah. There was a door named bab al-’Umrah, and of course a few other Saudi Kings, Islamic historical male figures, like bab Umar, and important cites, like bab al-Madinah.
The thing is, as far as I could tell, women are hustled out of every place on the first floor, but especially as salat time approaches. Sometimes if it gets late enough and there is a large enough unyielding cluster, they may eke out a space behind some men. But the rudeness of the removal is so disturbing, I just do not want that encounter. But I do want to pray where I can see the Ka’abah. That is only possible from the first floor, and if you are right by the railing on the upper floors. So, I have missed this opportunity after that first day, when we did our tawaf, followed by two rakaat at the maqam Ibrahim.
As I circled around inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out after zuhr prayer one day. There it was: a whole section with all women in it.
Not wanting to get my hopes up too high and then be disappointed (because this was at least 45 minutes after the prayer had ended), I ask the female guard, “al-Nisaa yajuz tusalli hinna?”—are women allowed to pray here? And she said, “yes, this is the women’s section.” Cool. I mean, literally. This was the coolest temperature of all the sections of the mosque that I had been in.
I changed my plans and decided I would have a quick lunch at the mall, and then return and get the opportunity to pray on the first floor and not be hassled. Yay! Clearly, I was celebrating prematurely. In all my attention to seeing women un-hassled in this section, I failed to notice that from this section, the Ka’abah is not visible.
Now the words of my friend Zainah came back to me, “All our lives we pray, oriented towards the Ka’abah. We even have prayer rugs with it designed upon them. So of course when you are there you want to be able to see the real thing as you pray.” It seem par for the course in finding markers to make my way back that this section would be by the door with no name. Are you getting the metaphors here?
