Standing Alone Read Online Free Page A

kind of graduation gown with a loose ninja hood; only her eyes were visible. A man came in with her. She flipped open her passport. The picture inside showed her face, but her hair was still completely shrouded. I wondered what identity I would have to assume to make this journey. Did I have to become her ? I cherished cousins and aunts who dressed in burka. But as much as I loved and respected them, I didn’t think I’d ever adopt their external persona. I left frustrated.
    In the house of my elderly aunt, Rashida Khala, a doting, pious, and beautiful woman, I met a distant cousin. He was planning on going on the hajj with his wife. “Can I go with you?” I asked eagerly.
    â€œWe shall see,” he answered.
    He was my elder. Surely he could qualify as my mahram. Surely the Saudi government didn’t care if he was a distant relative. Surely, it turned out, it did. I rode my motorcycle for almost seven hours (with a rest overnight) to my ancestral village of Jaigahan, where women don’t emerge from the cloisters of their houses except in burka. Yet I couldn’t travel to Saudi Arabia with a cousin. I had to be accompanied by a direct bloodline male relative. On top of that restriction, the fundamentalist Hindu government in power in India didn’t seem to rank Muslim pilgrims as a top priority. Fundamentalism in Hinduism was like fundamentalism in all religions: its adherents believed in the supremacy of their faith over others. Its politicians wanted to turn India’s secular state into a Hindu nation. This was an issue for hajj pilgrims in India, where, as in many countries outside the Western world, pilgrims have to be state-sanctioned. I called my relative from a phone booth in the Jaigahan bazaar.
    After our greetings, I asked, “Are you going?”
    â€œIt is not so simple being a Muslim in India,” my cousin told me.
    His wife had to get a new passport before she could apply for a hajj visa. “They see a Muslim name, and they delay the application,” my cousin said.
    It continued like that for days. Finally, I had to admit to myself that I was not going to be able to do the tricks in this circus—at least not that year.

THE WALL OF WAHHABISM
    KARACHI , PAKISTAN —Later that year, I found myself in the most unlikely of places. I was living in a posh neighborhood in Karachi, Pakistan.
    When Muslim hijackers killed thousands in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I went to Pakistan as a journalist for Salon magazine. I had been writing my book in Morgantown but put it aside. I was a Muslim of the West. Somehow, I thought that through journalism I could bridge some of the critical failings that had led to the violence of September 11. I had last been in Pakistan under very different circumstances. When I was twenty-seven, I met a Pakistani man, projecting onto him my deep desire to reconcile the dissonance in my life between East and West. Like me, he had run high school crosscountry, and he lived a bifurcated life: born in Pakistan, he was raised in Paris and settled in Washington, D.C. Over the years my mother had warned me: “If you marry an American, your father will have a heart attack.” Muslim guilt set in. Within weeks I left an American Lutheran boyfriend who loved me fully, said he was willing to convert to Islam, and was ready to learn Urdu. I got engaged, sold the condo I had bought off Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, and moved to Washington to prepare for a wedding in Islamabad, Pakistan. The deeper voices of my religion were speaking to me: the ban on Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, the disapproval toward sex before marriage. I was looking for a reunion between my two selves.
    Within weeks after the wedding, however, I knew I hadn’t made a suitable match for me. I fell into depression, and my husband left the marriage, withdrawing from our joint bank account the proceeds from the sale