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of my condominium. After that disillusioning experience, my pendulum swung to the West, and I escaped into beach volleyball, my work, and casual dating. Still, I couldn’t escape my programming. I threw hopes of matrimonial bliss on every man I dated. On my trip to Pakistan after September 11, I landed in Karachi alone, on a grim search for the family of a suicide victim. I was reporting a story on how despair over dismal economic opportunities was driving record numbers of men to commit suicide in this Islamic country where religious clerics ruled that suicide was a one-way ticket to hell. I didn’t think their rulings allowed compassion for the real chemical imbalances that actually drove people to commit suicide. To me, their rule was as compassionate as condemning a heart attack victim to hell. The helplessness and hopelessness that led Muslim men to acts of violence against themselves seemed to have much in commonwith the imbalance and frustration that was leading other Muslim men to commit suicidal acts of terrorism, such as the 9/11 disaster.
    To my surprise, in the midst of my reporting I fell in love with a young Pakistani man. We met one Sunday afternoon when I went to visit the son of a local newspaper columnist, a family acquaintance, at a weekend getaway called French Beach. We started seeing each other, as openly as if we were dating in the West. The candor surprised even me, but I got caught up in the emotion. He told a friend, yelling into his cell phone as we entered an elevator at the Karachi Sheraton Hotel and Towers, “I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry!” His proclamation might have seemed frivolous to some, but I took it seriously. I had been traveling the Indian subcontinent for two years searching for divine love. Just when I had given up, I seemed to have found it.
    During the first days of January 2002, I rented a villa with jasmine flowers in the garden to write my book and pursue my romance. Again, I saw the two aspects of myself in this Muslim man whom I had met. Even in love, I was seeking truth and wisdom.
    I was also again trying to do my hajj. This time I had a potential assignment from Outside , an outdoor adventure travel magazine, to experience the hajj in the most adventurous way that I could. For years as a Wall Street Journal reporter, I had thought I could do an unconventional profile on the big business of the pilgrimage. It amazed me that you could do the hajj and also get Hilton honor points. The magazine assignment seemed a good way to report this side of the hajj phenomenon. I was struggling with the question of whether to go as a journalist or as an ordinary pilgrim. To go as a journalist, I would have to get a journalist’s visa from the Saudi Ministry of Information. I was fortunate to know a fellow Wall Street Journal reporter who had penetrated Saudi Arabia’s bureaucracy and reported from there. His name was Daniel Pearl, and we’d been friends since the summer of 1993, when I was reeling from my failed three-month marriage to the man from Pakistan. Close in age, we bonded immediately and built a close friendship over office pranks, beach volleyball, and immigrant parents who wanted us to marry within our ethnic and religious roots. Danny made a decision to choose love over religion and ethnicity; he married an exuberant French Buddhist woman, Mariane Vanneyenhoff, born to a Cuban mother and Dutch father. Danny became the South Asia bureau chief for the Journal , and he and his wife flew straight to Pakistan after the planes hit the World Trade Center. I called him in Islamabad, where they were staying.
    â€œShould I go as a journalist or an ordinary pilgrim?” I asked him.
    Danny told me a Saudi information chief was a man named Prince Turki bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz.
    â€œHe’s a real turkey,” Danny chortled, in a joke he admitted was obvious. More seriously he said, “Stay away from him.”
    These weren’t