the intellectual, perhaps the unconscious hope of an eruption. By early 2005, when Une saison à la Mecque was published, the question ‘Et toi, que fais-tu là?’ had an even sharper sting. The gestation of the book took place over the years following the 11 September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the years of the ‘war on terror’ declared by an American administration that sees (or saw) itself as world-mastering. And our reading in 2006 is in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the invasion of Iraq, acute US-Iranian tensions, the continued marginalisation and domination of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation, and all the wider tensions around ‘Islam’ we know too well. All of these shadow Hammoudi’s narrative, though it is only at the end of the book that he makes them explicit. He also makes explicit the ways in which he lost the courage or the desire to write as he had before. As Hammoudi’s pilgrimage proceeds, anxiety, sadness, disquiet and unease are compounded by dizziness, fever, exhaustion and frailty. The physical strain caused by the climate, endless delays in transport, hellish bus rides, stifling crowds, absent guides and organisers, buzzing helicopters, officious Saudi policemen and corrupt Moroccan officials, voracious merchants, overflowing toilets and abysmal food are linked to illness, insomnia, vertigo and a pervasive sense of being at the end of his tether. He is, in a sense and at times, out of his mind as well as out of his place, wherever that place might be construed to be. Most strikingly, at a key later phase of the pilgrimage, his boyhood memory of the stench of animal blood will flood back when he sees the millions of sheep penned before the sacrifice.2

‘Slowly, the horror that always seized me when I heard a beast’s final death rattle came back. Once again, something familiar was catching up with me in a new, unbearable guise.’ The initial stages of his journey, similar to those faced by many across the Muslim world, appeared simple. Not for long. All must begin with a rather different but essential pilgrimage, through the state bureaucracies. Pilgrimage is a scarce good. There are quotas; not everyone can go. Hammoudi finds himself in the hands, or rather the folders, of the Moroccan bureaucracy and what one might generously call its gift economy. Fondly imagining that he could benefit from a friend’s influence and his own status, he does not quite grasp his powerlessness in front of the caid, the convolut

2The importing of livestock for such occasions can be a major drain on the foreign exchange reserves of a country such as Algeria. In Singapore in 2005 there was much consternation among the Muslim community when large shipments of animals from Australia did not arrive on the appointed day for slaughter at the mosques and distribution to the needy. 3 An English Muslim friend told me that goingon the pilgrimage with very wealthy Saudi friends with every imaginable luxury and convenience had led to some perhaps not entirely humorous joking about whether it was really appropriate to indulge in so many amenities while in a state of ihramand when performing so solemn a re-enactment of key Islamic rites.

edproblems of obtaining a residency certificate when you live in another country, the need for a boucle, a sweetener to secure the deal, a ‘present’ which his friend tactfullydelivers in Hammoudi’s absence. The anthropologist worries scrupulously whether this everyday way of getting things done does not taint the ritual on which he is embarking. 3 It’s how you get along, is the slightly surprised response, the government’s ways of doing things, the mauvaises habitudes(translated rather awkwardly as ‘cursed customs’). The gift only gets him through the entrance and into the maze. There he finds himself entrapped in a universally practised modern habitude: the constitution of the file (Hammoudi’s italics) or rather, the multiple files. Twenty-four photographs, then 30, copies of his birth certificate, copies of his national ID card, forms, validating signatures, medical certificates etc, proving and proving again in seemingly endless circuits at whose mysterious workings one can only guess, that he is officially identified as this person, from this rural or urban or other unit or subdivision of Morocco. (We have come a long way from the days of a photograph in a Dutch consulate.) Pilgrims must be organised for the pilgrimage accordingto all the appropriate state classifications of residence and place of origin, justas later in Saudi Arabia they will live inareas arranged by nationality. And pilgrims should pay a little barakaalong the way. If they do, then they have no registration problems and can fulfil the conditions of the Royal Commission on Pilgrimage and Umra(shorter visits to Mecca that Muslims can make at any time of year). If they do not,and Hammoudi again does not grasp this early enough to save himself a lot of trouble and many, many days of effort, then, naturally, nothing happens. He risks not being one of the authorised 24,000 (plus 5000 reserved for travel agencies) that year. Small wonder that he becomes obsessive about his photograph and the many eyes that scrutinise or glance dully at it: the Moroccan police, the interior services, the sanitation department, the royal commission, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, border control, customs, smuggling and drug-control officials, the Saudi embassy, the Saudi Ministry of the Haj. This is all part of learning what it is to go on a modern pilgrimage. You have to learn about bureaucracy and corruption, to discover what it is to be ruled by those who guard the ways to salvation, to know how to wait, to submit: ‘The point was to await the awaiting.’ That is only one part of your training. More obviously, you also have to be taught specific religious duties, exactly what to do at each phase of the haj, by members of the Rabat Ulema Council. There is a lot to learn. But it is not made any easier by the teachers’ accents or the way they mix up classical Arabic and the Moroccan colloquial. The audience is made up of people from all over the country of very different levels of education and class, the message sometimes not quite clear even to someonewith Hammoudi’s training. To much general relief, though some hesitation on the part of his colleagues who disapprove of such matters being spoken of in the

common tongue, the chief scholar chooses the ‘lower’ colloquial for an address. He exhorts his listeners to pay the strictest attention to the avoidance of commerce between men and women, to purity in all its signs and forms, to dress, to the exact detail of each part of the rites. Failure toperform these rites ‘properly’ is sternlywarnedagainst. A store of anxiety is laid upfor those who lack confidence in their understanding. Following the traces of the Prophet Muhammad, of Ibrahim, Hajar and Ismail, involves for some a constant worry about rite and regulation: have they done this or that act in exactly the way prescribed? Saudi religious law of the Hanbali school is different from the Maliki practice of so many from North Africa. Some younger North Africans are attracted by the apparent rigour of the fundamentalist legal view and are more than willing to hector their compatriots about their inadequacies. Ironically, given his unease, when he is in Arabia, the professor who teaches in America finds himself consulted as an authority on proper behaviour by some of his companions. How can they tell if they have really done everything right and that their pilgrimage is acceptable to God? There are plenty of people around to tell them when they have not. Wahhabi teachings ferociously criticise the practice common in many regions from Morocco to Indonesia of visiting the tombs of holy figures or the graves of ancestors, or making the haj on behalf of deceased parents and relatives. The Saudi teacher’s denunciation of those who timidly ask for guidance is swift: ‘Those who committed such deeds are wood for the fires of Hell!’ The despair this judgment brings is only slightly mitigated when Hammoudi reminds one man that he says the name of God before sacrificing an animal at a holy figure’s tomb, so he puts God first, doesn’t he? A companion ismore robust, less theological: ‘Are they really ulema? Yes, we can see their beards and the towels on their heads. But what’s underneath?’ Always a good question, and the stuff of many satires on the authorities in many traditions. It is also true that Saudi attitudes to other nations do not always leave the warmest impression with visitors. Muslims of my acquaintance in Indonesia or Malaysia have frequently expressed indignation at being treated as second class

by Saudis who appeared to consider them marginal cases of Islamic purity, not to mention racially inferior. For Iranians, the denunciations may be harsher, the problems greater. Like all Shia, they are beyond the Islamic pale to many of their fellow pilgrims. This is especially true in Saudi Arabia, which has its own Shia population, its political problems with Iran, its preaching of an exclusionary Sunnism and, no doubt, memories of the 1987 battle in the Grand Mosque between the police and pro-Iranian demonstrators in which 402 people died. For the Saudis, guardianship of the Two Holy Places brings with it the enormous administrative and organisational – not to say political – task of trying to ensure that the needs of more than two million people are met without disaster: the stampede beside the Jamarat bridge in January, a fire in a camp in 1997 and stampeding crowds in 1990 are only three recent calamities. The vast security apparatus and the health, fire and safety agencies are fully stretched, and have to operate under the lenses of the world’s news cameras. The Saudis are in no mood to tolerate deviances, let alone people they see as schismatics. Hammoudi has little time for their version of Islam or for the Saudi version of modernity in general. The barren concrete cities have demolished the past almost as effectively as gravestones have been smashed. But in the rites, at certain moments and in certain places, he finds an ‘irreducible archaism’ that frustrates the policing of body, thought and organisation: ‘The serene crowd’s prayer flowed out to the horizons. Nothing could touch it – not the urban security grid around it, not the incessant buzz of surveillance and rescue helicopters circling above . . . not even the exploitation of the pilgrims for business and as political pawns.’ No amount of garbage strewn across the Mount of Mercy can break that spell. The notorious avarice of the Meccan merchants, the dedication of many pilgrims to shopping and buying just enough suitcases of just the right kind forthe journey home, the blind struggles over food rations after solemn prayers, donot diminish the quite different force of observing the endless circlings of the Kaaba, the circumambulation that induces a kind of vertigo, the mystery of the Black Cube. ∆

Julian Barnes, Nick Laird, Hermione Lee, Andrew Motion, Helen Simpson and Zadie Smith

will be reading from literature that has inspired them over the years at this popular charity event

Weds 1st Nov 06, doors 6.30pm Camden Centre, Bidborough St, London WC1

Tickets £17 & £25 including free wine reception & opportunity to meet the authors

T: 020 7697 7755 E: events@torturecare.org.uk W: www.torturecare.org.uk

7 london review of books 19 october 2006