A Sinner in Mecca: A Gay Muslim's Hajj of Defiance

3.5 stars rounded up.

It's a little messy and not exactly easy to follow. It gave me more Shia-Sunni historical history than what I had expected. Also more than expected: Saudi/middle eastern politics, ruminations on islam in Europe (the last chapter has a strong Islam apologia flavor). Of the twelve chapters, five aren't about the his hajj experience—but more about his spiritual journeys to get there/his perspectives after he returned.

In chapter three, he got circumcised as an adult before his pilgrimage to Mecca because, ‘the religious opinion that terrorizes my soul the most came via Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani [who] opined: if an uncircumcised pilgrim in ihram be he adult or discerning child, performs a tawaf, it is invalid. An [cut] penis could be a dangerous thing in the small Indian town I grew up in. But once there were riots. [My grandfather] recounted how his two best friends were stripped, genitally identified as Muslim, and hacked to death. In my many nightmares, my ihram would fall off in Mecca, subjecting unsuspecting pilgrims to my un-Muslim penis.' (p76-77)

He asked a female friend to join her. “Shahinaz was an old fried. She, like me, was gay. She was ‘Allah conscious' like her Somali parents in Paris, but Islam's strictures were not for her.” (P81) they were of course separated because of their genders.

When they finally start donning ihram:
“Upon donning the lower part of my ihram, after performing all rituals and making sure I wore no underwear, I realized the sexual potential of an unsheathed penis rubbing against this made in China towel fabric. ‘A horny gay man into mid-eastern types would be in paradise here, with all this man smell and exposed genitalia, I texted Shahinaz. We looked like the men I had seen in gay-hookup saunas during my first trip to the US in 1998. Also, fragrance was part of the long list of the forbidden while wearing ihram, making for an unpleasantly malodorous Hajj. We were innocents, she and I. No one had ever dared to tell us the unspeakable horrors that unfolded when unsheathed male genitalia rubbed against the bodies of hundreds of thousands of women, not separated in the holy mosque of Mecca. At peak time, the tawaf was violent. The majority of these men had never been in such extreme proximity to the bodies of women. And not every male pilgrim had the discipline of piety.” (P116-117)

After Hajj:
“For the first TV interview, the anchor asked me how the Hajj changed me. ‘How to deal with claustrophobia,' I said, laughing. ‘But more seriously it was a life-transforming journey because in Mecca I killed the part of me that questioned whether Islam would accept me. In its place was the certainty that it was up to me to accept Islam.'”


Read in June 2023 (Pride month!) but also hajj season (idul adha is on the 29th) and my mom just started her Hajj as I wrote this.