NOT QUITE OPENNESS, BUT A START:

Islamic Pilgrims Bring Cosmopolitan Air to Unlikely City (HASSAN M. FATTAH, 1/20/05, NY Times)

Rare in most of the Muslim world, the willingness to debate and raise seemingly taboo questions is standard here in the birthplace of Islam and the site of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage beginning Wednesday that attracts about 1.5 million Muslims from all corners of the world for five days of meditation, prayer and, often, vigorous debate.

In workshops and meeting rooms, at schools and mosques in the city, the freewheeling discussion of theology, history and politics lives on. And if this intellectual melee was any indicator, the debate is quite civilized - no raised voices, no threats, no personal attacks.

In Mecca, Dr. Bagader said later, that is the way. "This city is a stage where people from all over the world can come and find an audience to listen to them," says Dr. Bagader, a Meccan native. "There is an acceptance of being different here."

It is a city where spirit, not ritual, rules the day. Typically, in conservative Islamic societies like Saudi Arabia, men and women are strictly separated during prayers, and they are here. But with the enormous crowds that gather for meditation around the Kaaba - the small temple in the center of the Grand Mosque that Muslims believe was built by the prophet Abraham and consider the defining symbol of Islam - men and women are jammed in side by side. Saudi Arabia's normally relentless vice officers often throw up their hands, their usual tactics of harassment overwhelmed by numbers.

But what really makes Mecca so open is its diversity, a product largely of the hajj, which for 1,425 years has been attracting believers from all over the world. Many stay on.

Far from the strictness of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's ascetic capital, and the homogeneity of most other Muslim capitals, Mecca is by far the Muslim world's most diverse city - some 100 ethnicities are represented here, and almost every sect and creed lives in peace, whether Shia, Sunni or Ismaili.

The average Meccan is just as likely to be Asian as Arab, just as likely to be light-skinned as dark-skinned, just as likely to speak English as Arabic, and almost everyone who lives here is bilingual or better. (Openness is not absolute; no non-Muslims are allowed in the city.)

Some elderly Muslims come simply to die in a divine city. But countless others stay to seek refuge, to seek higher learning or simply to make some money.

These days, many are from Africa or the Arab world. But in generations past, many were Chinese, Malay, Turkish, even Albanian. Some came for spirituality and others came to escape subjugation.

"Other cities claim to be melting pots, but this is the original melting pot," says Salah Abdel Jalil, an educator who heads a program for gifted students. "You feel a certain level of peace and openness here that you won't find elsewhere."

It was famously his hajj to Mecca that transformed Malcolm X, Malcolm X's (Al-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) Letter from Mecca

"Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors.

"I have been blessed to visit the Holy City of Mecca, I have made my seven circuits around the Ka'ba, led by a young Mutawaf named Muhammad, I drank water from the well of the Zam Zam. I ran seven times back and forth between the hills of Mt. Al-Safa and Al Marwah. I have prayed in the ancient city of Mina, and I have prayed on Mt. Arafat."

"There were tens of thousands of pilgrims, from all over the world. They were of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and non-white."

"America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem. Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered white - but the white attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color."

"You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth."

"During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept on the same rug - while praying to the same God - with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the deeds of the white Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana."

"We were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 24, 2005 8:35 PM