Free Standing Alone by Asra Nomani

beauty. Maybe, just maybe , I thought, my family and I will be able do this journey without getting arrested.
    A young man approached Shibli. “As-salaam alaykum! How are you, youngest hajji?” He had delivered the Muslim greeting that means “Peace be upon you.”
    â€œWalaikum as salaam,” I responded for Shibli. “And peace be upon you.” Shibli looked at him with wide eyes and a curious smile. I appreciated this simple expression of kindness by my fellow Muslim brother. It reminded me of a moment while we were in transit in Jordan. A man in our group by the name of Hameed Omar pushed heavy airport chairs aside so I could squeeze Shibli’s stroller close to a group leader giving a sermon. “You are not alone,” he said to me quietly. “We will look out for you and help you.” I looked at him and wondered if the Muslim ummah would indeed look out for me and help me. As a new mother raising her son alone, I found myself in the greatest position of need that I had ever known.

ON THE ROAD OF BIN LADEN
    JEDDAH —I had to admit something: I was afraid for my safety. I was in a country that was totally defined by the repressive ideology that I was just learning about, Wahhabism.
    When the Saudi royal family allied itself with Islamic evangelical Ibn ‘Abd Al Wahhab in the eighteenth century, it was the beginning of the growth of a very puritanical branch of Islam. With the help of Lawrence of Arabia and the British, this alliance enabled the Saudis to remove Turkish rule from the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. Over the centuries the Saud family allowed the Wahhabi clerics to have control over the masses. It was their ideology that bred Osama bin Laden. He wasa son of Saudi Arabia, and he used U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and Israel’s control of most of Jerusalem to link his call for a holy war against the West to the rights of Muslims to maintain complete authority over the land where the three holiest mosques in Islam stand. Those three mosques were on our itinerary: the sacred mosque of Mecca; the sacred mosque in Medina, a city north of Mecca in Saudi Arabia; and a mosque called al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, these sacred mosques are not just spiritual centers. They are also political symbols.
    In an interview with CNN in 1997, bin Laden said the ongoing U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was an “occupation of the land of the holy places.” In February 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa, a religious ruling, calling for Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. Three other groups, including the Islamic Jihad in Egypt, endorsed the ruling. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [of Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim,” read the statement, which was issued under the name of the “World Islamic Front.” It was published three months later in the London newspaper Al-Quds al-’Arabi.
    On the hajj, I stood in bin Laden’s “lands of Islam.”
    He and the events of September 11 had made our religion a lightning rod. Saudi Arabia was the birthplace and breeding ground for most of the hijackers who flew planes that day into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed another plane into a Pennsylvania field. It is a country that has been skewered by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its abuse of the human rights of dissidents, reformers, non-Muslims, and women. I stood in Saudi Arabia sad that my religion was being misrepresented by Osama bin Laden and his brand of puritanical Islam. No longer perceived in all their complexity and humanity, Muslims had become a monolithic enemy.
    What