Standing Alone in Mecca:
A pilgrimage into the heart of Islam
by Asra Q Nomani
Harper Collins, 2007
Asra Q Nomani's Standing Alone in Mecca is at once compelling and predictable, clichéd and refreshing. Its moments of startling frankness and honesty prevent it from descending into another exercise in presenting the 'positive' side of Islam, of which there has been a regular barrage since the attacks of 11 September 2001. While Nomani's work (which was first published in 2005, but has recently been released in India) does throw up more questions than it answers, the questions posed are piquant enough. Perhaps most importantly, Nomani does not attempt to gloss over uncomfortable facts.
The author, a Bombay-born journalist now living in the US, writes that she felt "compelled" to start work on Standing Alone in Mecca after "two defining moments shaped" her relationship with her religion. The first was the 2002 murder of the US journalist Daniel Pearl (Pearl and his wife had been staying with Nomani in Karachi just before he was kidnapped); the second was the birth of her son, Shibli. Shibli, it turns out, was conceived out of wedlock, and his father abandoned Nomani before the boy was born. Left a single mother, guilty of committing zinna, or adultery, Nomani subsequently turns to the roots of her faith – seeking both to understand her 'status' within Islam, as well as to question the existing norms.
How does one learn about a faith – any faith, whether one's own or not? The Dalai Lama gives Nomani a clue: "Read the holy books of each other's religions. Talk to the enlightened beings of each other's religions. Finally, do the pilgrimages of each other's religions." Presumably, Nomani had already done the first two; now she embarks on a pilgrimage, albeit of her own religion. Standing Alone in Mecca – which begins, for no discernable reason, with reference to the destruction of the Babri Masjid – is about pilgrimage, and thus about journeys. Nomani's is a two-fold journey: a physical one to Mecca, to make the Hajj pilgrimage; as well as a spiritual one, to simultaneously come to an understanding of the 'soul' of Islam, and of the author's place in it as a single mother.