Saudi Arabia: Beauty & Civilization

Reporter: What do you think of western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

These words attributed to Mahatma Gandhi came to my mind while I was walking the streets of Mecca this past April during my Umrah pilgrimage. They were words that I hung on the wall of my apartment when I was an undergrad in college, but they suddenly became very real for me when I was visiting Saudi Arabia some twenty years later. It occurred to me — walking through the beautiful streets of Mecca and Medina — that this was perhaps the first time that I had truly experienced living in a ‘civilization’. Gandhi’s words came very much alive to me right there in the hot, dusty streets of Mecca.

As a child in America, I was raised with a very negative view of Saudi Arabia — and of Islamic society in general. From an American perspective which valued individual autonomy, absolute freedom of expression, sexual liberation, and liberalism, Saudi Arabia was often seen as the opposite of all of these values. It was darkness. It was oppression. It was backward-ness. It was religious fanaticism. All the dark forces that a Western, American liberal could conjure up were projected onto the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And as an American, you took all this for granted. Our way of life was, of course, the best way of life. After all, why do we spend so much time, money, and effort trying to ‘spread democracy’ to the rest of the world? Beer, women, Harleys, hamburgers… these are all our God-given rights in America. A society built on personal and individual liberty. Rights given to us by ‘Nature’s God’. And so on.

And yet, even as a man who has given up all of these ‘American’ things to first enter into monastic life, and then enter into Islam — I had never really experienced life in a society outside of this American Liberalism. Like a fish swimming in water, it is just all around you — this American, liberal culture. You take it for granted.

This changed for me, however, one evening as the sun was setting over Mecca during Ramadan. As the shadows lengthened and the golden sunset shone through the buildings and streets just blocks away from the Kaaba, the call to prayer started to echo through the air. While most of the people in Mecca rested and stayed inside through the heat of the day, all of a sudden the streets became a bustle of activity. It was Ramadan, after all, and we had been fasting all day. With the setting of the sun came the time not just for prayer, but for the breaking of the fast. In America, fasting — for a Muslim — is very often a private affair. Its struggles are private. And its joys are often private, as well. American society is not a fasting society. And of course, it is not a Muslim society. These spiritual and ascetical practices as a people — as a society — as a culture — are not shared. In American society, even things which we once held in common are not held in common anymore. There is an increasing atomization of American culture.

But here in Mecca — as the sun was setting — the feeling of community came back to me. The feeling of living in a civilization hit me perhaps for the first time in my life. As the call to prayer rang through the streets, perfect strangers joyfully came up to me on the streets with wide and sincere smiles offering me ‘salams’ and greetings me with ‘assalamulaikum’, offering my fresh dates, delicious yogurt drinks, piping hot Saudi coffee, blessed zamzam water, and all manner of things as we broke the fast — together. The joy was palpable. Every man on the street — no matter their background or where they were from — was not a stranger, but a friend. Every man was a brother in Islam. With joyous smiles and genuine kindness, we’d greet each other in the breaking of the fast. And in a few minutes, after sharing a bite and refreshing ourselves with some coffee, we stood together, shoulder to shoulder, as brothers in prayer before Allah. All facing the Kaaba. It was a beautiful experience — and one that was quite new to me. We were a society all sharing the same values, all bonded together in love, all facing the same direction — both physically and spiritually — in our pursuit of God. We were a society that was not simply centered on the autonomy of the individual, but rather on the reality of Allah. A society with a telos, which is the ancient Greek term for an end, fulfilment, completion, goal or aim. And it was beautiful.

This experience of the beauty of Islamic civilization and of brotherhood was not relegated to particular moments during my time in Saudi Arabia. It was the experience of my entire time during my visit. The experience was only intensified with the arrival of Eid at the end of Ramadan, where a feeling of tranquil bliss and joy permeated everything and everybody in the streets of Mecca and Medina.

From the moment I touched down at the Medina airport, all the way though to my final, sad departure to return to America, I have never seen hospitality as I have seen it in Saudi Arabia. And it was on all levels of society— from the shopkeeper in Mecca and the stranger in the street in Medina, all the way up to the highest levels of Saudi society — who saw to my comfort and my needs during my visit to the Islam's holiest cities.

Saudi Arabia is very much a ‘high trust’ society. Not only was there incredible hospitality, but never in my entire time in either Mecca or Medina did I feel unsafe or uncomfortable in even the slightest way. At one point, a friend travelling with me went along with me to a small shop down the street from our hotel to pick up some necessities — some undershirts, deodorant, toothpaste, water, etc. We thought that the store took credit cards, but after ringing up our items — which came to a significant sum — we realized that the store only took cash, of which we had none at the time. After apologizing profusely, we offered to put the items back and return tomorrow. But the shop keeper, without any hesitation, very warmly and enthusiastically insisted that we take the items and just pay him back whenever we could. We were stunned. This was not a rich man. He got by form whatever money he could raise selling small items and necessities in a dusty shop in Mecca. And yet he trusted us to return and pay him back whenever we could. We offered to give him our IDs and contact info, but he would have none of it. I’ve never experienced this in my life. It is the definition of a ‘high-trust society’, and something we haven’t experienced in America for a long time.

It was my original intention to write a more systematic article here about Saudi Arabia and society, but I’ve opted instead simply to share some of my experiences in the Kingdom. I feel that perhaps my personal experience might be of more interest to people. And my experience was this: Far from being the backward, oppressive, scary desert of Islamic fundamentalism that was presented to me as a child in America, I found Saudi Arabia to be a place of spiritual joy, absolute beauty, and profound hospitality. In Mecca and Medina, there were people there from all across the globe — America, Asia, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Japan, England, Ghana, South Africa, Germany, India, Pakistan, Canada, and so on. The entire globe was represented here. And yet, here we were, all dressed the same clothes as pilgrims, all praying the same way, all moving in one direction — circling the Kaaba and journeying together towards God.

My experience in Saudi Arabia was the most profound and beautiful experience of my life, and I very much look forward to returning.

I would write more… but I’ll save the details for the book I am writing, inshallah.

Thomas Jefferson, in the American Declaration of Independence, wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Some 250 years later, we have to ask — what is ‘happiness’? What is ‘liberty’? What is ‘equality’? In America, these ideas spring out of our atomistic individualism and Enlightenment ideals. But are we closer to these ideals now than we were in Jefferson’s time? With all of our material wealth and prosperity, we seem further away in my estimation.

However, in the dusty streets of Mecca, I found much of these ideals realized. There was not just happiness, but real and palpable joy among strangers and pilgrims in prayer and in breaking the fast together. In Mecca and Medina, liberty is found not in satisfying our desires — in drunkenness, materialism, and worldly distractions. Rather, true freedom is found only in Allah. And as for equality, it almost goes without saying. All people from all walks of life from all corners of the world gathered together in prayer and pilgrimage, all seeking God and travelling together along the way.

As the sun sets on Western Liberalism and America and Western Europe becomes tired and groaning under its own weight of materialism and secularism, the world is increasingly looking towards the East where a light is beginning to glow on the horizon. As Saudi Arabia is the geographic and spiritual center of the rapidly growing community of Muslims around the globe — the ummah — it is guaranteed that more and more people will come to Mecca and Medina and taste the sweetness of this Islamic civilization themselves. And more and more people will begin to ask: Why can’t we have ‘civilization’ everywhere?

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Thank you, and may God reward you!

Update: Some video reflections I took while walking through Medina during Eid.