Azania Imtiaz Patel at Aeon:
It is Ramadan, the holiest month of the Islamic calendar, and I am sitting in a rooftop café in Mecca, the holiest city of the religion. The sun has gone down, and an array of glittering shops and hotels lights up the urban expanse below me. At the heart of this ancient city, the foremost site of Muslim worship, guarded with fortress-like marble walls, is the Masjid al-haram complex – the largest mosque in the world. I’ve just completed my own pilgrimage to the holy site, and I’m struggling to name the discomfort that I am feeling.
There are few words to describe the whiplash of coming face to face with a Joe & The Juice, a Sephora and a plethora of other shops and hotels and Times Square-style billboards after going through one of the most spiritually charged experiences of my life. To find myself in what seemed just like any other petrodollar-fuelled Gulf port instead of a sanctified land was jarring. I felt robbed of the romanticism I had expected after a childhood built on admiration for religious lore and high-flown notions of a fantastical divine city.
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