In a bid for spiritual renewal, I made a pilgrimage to Islam’s holy city. Almost everything I expected to see was gone

by Azania Imtiaz Patel  BIO

The Great Mosque and the Kaaba in Mecca, seen from the Makkah Clock Tower, Saudi Arabia, 22 June 2023. Photo by Rania Sanjar/AFP/Getty Images

is a writer and researcher based between Mumbai and London. She is the co-founder of the India Ghost Project, an independent research initiative examining how belief in the paranormal shapes economic behaviour. She is currently writing her first book on how anxieties about modernity find expression through ghost stories in Indian cities. Previously, she has reported for The Economist. She holds an MSc in South Asian Studies and an MPP from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

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.

A Dunkin’ Donuts outlet in Mecca. Photo by Tamer Soliman/Getty Images

I’d found myself in Mecca, trying to catch a break from the existential dread of my day-to-day life – the constant round of applying for jobs I didn’t really want because it wasn’t sustainable to write full-time, going on first date after first date, trying to find love on apps that were designed for failure, doomscrolling social media while caught in a dopamine trap, and staring at my laptop screen while waiting for some revelation to break through the fog in my mind and string itself into life-changing words. My 30s were closing in, and I felt the noose of squandered potential around my neck.

One of my most frequent prayers comes from a verse in the Quran that narrates Moses’ escape from Egypt: ‘Rabbi inni lima anzalta ilayya min khairin faqir’ (‘My Lord, indeed I am in absolute need of whatever good You send down’). I have always been comforted by the notion that a divine power was looking after me, that something out there existed beyond the constraints of time and space – omnipresent, omnipotent – and yet closer to me than my jugular vein, as my Holy Book would tell me.

My rationale for the trip was that this kind of spiritual sugar rush would allow me to find my footing in the secular world. My worshipful hope was that God would be impressed by my performed devotion, and divine intervention would set my worldly affairs straight. And though I felt a sense of renewed worship in making my pilgrimage, that break from the ordinary world never came.

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Islam is not an ascetic faith: interestingly, it prohibits monasticism. However, the state of being a pilgrim is the closest that one comes to forsaking the material world. Before entering the boundaries of the Holy City, dressed in a swishing white abaya with a prayer book hung on a lanyard around my neck, I had committed to a state of heightened spiritual purity known as the ihram.

The word ihram has etymological roots in the word haraam, which means to forbid. It is the embodiment of additional, out-of-the-ordinary prohibitions. In this consecrated state, pilgrims are not allowed to have sexual relations or to hunt an animal or to change the state of their body: they cannot cut their nails or hair, for example, or perfume themselves. Men must cover themselves only with two pieces of unstitched cloth, while women must wear unadorned garments that leave their faces and hands visible. The purpose of the ihram is to equalise worshippers for the duration of their pilgrimage. As the anthropologists Victor Turner and Edith Turner described (albeit........

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