ulises mejias

Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to travel to London to attend Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference, hosted by the New Political Communication Unit (NPCU), Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London.

The theme of the conference was summarized as follows:

Has there been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media - a new web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

The conference was in large part the brainchild of Andrew Chadwick, Founding Director of the NPCU. There were 120 papers organised into 41 panels, and over 180 participants from over 30 countries. Some of the conference topics included: Parties, Elections and Campaigning; e-Governance; Constituency, Mobilisation and Engagement; The Politics of Blogging; Platforms, Power, and Politics; Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation; New Perspectives on e-Democracy; and Theorising Web 2.0.

What follows is a review of some of the presentations I found relevant to my interests (a summary of my paper is provided towards the end).

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Here is the abstract for an upcoming talk at the Politics: Web 2.0: An International Conference organized by the New Political Communication Unit, Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London. The conference is April 17 & 18.

Social Networks and the Politics of Nodocentrism
Ulises A. Mejias

As social networks are actualized by information and communication technologies (ICTs), they cease to function as mere metaphors and become templates for organizing sociality. Networks –as assemblages of people, technology and social norms– arrange subjects into structures and define the parameters for their interaction, thus actively shaping their social realities. But what does the social network include, and what is left out? What are the politics of the network as episteme? By definition, social networks are not anti-social, but they manifest a bias (which I term “nodocentrism”) against engaging anything that is not part of the network. Nodocentrism embodies a politics of exclusion, since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node. For nodes, what is outside the network diminishes in social value. Using the framework of nodocentrism, I explore the politics of the social network through its stages of growth (creating new nodes through assimilation), preferential attachment (favoring rich nodes), hyperinflation (widening of the inequality between nodes), capitalization (converting inequality into gain for a few and loss for the rest) and segregation (purging of unwanted nodes from the network). I end by proposing the concept of the “paranodal,” the expanse between nodes, as the only possible site from which to un-think the logic of nodocentrism. Paranodality can provide the subject with the political context for disidentifying from the network, offering a site for the critical assessment of networked sociality.

Below is an essay I wrote for an exhibition at the 2008 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, Ithaca College. I curated a collection of nonfiction video games and am giving a couple of talks on the topic (April 2 @ 4PM and April 6 at 1PM, in case you are interested). For a list of the games and more information on FLEFF, click here.

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Shoot Mexicans trying to cross the border, or guide Mexicans across the border. For every political stance, a video game. Are we what we play? If video games excite us cognitively and affectively, why not put that stimulus to use in the service of a cause—preferably a worthy one? Save the environment. Learn how to overthrow a government peacefully. Manage a disaster relief operation. Have fun while doing it.

Are video games effective tools for promoting social change? Can a good deed in virtuality make a difference in actuality? If so, how do we promote video games for social change, given that in reality the market for Halo eclipses the market for PeaceMaker? Do we need, as David Rejeski suggests, a Corporation for Public Gaming (similar to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to promote educational and socially conscious games?

This year, FLEFF has again assembled a sample of “serious” games, video games that attempt to promote social change through education, critique, or simulation. The work ranges from simple maze games such as Homeless: It’s No Game, to more sophisticated strategy games such as Karma Tycoon, to a full-fledged simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to an alternate reality game (ARG) called World without Oil.

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In my course Friend Request Denied: Social Networks and the Web I have my students play a game I developed to let them explore the dynamics of building a reputation online by giving and capturing attention. It’s also a fun way for students to get to know each other. I’m posting the game instructions and materials here (under a Creative Commons license) for anyone who wants to try it. If you make any improvements, please share!

Attention Economy: The Game

Ulises A. Mejias

How do new bloggers gain recognition? Why are some people in MySpace or Facebook more popular than others? Why does one YouTube video get seen by thousands of people, and another by just a few? What does it mean that “on the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people”? Can the subject matter of the content we post to an online network make us more or less popular?

This game is an accelerated simulation of the process of gaining attention online (acquiring more readers, friends, hits, etc.). The goal of the game is to collect the most attention. The game tries to condense a process that can take weeks or months into about an hour. It is intended for people who are new to the study of online social networks, but anyone can play. The game can also be used to teach some basic characteristics of networks, such as the role of hubs or connectors in scale-free networks. Players are asked at the end to critically reflect on the values that drive this Attention Economy.

Number of players: around 10-25

Time for activity: 45 minutes to 1.5 hours (depending on number of players)

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I’ve switched the original feed link in Feedburner to point to my new blog. If you were subscribed to ideant through Feedburner, you should be able to see this.

What follows is NOT intended to be a comprehensive review of the European Computing and Philosophy (ECAP) and the New Network Theory (NNT) conferences, which took place in the Netherlands this June (for good summaries of NNT, see the Masters of Media blog or Lilly Nguyen’s post). Instead, my intention is to briefly discuss some of what I heard in the context of my own research, putting some of those arguments in conversation with my own, so to speak. I apologize in advance to all the authors I’m citing because this selective form of quoting will undoubtedly reduce and perhaps even misrepresent their original arguments. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, correct?

My remarks are organized into three major areas having to do with network metaphors, network metrics, and network critiques.

Networks: Metaphors or models?

My own presentations at the two conferences were framed in the context of the current shift from using the network as a metaphor to describe the social to using it as a model for organizing sociality (putting people into buckets called ‘nodes’). This theme of the limits of the network as metaphor was a recurring one, specially during NNT. Marianne van den Boomen (all authors are from the NNT conference, unless otherwise indicated), for instance, discussed the tensions created when we try to stretch the metaphor of virtual community (a troubled metaphor to begin with) to encompass the kind of social structures engendered by Web 2.0. According to van den Boomen, the very label “Web 2.0″ suggests a metaphor that at least acknowledges the role of software in forming social structures. But the question is whether the network —or any other metaphor, for that matter— can adequately describe social realities. Part of the problem, according to her, is that new media can no longer be associated with a stable ontology. If I understood her correctly, whereas before we had ’stable’ categories of media, new media is too vast and too amorphous, too difficult to pin down. New media is more about the processes of transmediation and transcoding than about a particular kind of tool or industry, so it is problematic to use such an polymorphous concept to metaphorically describe “stable” social and cultural structures. If anything, as Mirko Tobias Schafer (and others) suggested, the network functions more as epistemology than metaphor, blurring the distinction between information infrastructure and social relations. The network, in other words, does not describe or represent our social world, it is how we understand and construct our social realities.

Bernhard Rieder enlisted some of the tensions inherent in working with the network as metaphor or model: Should we describe its structure topologically (in terms of broad ‘areas’ and components) or through thick anthropological description, as Actor-Network Theory (ANT) would have us do? Is the network static or evolving, tangible or abstract? How are network configurations caused? Should network critique be localized, or overarching? I understood Rieder as suggesting that we approach the network as a methodology to explain the social, not as an ontology to take certain forms of sociality for granted. The network as question, not as answer, in other words.

Network metrics: Quantifying the social?

But is the methodology that the network suggests biased (dare I say, corrupted) by a form of scientism that subordinates the kinds of questions we allow ourselves to ask of the network to the kinds of answers we can, quite literally, compute? What I see in this latest ’social turn’ of media is a propensity to let the computational functions that the code can perform define the nature of the social functions we can perform. Social is what code does. In the Web 2.0 rush to innovate, to re-invent sociality with code, there is no room for asking what aspects of sociality to formalize, and how much.

Perhaps, as Noortje Marres suggested, the problem began when ANT 1.0, which started as a way to explain technosocial systems, became a bit arrogant and re-imagined itself as ANT 2.0, capable of explaining anything and everything. Yes, as Valdis Krebs stated, the network as method allows us to map and measure what was formerly invisible, and this data may indeed tell us something new about the way we perform our sociality. But from there it is a slippery slope to thinking that sociality can be quantified and reduced to network functions.

The kind of network logic that Giovanni Boniolo (ECAP) is in the process of formulating describes the relation between nodes in terms of logical propositions. Relations between elements in a database can be expressed through these logic statements, allowing us to map the network through logical operations. This form of network quantification is meant for application in the natural sciences, but how long before such methods become the research standards in the social sciences? Aren’t the algorithms embedded in the code of social media already the precursors of this reductive logic?

Moreover, behind the social markup schemes that Alan Liu proposed to calculate or quantify the social character of networks is the belief, shared by Warren Sack and others, that new forms of object-oriented democracies or publics are not only possible, but desirable. After all, as Noshir Contractor suggested, it’s all about relational metadata: “it’s not who you know, but what who you know knows.” Being is subordinated or reduced to informational value. What will democracies and publics look like under such models of efficiency?

Towards a critical theory of networks

According to Jeroen van den Hoven (ECAP), technology —by virtue of its affordances— presents us with a form of epistemic enslavement: deferment to the authority of the system. Epistemic enslavement in networks takes the form of what I call nodocentrism: nodes are capable of knowing only other nodes. As Wendy Chun puts it, we need to question the kind of network logic that seeks to eradicate gaps (the paranodal) at all costs. In this context, she argues that we need a critique of “openness” as an end (this is an important question: to what extent do open source, open content, p2p, etc., contribute to this ethos to “close all gaps”?). According to her, mapping a network can be enlightening, but can only happen if we surrender ourselves fully to the logic of the network. Thus, the best way to map the network might be to refuse the map altogether. Thus, it seems to me that any useful critique of networks needs to begin with an exploration of their indeterminacy: not only their borders, but the very paranodal spaces that help define them.

Perhaps a way to begin to formulate such a critique is to address how network logic is inadequate for locating suffering in social networks. This seemed to be part of Thomas Berker’s plea for a meaningful and non-trivial theory of suffering within the network. Power Laws and Long Tails might explain why there are elite nodes and less-fortunate nodes, but do they address the meaning of inequality in the network? Can they suggest a politics to correct it? Or are these concepts a new opium that allows the masses to think of themselves as a new elite, as I thought Ekaterina Taratuta (ECAP) was hinting at?

[photo: An emergent mosaic of Wikipedian activity, cc: silvertje]

Apparently there was a revolution, and I almost missed it.

This is what happened: Somebody cracked and published the encryption key that unlocks HD DVDs, allowing for the copying of the discs. The code started appearing on various websites. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) began issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notices. Some websites attempted to censor the publication of the code. There was a massive reaction from users towards this apparent act of censorship: the more the code was being “suppressed,” the more it appeared on web sites, blogs, t-shirts, songs, etc. [For a detailed account of the controversy, see the Wikipedia article.]

I found this interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first is the way in which Web 2.0 companies have had to negotiate a balance between their corporate interest and the interests of their users. As you probably know already, after its initial attempt to censor the posts containing the code (and the subsequent ‘revolt’ by users), Digg reversed its decision and said that it would rather “go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.” As Andrew Lih writes:

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

But what you have, actually, is a Web 2.0 company (reportedly worth around $200 million USD) doing a cost-benefit analysis and realizing that losing its user base would pose a higher and more immediate risk than facing the possibility of lawsuits from “a bigger company” (I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the cost-benefit analysis does not favor the users…).

The second aspect that I find fascinating about this whole thing is the way in which the dissemination of the encryption code has been constructed as a revolutionary, subversive act —as an example of what cyber revolt looks like (establishment, beware!). I was surprised to see many of the people I read online immediately jump on the bandwagon, and gleefully proclaim our revolutionary duty to publish the numbers (one actual quote: “Hahahaha! I am breaking federal law! Hahahaha!”).

Now, I’m no friend of the DMCA. Also, I believe that breaking the law can be a powerful statement if the right social cause is invoked… But a DVD encryption key? Why not refuse to pay taxes to protest the war, or something like that? Perhaps the nature of the revolt can be explained by the demographics of the “revolutionaries”: according to Businessweek, 94% of Digg’s army of free labor are male, over 50% are IT workers in their 20s and 30s, and they earn $75,000 a year or more. Ryan Shaw calls ‘em as he sees ‘em:

While most of the blogosphere was atwitter over the tantrums being thrown at Digg, real injustice in Los Angeles was being ignored. After watching this video [of Police oppression during the May 1st immigration reform march] I was ashamed to be part of a community (the designers and evangelists of “Web 2.0?) which sanctimoniously promotes “people power” among the spoiled and entitled while disregarding the tightening grip of authority on the poor and disenfranchised. [see his post for links to video and newspaper articles]

We keep hearing that social media tools will help to bring about social change. So are we being overly critical of the tools just because of the communities that presently wield them? This whole affair might have at its core something rather trivial (a code to hack DVDs), but can we extrapolate some of the lessons and techniques learned to a social justice context? Or as Ethan Zuckerman asks:

What would it take to harness this sort of viral spread to harness the net in spreading human rights information? Can activists learn from the story of The Number and find ways to spread information that otherwise is suppressed or ignored in mainstream media?

I wonder what activists would compromise in this transition to cyber revolt. To begin, I doubt that experienced activists believe that all it takes is for suppressed information to reach the public. Brecht suggested that “He who laughs has not yet heard the bad news.” Today, however, he who laughs has indeed heard the bad news, but from The Daily Show.

But the thing I believe anyone interested in social change should explore more carefully are the kinds of action that information can be transformed into as it is communicated. Perhaps, as Tiziana Terranova explains in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004, Pluto Press), what we call “information” already embodies a certain containment of openness:

The first condition of a successful communication becomes that of reducing all meaning to information —that is to a signal that can be successfully replicated across a varied communication milieu with minimum alterations. (Terranova, 2004, p. 16)

When activism is defined solely in terms of the exchange of information, we are reducing the options available for acting. That is how an encryption key (information in its purest form) was easily converted into a “subversive message” whose replication and dissemination was seen as a revolutionary act. As long as we’ve had media —and I’m afraid emerging “social” media don’t pose a significant alternative— we’ve seen this dynamic: the replication of information has itself come to define what it means to act, has become the source of meaning. The individual goes from being a social actor to an intersection of information flows. She possesses more information than ever before (about global warming, about genocidal poverty, about the false pretenses under which wars are started), but all she can do is replicate and pass on this information. The purer the information (09 F9 …), the more efficient the activism.

Here it is: PDF of the full dissertation. Right-click and choose Save As…

mejias__networked_proximity.pdf (1.2 MB)

I’m removing all previously posted drafts from this blog.

There are important differences that make this final version much better.

Abstract

Networked Proximity:
ICTs and the Mediation of Nearness

Ulises Ali Mejias, 2007

The network as a map of interconnected elements or nodes has become a favored metaphor for describing a wide variety of social systems in our age. But the network is transitioning from being merely a way to describe social realities to serving as a model for organizing them. The large-scale adoption of information and communication technologies is producing new architectures of networked participation in which the social subject becomes a decentralized node, unbound by location or physical space. Nearness (in terms of social proximity) acquires a new significance, since the distance between two nodes—regardless of their physical location—is practically zero, while the distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Thus, physical proximity is replaced by informational availability as the basis for experiencing social nearness, resulting in a form of networked proximity characterized simultaneously by a sense of renewed connectedness to the local (hyperlocality), and a sense of distancelessness that makes any point in the network readily accessible. Hence, critiques of networked sociality need to account for the fact that the network is neither anti-social nor anti-local: it thrives on making social connections, and is indifferent to where nodes are located in relation to the social subject (physically near or far). Instead, critiques need to focus on the epistemological exclusivity engendered by the fact that nodes are only capable of recognizing other nodes. In other words, the network imposes a nodocentric filter on the social, and only elements that can be mapped onto the network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can acquire value only by becoming part of the network. The social becomes subordinate to the economics of the network, and the network becomes a model of subjectivation that prepares individuals for entrance into this form of sociality. In this context, the paranodal—the space between nodes—becomes an important site for disidentification from the network, correcting the nodocentric tendencies of networked sociality and providing alternative models of social engagement.

[cc photo credit: striatic]

Here is my summary of this month’s discussion at the iDC forum. The archive of the discussion can be found here.

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It’s time to wrap up this discussion on the question of ‘How does social media educate?’ I would like to thank everyone who contributed to it, even by lurking! As the moderator, the one responsible for reading everything and trying to engage all opinions, I am thankful because I probably benefited the most from these exchanges. At the same time, I want to apologize if I somehow failed to fulfill my duties responsibly.

Below I offer a summary of some of the main themes I took away from the discussion.

What is social about social media?

The conversation started by questioning the term ’social media’ itself, and wondering what the word ’social’ is supposed to be telling us if all media is, by definition, already a social construct. Perhaps the redundancy is a good reminder that the assumptions behind the word ’social’ are precisely what we should be dissecting. As Latour says in his book Reassembling the social, those who treat the social as a black box “have simply confused what they should explain with the explanation. They begin with society or other social aggregates, whereas one should end with them” (p. 8). In other words, one should not take the word ’social’ as something no longer in need of explanation. When looking at various instances of the application of sociable web media in education, we need to take these social aggregates as points of departure, as what needs to be explained in the first place.

The goal, then, is to trace the interactions of humans and technologies as they go about redefining the social, inventing new forms of sociality. Just as the concept of ‘virtual reality’ (with its own set of assumptions, contradictions and delusions) helped us to question what was real, ’social media’ should help us question what is social, how the social is being put together in the world of education.

The politics of networked participation

Interpreting the meaning of new social assemblages is not a neutral exercise that can be accomplished by means of scientific inquiry exclusively. We rely on ideologies and metanarratives to explain the impact of new media on society. Throughout this discussion, there was much debate about which framework is best suited to explain new social assemblages. There was even some arguing over which assemblages (corporate, independent, etc.) are more worthy of analysis!

One side seems to espouse a Lyotard-influenced framework that sees the increasing role that digital media play in our societies as solidifying the spread of a capitalist culture that commodifies *knowledge* by transforming it into *information* that can be easily exchanged and consumed. To us, the educational applications of sociable web media should not be analyzed without considering the ethical implications of capitalism and a market economy. This is not to say that the architectures of participation that social media engenders cannot present an authentic challenge to the dynamics of the market, even right in the middle of corporate-controlled platforms. But to fail to acknowledge the context from which these technologies emerge can only result in incomplete analyses.

Learning 2.0 - Opportunities and challenges

Depending on how it is applied, social media can be a site for a liberatory or an oppressive education. As educators and learners, we need to be aware of our own practices, simultaneously teaching and learning ‘with’ and ‘against’ social media. Simply embracing new technologies or taking for granted the pedagogical assumptions behind the new ‘Youniversity’ is not enough. The fact is that we live in a world where education is not a ‘good’ distributed equitably or always for the benefit of the learner, and some applications of social media will continue this trend. Increasingly, the ‘public’ education system is being used to separate the unproductive members of society (the ones that need to be ‘managed’ by the growing private incarceration business) from the productive ones (the ones who demonstrate compliance and aptitude for jobs in the service industry). The kinds of social media applications the latter are more likely to see will probably be in alignment with the needs of a control society:

“In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything… school is replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business.” (Deleuze (1995), Negotiations, p. 179)

This definitely puts a sinister spin on ‘life-long’ learning. The ‘constant student’ is not one who engages in an ongoing perfection of the self, but one who is constantly assessed according to the performance standards of a service economy. Social media can be used to ensure that education for the constant student becomes something that can be delivered anytime and anywhere, and which –more importantly– can be used to monitor performance throughout the ‘learning’ life of the individual.

Daily Kos: They Hate us for Our Freedom (the Assessment Movement in Higher Ed)

Social media literacy

For a long time, educational technologists have put their faith in technology as a way to change education, and even the world. Access to the technology is seen as the magical solution that will end disparity:

Web 2.0 can benefit the world’s poor - SciDev.Net

Unfortunately, for the reasons discussed above and during this whole month, access is not enough, and narratives of bridging the ‘digital divide’ do not help us better understand how digital technologies such as sociable web media contribute to the commodification of education.

The work of a new generation of educators and learners shows us that social media can be used to promote positive change in the world. This work demonstrates that the issue is not universal access, but rather the strategies through which those who benefit from access to social media are able to transform those benefits into benefits for the greater society, extending the value of social media beyond the privileged minorities that have access to it.

And so I end by recapitulating some of the skills I mentioned earlier in the discussion that I think we need to develop as part of a critical literacy of social media:

• The ability to articulate the difference between open (FLOSS) and proprietary social media platforms (including how to tell when the former mutates into the latter, and what to do about it).
• The ability to determine when it’s appropriate to use open (FLOSS) or proprietary social media platforms to promote social change with maximum effect.
• The ability to understand the social agency of code of a particular technology, i.e., how the program promotes, constricts or redefines social functions through its affordances.
• The ability to identify the benefits of contributing to a social media environment that operates as a gift economy versus a market economy (including the ability to identify social media environments that operate as both simultaneously).
• The ability to articulate in personal terms how networked participation is changing the relationship with one’s local environment, and be able to calculate tradeoffs and assume responsibility for one’s choices.

I hope you can help us continue to refine these, within or outside of the iDC forum.

-Ulises

[UPDATE: Asma and I were interviewed for the NPR show Weekend America about our Hajj experiences. It aired this past Saturday 1/13. You can listen to the interview here.]

Ali Shariati, an Iranian intellectual and political activist, member of The Movement of God-worshipping Socialists, called the Hajj an “antithesis to aimlessness” (1994, p. 1), in the sense that it is a break in the routine of our daily lives and comforts, a physical dislocation from the familiarity of our surroundings intended to deliver a shock not only to the soul but to the body. For the Hajj is not only a spiritual but a social learning experience, a simulated migration involving masses of pilgrims converging in a small corner of the Arabian desert; a test of one’s devotion, empathy, patience… and immune system. There was nothing to prepare me for any of this, however, as I started my Hajj accompanied by my wife in December of 2006, or the month of Dhul-Hijjah in the year 1427 according to the Muslim calendar. What follows are some reflections on my experience.

Some exercises in spiritual renewal involve a retreat into the solitude of nature or the quietness of the inner self, and focus on the cleansing of the body and the mind. The Hajj, on the other hand, hits you with the sudden force of 3 million people from all corners of the world descending on the vicinity of Mecca (in Saudi Arabia) over a period of a week —probably the largest flash mob of our times. It is an awesome enactment of the unity and purposefulness of God’s creation. It is also an apocalyptic laboratory of pandemic viral outbreaks. The environment the pilgrims create is not what one would think of as being conducive to spiritual growth: they bring sickness, pollution, selfishness, prejudice, tiredness, and the bad temper these combined factors create. When you are stuck in a bus inhaling carbon monoxide for 12 hours (moving all of 6 kilometers during that time), hungry, tired, sleepy and in need to go to the bathroom, and you and everyone around you has some form of respiratory ailment or is in the process of getting one, what chance of realizing taqwa —consciousness of God— can possibly exist?

But the pilgrims also bring devotion, communal love, compassion, a predisposition to solidarity, and a thirst for knowledge. Perhaps it is the impact of the collective worshiping that facilitates an awareness of the divine amidst the grimy reality of the world. As a Muslim, you face a particular direction when praying, as does every other Muslim in the world. But when you actually reach the focal point of the prostration —the Ka’bah— and witness masses of people bowing down in synchronicity, the collectivity of the action takes over a certain part of the consciousness. Perhaps it is this mob mentality, increasingly associated with Muslims in the media, that scares the individualistic sensibilities of the West. (If I was still doing film theory, I would like to explore the connection between the re-emergence of the zombie genre film and post 9/11 Islamophobia…)

Some basics: For Muslims, performing Hajj at least once during a lifetime (if one has the financial means to afford it) is a requirement. Along with the belief in the unity of God, prayer, charity, and fasting during the month of Ramadan, Hajj is one of the fundamental pillars of Islam. Before the era of modern transportation, the journey to perform Hajj could take months, and it was dangerous enough that some people would’nt survive it. While air travel has made the trip easier, the explosion in attendance has introduced a new set of safety threats, mostly related to health issues and mass stampedes. The ritual involves, in short, visiting certain areas around the city of Mecca:

Arafat (9th of Dhul-Hijja, daytime), where God asked humanity to stand on this particular day and promised to forgive whatever one asks mercy for.

The scene is like the day of judgement [the two pieces of unstitched white cloth one wears during Hajj are the same style Muslims are buried in]. From one horizon to the other, a “flood of whites” appears. All the people are wearing the Kafan. No one can be recognized. The bodies were left in Miqat and the souls are motivated here. Names, races, nor social status make a difference in this great combination. An atmosphere of genuine unity prevails. It is a human show of Allah’s unity. (Shariati, 1994, p. 10)

Muzdalifah (9th of Dhul-Hijja, night), where one is supposed to spend the night in the open desert, praying and collecting pebbles with which to symbolically fight the devil the next day. In actuality, most of our time was spent looking for a place to park.

Mina (10th to 13th of Dhul-Hijja), where one spends these days waging battle with the devil (one’s own weaknesses), and where the Saudi government has set up a camp of thousands of tents which become a veritable slum during this time. On the 10th, after the first ’stoning of Satan,’ this is also where men shave their heads, remove their white clothes, and where a sacrifice is offered (the sacrificial meat is meant to feed the pilgrims as well as the poor).

Mecca (10th to 13th of Dhul-Hijja), where the Holy Mosque, that houses the Ka’bah, is located. This one and the Prophet’s mosque in Medina are the two Holy Mosques of Islam, open only to Muslims (which I guess adds to their mystery in the eyes of non-Muslims).

Since information about the specifics of Hajj can be found elsewhere, I will instead offer some disjointed, non-chronological snapshots of my experience.

Muslims on a plane

The flight from JFK to Amman is packed with ‘Arab’-looking men reading the Qur’an. It occurs to me that had this been a regular flight with any non-Muslims on board, the national security threat level would have gone up a couple of notches.

Monolith

The Ka’bah is a recognizable icon: it is the black cube built by the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) and his family to venerate the One God. It is not meant to be a representation of God —it is but a simple, empty black structure. Instead, it is meant to serve as an attractor or anchor which allows Muslims to express their belief in the unity of God. The act of circling the Ka’bah in counterclockwise direction seven times is called Tawaf. It is an awesome spectacle: a black smooth cubical structure exerting some sort of magnetic attraction which brings people from every corner of the world. All Muslims bow down in the direction of the Ka’bah at the prescribed prayer times, but to see the prostration of thousands of Muslims of all ethnicities converging on one single point, men side by side with women, gives a visual significance to that act that is unforgettable.

Ismail

Given that the Ka’bah was built by Ibrahim, his story plays a central role during Hajj. According to Shariati, Hajj is about each one of us identifying and sacrificing our Ismail.

… whatever weakens your faith, whatever stops you from “going”, whatever distracts you from accepting responsibilities, whatever causes you to be self-centered, whatever makes you unable to hear the message and confess the truth, whatever forces you to “escape”, whatever causes you to rationalize for the sake of convenience, whatever makes you blind and deaf… that is your Ismail!

God asked Ibrahim to sacrifice what was most precious to him in this world: his son Ismail. One cannot claim to follow monotheism and at the same time set partners with God (worship or love other things beside God). These false partners with God can take the form of material goods, or our bodies, lifestyles, desired fame, jobs, or our own families. God asked Ibrahim to sacrifice his son not because God is bloodthirsty, but because monotheism accepts no substitutions — there is no ontological ambiguity here: it is the death of the self, absolute submission to a will larger than our own.

Of course, once Ibrahim demonstrates that he is ready to carry out the sacrifice, God stops him. It was only a test. We are all tested in a similar manner throughout our lives, and most often fail. I know what my Ismail is, but will I have the strength to make the sacrifice?

Crush

There is that moment when you go from a theoretical to a practical understanding of what it means to be crushed by a mass of people. It is not any one individual’s fault. The mass acquires a will of its own. You find yourself surrounded by people on all sides, pushing in opposite directions. Telling the people next to you to stop pushing is futile, as they themselves are being pushed by somebody else, the source being somewhere far away. You are simply experiencing the accumulated aggregation of a thousand little pushes. No one can stop it. You move without necessarily using your feet. Bodies are jammed so close together that eventually there is no room for the lungs to expand. If the situation worsens, you realize you could asphixiate. Fortunately, this does not happen this time. The force finds other outlets.

Clash

Upon entering Mecca, we are handed a Guide to Hajj, Umra, and Visiting the Prophet’s Mosque, written by the “Agency Of Islamic Enlightenment in Hajj, approved by The Permanent Committee of Islamic Research and Fatwa and Shaikh Muhammad Bin Saleh Al-Uthaimin (May Allah have mercy on him).” It is a gift from “Your Highness Prince King Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud.” It contains some useful information, but I am particularly intrigued by a section called The Things That Nullify Iman (a sort of “you know you are no longer a believer if…” kind of list). This is where State ideology meets religious practice. Apart from the usual stuff (setting up equals to God), Article 4 states:

Anyone who believes that some guidance other than the Prophet’s guidance is more perfect, or a judgement other than the prophet’s judgment is better, has become an unbeliever. This applies to those who prefer the rule of the Evil One (Taghut) over the Prophet’s rule. Some examples are:

(a) To believe that systems and laws made by human beings are better than the Shari’ah of Islam, for example:

(i) That the Islamic system is not suitable for application in the twentieth century.

(ii) Or that the Islamic system is the cause of backwardness of muslims.

(iii) Or that Islam is only a relationship between a man (sic) and His Lord, and does not have any relations with other aspects of life.

(b) To say that working with the judgments of Allah in enforcing the punishments prescribed by Allah, such as cutting off the hand of a thief, or stoning an adulterer is not suitable in this day and age.

(c) To believe that it is permissible to rule by a law other than what Allah has revealed in Islamic transactions or matters of criminal justice and similar affairs, even if he does not believe that such rulings are superior to the Shari’ah. This is because by doing so he would be declaring as permissible something which Allah made impermissible, such as adultery, drinking alcohol, or usury, and similar things whose prohibition is common knowledge to all, such a person has become an unbeliever according to the consensus of all muslims.

In short, anyone living outside of Saudi Arabia is an unbeliever. But by the way, isn’t the Shari’ah made and modified by (a select group of) human beings? And should a judgment which authorities claim is derived from the practice of the Prophet be taken as valid even if it contradicts the Qur’an? And where in the Qur’an exactly does it say that the punishment for adultery is stoning to death? And… oh, forget it. The only comforting thing about inhaling gas fumes is that they are a reminder that oil kingdoms will one day go up in smoke.

Voiceless

Entering Mina, you cannot believe your eyes. It is a city —or more accurately, a slum— of thousands of identical tents. There are 3 million people living here, but not all of them can afford a tent. All the roads and sidewalks are crammed with poor people’s make-shift camps. It’s hard to walk without having to step over some family sleeping on the ground, or cooking, or going to the bathroom. It is filthy. Bulldozers push piles of trash to clear the roads. Police cars constantly patrol the area and force people sleeping on the roads to move in order to clear the roads so that cars transporting more people and provisions can go through. There are ’sections’ for different nationalities: Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, and on and on. It is a microcosm of the world. Of course, the European and American camps are surrounded by a fence and the tents are considered ‘upgraded’, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at the bathroom stalls which double as showers, and which are perpetually flooded.

By the time we reach our camp, I am sick as a dog. My cold has gone from viral to bacterial, a doctor traveling with our group informs me. I completely lose my voice, which I take as a positive step towards the death of the self. The doctor says I should start taking antibiotics. We brought one course for my wife, which she took when she began her cold almost as soon as we reached Saudi Arabia (she is quite susceptible to respiratory problems). A Muslim brother, who overhears our conversation (I mostly communicate by grunts and signs) offers me his medication. I say I feel bad taking the antibiotics —what if he needs them later? He insists. He says, with a smile, that I should allow him to earn the reward of a good deed. In our tent, people are sharing their medication and food, and looking out for each other. It is only a spontaneous and momentary show of communal solidarity, but it’s genuine and touching. One forgets the value of such moments in restoring one’s faith in humanity. My wife, however, informs me that in the sisters’ tent the good will is not as abundant.

Rhythm

When you have the opportunity to pray at one of the two holy mosques, you try to take advantage, despite the crowds. Sometimes you can’t even make it inside, and have to pray in the courtyard, or even on the dirty streets. The azzan, or call to prayer, sets the rhythm of your life: you sleep little, eat little, and try to spend as much time as possible in the mosque.

Cell phone

Yes, even in the holiest place and at the holiest time you will not escape the curse of the ringtone, and someone saying in a foreign language what I imagine to be something like: “Hey, what’s up? Nothing, just going around the Ka’bah…” They receive some disapproving stares and maybe a chastising comment, but this does not seem to dissuade them one bit.

Patience

When the bureaucracy of the Saudi government is coupled with the ineptitude of the Hajj guides, you are constantly reminded that part of the purpose of Hajj is to learn patience. At first you are insulted at the insinuation that you are a bad pilgrim, but eventually you realize you have no options. Things will unfold completely outside your control.

Aunties

After a while, you become one with the shoving and the pushing, and you learn to incorporate them into your own movements. Except for the pushing of the Aunties. These little frail old ladies from the Sub Continent have a way of poking you and shoving you aside with their bony hands that leaves bruises afterwards. I call it the Auntie Vulcan Maneuver.

Comfort

After performing our farewell Tawaf on the last day, we board our bus to Jeddah, sick and exhausted. I get some local cough mixture for my wife and myself before leaving. It is dark, and I don’t have the energy to read the directions, so we end up inadvertently taking four times the recommended dosage. That, and the exhaustion, knocks us out completely. My sleep in the bus is so deep, that the next thing I know my wife is shaking me, telling me that we have arrived at the Sheraton in Jeddah. In a daze, we go up to our room. It is sometime in the wee hours of the morning. The cleanliness and the comfort comes as shock, considering what we have endured the past few days. No more standing in long lines for food, or to use the messy bathrooms. No more sleeping toe-to-toe in tents with 50 snoring men. The luxury of the hotel feels familiar; it is what I am accustomed to in my privileged life. I feel sad, and wonder if the comfort will erase some of the lessons of Hajj too quickly. I don’t want it to. I don’t want to be like the person admonished in Naser Khosrow’s poem: “You spend your money to buy the hardships of the desert.”

Foot

It is considered bad manners to cross right in front of someone praying, but in a Mosque with thousands of people moving about, it is impossible to avoid this sometimes. I am praying at the Holy Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, before Hajj begins. I am immersed in meditation, and feel particularly attuned to my prayers. I’m on the floor, about to bow down and place my forehead on the floor as part of the prayer. As I am about to prostrate, a foot plants itself right in front of me, on the spot where my forehead is supposed to touch the floor. It is no ordinary foot. It is the most disgusting foot I have ever seen, verging on leprosy. The skin is scaly and replete with oozing sores… the sole is cracked, with bloody lines as deeps as canyons… there is stuff growing on the “nails” that is straight out of a horror film. My first reaction is extreme repulsion. My second reaction is extreme anger: I feel like violently removing this foot from my prayer space. But the foot moves away soon enough, leaving the space free for me to place my forehead where it was just standing. Needless to say, my concentration is broken. Only later does it occur to me that none of my initial reactions was of compassion for the owner of such a limb. Surely, it could not have been comfortable to perform Hajj under such conditions (I doubt this person was traveling First Class). Did my personal outrage outweigh his discomfort, and justify my lack of compassion? My experience of the Hajj begins to change at the moment of that realization.

Arafat gives you a blank slate, an opportunity to change the direction of your life, but your old self awaits you back in Mina, where evil must be faced. In between, you will partake of the unity of creation by circling the Ka’bah and running between the hills of Safa and Marwah. That is the Hajj, a reminder that we are nomads, immigrants, ceaselessly going back and forth —simultaneously losing and finding ourselves in the crowd.

Reference:
Shariati, A. (1994). Hajj: Reflection on its rituals. Houston, TX: Islamic Publications International.

All photographs: Creative Commons 2007 Ulises A. Mejias