IN HIS OWN WORDS
In a 2006 interview with Al Jazeera, Dr. Al-Sumait described his journey to a village in south-eastern Madagascar that bears the name “Mecca”. The story is about the road, but at heart it is about a religion whose name survived while its meaning was lost — and about the way he chose to set that right.
On one of my visits in 1991, I heard of a village there called Mecca, and I was seized by the longing to travel to the Mecca of Madagascar. But our office director there and the preachers said: it is difficult, the road is very rough. I asked: has anyone reached it before me? They said: yes — the villagers, of course, get there. So I told them: then I am like the villagers!
We flew for an hour and a half in a large Boeing to a town called Manakara. There was no car to take us on, so we hired a very old minibus with no seats, and we sat on the bare metal. It had no ignition key, so the driver joined the electrical wires to start it. After an hour we reached the village of Vohipeno, and from there we crossed a river full of crocodiles.
We crossed the river and walked for a quarter of an hour on dry land, and then we reached the swamps. They came up to the chest, sometimes to the shoulders, and all of it was fouled with cattle dung. For four hours we waded through these swamps; there was no other way. Before we reached the village of Mecca, one of the brothers with me, from Mauritius, said: don’t go in smelling like this. He asked me to take off my robe, so I took it off, and he washed it in the same filthy water.
At last we entered the village and spoke with them. It was the first time they had seen anyone from the Arab lands enter the village of Mecca. We asked them: why did you name it Mecca? They said: after the land we came from. We asked: and where is that land? They said: in the north. But of course they had never heard of the Arab lands, nor of Saudi Arabia — even though there is a second village called Hijaz, which they pronounce “Ijaz”.
When I asked them: what is your religion? they said:
Praise be to God, we are Protestant Muslims!
A village called Mecca, and another called Hijaz
I said to them: how can you be Muslims and Protestants?
They said: our forefathers told us that we are Muslims, but we know nothing about Islam. Then the Protestants came to us and said that Protestantism and Islam are one and the same, with no difference between them. They taught us how to pray, built us this church and gave us the Gospel.
At first I could not bring myself to tell them they were wrong, because I consider that the wrong approach. I believe our duty is to enter their hearts first and win them over, and only then tell them everything.
In Madagascar we also found a tribe called the Antemoro, who say: our origins lie in a village in the north called Jeddah, next to another village called Mecca, where there lived a good man whom they love dearly, named Muhammad. We would go to their villages, dig a well and write on it: “A gift from your Muslim brothers”, then leave it and go. When we returned a year later, they received us like kings.
SOURCE
Al Jazeera — “The Antemoro Tribes and the Arabs of Madagascar” — interview with Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait, 23 February 2006 — as cited in the reference book (pp. 200–202), with the final paragraph from p. 211.
Reference book: “Abdul Rahman Al-Sumait — The Legend of Relief Work”.
Translated from the Arabic for this site. His words are given as they appear in the source, with ellipses where the text has been abridged.
Read next: Africa: The Forgotten Continent →