The caramel dunes and rocky hills melt up into the sky. It is night, almost morning; it is dark, but not quite black-almost the last sparkling shade of heavy purple that bleeds from the spectrum between blue to black. A thick palm tree pops into the mix every few hundred feet, and we speed through the speckles of small towns built off the highway. Arabic on lit signs in flickering colors sometimes stand above or besides their English translations or transliterations or some weird estimated meaning that doesn’t exactly match up-but you go with it.

A sheikh leading our trip stands at the head of the aisle, hollering into the mic at 2:44 AM. The warm bus seats 50 family, friends and family friends dozing off to sleep at the phenomenal but fatiguing eight days through Medina and Mecca. Some fashion a smile at the perceived efforts of the sheikh, but everyone not-so-secretly wishes to sleep this short car trip to Jeddah.

“One last thing,” the sheikh begins, building up hopes that the driver will soon shut off the cabin lights so we too may melt into the purple night. “I think the girls on this trip could have done a better job speaking up. Like when I asked around just a few minutes ago about one dua everyone has for the Muslim Ummah, the girls didn’t talk, even when I offered them a chance.”

But, false. I spoke, both of my sisters spoke, my best friend spoke-automatically accounting for half the “girls” in the group, as well as immediately outnumbering the number of “boys” who spoke.

This wasn’t supposed to be a head-to-head comparison, but when the sheikh made the comment, my mind couldn’t help but cut to the quantitative crunch.

He kept going. “You know, I hear a lot of girls complaining and whining about how they don’t have a voice, but how about you just step up and stop being shy or cowering away when we give you the opportunity?”

complaining and whining.

just step up.

give you the opportunity.

we give.

when we.

I begin burning. All my exhaustion has precipitated into disgust. I am no longer poised and purple, now wanting to be one with the blistering Arabic stars. My brain frantically scours for the line between the patience we have grown and groomed over these days on Umrah and the right to defend one’s dignity against defamation — not to mention an additional stand against an entire gender’s general reduction into one, incapable stereotype — but my mind quickly realizes we are way past this point.