There Are No Bicycles In Makkah

For a while, for a short while, lets forget about cycling. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Come Horatio, this is my Rehlah, an account of a pilgrimage, although in the art of narration, I am no Marlowe of Lord Jim, more likely of Winston in 1984. 

In previous journeys I had always tried very hard to shape my thoughts and acts to fit the template of an exemplary pilgrim. I obeyed the rules and  avoided the injunctions to the letter. Azan was called on the departure from the house and all salats faithfully observed. I convinced my inner self this was the right thing to do. Of all salats in the the Grand Mosques in Makkah and the Prophet's Mosques in Madinah, none was missed. Above all, I psyched my self to reach the high points in the feeling of fulfillment after each ritual. There was always the nagging feeling that everybody closed to me, my parents, friends, relations and the folks in Kampong Sireh, the place I grew up and acquired my religious orientation, would be terribly, terribly disappointed that I had not kept up to their standards. Everybody told me that there is somebody and someone doing the counting.  The aim of life was to collect as many pahalas as possible. A maimed ritual will not be rewarded with pahala. In afterlife if it is judged your collection of pahala exceeded your dosa, you go to heaven, otherwise you go to hell. Dosa is the debit to your account for disobeying the rules.  Salat done alone would be rewarded with one pahala but the same salat done in group got seven and salat done in the Grand Mosques in Makkah one thousand, hence the attraction of Makkah to the seekers of pahalas.

It was a pleasant surprise when on boarding the plane, we were asked to go upstairs. Upstairs in a jumbo jet means business class, were we upgraded ? However the bliss was short lived as as the seating arrangement on this particular plane had been reconfigured, upstairs was just another economy compartment. Nevertheless, the feeling that this used to be business class and coupled with the spacious cabin somehow took away the cattle out of the class. The load was less than half and we had lots of empty seats to ourselves but the inflight menu was terrible, at least for me. The choice was either chicken or beef and I, as I had been avoiding both from my diet, ended up eating rice only. Salat for Asar was offered from the seat, which we were allowed to do while on a transport in a journey.

We touched down in Jeddah at 7.00 pm and for the first time Umrah bound passengers were taken to the Haj terminal for immigration and custom inspection. The agent of the operator was also confused as he had been waiting for us in the International terminal and this caused a bit of a delay in moving to Madinah, our first destination. After an uneventful journey by van we reached Madinah at 2.00 am and again there was a delay in getting to our hotel room as we were told we were not booked at the hotel promised by the operator, the Movenpick. It was only after 2 hours had passed that we were allowed into our room and by then it as already 4.00 am or 9.00 am in Malaysia, which meant that we had not slept for more than 24 hours. Still it was not the time to sleep because the Dawn salat commenced shortly after and no right thinking pilgrim in Madinah would want to waste the opportunity to collect the pahala.

MADINAH

During the Dawn salat, in the midst of reciting certain ayat of the Quran, the Imam leading the prayer was heard to sob and weep. It is said, when one understands the meaning of the ayats, and if one is deep enough, one feels real fear of the pictures of for instance, hell fire, hence the weepings and the sobbings. Do you weep when you are scared ? If I wept, which I last did in my teenage years, it was because I was sad, remorseful or disappointed, like failing a big test, scolded by Mama or losing the attention of a girl I had a crush on, never because I was afraid of anything. When I was afraid I shivered maybe, but did not shed tears. When fear gripped you, it was rather an inappropriate display of emotion to cry. It might have been the culture of the desert people to do so, like an Indian shaking his head in agreement. Appropriateness cannot be the subject of our exclusive interpretation, so I leave it to the wise.

Madinah is generally flat and would have been a beautiful bicycle country, but I hardly saw any bicycle. The few that I saw was used by the immigrant workers. It would be spectacular to have the pilgrims riding bicycles to the mosques and it would be the answer to the overcrowding of lodgings around the Prophet's Mosque. Riding for, say,  5 kilometres would be easy. To walk the same distance would be torture. Using the bicycles as a mean of transport would mean unlocking the reserves of housing to a more extended part of the city and reducing congestion around the Haram. Well this is the point of view from  cyclist, sane to people like me but may be mad to others.

A working bicycle, single speed and  locked; looks like bicycle thieves are undeterred despite severe punishment for theft under the Sharia law.

Volcanic shaped hills on the way to Makkah from Madinah

A lone cyclist making way through local traffic

My filling broke and the tooth needed immediate attention. It had to happen here. Where on earth can I find a dentist, in fact is dental treatment available in this country ? At the  laundry, the man gave me directions to the nearest dental clinic which he said was only 2 minutes away. ( In Madinah do not send your soiled clothing to a laundry. They came back pressed and packed in plastic bag together with coat hangers. The charges were astronomical but who needed the extra services while on a go ? ) Well I walked for a good 15 minutes before asking for another direction from a group of Africans who were lounging in an empty car park. Man was I glad to find a clinic and yes, foreigners were just as welcomed. The dentist who treated me, Dr. Dawood, was an expatriate from India and he had a brother in Malaysia working as an engineer in the IT sector. I was billed SR150, quite reasonable considering the dire situation I was in, a traveler in a strange country with a medical issue looking for immediate solution. 

Well, to a Malaysian pilgrim, that would count as an out of the ordinary incident. But I did more than that, or rather did not. I did not do the Raudhah, nor the Prophet's grave. The Raudhah is an area near the Prophet's grave decreed by the Prophet to be a representation of heaven on earth and a salat offered here is equal to a salat in heaven. I did not do it because I had done them on previous visits and I never liked the pushing and shoving from fellow pilgrims obsessed with their display of faiths. The pahalas collected then should still be in the bag. Anyway, besides being religious they were also historical features and they had always been there, and will always be in the future. Nothing had changed and my absence would not take away  anything from the sanctity and historical values of the sites.

Normally, a pilgrim's routine would be from hotel to the mosque and nothing else asides from perhaps a little shopping for souvenirs. But I went cultural and paid a visit to a museum. It was injustice to see very few visitors patronising the place, mostly Iranian, as the displays were quite memorable. There were among others, blown up old photographs of Medina, model depiction of Battle of Uhud, the plan of Baqi' with markers of the graves of the Sahabats and Wives of the Prophets and the most attractive to me was the geological presentation of Medinah and the surrounding areas. The museum was quite small and one hour of browsing was sufficient.


I took an early morning walk around the old part of Madinah that is fast disappearing. In the process of rebuilding old buildings were torn down. The new Madinah is very modern in appearance and very well planned. The streets are laid in grids very similar to downtown New York. In old Madinah I passed through "Little India-Pakistan" with their restaurants and eating places, very quaint and I could feel the character of the inhabitants, its living an ordinary life in the vicinity of obsession with after life. I saw small bakeries baking fresh rotis and people queueing to buy. These bakeries could not fit in the new buildings, maybe people will stop baking and eating these rotis in the future. Soon, very soon all this will be gone.  The increasing number of pilgrims visiting and staying in the city neccesitates the construction of bigger hotels  and this means these collection of low rise with winding and narrow streets will have to give way to modernity. This is the only way forward and soon  the changed landscape will slowly become acceptable. 

MAKKAH

In spite of reminding our guide of our departure from Madinah in the afternoon, we were made to wait for more than two hours before our transport turned up. Well that is the rigours of travel, I had thought by buying a package it would iron out the unpredictabilities but that was not so. Waiting and anxieties have always to be factored in, lest we end up whining about unkind fates.


We had a van for the journey and the driver drove like a mad man. The speed sensor was beeping incessantly and in a record time we entered Makkah. On the way there was not much "Labaikallah" as I was engrossed by the sight of the volcanic landscape. North of Madinah was a huge area littered by volcanic rocks, in fact lava flow was recorded merely five hundred years ago, a blink of an eye in geological time. There were remains of volcanic hills which are are truly volcanic in shapes


In Makkah we checked in the Zam Zam hotel. We were given a suite, with the kitchen hobs disabled for fear of fire hazards. There were elegant restaurants for fine dining, if you can afford the price. This was upscale. Even if outside midday temperature was hitting 45C, inside the building it was comfort. Below were five levels of shoppings and food courts. But if Zam Zam was upscale why was it swarming with Indonesian pilgrims. I did not meet a single fellow Malaysian. Might it be that we had lost our wealth in paying off huge sums to our Indonesian maids who sent it home to their dependents who were now spending it in Zam Zam ? What an asinine suggestion, but would be readily adopted as true by the xenophobes at home.


Unlike Madinah the terrain of Makkah was steep and unforgiving for cyclists. I did not see any bicycle for the whole duration of my stay.  There were tunnels dug into the mountain to allow traffic to enter and leave the city. These tunnels were used by pilgrims during the Haj to move to Mina, some walked and the rest were transported by motor vehicles and imagine the congestion caused by a million people all trying to get to the same place at the same time. Currently the authorities are constructing an electric powered rail to carry pilgrims which will ease the traffic congestion. A more environment friendly solution would be to provide bicycles to the pilgrims, the distance between Mina and Makkah was only 5 kilometres and that would be ideal distance for a cycling pilgrim. The tunnels could be utilised to help the cyclist overcome the mountain around Makkah. So far, we hear pilgrims walking to Mina, cycling would be much easier, although as of today we are yet to hear about this novel mode of Haj transportation.


As in Madinah, the Imam leading the dawn prayers wept while reading the Quranic verses. This one was bad, for a few moment there was silence while he was trying to regain his composure. Quranic verses surely have emotional effects on the Arabs. These weepings and sobbings are very much looked in favour by the Malaysian, so much so that these imams were imported during Ramadan to replicate the hysterical atmosphere in our mosques. These outpouring of emotions in public had historical records. It was said one Sahabat when refusing the Prophet's request to lead the prayers gave the excuse that he was liable to lose control when reading the Quranic passages aloud.


For reading pleasure I brought along a book, "Incognito", a delightful account of the working of the human brain. Among the discourse was the theory that the need for socialising is wired in our brain. A new born baby will try to communicate by making eye contact and when he grows older is always in need of a peer contact. Socialising is evolution. As I look at it, one of the most  powerful medium of socialising is group religion. Religion, whatever the choice, right or wrong, is the ancient bond that binds mankind together. People of similar religion feel at ease to be among their co-religionist. People not subscribing to the faith tend to be ostracized and shunned. For this reason religion thrives and secularism does not, not until secularism takes up the rituals like in religion so that secularists will feel they are in a group with similar belief and creed. 


A person of religion has fellow religionist surrounding him with pleasant similarities. A secularist is a loner. A religious person has his table full of spread and choice food. A secularist opts to reducing his food intake in pill forms, full of nutrition but tasteless. A man of religion will attend social events of a thousand attendance where he can cheer with others at silly spectacles. A secularist stays at home and rehearses his arguments with one or two fellow atheist. A religious man is a social animal, a secularist antisocial. 




I did not quaff the zamzam water endlessly. One cup was enough, and that was for the sake of paying tribute to the ancient and unchanging practice. It was to acknowledge that some parts of Makkah had remained unchanged. The skyline and and the physical outlook may not be recognisable anymore but there were things that defied changes. The women were still tall and achingly beautiful, the crowd around Aswad exuberant and rowdy, the taste of zamzam metallic, the English speaking Indian pestering you for money to purchase ticket home diplomatic and polite, the street argument loud and boisterous and the above all the voice of the Imam leading the prayers hauntingly sweet. 


Neither did I offer endless optional prayers. I only did the compulsory. Instead before and after salat I spent my time in self contemplation. Many issues crowded my mind. The Prophet during Isra' flew on a Bura' from Makkah to Jerusalem but when fleeing Makkah during Hijrah chose an unbeliever to guide him across the desert to Madinah when he could have nailed the taunt of Herod to Jesus to walk on water if he was the Son of God. That was one wasted opportunity. If he had flown in before the eyes of the Jews waiting for his arrival in Madinah,  history would have taken a different turn.


Soon it was time to leave and our travel agent saved the worst for the last. He dropped us at the wrong terminal, and we had to rush to find our own taxi to take us to the right terminal. In the rush we left behind one of our luggages. At the Haj terminal condition was chaotic. There was no signage and we barely made it to the counter for our boarding passes. The flight home was routine and we touched down safely at KLIA the next day, back to my love in life, my Merida.