One woman introduced herself and said she too was traveling alone, so maybe we could hang out. In fact she said, I think we'll be in the room together, since we are both unaccompanied. She made wudu' there, but, in my mind, we'd be able to shower and change before fajr prayer, so I erred on the side of the simple hand wash. I say erred because before we would reach our rooms, there were still many stations to go.
For example, our bus contained 31 people from our tour group all headed towards the same hotel. The other persons on the bus had to unloaded first. Apparently, neither they nor the bus driver knew where to unload them. Where we stopped was not yet into the city limits for Makkah. Even when they got to this nice, quiet (or creepy empty?) spot outside the city, there were a lot of negotiations. This was followed by the inconvenience that since they had boarded first, their bags were somewhere under our bags, tied under tarp on the roof of the bus. Yes, I did say on the roof of the bus and under tarp. But don't get me started on the conditions of the bus, because at least no one was standing and the AC was kicking. Just because the windows had not possibly been washed for 8 or 9 years does not count, yet.
Next two stops were at local offices for the tour company and at one of them we got a few young African guys (baggage handlers apparently) and at another one, we got a guide who drove in front of the bus in his black BMW. We also received a third boxed meal. By the time we hit the city limits of Makkah and negotiated all of this, it was already after 4 a.m. Hope for completing umrah before fajr was out. Still, we wound our way through the city. Most of the time we followed a sign that said "Masjid al-Haram" in Arabic and English, so it was pretty clear we were going in the right direction.
Well, that is until we did a few U-turns and went through a few tunnels. First U-turn was forced by a police by a blockade. It seemed, we were nearing the mosque, because droves of people started to walk beside us on the road, on the sidewalk, or in the streets. "They're heading to pray in the mosque!" I said to no one in particular. I cannot explain what the sensation is like with these people all headed in the pre-dawn darkness, purposefully towards something you cannot see, something in the distance but clearly the goal. So of course I thought we must be nearly there. Later I learned that people came from however much distance, including a few kilometers, towards the mosque for prayers. So we plodded along beside them in our bus. Once we were stopped at a traffic bottleneck just before one of the tunnels by a policeman. We parked on the side of the road.
The news was finally translated, we are not allowed to pass with our vehicle during the salah. This was about the point when I start to lose it. Oh yeah? Well, we want to pray too you know. But, while the driver said we could walk and then get our bags at the hotel, the man in the BMW said we might get lost. Get lost, how? We just follow the river of people, right to Bayt-Allah. No, not lost to the haram silly, how do you find the hotel? You know, the one no one has given any address to. Oh, now, that is a possibility.
After the crowds dissipated, we tried again to get permission to pass. The guy in the BMW did all the talking and I did all the praying, Oh Allah, please, please please, let us pass. You know what? It worked, and the policeman let us pass. My heart was pounding at the possibility that I would make it to the Ka'abah for prayer: the first time I prayed in Makkah! Alas, there was still an impasse. The best we could do by the time the final call for prayer was made was get out and join the prayer lines right along the side of the street. Yep, right along the side of the street, people put down their rugs and formed prayer lines!
These lines would stretch further back from the Ka'abah and get thicker over the next week. By the time we got to our rooms it was past 7 a.m., only 12 hours after landing, for what is normally a one hour trip.
Dec. 2, 2010—Tawaf: How I Fell in Love
In order to get a sense of the Tawaf, imagine there is a string: One end is tied in knot inside your heart, the other end is tied to the Ka'abah. The Ka'abah is like a magnetic force that pulls so strongly you just SPIN out of control—around and around like a mad dervish, until you are dizzy, drunk with the joy and ecstasy of it.
If you have plans to make hajj, I strongly recommend that you plan for hajj tamattu' in such a way as to arrive in Makkah as close to the new moon as possible for the Zhul-Hijjah, or 12th lunar month. This is approximately one week before the hajj begins on the 8th day.
When you first see the Ka'abah, you are supposed to say certain du'a (including asking for ANYTHING you want), and then make two rakaats. Most people are so overwhelmed at the sight of it, they simply dissolve into tears. For Muslims, this is the psychological center, the heart of our daily prayers. We see it in our mind's eye, we reproduce it as a design on our prayer rugs. But the real thing—WOW!
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