Day 3 of My Sprint through Saudi Arabia: Medina

I arrived in Medina at nine in the morning and was out of the airport within fifteen minutes. A taxi dropped me off right in front of Quba Mosque, a glistening white building with three domes and four minarets at the southern end of the city. Quba prides itself on being the oldest mosque in the world, its first stone being laid by the Prophet Muhammad in the first year of his emigration to Medina (the Hijrah). The current building, however, retains little to nothing of the original structure, which underwent gradual changes over the centuries until it was abruptly knocked down and replaced in the 1980s.

Although the driver left me at the entrance of the mosque, I first walked around it to see if I could take some nice shots of it from outside. The crowds had already gathered around the mosque, but since the open spaces in front of it had yet to be cleaned up and paved, everyone milled around the perimeter of the building itself taking off and putting on their shoes. The interior of the mosque – and indeed, the insides of all the mosques I visited in Saudi Arabia – did not strike me as very spectacular, and of course it had little to say for itself from a historical point of view, but at least it was bright and clean without seeming antiseptic.

From the mosque, I walked the three-kilometre-long Quba Avenue to the city centre. The avenue actually comprises two largely parallel walkways that separate at the beginning and join up again at the end, embracing several kilometres of apartment buildings and shops. I found the walk quite pleasant, which was mostly due to the absence of cars, but also thanks to the shade provided by the trees in the less built-up areas. At the northern end, the roads converged on an underwhelmingly small plaza in front of the elevated ring-road around The Prophet’s Mosque. I believe that in addition to its small clocktower, the plaza was supposed to have a water feature, but it was being repaired. One man was directing this process by pointing – to my mind completely haphazardly – here at one spout and there at another, ordering a duo of hapless subordinates to remove the covers and pensively stare at the apparatus.

At the clocktower, I turned west and walked towards al Anbariya Mosque and the old al Hejaz Railway Station. Now serving as a museum (though it appeared to be closed on the day I arrived), the railway station was once part of an ambitious Ottoman project to link Mecca with Damascus, thus providing a connection between the holiest city of Islam and the Ottoman capital at Istanbul. However, the railway was never completed, with the works only having reached Medina by the outbreak of the First World War and the Arab Revolt. In later years, large segments of the track were stolen and destroyed.

Now walking back to the centre in earnest, I passed through a busy square with three mosques: the Abu Bakr Mosque, the Mosque of al-Ghamamah, and the Mosque of Ali bin Abi Talib. The Abu Bakr Mosque is the quaintest of the three with its fairytale-like minaret and its small square base that somehow reinforces the similarity of its dome to a lemon press. This is the mosque where Muhammad offered Eid prayers, in which he was succeeded by Abu Bakr after his death. The Mosque of al-Ghamamah (literally, the mosque of the cloud) is somewhat larger and more rectangular than the Abu Bakr Mosque. It was also used by Muhammad for Eid prayers, but it received its name from a prayer Muhammad made for rain during a particularly dry year. The last mosque is named after Ali bin Abi Talib, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, who also led prayers in this location. Ali, of course, was the founder of the Shia branch of Islam which now predominates in Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan.

Crowds of people were streaming towards the Prophet’s Mosque, al-Masjid al-Nabawi. I had done my research and knew that I was not permitted to enter this mosque, but I was not entirely sure where the restricted area began. On the western side, a gate quite decisively separated the shaded area of the mosque from the city, but the boundary on the southern side was hardly as clear: a building ran along the road from east to west, with the occasional entrance into the complex offering only partial glances. As I paced along the building, the midday call to prayer began. It seemed that the rivers of people flowing into the mosque from every entrance suddenly hastened and turned into torrents, with the latest arrivals rushing in from the hotels just across the road. When this current weakened into a trickle, I noticed that I could see barriers through the building’s arches. This filled me with optimism: I could walk through this building, then, and stop just short of the barrier.

As I walked through the gate, the whole square opened before me. I had entered the complex right in front of the famous Green Dome, which floated above an array of smaller silver domes, and towering above everything else stood the mosque’s six minarets. The ground was so polished that it reflected the contours of the buildings as well as the people streaming under their roofs. This, then, was the second holiest site in Islam, the second oldest mosque in the world, the house of Aisha and the tomb of Muhammad.

After finding lunch at a nearby stand, I embarked on a quest to procure a taxi. This took barely any time at all, as taxis in Medina are a very recognisable shade of green. My driver was Yemeni and spoke barely any English. At length, I was able to explain that I would need to pay him by card, as I had burned through most of my cash, and he was able to explain to me that I would find no taxis where I was heading. We thus struck a deal that he would take me around the rest of the places I wanted to see, which were all on the periphery of Medina.

Our first stop was al-Qiblatayn Mosque, the place where Muhammad received God’s command to change the direction of prayer (or qibla) from Jerusalem to Mecca. The mosque’s name literally translates to “The Mosque of the Two Qiblas,” referencing the fact that it contained – at different times – two mihrabs facing different directions. With the sun high in the sky and the polished tiles of the outdoor platform reflecting both the light and the building, its overwhelming whiteness felt almost painful. I escaped the glare to see if I could get a better view of the whole mosque, which I found – once again – above a construction site right behind it.

Our next stop was Mount Uhud, or rather, Archers’ Hill which overlooks it. This was the place where Muhammad and his allies fought their second battle against the polytheists of his own tribe. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the Muslims were able to gain the upper hand until a strategic blunder lost them the whole battle: the information board by Archers’ Hill says that – disobeying Muhammad’s orders – the archers descended from their hill to despoil the enemy camp and were suddenly counterattacked by enemy cavalrymen. In the chaos that followed, Muhammad’s uncle Humza was killed, and Muhammad himself was injured. As the Muslim troops retreated into the hills, their enemies returned to Mecca boasting of their victory.

Our last stop was going to be the Medina High Speed Railway Station but seeing as I still had four hours until my seven o’clock train, I asked my driver to drop me off at the nearby Dar al-Medina Museum instead. Despite its high ratings, it was somewhat underwhelming. The museum occupies a single floor of a historical building and does not contain very many interesting artefacts. What it does have are dozens of dioramas and miniatures of buildings, including several models showing the successive expansions made to the Mosque of the Prophet. The pathway at the museum takes visitors through the chronology of Muhammad’s life and related histories, leading from Mecca to Jerusalem and Medina. Interestingly, the people in the dioramas were represented by stick figures, while many of the animals had their faces glued over with black tape. I wondered whether this was because of the strict ban on representing animate beings in Saudi Arabia’s Salafi School of Islam.

I had planned to walk from the museum to the train station, which I judged would take me about thirty minutes, but almost as soon as I set off for the main road, a car pulled up, and the driver asked me if I needed a lift. When I asked whether he was a driver, he said he did not want any money, and that this was merely a small act of kindness. It turned out my benefactor was an Alexandrian working for a local construction company. He seemed incredulous that I had never heard of it and began to point at all the billboards plastering the roadside with announcements of massive residential projects. The company had even participated in building the train station. We pulled up to it by a minor street entrance, and he walked me over to the main concourse through a series of halls that were still under construction.

The train departed on the dot and arrived at the airport in Jeddah over ten minutes ahead of schedule. I was amused when, a few minutes into the journey, the call to prayer that was broadcasted through the train’s speakers had to contend for the passengers’ attention with the tones of the Alphabet song booming from a tablet held by two enraptured children.