My Travel Adventures

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.

I started my second day in Saudi Arabia by eating the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner, after which I headed to the old town of al-Ula. I had saved two parking lots on my phone: one just south of the old town and one just north of it. I did not like the idea of walking all the way from the parking lot into the old town under the scorching sun, but when I arrived at the southern parking lot, I found it had a whole fleet of golf carts and a minibus. I cannot conceive this whole operation to be profitable. The buses and golfcarts are free, and they depart as soon as a single person climbs on board, employing perhaps dozens of drivers. I ought to note that many of the drivers were women, which I did not find remarkable at the time, but it now strikes me as quite a large stride from the times when women were protesting in Saudi Arabia for the right to drive.

Having toured Moroni and a few of the villages north of it, I turned my attention to the southern town of Iconi. This sleepy town was once the seat of the Sultanate of Bambao, which also encompassed the country’s present capital. Until the arrival of the French in the late nineteenth century, the island of Ngazidja (or Grande Comore) was divided into ten sultanates, with the sultanate of Bambao and the sultanate of Itsandra occupying a preeminent position among them. Rulers from these two lineages selected the Sultan Ntibe, who crowned the other rulers and theoretically held authority over all but one of the other sultanates.