Finally made it to Holy City

Labaikallah hum malakbaik, labaikalla shari kalab kalabbaik, Arrived at Jeddah airport at 11 pm and I was tired flying up and down from Manchester to London to Riyard to Jeddah in 12 hours. Straight to immigration and after clearance, toilet was my first stop to change to the state of Ihram. I know I should have changed it in the plane when the plane passes the Miqat (Imaginary boundary before entering Holy City) but stupid of me not putting 1 set of Ihram in hand luggage. So I did the Niat(intention of Umrah) in the Miqat and changed to the Ihram for my Umrah pilgrimage. Soon exiting the arriving gate our passports were pulled together by the Umrah officer. That was normal procedure that Saudi immigration needed to copy the entire passport. It took nearly an hour to do that. I didn’t know what was really happened as I just follow the group and I don’t speak Urdu. All of them were British born Pakistani from Oldham, Manchester.

There was no sign of the tour representative who’s in charge in Saudi ground. After a while I saw this guy who was like arranging something with Saudi Officer who had our entire passport with him. He is the guy in charged and the procedure was that the Saudi officer needed to make sure the total number of pilgrims present and their nationalities in that group before he can let us boarded the coach to Makkah. All sorted although my first impression was the country’s system is like 3rd world country. Everything is done manually and there are lots of bureaucracy and a lot more to come. The only thing in my mind was, God please bless me and make it easy for me.


We boarded the coach and I was sitting beside this brother. This was his 3rd Umrah and had performed Hajj 2 times. He was still young 41 years old. Normally Muslims go to Hajj when they reach 50’s or older. He’s lucky. He came with his wife and kids - 2 girls and a boy. On the journey he talked about his knowledge about Malaysia Islamic state that he knows from the news. There was this political misconduct of this opposition party in Malaysia. At lease my country was in the world news only on bad and embarrassing issues.