Emails from the Edge (19 page)
Read Emails from the Edge Online
Authors: Ken Haley
The former is the capital of this collection of seven sovereign sheikhdoms one third the size of Victoria, the latter a glittering showcase of how Islam and advanced Western civilisation can coexist in harmony, despite a view abroad that they must inevitably clash head on.
Of course, this first New Year of the âwar on terror', I have been wont to joke to concerned friends back home that I will be careful to stay out of tall buildings and away from any large gatherings of celebrating Westerners. Once in Dubai, though, I tempt fate on both counts. In the early afternoon I roll up to the ubiquitous Irish bar, where an expatriate rock band is tuning up at the decibel level of a ship's boiler room. This, I muse, would be doubly unbelievable to the folks back home: that a deeply Muslim state should have any bars at all, let alone Irish ones.
The ancient year's last hurrah is a hauntingly beautiful burnt-orange sunset seen from atop the most stunning of skyscrapers, the Arabian Tower, symbol of the fast-growing Gulf and more familiarly known as the Jumeira Beach Hotel. What to do until midnight? I hail a taxi and direct the driver to Dubai's most modern cineplex. It is almost as though I am seeking out those places that one occasionally sees at the foot of the âBriefs' columns on newspapers' foreign pages: â232 killed in downtown theatre explosion in Dubai'. But such is the draw of the box office that the temptation to see the first âHarry Potter' movie in this exotic setting is too great to resist.
Unfortunately, so energy-sapping has the constant cycling around town been that, not long after one of the school scenes, I doze off. All I can remember of the rest of the film is the excitement of that bout of âaerial football' (aka quidditch) where Harry's broomstickmanship lays his enemies waste.
Just after 11 pm I emerge into the warm night. Families, old couples, teenagers (but no skateboards yet, one expects them any time now) drift along the concourse beside the creek awaiting the change of the Christian year in what is truly a Common Era. Cometh the hour, come the fireworks: silver sparklers and blue fountains of light arc over the inky-black water. The
abras
, those long wooden floating taxis once poled now engine-propelled up and down the waterway, honk their horns to welcome in 2002.
DAY 234 (1 JANUARY): DUBAI
Sana Jedida Sa'ida
â(Happy New Year' in Arabic), uttered in what must sound a weirdly uncultured accent, elicits fond indulgent smiles from strangers everywhere. As the years turn, the world may not be at peace, but here I'm among people at peace with the world.
DAY 237 (4 JANUARY): DUBAI
Afternoon on the water: I hire an abra for an hour's sailing past superb incurving gold-tinted facades of the, ahem, Twin Towers shopping centre and back again to Deira docks. Ahmed the abra pilot pours petrol into the engine and then sits back to enjoy a smoke (bit of a worry, that) but we are soon on our way, gliding on the gentlest of swells. With no language in common, my thoughts are totally absorbed in the scenery.
DAY 238 (5 JANUARY): ABU DHABI
First impressions often last, and this is obviously nowhere truer than in a city you visit for a single day. The oldest building in the UAE capital, the al-Hosn Palace or White Fort, dates back only to 1930 (which makes it an exact contemporary of New York's Empire State and makes it more than twice as old as most other structures here). Abu Dhabi is mostly boutiques and banks, but what state-of-the-art boutiques, what opulent banks!
DAY 240 (7 JANUARY): AJMAN
Hearing that the animal-and-bird market in the smallest sheikhdom of them all is in full swing, I arrive late in the afternoon unprepared for what awaits me, the impressive and the depressive separated only by iron bars. Falcons from the emirates fetch from A$10 000âa Sharjah man later tells me top price for the elite type runs to 150 000 dirhams, a price comparable to that for a classy saloon car. Australiana is predictably represented by kangaroos: two mangy grey wallabies are in a cage of less than one square metre (in contravention of market rules as printed on a wall sticker, I note) and offered for sale at 6000 dirhams (A$3300) each.
SULTANATE OF OMAN: 8â30 JANUARY
DAY 241 (8 JANUARY): MUSCAT
It would be grossly dishonest to say I'd forgotten the grandeur of this country's interior, but to be back here where I spent a year of my life (working at a newspaper in the late 1980s) is to see it as new, if somewhat changed. Jagged cliffs, ochre turning orange in the late-afternoon sun, vie for attention with the
wadis
âthose dry riverbeds where expatriates and bronze-skinned Omanis alike can be found picnicking on Friday-and-Saturday weekends.
This visit constitutes a break with the purity of my journey, in that so far I have mostly looked after myself but here I have accepted the kind hospitality of Rosie, an Englishwoman from the Ministry of Information with whom I had dealings in those days. First she arranges for me to be put up for a few days at the five-star Muscat Intercontinental Hotel where the cheapest rooms are about A$300 a night. Then I move into her house, built on a beetling clifftop high up over the Arabian Sea, within what seems a stone's throw of the most perfectly formed cove.
DAY 244 (11 JANUARY): MUSCAT
An Arab society long cut off from others, Oman has a fraction of the oil reserves of nations to the north and west. So Omanis, I recall from my working year here, are less mercenary, gentler, than the Bahrainis, less worldly than the Emiratis but less strict than the Saudis. These, of course, are generalisations but, just as no one who had been to Britain and France would deny the existence of different national characteristics there, we should not lump all Arabs together in our thinking. Omanis have their own story to tell, their own pride and vulnerability, their own traditions.
Serving coffee to the guest is one of those traditions. The first sight that greets you upon entering the palatial al-Bustan Hotel is an old gentleman sitting cross-legged on a carpet, silver dagger under his belt, gaudy turban on his head, dispensing pure arabica from a silver beak-nosed coffeepotâanother distinctive symbol of Oman.
Another tradition is the Omani bullfight, and it is a fairly safe bet that Hemingway, intrepid adventurer that he was, never witnessed anything like this. Here the bull fights its own kind: man, in the form of a handler or two tugging on the leash, restrains aggression rather than incites it. Every Friday afternoon in what is laughingly called winter (average temperature 28°C), the owners of these cloven-hoofed Sherman tanks converge on Barka, an hour up the Arabian Sea coast from the capital.
Once before, in the 1980s, I attended a skirmish here. Then your typical Brahmin owner arrived at the battlefieldâa patch of dirtâwith his charger in tow. Today a low-rise concrete stadium attests to the same type of modernising influences that have affected sports closer to home. Around the boundary, combatants-in-waiting take their stand. Iron stakes prevent them from upsetting the order of play, but unprogrammed bellowings (not to mention less decorous bodily functions) add to the ringside atmosphere.
Prodded into head-on confrontation, the two leviathans in the centre indulge in an engrossing tug of war which begins with their locking horns and ends either with a knockoutâwhen one forces the other off the turfâor when one of the opponents turns tail and runs. This is what, late in the two-hour card, one of these lumbering beefsteaks decides to do, and ârun' scarcely does justice to what ensues. Fed up with the spectacle at close quarters, this Taurus not only turns his rump on the whole affair but gives his handlers the slip and charges straight for the perimeter, gathering ferocity and velocity as he rages around the fence in what might have been a victory lap (if he hadn't been a loser with a mean streak) but what is, in fact, a frenzied quest for liberty.
Suddenly, he spies it, in the form of the stadium's only exit, just one life-saving metre to the left of where I have foolishly chosen to sit. Oblivious to my existence, the frantic beast bounds over the fence and scrambles down the embankment, leaving me to offer a silent prayer to the stadium architect who placed a bull bar just in front of my otherwise exposed vantage point.
The fugitive's dash for freedom is as short-lived as it is spectacular. The last I see, one of his âcontrollers' (this being a three-handler bull, make no mistake) grabs his tail and holds on for dear life as they both disappear over a sand dune.
DAY 248 (15 JANUARY): MUSCAT
At Rosie's, I add BBC World TV news to my routine. At this point, my usually inviting itineraries are perturbing. Saudi Arabia is probably second only to North Korea when it comes to the difficulty of obtaining a visa: I know it's going to be almost impossible to get one even before I head off to the embassy.
Tourism is an alien notion, and a transit visa may restrict me to staying on a long-distance bus all the way from Dubai to Jordan. As that is said to be a 36-hour journey, and I can't use bus toilets the size of broom closets, a road crossing of the peninsula seems out of the question.
The Saudi visa application saga deserves a book to itself, but here is the condensed version. On six occasions between now and 28 January I will take a taxi to this embassy. On the fourth visit I become so desperate for a stamp in my passport that (I can hardly believe this now) having squeezed through the metal detector, which my chair of course sets off every time, and waited in absolute silence for an hour and a half, I dismount carefully to a low step and crawlâyes, crablikeâalong the corridor and into the chancery, to press my case.
Security is called and things look hairy for a moment, but this manoeuvre does result in my application, already completed in triplicate and drawered a week before, being retrieved and passed on to a higher level: Ali Shehri.
It is he, on my sixth visit, who in exchange for the non-princely sum of U$$12 ostentatiously issues me with a transit visa, the number 7 written in (I insist on that). Armed with this, he assures me, I will be able to cross the kingdom within as many days, getting on and off buses, and staying at towns along the way, without let or hindrance.
DAY 250 (17 JANUARY): NIZWA
In spite of all my micro-planning, I must admit some of the best travel moments owe everything to luck. And today I'm in luck, for today is Thursday, and in Nizwa that means one thing: the goat market.
In the Bible, goats are separated from sheep: here, cattle get into the act as well. Being paraded around a circuit under capacious trees in the market square are goats and cattleâbulls, cows and heifersâand the only controversy attending the live sheep market here revolves around price, not morality. A small boy also circulates, selling peanuts and chickpeas.
An English-speaking Omani who sees I am a stranger to these parts talks learnedly of the spectacle before us, betraying a wicked and hitherto unsuspected sense of humour as he points out the meanest bull on the blockâbig, black and muscle-boundâand tells me deadpan, âWe call it Tyson.'
For a few minutes, I am absorbed in the hyperbole of haggling, the play-acting of disappointment and pleading that rivet the spectator at any market or auction. I look on at one veteran raising his cane as if to strike a grasping herdsman, wondering what will happen next, when a tremendous shove from behind nearly pitches me out of my chair. Grabbing the tyres, it takes me a moment to regain my balance, then I jerk my head around to find myself face to face with the goat that has just butted my personal transport (perhaps mistaking it for a hostile beast). The drama is over in seconds. With a dumb look and a snort of contempt, the horned one disappears through a parting knot of people.
DAY 253 (20 JANUARY): MUSCAT
I'm not done with bureaucracy yet. The visa prospects for Syria are dubious. So I return to the diplomatic quarter, to seek assurance from the consul, Muhammad Ibrahim. A breezy, mustachioed man in his forties, Ibrahim gives me his card and assures me that, as an Australian, I will be a welcome guest in his country and given a visa, cost-free, on arrival. Then he adds ominously, âIf you have any trouble, ring my number.'
DAY 255 (22 JANUARY): SALALAH
Having insisted on taking the overnight bus the whole 1000 kilometres through the Omani interior, I find myself on the Frankincense Coastâa couple of hundred âclicks' from busy al-Qa'eda training cells, if Donald Rumsfeld is to be believed. At the Hilton Salalah they have changed my name to Mr Halev, but when landed in the lap of luxury a well-brought-up lad knows better than to complain about such trifles.
Greeted by officials from the Ministry of Information, courtesy of Rosie, a letter of official welcome is handed to me on behalf of the General Manager, an Austrian with the magnificent moniker of Franz-Josef Macho (I kid you not).
DAY 256 (23 JANUARY): SALALAH
BBC bulletin: A suicide bomber blows himself up in West Jerusalem. The blast leaves 20 civilians injured.
My principal guide, Abdul Aziz, troops around the central market as I negotiate for frankincense with chubby women whose faces are covered by black burqas. We are in the Land of Ophir from which that precious essence has been derived since the Queen of Sheba was a girl. I have been here before and know a thing or two about bargaining, but the vendor knows ten or 20, and only later do I learn that the price I have paid for a tin of the stuff is three times what the locals shell out.
DAY 257 (24 JANUARY): JOB'S TOMB
Up into the hills our Mercedes climbs until eventually we come to a site that leaves me at once sceptical and reverent. Beyond a simple mosque, an uphill push of 100 metres brings me to a sunlit room with just one piece of furniture (if that is the word for a three-metre-long tomb draped in silken green fabric).
Mournful-looking women in black enter the room, dropping to their knees beside the tomb. My scepticismâhow could Job, however patient he was, have made it here from Palestine?âis also silenced. They believe: this is more important, this is enough. Enough to remind me that Job is a prophet revered not only by Jews and Christians but by the God-fearing faith of Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim's other spiritual descendants, the Muslims. To Muslim Arabs everywhere, this site is sacred. Job's Tomb.
Nabi Ayyub
.
Of course, this first New Year of the âwar on terror', I have been wont to joke to concerned friends back home that I will be careful to stay out of tall buildings and away from any large gatherings of celebrating Westerners. Once in Dubai, though, I tempt fate on both counts. In the early afternoon I roll up to the ubiquitous Irish bar, where an expatriate rock band is tuning up at the decibel level of a ship's boiler room. This, I muse, would be doubly unbelievable to the folks back home: that a deeply Muslim state should have any bars at all, let alone Irish ones.
The ancient year's last hurrah is a hauntingly beautiful burnt-orange sunset seen from atop the most stunning of skyscrapers, the Arabian Tower, symbol of the fast-growing Gulf and more familiarly known as the Jumeira Beach Hotel. What to do until midnight? I hail a taxi and direct the driver to Dubai's most modern cineplex. It is almost as though I am seeking out those places that one occasionally sees at the foot of the âBriefs' columns on newspapers' foreign pages: â232 killed in downtown theatre explosion in Dubai'. But such is the draw of the box office that the temptation to see the first âHarry Potter' movie in this exotic setting is too great to resist.
Unfortunately, so energy-sapping has the constant cycling around town been that, not long after one of the school scenes, I doze off. All I can remember of the rest of the film is the excitement of that bout of âaerial football' (aka quidditch) where Harry's broomstickmanship lays his enemies waste.
Just after 11 pm I emerge into the warm night. Families, old couples, teenagers (but no skateboards yet, one expects them any time now) drift along the concourse beside the creek awaiting the change of the Christian year in what is truly a Common Era. Cometh the hour, come the fireworks: silver sparklers and blue fountains of light arc over the inky-black water. The
abras
, those long wooden floating taxis once poled now engine-propelled up and down the waterway, honk their horns to welcome in 2002.
DAY 234 (1 JANUARY): DUBAI
Sana Jedida Sa'ida
â(Happy New Year' in Arabic), uttered in what must sound a weirdly uncultured accent, elicits fond indulgent smiles from strangers everywhere. As the years turn, the world may not be at peace, but here I'm among people at peace with the world.
DAY 237 (4 JANUARY): DUBAI
Afternoon on the water: I hire an abra for an hour's sailing past superb incurving gold-tinted facades of the, ahem, Twin Towers shopping centre and back again to Deira docks. Ahmed the abra pilot pours petrol into the engine and then sits back to enjoy a smoke (bit of a worry, that) but we are soon on our way, gliding on the gentlest of swells. With no language in common, my thoughts are totally absorbed in the scenery.
DAY 238 (5 JANUARY): ABU DHABI
First impressions often last, and this is obviously nowhere truer than in a city you visit for a single day. The oldest building in the UAE capital, the al-Hosn Palace or White Fort, dates back only to 1930 (which makes it an exact contemporary of New York's Empire State and makes it more than twice as old as most other structures here). Abu Dhabi is mostly boutiques and banks, but what state-of-the-art boutiques, what opulent banks!
DAY 240 (7 JANUARY): AJMAN
Hearing that the animal-and-bird market in the smallest sheikhdom of them all is in full swing, I arrive late in the afternoon unprepared for what awaits me, the impressive and the depressive separated only by iron bars. Falcons from the emirates fetch from A$10 000âa Sharjah man later tells me top price for the elite type runs to 150 000 dirhams, a price comparable to that for a classy saloon car. Australiana is predictably represented by kangaroos: two mangy grey wallabies are in a cage of less than one square metre (in contravention of market rules as printed on a wall sticker, I note) and offered for sale at 6000 dirhams (A$3300) each.
SULTANATE OF OMAN: 8â30 JANUARY
DAY 241 (8 JANUARY): MUSCAT
It would be grossly dishonest to say I'd forgotten the grandeur of this country's interior, but to be back here where I spent a year of my life (working at a newspaper in the late 1980s) is to see it as new, if somewhat changed. Jagged cliffs, ochre turning orange in the late-afternoon sun, vie for attention with the
wadis
âthose dry riverbeds where expatriates and bronze-skinned Omanis alike can be found picnicking on Friday-and-Saturday weekends.
This visit constitutes a break with the purity of my journey, in that so far I have mostly looked after myself but here I have accepted the kind hospitality of Rosie, an Englishwoman from the Ministry of Information with whom I had dealings in those days. First she arranges for me to be put up for a few days at the five-star Muscat Intercontinental Hotel where the cheapest rooms are about A$300 a night. Then I move into her house, built on a beetling clifftop high up over the Arabian Sea, within what seems a stone's throw of the most perfectly formed cove.
DAY 244 (11 JANUARY): MUSCAT
An Arab society long cut off from others, Oman has a fraction of the oil reserves of nations to the north and west. So Omanis, I recall from my working year here, are less mercenary, gentler, than the Bahrainis, less worldly than the Emiratis but less strict than the Saudis. These, of course, are generalisations but, just as no one who had been to Britain and France would deny the existence of different national characteristics there, we should not lump all Arabs together in our thinking. Omanis have their own story to tell, their own pride and vulnerability, their own traditions.
Serving coffee to the guest is one of those traditions. The first sight that greets you upon entering the palatial al-Bustan Hotel is an old gentleman sitting cross-legged on a carpet, silver dagger under his belt, gaudy turban on his head, dispensing pure arabica from a silver beak-nosed coffeepotâanother distinctive symbol of Oman.
Another tradition is the Omani bullfight, and it is a fairly safe bet that Hemingway, intrepid adventurer that he was, never witnessed anything like this. Here the bull fights its own kind: man, in the form of a handler or two tugging on the leash, restrains aggression rather than incites it. Every Friday afternoon in what is laughingly called winter (average temperature 28°C), the owners of these cloven-hoofed Sherman tanks converge on Barka, an hour up the Arabian Sea coast from the capital.
Once before, in the 1980s, I attended a skirmish here. Then your typical Brahmin owner arrived at the battlefieldâa patch of dirtâwith his charger in tow. Today a low-rise concrete stadium attests to the same type of modernising influences that have affected sports closer to home. Around the boundary, combatants-in-waiting take their stand. Iron stakes prevent them from upsetting the order of play, but unprogrammed bellowings (not to mention less decorous bodily functions) add to the ringside atmosphere.
Prodded into head-on confrontation, the two leviathans in the centre indulge in an engrossing tug of war which begins with their locking horns and ends either with a knockoutâwhen one forces the other off the turfâor when one of the opponents turns tail and runs. This is what, late in the two-hour card, one of these lumbering beefsteaks decides to do, and ârun' scarcely does justice to what ensues. Fed up with the spectacle at close quarters, this Taurus not only turns his rump on the whole affair but gives his handlers the slip and charges straight for the perimeter, gathering ferocity and velocity as he rages around the fence in what might have been a victory lap (if he hadn't been a loser with a mean streak) but what is, in fact, a frenzied quest for liberty.
Suddenly, he spies it, in the form of the stadium's only exit, just one life-saving metre to the left of where I have foolishly chosen to sit. Oblivious to my existence, the frantic beast bounds over the fence and scrambles down the embankment, leaving me to offer a silent prayer to the stadium architect who placed a bull bar just in front of my otherwise exposed vantage point.
The fugitive's dash for freedom is as short-lived as it is spectacular. The last I see, one of his âcontrollers' (this being a three-handler bull, make no mistake) grabs his tail and holds on for dear life as they both disappear over a sand dune.
DAY 248 (15 JANUARY): MUSCAT
At Rosie's, I add BBC World TV news to my routine. At this point, my usually inviting itineraries are perturbing. Saudi Arabia is probably second only to North Korea when it comes to the difficulty of obtaining a visa: I know it's going to be almost impossible to get one even before I head off to the embassy.
Tourism is an alien notion, and a transit visa may restrict me to staying on a long-distance bus all the way from Dubai to Jordan. As that is said to be a 36-hour journey, and I can't use bus toilets the size of broom closets, a road crossing of the peninsula seems out of the question.
The Saudi visa application saga deserves a book to itself, but here is the condensed version. On six occasions between now and 28 January I will take a taxi to this embassy. On the fourth visit I become so desperate for a stamp in my passport that (I can hardly believe this now) having squeezed through the metal detector, which my chair of course sets off every time, and waited in absolute silence for an hour and a half, I dismount carefully to a low step and crawlâyes, crablikeâalong the corridor and into the chancery, to press my case.
Security is called and things look hairy for a moment, but this manoeuvre does result in my application, already completed in triplicate and drawered a week before, being retrieved and passed on to a higher level: Ali Shehri.
It is he, on my sixth visit, who in exchange for the non-princely sum of U$$12 ostentatiously issues me with a transit visa, the number 7 written in (I insist on that). Armed with this, he assures me, I will be able to cross the kingdom within as many days, getting on and off buses, and staying at towns along the way, without let or hindrance.
DAY 250 (17 JANUARY): NIZWA
In spite of all my micro-planning, I must admit some of the best travel moments owe everything to luck. And today I'm in luck, for today is Thursday, and in Nizwa that means one thing: the goat market.
In the Bible, goats are separated from sheep: here, cattle get into the act as well. Being paraded around a circuit under capacious trees in the market square are goats and cattleâbulls, cows and heifersâand the only controversy attending the live sheep market here revolves around price, not morality. A small boy also circulates, selling peanuts and chickpeas.
An English-speaking Omani who sees I am a stranger to these parts talks learnedly of the spectacle before us, betraying a wicked and hitherto unsuspected sense of humour as he points out the meanest bull on the blockâbig, black and muscle-boundâand tells me deadpan, âWe call it Tyson.'
For a few minutes, I am absorbed in the hyperbole of haggling, the play-acting of disappointment and pleading that rivet the spectator at any market or auction. I look on at one veteran raising his cane as if to strike a grasping herdsman, wondering what will happen next, when a tremendous shove from behind nearly pitches me out of my chair. Grabbing the tyres, it takes me a moment to regain my balance, then I jerk my head around to find myself face to face with the goat that has just butted my personal transport (perhaps mistaking it for a hostile beast). The drama is over in seconds. With a dumb look and a snort of contempt, the horned one disappears through a parting knot of people.
DAY 253 (20 JANUARY): MUSCAT
I'm not done with bureaucracy yet. The visa prospects for Syria are dubious. So I return to the diplomatic quarter, to seek assurance from the consul, Muhammad Ibrahim. A breezy, mustachioed man in his forties, Ibrahim gives me his card and assures me that, as an Australian, I will be a welcome guest in his country and given a visa, cost-free, on arrival. Then he adds ominously, âIf you have any trouble, ring my number.'
DAY 255 (22 JANUARY): SALALAH
Having insisted on taking the overnight bus the whole 1000 kilometres through the Omani interior, I find myself on the Frankincense Coastâa couple of hundred âclicks' from busy al-Qa'eda training cells, if Donald Rumsfeld is to be believed. At the Hilton Salalah they have changed my name to Mr Halev, but when landed in the lap of luxury a well-brought-up lad knows better than to complain about such trifles.
Greeted by officials from the Ministry of Information, courtesy of Rosie, a letter of official welcome is handed to me on behalf of the General Manager, an Austrian with the magnificent moniker of Franz-Josef Macho (I kid you not).
DAY 256 (23 JANUARY): SALALAH
BBC bulletin: A suicide bomber blows himself up in West Jerusalem. The blast leaves 20 civilians injured.
My principal guide, Abdul Aziz, troops around the central market as I negotiate for frankincense with chubby women whose faces are covered by black burqas. We are in the Land of Ophir from which that precious essence has been derived since the Queen of Sheba was a girl. I have been here before and know a thing or two about bargaining, but the vendor knows ten or 20, and only later do I learn that the price I have paid for a tin of the stuff is three times what the locals shell out.
DAY 257 (24 JANUARY): JOB'S TOMB
Up into the hills our Mercedes climbs until eventually we come to a site that leaves me at once sceptical and reverent. Beyond a simple mosque, an uphill push of 100 metres brings me to a sunlit room with just one piece of furniture (if that is the word for a three-metre-long tomb draped in silken green fabric).
Mournful-looking women in black enter the room, dropping to their knees beside the tomb. My scepticismâhow could Job, however patient he was, have made it here from Palestine?âis also silenced. They believe: this is more important, this is enough. Enough to remind me that Job is a prophet revered not only by Jews and Christians but by the God-fearing faith of Avraham/Abraham/Ibrahim's other spiritual descendants, the Muslims. To Muslim Arabs everywhere, this site is sacred. Job's Tomb.
Nabi Ayyub
.
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