Freelance

Since I have retired from my professional life a couple of years ago, it was every now and then tempting to write sort of memoirs here on this blog and elsewhere. These days I have once more looked, with horror, at the Middle East, where desperate Benjamin Netanyahu is about to escalate his already escalated war in Gaza by extending it to another front in the north, apparently eagerly waiting for his old friend Donald Trump being re-elected in November.

I am not going to entertain opinions and emotions about the people of Gaza here. I want to focus on Saudi Arabia, where this year’s hajj had just been completed. News about hundreds of casualties, due to unbearable heat in the holy city of Mecca have triggered memories of 2015 when a stampede at Mina had led to hundreds if not thousands of people crushed to death during the annual hajj.

It was reported that, on Tuesday, June 18, temperatures rose to 117 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius). Others wrote about an unbelievable 125 °F (51.8 °C) and thousands of dead people due to “heat exhaustion”. Checking regularly Eldorado Weather which lists the hottest spots on earth on a daily basis, I did not find Mecca in recent weeks. After the heat records had plagued the Indian subcontinent in May with unprecedented temperatures up to 52 °C, the hottest area again became the northwestern corner of the Persian Gulf region with Kuwait, southern Iraq and neighboring Khuzestan, Iran. Here, in 2017, a record high for Asia was noticed, 54 °C, on 21 and 22 of July. This year’s extreme temperatures are much earlier.

Anyway, climate change has ultimately also arrived at the hottest places on Earth, and authorities in Mecca have probably failed to protect millions of pilgrims from unbearable heat. If the hajj can be organized on a smaller scale during times of a pandemic, it would have been appropriate to discourage pilgrims (or restrict approved numbers from countries around the world) when Dhul al Hijja moves through the summer months in an arid and hot location as Mecca. Note that, in the life time of the Prophet Muhammad, the northern hemisphere experienced what has been called The Little Antique Ice Age, possibly caused by a colossal volcanic eruption of the Ilopango in Central America in 536 CE.

I had visited Saudi Arabia once, in 2004. It was just before the annual hajj, when I attended a conference which was organized by Saudi Arabian dentists. So, 20 years on, it is tempting to repost what I had written before on another blog. So, read and enjoy.

The Farewell Sermon Of the Prophet of Islam (S.A.W.)

I was sitting in an airplane of Saudi Arabian Airline. It had turned out to be extremely difficult for me, the infidel, to get the visa for the, at least for foreigners, isolated country of Islam. Countless times I had to go to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Jabriah. I spent endless hours there and was usually treated in an unusual rude and impolite way. “The organizers will inform us if you are welcome!” I was told. “Come next week!” The organizers were the Saudi Arabian Association for Dental Research who had just started another attempt of organizing an annual meeting of the country’s dentists. Having lived and worked for a couple of years in Kuwait, I became more than curious to see whether they were interested in my research, too. Our Dean and my friend and colleague from Jordan wanted to accompany me. She also wanted to go to Makkah for Umrah, the lesser pilgrimage, but that was immediately declined by the authorities at the consulate. No way. Dhul al-Hijjah was coming soon, and the country was flooded with pilgrims from all over the world.