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Chapter Four

                  bin Khallfah’s rule a group of some twelve lo fifteen people from Abu
                  Dhabi went together by boat to Haifa and from there to Jerusalem and
                  on  lo the Holy City of Mecca; this pilgrimage is well remembered by
                  the community to this day. After the Second World War  an ever
                  increasing number of pilgrims found a seat in one of the desert taxis
                  and buses which private tour companies were operating from the
                  main centres such as Baghdad, Riyadh and Damascus. But to travel
                  even as far as these cities from the Trucial Coast was no easy task,
                  particularly for the women.
                    Few people from the Trucial Stales ever set out to cross Arabia
                  alone or in small groups; they preferred the security and companion­
                  ship of an organised pilgrim caravan. The only people who could
                  have undertaken the journey alone were some of the beduin who
                  were sufficiently familiar with theRub' al Khali and the other deserts
                  of Arabia. The pilgrims from among the settled population of the
                  coastal towns and villages of the Trucial Coast were familiar with the
                  climatic and geographical conditions of the entire Peninsula, if only
                  through listening to poetry and the accounts of beduin; therefore
                  they did not set out without adequate preparation and they kept to
                  the commonly travelled routes.
                    On the other hand, for centuries the Trucial States have seen
                  faithful Muslims from further east land on their shores and in their
                  ignorance of the geography attempt lo reach Mecca on foot; these
                  people were usually ill-prepared, carrying only a little water, few
                  provisions and a little bundle of their seamless clothes for the
                  festivities in the Holy City. It was usually impossible to deter the
                  pious pilgrim, to turn him back, or to suggest he took another route
                  on account of his being so ill-equipped for the lonely journey along
                  sparsely populated coasts and through the empty deserts. Pilgrims
                  believed that if they failed to reach Mecca, it was at least meritorious
                  to die on the way.
                    It was in the nature of the pilgrimage that usually the older people
                  would undertake it because they could see that their time in which to
                  obey the Holy command was running out. On their return from the
                  pilgrimage the entire family and all the neighbours would rejoice,
                  celebrate and listen avidly to the hajji's often-repeated accounts of the
                 festivities in the Holy City, and the hazards of the journey, and the
                 people he encountered.
                   But neither the performance of the pilgrimage nor any other deed
                 which was of religious merit made a person so honoured as to accord

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