online rihla

As a child, family vacations consisted of each child carefully packing a box of books and colored pencils, my mom baking weeks worth of almond chocolate chip muffins and everyone piling into the family van for a 3 week road trip to some scenic and/or historic american destination.  On these family vacations, I developed a great love of history and it’s preservation.  Walking the battlefields at Yorktown and Gettysburg, viewing the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, following the Oregon Trail westward, earning countless junior ranger badges, american history came alive.  History wasn’t simply something printed on the pages of textbooks.  No, it was something to touch, to see, to experience, to live.   I feel my life is fuller having experienced the history of my country.  I better understand my country, and what it means to be an american.

Imagine my disapointment then, when I first visited the Great Pyramids of Giza and found it was one big tourist trap.  Certainly, there were some highlights, such as the solar barque preservation building, but mostly, it was a bunch of ducking and avoiding men and boys trying to show you secret hidden chambers or get you to overpay for a ride on a poor, mangy camel.  Later trips to historic mosques like al Azhar were mared by janitors demanding enormous amounts of baqsheesh for special tours to places we could have gone to on our own.

But, at least the pyramids and these mosques were still there.  Muslim history, OUR history, has been steadily destroyed right under our very noses by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for decades.  Want to follow in the Prophet’s (saws) footsteps?  Good luck trying to find them.

Is the danger of grave worship and bida so dangerous that we must wipe our history from the face of the earth?  Should not future generations be able to visit these places where the blessed Prophet (saws) and his companions walked, to touch, to see, to experience, to live?  Companions of the Prophet (saws) strove to walk in the Prophet’s footsteps, literally.  They loved him so much that they followed him physically, with their bodies, as well as in their hearts.

Should not muslims today be allowed these same opportunities?  Do we not love the Prophet (saws) and want to imitate him as his companions did?  Cannot these brushes with our history increase our love for the Prophet (saws) and his sunnah, help us to better understand who we are, where we came from, and what it means to be a muslim?

Now, that rant aside, via 13 Martyrs, there is some good news:

The Supreme Council for Tourism plans to open a number of museums across the country including an Islamic museum in Makkah, a Qur’an museum in Madinah and a major one in Jeddah.

It is a very welcome development. Awareness both abroad and at home of the country’s heritage and history ranges, with one or two notable exceptions, from poor to abysmal. The consequences of that are seen in the way historic sites have been left to rot or destroyed altogether to make way for the new — with no concern whatsoever for what is being lost. For the past 40 years or so, the past has been studiously ignored. It was perhaps understandable in the rush for development.