Faithful climb Mount Arafat in Mecca with mask and disinfectant in hand
A little more than a thousand Muslim faithful went up today to Mount Arafat, east of Mecca, in buses, with their masks on and disinfectant in hand, to perform the ritual considered the culminating moment of the "hach" (the great pilgrimage), this time less attended by the COVID-19.
From dawn, hundreds of pilgrims left their hotels to board the buses, not without first undergoing temperature checks, in the direction of Mount Arafat, where Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed prayed and delivered his last sermon, the farewell sermon.
Each group of 50 worshippers, led by a guide whose task it is to ensure compliance with the health measures imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, arrived at the Namira Mosque, adjacent to the mountain, to listen to the sermon from the place where the prophet camped before saying his last prayer.
Inside the mosque, which has a capacity of more than 300,000 people, just over a thousand pilgrims took up positions to listen to the noon sermon, separated by a meter and a half.
Each pilgrim had to bring their own prayer rug from home to avoid further contagion, and the authorities in Mecca provided them with a bag of disinfectant, gloves and masks to perform the ritual in compliance with the preventive measures.
From the top of the "minbar", the imam gave a speech simultaneously translated into nine languages, including English and French, but with the mask lowered to the chin so that the faithful would not miss a word of the sermon before the noon prayer.
For his part, Saudi Arabia's Interior Ministry spokesman Talal al Sahlub told state television that they arrested 936 "offenders" who violated preventive measures or snuck into Mecca to perform a very limited "hatchet", which normally accommodates more than two million worshippers but this year is reduced to a few thousand.
The Saudi Arabian authorities have not yet provided the exact figures for attendance at the large pilgrimage, but in recent months they announced that it would be "a few thousand" and with places reserved only for residents of the country, 70% of whom are foreigners of more than 160 nationalities and the rest Saudi nationals.
