HAJ GOES VIRTUAL FOR FAMILIES OF LUCKY PILGRIMS

Faridah Bakti Yahra travelled alone to Mecca when she won the lottery of a lifetime to join this year’s Haj, the smallest in living memory, but her family is relishing the experience virtually.

Thanks to her smartphone, and the 5G towers that loom over the holy city, the Indonesian housewife is sharing every step of the pilgrimage with her husband and three daughters back home in the Saudi coastal city of Khobar.

“I am so happy he joined me virtually, spiritually, with my daughters also. May my dear husband come here together with me again for Haj -- inshallah”, the 39-year-old told this agency.

In the first days of the pilgrimage, many of the faithful were seen holding their phones aloft to snap selfies and livestream their progress to friends and family back home.

Super high-speed 5G technology was rolled out in Mecca last year, allowing pilgrims to transfer data at breakneck speeds and the network is now prevalent across much of Saudi Arabia.

But this year the shared religious experience has even greater resonance, with the gathering scaled down from more than two million people to just a few thousand, and at a time when many prayers are being offered for a world gripped by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Super high-speed 5G technology was rolled out in Mecca last year, allowing pilgrims to transfer data at breakneck speeds and the network is now prevalent across much of Saudi Arabia

Yahra opened a video call on the first day of the Haj at Mecca’s Grand Mosque when she approached the Kaaba, a large cubic structure draped in gold-embroidered black cloth, towards which Muslims around the world pray.

“When my wife entered the Kaaba area and she showed me the Kaaba, I felt very, very cheerful, joyful, with tears”, her husband Hendra Samosir said.

— AFP