Medina

Medina began as Yathrib, an oasis of springs and date gardens on the caravan road north from Mecca, farmed by Arab and Jewish tribes whose feuds divided it. In 622 the Prophet Muhammad and his followers emigrated there from Mecca, an event known as the Hijra that opens the Islamic calendar, and the town took the name al-Madinah, "the city". He built his mosque and house at its centre, made a compact between its communities, and was buried there in 632. Under the first caliphs Medina governed an expanding empire, until the centre of power moved to Damascus and then Iraq within a generation.

For the next thousand years the city lived mainly on pilgrimage and patronage. The mosque was rebuilt and enlarged by caliphs and sultans; the Ottomans, who ruled from 1517, walled the town, endowed its scholars and in 1908 completed the Hejaz Railway from Damascus, ending a caravan journey of forty days. During the First World War the city held out under an Ottoman garrison during a long siege in the Arab Revolt, and the railway north was broken and never repaired.

Medina passed to Ibn Saud's forces in 1925 and became part of the kingdom formed in 1932. Oil wealth from the 1950s paid for successive enlargements of the Prophet's Mosque, the largest of them in the 1980s and 1990s, which cleared much of the old walled town around it and replaced it with courtyards, hotels and approach roads. The city has grown outward rapidly since, and the opening of the Haramain high-speed railway in 2018 shortened the journey to Mecca and Jeddah to a matter of hours.

Everything in Medina turns on the Prophet's Mosque. The five daily prayers set the rhythm of traffic, trade and meals; the call to prayer empties the shopping arcades and fills the courtyards; and the greatest crowds come in Ramadan, when the night prayers draw people in their hundreds of thousands. Visiting the mosque is not part of the formal rites of Hajj, but most pilgrims come, and many families in the city have made their living for generations by guiding, housing and feeding them.

That traffic has made a deeply cosmopolitan place. Communities descended from pilgrims who stayed — from Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, Turkey, West Africa and the Levant — have been part of the city for centuries and show in its surnames, cooking and faces. Hejazi Arabic, softer and more loanword-rich than the dialects of central Arabia, is spoken here, and Urdu, Bahasa Indonesia, Turkish and Bengali are heard in the markets around the mosque.

Manners are formal and hospitable. Greetings are unhurried, coffee and dates are offered to guests, and modest dress is expected of everyone in public. The city has a long scholarly tradition centred on the Islamic University and the older circles of teaching around the mosque, and the Medinan style of Quran recitation is known throughout the Muslim world. Public entertainment is far more restrained than in Jeddah or Riyadh, and the character of the place is deliberately kept quiet.

About 1.5 million people live in Medina, making it the fourth largest city in the kingdom, and the number in the city at any moment swings enormously with the pilgrimage calendar. Residents are concentrated in the outer districts — Al-Awali and the southern palm belt, Quba, the western and northern suburbs — while the rebuilt central ring is given over to hotels, shops and the mosque itself. Housing is mostly low villas and apartment blocks along wide roads, and almost every household depends on a car.

The economy rests on visitors. Hotels, catering, transport, retail and the trades that serve them employ much of the working population, alongside government offices, the Islamic University and Taibah University, hospitals, and the date farms that still work the oasis. Light industry and logistics sit on the edges of the city, and the King Fahd printing complex is a large employer in its own right.

Days start early, pause in the worst of the afternoon heat, and come alive again after sunset, when families shop, eat out and sit in the mosque courtyards until late. Weekends are Friday and Saturday, with Friday prayers the busiest hour of the week. Current pressures are those of a fast-growing pilgrimage city: crowding and traffic around the haram, the cost of housing, the loss of older neighbourhoods to redevelopment, and the strain that summer heat places on outdoor work.

Medina eats Hejazi food, the cooking of the pilgrim coast, with dates threaded through all of it. Saleeg, rice simmered slowly in broth and milk until it turns creamy and served with chicken, is the dish most associated with the western highlands and is common here. Mandi, meat and rice cooked in a pit oven, came with Yemeni and Hadhrami settlers; kabsa, spiced rice with lamb or chicken, is the standard family meal; and sayadiya, fish with cumin-spiced rice and dark caramelised onion, arrives from the Red Sea coast.

Breakfast is ful, fava beans stewed with cumin and dressed with oil, eaten with tamees, a large round flatbread of Afghan origin baked against the wall of a clay oven, and shakshuka or foul-and-egg plates at the same counters. Street food is where the pilgrim city shows itself: mutabbaq, a paper-thin pastry folded around egg, minced meat and leek and fried flat on a griddle; balila, boiled chickpeas with cumin and lemon; sambusak pastries in Ramadan; and shawarma at every corner. Sobia, a lightly fermented sweet drink of wheat flour, malt and spices, is a Ramadan fixture, and Arabic coffee spiced with cardamom is served everywhere with dates.

The dates themselves are the city's best-known product. Ajwa, dark, soft and medium-sized, is grown above all around Medina and is bought by pilgrims as a gift and a blessing, but the markets sell dozens of varieties, along with date syrup, date-stuffed ma'amoul biscuits and dates dipped in chocolate. Kunafa, basbousa and other syrup sweets fill the confectioners, and fresh juice stands do heavy trade through the hot months.