Word: hajjis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...outside a small door and beckons his guests inside. "You are welcome," he says, casting cautious eyes up and down. In a long, high-ceilinged room where half a dozen men rest on cushions, he is joined by another man, who agrees to be identified only by his titles, Hajji Mullah Sahib, meaning, roughly, Honorable Mr. Cleric...
...denied access by the hundreds of troops who guard the border. Yet here they sit, sipping sweet green tea, untroubled, gregarious and masters of their domain. Mullah Palawan, who commanded an armored corps in Herat before his flight to Pakistan, has spent the morning browsing through the bazaar. Hajji Mullah Sahib, once a Taliban ideologue and functionary in Kandahar, passed the time at home chatting with friends and neighbors. Both seem to go about their daily business without a care in this bustling gateway to Afghanistan...
...illness. But the Hajj is obligatory: it must be performed at least once by every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it. (Borrowing money to come is prohibited, although many do.) Having performed the Hajj becomes a lifelong distinction celebrated with an honorific: I can now call myself Hajji Maseeh Rahman. And the Hajj is done en masse during one five-day period in the final month of the Islamic lunar calendar. Two million faithful have come to Mecca this year from virtually everywhere - Bosnia, the Ivory Coast, Michigan - and it feels like the most interesting year...