Shops around the Prophet’s Mosque are witnessing big sales during Ramadan as hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from around the world rush to buy souvenirs and rare collections from Madinah.
Several kiosks and stalls have been sprung up in the area with an eye on the huge influx of pilgrims during the peak of the Umrah season.
They display wide variety of items and souvenirs, including rosaries, prayer rugs, henna, perfumes, incense, abayas, pictures of the Prophet’s Mosque and historic places, and copies and CDs of the Holy Qur’an and its translations.
Many elderly men were seen searching for and buying silver rings adorned with precious stones.
Almost all the pilgrims are buying various types of Madinah dates that are famous worldwide.
On a tour of several shops in the area, Arab News saw many pilgrims buying souvenirs and special rosaries and abayas available in Madinah.
Nabeela, a Syrian pilgrim, said she bought rosaries after realizing that these are the best gifts that she can take to her family members and relatives back home.
Echoing the same view, Jouda from Pakistan said the beautiful and light Madinah rosaries are the precious gifts that she bought from the holy city.
On the other hand, Sofia Akhtar, also a Pakistani pilgrim, preferred rosaries made of amber and a prayer rug with inscriptions of the Holy Kaaba and the Green Dome of the Prophet’s Mosque to gold ornaments.
Inayat Ahmad, an Egyptian woman pilgrim, said that she was keen to buy traditional toys of Madinah that are popular in her country like small birds and pistols.
She said: “I take these home because they fascinate my sons as well as children in our neighborhood.
“A few years ago they used to get them from some of our relatives who brought them from Madinah.”
Pilgrims eager to buy Madinah souvenirs
Pilgrims eager to buy Madinah souvenirs
‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance
PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.
In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.
For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.
There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.
"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.
"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."
The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.
It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.
Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."
And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.
"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."
