The Best View in Qadian

Minarat-ul Masih, Qadian

Today I got to go to the top Minarat-ul Masih (aka the White Minaret), the most famous minaret in Ahmadiyyat and the main symbol for the Ahmadi community! (Minarets are the tall, skinny towers attached to mosques, from where the call to prayer is recited.) It's the highest point in Qadian and has a breathtaking 360-degree view of the city. The person who took me up there was a graduate form Jammiah who has lived in Qadian for a decade and he said he's only gone up here two or three times. It's hard to describe the feeling of being up there. Time felt so short, I wanted to just stay up there and soak up more of the view of Qadian.

I went for another walk through town today. I thought I had only gotten to see part of the bazaar yesterday, but as it turns out I had pretty much seen the whole thing. Qadian really isn't all that big.

Later in the evening, the same guy who took me up to the top of Minarat-ul Masih came back on him motorcycle to give me a tour of all the other historic places in Qadian. This, for the record, is the second time I've ridden on the back of a motorcycle in India. We went to see the Ahmadiyya Library, Jammiah, a few mosques, and a handful of other historic buildings.

Inner courtyard of Jammiah

A huge portion of this city used to be owned by Ahmadis, but when the partition between India and Pakistan took place, a lot of Ahmadis had to abandon their homes and many of them moved to Rabwah, Pakistan. When that happened, a lot of those abandoned places became occupied by others or by the government, and the Ahmadi community has been slowly buying back those buildings / that land as it becomes available again. For right now, the city of Qadian is sort of split up between the different communities that live here, with the mosque and much of the surrounding land on one side belonging to Ahmadis, and the other part of the city belonging to everyone else.

View from the top of Minarat-ul Masih

Today was another day filled with a lot of prayers throughout. Having taken this time off, it's pretty easy for me to actually do that since I don't have other responsibilities, really. Prayers have been pretty all-encompassing, but it's left me wondering that for the people who have their jobs and their lives outside of the mosque, how can they possibly do all of this too? Qadian for me in inextricably linked to religion and prayer. And I've met a lot of people here who have dedicated their lives to Islam and their actual jobs are related to work for the mosque, but what about everyone else? How can you live in Qadian and not come to the mosque for prayers. I guess if you live here and you don't work for the mosque, then being in Qadian is just normal life for you. Like how I saw the Golden Gate Bridge all the time, and it's still cool to see, but to me it's not the super-amazing thing that people fly in from all over the world to traverse. Because it's just my local bridge.