Robin: We are now going to move to another caller, Dahlia Haj Omar calling from Indiana in the United States.
Despite having foresworn gambling after making the haj pilgrimage to Mecca in 2010, Khan bought a lottery ticket in June.
For this year's haj, which reaches its climax on April 6th, Iranian officials turned down the rhetoric, barely mentioning the ritual demonstration.
Tourism is a valuable component of the Saudi economy and of the 9m visitors each year some 2.5m come for the haj.
This was the case under the leadership of the fanatical Haj Amin el-Husseini in the 1940s and under Arafat from the 1960s onwards.
Once a year the economy gets an injection of dollars when goats are sold to Saudi Arabia to feed pilgrims undertaking the haj.
These ranged from a Muslim initiative to make the haj or pilgrimage to Mecca less environmentally wasteful to a Daoist pledge to burn less incense.
However, cardiothoracic surgeon Saleem Haj-Yahia refused to give up on her.
Thus on March 21, three days before he left for the Haj (pilgrimage to Mecca), Mahathir began his roadshow in Alor Star's 35, 000-seat football stadium.
This year, the number of Indonesians who have embarked on the Haj pilgrimage, after shrinking 65% between 1998 and 1999, is nearly back to pre-Crisis levels.
The creation of such a situation was exactly the intent of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and foremost Arab political and religious leader in Palestine under the British mandate.
An officer pulled him out of a queue for picking up papers to vaccinate his mother for her trip to Saudi Arabia for Haj, arranged for her inoculation quickly, and remained in touch with him.
On January 12 of this year, Tunisian Interior Minister Rafik Haj Kacem announced the dismantlement of a GSPC cell, following a three-week period of separate gun battles between Tunisian security forces and the terrorists.
More flights, especially between Europe and South Africa and from Africa to Mecca during the annual Muslim pilgrimage, the haj, have put a strain on air-traffic control: some controllers do not even answer pilots' calls.
They include Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj, held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after his arrest in Pakistan, and Jawed Ahmad, a journalist with Canada's CTV who is at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, according to the group.
Still, anyone who thinks that Muslims will be discouraged from making the haj is underestimating the appeal of a spiritual journey in which people forget their worldly concerns and share the hazards and joys of voyaging and praying with their co-religionists.
Sami Angawi, a Saudi architect who founded the Haj Research Centre, which aims to preserve the history and architecture of Mecca and Medina, Islam's second city, is apprehensive about the plans, reasonably pointing out that in order to design a mosque, you have to visit it.
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