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Our trip to Jordan

By Atif Raja

So last Christmas we decided to dodge Santa’s bombardment of presents and went to Jordan instead. That is myself, my wife Zahra, four year old daughter Khadeejah and six month old son Khaleel. We like to label ourselves A to Z plus K squared!!!

Anyway, we arrived at Amman airport and its was much colder than we envisaged. We got through immigration after about half an hour and arrived at the Marriot in Amman. The next morning our car arrived, which I had booked through the internet. Yikes I did not realise that the cars are left-hand drive, you drive on the right side of the roads, and the freakiest of all you have to go around the roundabouts anti-clockwise!!!

Of we went through hilly Amman, with our first stop the Roman Amphitheatre, thousands of years old and still preserved with a modern city built around it. From there we drove up to Jabal Qala where we saw the remain of Hercules’ temple as well as an old Umayyad palace. We got an early night for the next day.

We set off to Al-Kerak in the South west, a beautiful town with the most amazing castle which Saladin had once captured. There is also Prophet Noah’s shrine in that town and fantastic markets. The people were great and happy to see us. After spending the day there we headed to the red city of Petra where we spent the night. The next morning we headed to the main carvings in the mountains, huge buildings including theatres, monasteries, homes and government buildings thousands of years ago had been carved into the mountains.

The next day we spent a calm afternoon in the warm coastal city of Aqaba, from where we went that night to the Dead Sea. In the morning we floated on the Dead Sea which is an experience in itself. In the afternoon we headed to the Roman ruins of a city in Jerash to the North.
The main thing we noticed was how gentle the people were, how safe we felt and how Islam had visibly been growing in Jordan unnoticed. They were pleasantly surprised to see Muslims from Britain visiting them. We felt that day that to make a global ummah a reality, we need to travel further than just our countries of origin and meet the vast and various peoples in the global Islamic family.