Another day, another "exotic" adventure, this time to the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi. You know me, always a sucker for a good tourist trap, especially when it's a holy-site-cum-Insta-backdrop. Rick, ever patient, was along for the ride, though mostly to ensure I didn't get lost or start a diplomatic incident, I think.
Abu Dhabi is about 90 minutes by car from Dubai, and I was not about to drive. So we hired a car chauffeured by Young Cassim. Who was very quiet pretty much the whole time. Which I preferred actually because I typically just fall asleep in the car.* This is just to say that I don’t remember much of the drive between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but Rick tells me it’s just as well. Apparently there was an overabundance of sand.
When we arrived, the mosque was, in fact, quite grand. It's like someone took every mosque stereotype, smashed them together, dipped the resulting building in gold, and then hit it with a glitter bomb. But this is the U.A.E.—so of course the mosque sits over a gigantic mall. You heard me. A temple to God on top of a temple to consumerism. And you have to walk through the mall to get to the mosque. Like when you have to walk through a 5-acre duty-free shop to get to your gate at the airport. Man, I love the 21st century.
On the bright side, it did give us a chance to grab a quick bite before touring the mosque upstairs. We figured—correctly, as it turns out—there wouldn't be a chic little café off the side of the prayer hall. And honestly, in this day and age, is it really a cultural experience if you don’t first swing by the Starbucks that is inevitably less than 200 feet away?
Anyway, we finally tore ourselves away from the souvenir and carpet shops and went up the escalator to the mosque. I say "went up the escalator" like it was right there between the Tim Horton's and the Cinnabon, but it's just shorthand for "trudged roughly 4 1/2 miles on a gentle upward slope with hundreds-nay-thousands of other visitors. In fact, as we got closer and closer to the front of the mosque, the crowd got more and more dense. By the time we finally made it to the entrance plaza, we could barely move.
The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque received over 3.3 million visitors in just the first half of 2023 alone, with a significant number being tourists. The day we visited I think 3.3 million people had all decided to come at the same time.
But the good thing (?) is that everyone—everyone—had to follow a prescribed path around and through the mosque, with designated “photo stops” along the way. The line of tourists snaked through the building like ants at a picnic. “Like Disneyland, but instead of Mickey Mouse, you get marble and chandeliers," I said to Rick. He nodded slowly, probably pondering the advisability of agreeing to these types of trips with me.
Fun fact: This mosque turned out so good that they built an identical but smaller copy in Surakata, Central Java in Indonesia.
This mosque was built under the orders of, you guessed it, Sheikh Zayed. Or, more correctly, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late president of the U.A.E. He’s buried here, too. More than 3,000 workers and 38 sub-contracting companies worked for roughly 13 years from 1994 to 2007 to build the thing. Architects from the U.A.E., Italy, and the U.K. incorporated design elements from Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, and Egypt.
Construction included natural materials like marble, gold, semi-precious stones, crystals, and ceramics. The central courtyard is about 180,000 square feet and is the largest example of marble mosaic in the world. In the world! It also took marble from around the world—including North Macedonia, Italy, India, and China. A veritable United Nations of stone.
The prayer hall accommodates 7,000 worshippers, and two smaller halls hold 1,500 people each. The carpet in the main hall is, well, mind-blowing. At 60,570 square feet, it's the world's largest hand-knotted carpet, hand-crafted by about 1,200 artisans, mainly in Iran. It took about two years to design, weave, and install the carpet, which was created in nine pieces that were assembled inside the mosque.
Now, I can be a little arch sometimes. And the Lord knows I hate other people, especially when they coalesce into mobs. And I really hate being told what to do (“Sir, no sir, you cannot take a picture from there, you must stand over here,” eff you!). But this place was worth all that—it is one of the most amazing, detailed, breathtaking buildings I've seen.*** Just jaw-droppingly gorgeous. It’s impossible not to love everything about this place—from the reflecting pools to the towering domes, from the mosaics to the giant crystal chandeliers.
So mark me down for liking this place. A lot.
* I believe this is a Pavlovian response. I had terrible motion sickness when I was young, so my parents always gave me Dramamine before long car trips. And I am convinced that the medical efficacy of Dramamine lies entirely in its ability to simply put people to sleep. After all, you can't worry about being carsick if you sleep through it. I suppose now would also be an excellent time to point out that my habit of falling asleep in cars does not apply when I am the one driving, I promise.**
** Reminding me of a Will Rogers quote, “When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.”
*** So far.
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