Bound for Mecca, These Pilgrims Rode From Spain on Horses — and on Instagram
More than 1.5 million people traveled to Saudi Arabia this year for the hajj. Only three of them rode on horseback all the way from Spain, recreating the pilgrimage of Andalusian Muslims centuries ago and sharing their travels in the most modern way with big followings on social media.
In Bosnia, they lost days looking for borrowed horses that broke free after a scare and ended up wandering into a minefield. In France, the horses panicked in a tunnel filled with mud, and one nearly drowned before one pilgrim, on foot and chest-deep in the muck, helped pull the animal out.
'We were really scared. We didn't know what to do. There were too many horses jumping,' said Abdelkader Harkassi Aidi, one of the riders. 'We thought we would lose that horse.'
Hajj on Horseback, as they called their project, took four years of preparation and about seven months of travel over nearly 4,000 miles across about a dozen countries with sometimes treacherous terrain. The journey was, in a sense, a test of their faith in God, humanity and the internet.
The buzzy project, reviving an ancient tradition on social media, drew more than 345,000 followers on Instagram and more than 250,000 on TikTok. Some of the pilgrims' posts from the road — showing the group camping, making meals, hosing down horses, talking to strangers and running into administrative and physical obstacles that added many miles to the trip — have been viewed more than 550,000 times.
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