As everyone in our group came to know (and probably got tired of hearing!), I was a student of Ottoman history in a former lifetime. The second part of our journey - to Jeddah and the Hijaz - was an opportunity for me to walk the walk of the Arabian Peninsula's Ottoman past. And with the end of the Hajj just a few days before our arrival, I got to experience the aftershocks of the most important of Islam's communal rites. An Ottomanist's dream! *** Landing in Jeddah's airport, I realized right away that we were in a very different Saudi than what we'd experienced in Dhahran, even considering our foray into the desert. Jeddah, from it's earliest days (which stretch back well over a thousand years), has been a cosmopolitan entrepot and the staging point
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