This year, 1,707,301 people stood in one place

This year, 1,707,301 people stood in one place. I was one of them.
Hajj. People from 165 nationalities.

The men in two plain white cloths, the women in the simplest of dress. No rank, no flag. No way to tell a chief executive from a deckhand. For those days, every one of us was simply a person before God.

I kept thinking about ships’ crews.

Because that is what a crew is. Every nationality, side by side, doing one job the world depends on and rarely sees.

The sea has always understood something the shore still struggles with. Where a person comes from matters less than what they carry.

And while I stood in that crowd, seafarers from many of those same nations were stranded in the Gulf.

Ships were hit again this week. One seafarer is missing. I do not have a solution to offer in a post.

But I came home with this. The people on those ships deserve to be seen the way that crowd saw each other. As equals.

Alhamdulillah for the journey. And a question I cannot put down: can anyone today look a crew in the eye and tell them the Strait of Hormuz is safe?