A bicycle race and the sacred number 313

Last Sunday I was on the way to Kuala Lumpur to attend the last day of the 2009 Kuala Lumpur International Book Fest when my wife insisted we stopped at a place in Rawang to photocopy a document of hers. Since she wanted to make 100 copies, it would take a bit of time. Thus we decided to have breakfast at a restaurant across the road. That's when we noticed the road was suddenly cleared.

What happened was the cyclists for the ongoing Jelajah Malaysia (exploring Malaysia) race were passing this way. Thus the road, at least this part of the road was closed for a good 10 minutes or so.

This reminded me of the time I followed the first Jelajah Malaysia, I can't remember properly was it in the year 2000 or 2001. Back then, the race which covered major roads all around the Peninsular was fully conducted by the police... thus it had a lot of backing from all quarters including five-star hotels which I believed wanted to be in the good books of the police.

I was then still a sports journalists with the major English daily The New Straits Times. Me and a few others were whisked all around the distance over a period of more than a week via a dedicated van manned by 2 or 3 dedicated police personnels. We stayed at the best hotels and treated like VIPs. Why, even operators of night-clubs we happened to visit at tried their best to please us... upon realising the identity of our entourage which included top police investigators and their likes as in the CID.

The memory made me wanted to take the pictures above and weave it into a story. As it turned out, this article is my 313rd posting in this blogspot and the number 313 has a lot of significances in Islamic history.

For the record 313 is the number of early Muslims who along with Prophet Muhammad SAW fought againts the unbelieving Quraish of Mecca in the battle of Badr, the first battle between the Muslims and their enemies. 313 is also said to be number of persons in the army of Talut against Jalut, or as written in the Bible, army of Saul againts that of Goliath, in the time of the Prophet Daud or David. In Islam, 313 is the total number of messengers God sent throughout the history of mankind while the prophets numbered 124,000. 313 is also the number of the main walis or saints and this number is maintained until the end of time with each deceased wali replaced by a newly appointed one. That's all! :]