Apologies for my absence last week (or alternatively: you’re welcome). I’ve spent most of this fortnight far away from the news cycle, in the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina. Around the time Pauline Hanson strolled into the Senate chamber wearing a burqa, I was strolling into the Prophet’s Mosque, and I can’t tell you how small, how powerless Hanson’s stunt suddenly seemed. I’d seen its like before in 2017, and even in 2014 when Bronwyn Bishop tried to ban anyone wearing a face veil from entering Parliament House – even if only to watch their representatives from the gallery. Such things are designed to dominate the political imagination. To view them from somewhere like Medina is to recognise just how tiny that imagination can be.

That’s because politics imagines nothing beyond power. It imagines a world of total human sovereignty, where people impose their will on others, and on events. When, inevitably, it turns out we have no such control, when the economy won’t behave, or a conflict erupts in an unforeseen way, or a pandemic arrives, politics retreats to anxiety, anger and fear. No one wins office by acknowledging that most things are beyond their control. Many lose it once this becomes apparent.

Muslim pilgrims pray in front of the Kaaba, the cubic building at the Grand Mosque, during the annual hajj pilgrimage, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 2023.Credit: AP

But sacred places exist on a different plane, where you’re overwhelmed by your own powerlessness, and where our daily obsessions with power look positively juvenile. That’s why Medina, which is astonishingly serene, and Mecca, which is hot and........

© The Sydney Morning Herald