The 23-Year-Old Driving His Grandfather's Toyota Yaris to Mongolia in Search of Islamic History

Humraha News

A first-class history degree, 270,000 followers, a 20-year-old Toyota Yaris with a bed in the back, and a route that runs from the Balkans to Mongolia: meet Haris the Yaris.

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Two days before leaving on the trip of his life, Haris Tagari was still figuring out what to pack. "I've emptied everything from the wardrobe on the floor," the 23-year-old told Hyphen, the British Muslim news site that profiled him on September 24. "It's taken months of waking up at 3am and writing things I remember on my packing list."

Here is what he is packing it into: a 20-year-old Toyota Yaris that was a gift from his late grandfather, which he has converted into a tiny mobile home, insulated walls and all. And here is where it is going: along the Silk Road, following the remains of the Ottoman railway that once carried pilgrims toward Mecca, through the Balkans, Syria and Iraq, and eventually all the way to Mongolia. He expects it to take more than a year.

From Roman roads to Ottoman mosques

Tagari studied history at Lancaster University and graduated with a first-class degree, but the syllabus left him cold. "I ended up just learning about Roman roads and aristocrats living in the 10th century," he said. "For me, that disconnect actually pushed me elsewhere. I began to write lists of places that I wanted to see and questions that I had."

In 2025 he spent three months driving across Europe on a trip that was supposed to take 20 days, finding isolated mountain mosques in Serbia and memorials to Ottoman soldiers hidden in plain sight in Vienna. His favorite discovery came in the middle of Germany: the Schwetzingen Mosque, built between 1779 and 1795 on the orders of a German nobleman. "It goes to show that history and the landscape of Europe hasn't always been Islam versus Christianity, non-Muslims versus Muslims," he said. "There's actually been a fusion of ideas and cultures."

The cheapest city car possible

The first big trip began with a dare from two close friends, who bet him twenty pounds he would not drive the Yaris to Bosnia. He did, and the journey became a way of honoring their memory. It also made history personal. "I spoke with locals and survivors," he said of Bosnia. "No longer was I reading about it in a book or speaking to a lecturer who studied it. It was personal and it was real to me."

Documenting it all online has earned him more than 270,000 Instagram followers and an appearance on national TV in Bosnia. It has also earned him a nickname. "I went out at 3am the other day to get a burger dressed up so scruffily, and there'll be a guy asking me 'Yo, are you Haris the Yaris?'"

You can drive anywhere and if you're tired, you just sleep. I want to show that you can do it even in the cheapest city car possible and that you don't need to wait for all the conditions to be perfect.Haris Tagari, to Hyphen

"I want to unite people"

His research is obsessive: local tips, online communities, his own audience, and the occasional forgotten academic paper. "You'd be surprised that a whole leg of the journey can be influenced by just reading one line of a random pdf by some guy who wrote his dissertation in 1980," he said. The point of all of it is bigger than the car. "I want to unite people. I want to present each country and its culture, from the smallest moments to someone giving me something out of kindness, to the history of the people and the landscape. I feel like I have a responsibility to tell those stories."

The Mecca railway his parents told him about as a child is the thread he is following now. "You can still see vestiges of the Ottomans," he said. "They were there for 500 years." Somewhere between here and Mongolia, one small silver Yaris is going to find a few more of them. We will be following along, and we hope the heater works.

Related reading: the Madison Muslim who taught himself to swim, then finished a half IRONMAN, and nine habits for a morning full of barakah. If a road trip this long calls for a bag with your own name in Arabic on it, that is what our personalized collection is for.