given the cheap short range airplane tickets nowadays, can pretty much everybody in the Middle East and Egypt afford to save up money for the hajj? Or are there large groups of people there who don’t expect to ever do the hajj because of minimal participation in monetary economy or for some other reason?
There are still plenty of people who are poor enough that even the few hundred dollars is beyond their means.
turns out for Egyptians the hajj costs around four thousand dollars, and another type of pilgrimage costs surprisingly less, but still a lot. From http://arabnews.com/saudiarabia/article523808.ece
That’s a significant development I was unaware of. There’s historically been a lot of resentment against the Saudi regime because many Muslims feel they make it difficult for Muslims to go to Mecca. The high visa charge is one aspect of this. The fact that the Saudis have dropped it is interesting.
I don’t think that universal travel for the hajj is new. I read a series of articles recently written by a ship’s officer about his experiences on ships chartered for the sole purpose of taking pilgrims from Indonesia or Malaysia to Mecca. I suspect this was in about the 1950’s.
They would have to make three voyages each season to get all the booked pilgrims across.
Weirdly enough, the ship’s officers and crew were paid a substantial bonus based on the percentage of the pilgrims they brought back alive. He said that large numbers (many a day) did die. Horrific as this sounds, this wasn’t because of very poor conditions on board, this was because a large number of the pilgrims would be very old and unwell and would be essentially trying to make the trip before they died.
It was a very interesting series but I can’t link to it because it was in the Lloyd’s List, which is subscription only.
FTR, Saudi Arabia gives only a limited number of “hadj visas” per country, on the basis of the number of muslims living there. So, you can’t make the Hadj just because you want to.
Its actually not weird at all. There is a saying “Grandad’s getting old, send him to Mecca”. It is like the Nunnery for old women in the West, a place to dispatch old people while feeling less guilty.
Yeah, a client just went on Hajj and I had to expedite some U.S. immigration paperwork in order for him to be able to go. We had to show that he couldn’t easily change his departure date, so when I went poking around for duocumentation of that, I went to the travel agency website. Which said, in huge letters, “HAJJ IS SOLD OUT!!!” It was pretty funny (or I thought so, anyway).
No, what I meant was weird was the idea of being paid a bonus on keeping people alive. Prima facie, you’d think it was a given that the passengers on a (relatively) modern ship would remain alive without any need to pay a bonus to the crew! Of course it all makes sense in context, I do understand that.
You can make the Hajj if you want to, you might not get the year that you want.
Why do they all go at the same time? Are there “off season” Hadji deals out there? What goes on in a dump like Mecca the rest of the time?
The Hajj has to be done at a particular time of the year. Each year now, there are about three million Moslems making a hajj. Mecca is full at those times, so there can’t be any increase in this number. 3 million is a tiny proportion of all Moslems in the world (of which there are something like 1.2 to 1.57 billion):
So it is simply impossible anymore for all Moslems to go on a hajj.
It doesn’t seem fair, or accurate, to call the place a dump… it is a real city, after all. Population 1.7 million, sez Wikipedia.
I remember that a woman I used to work with told me her parents visited Mecca in the off-season. Since I grew up Catholic, I immediately thought of church-organized tours to Rome or Jerusalem, and asked if it were similar: a chance to visit places important to one’s religion, but as a tourist rather than a pilgrim. She said that was a very good comparison. From her description, this isn’t uncommon, but nothing compared to the capacity-crowds-every-day situation of the Hajj.
This coworker also said that if you’re going on the Hajj, you don’t just need to be able to be able to afford the journey; depending on your specific culture’s traditions, you may also need to be able to afford lavish parties for friends and family before and after. And, as clairobscur and several others have pointed out, you may also need to wait for several years, depending on how many Hajj visas there are for people coming from your country. There have been injuries and even deaths due to crush injuries in the huge crowds, so this isn’t the Saudi Arabian government being picky. It’s a genuine safety concern.
THERE’S some serious cultural blindness…as flodnak noted, Mecca isn’t some sort of Disneyworld for Muslims, where it’s only open and populated during Hajj season. That’s like assuming Rome closes down except at Easter and Christmas.
Next, you’re going to tell me the fridge light stays on even when the door is closed.
The little man who lives in my crisper says you’re wrong.
IIRC, only Muslims can visit Mecca. If so, is that true only during hajj season, or at all times?
But to put it in another perspective, the population of Saudi Arabia is only 27,000,000. It would be like having thirty million people all going to Chicago on the same weekend.
For religious reasons, a Muslim is supposed to go to Mecca during a certain four day period of the year. It only counts as going on a Hajj if you go at this time.
Muslims can go to Mecca at other times. But this is only considered an Umrah not a Hajj and a Muslim has not fulfilled his duty to make a Hajj during his lifetime.
Saudi law prohibits non-Muslims from entering Mecca.