More accurately, unless you are a pilgrim or have some other business, you cannot enter Mecca.
The huge numbers of people involved do make the Haj a health and safety nightmare. As well as the crush and stampede dangers mentioned above fire is a constant danger in the pilgrim’s tent cities.
A few years ago, following one of the worst stampedes in the history of the Haj a couple of hundred people died. Some of the bodies were never recovered. The parents of five children in my home city went that year and never returned. The oldest daughter (at 17) was assisted by social services to keep the home and family together.
I missed the edit window but should still point out that the tents are now required to be fireproof.
Is this the latest right-wing euphemism for grinding poverty? :rolleyes:
Saudi Arabia puts strict limitations on non-Muslim visitors to the country. I think it used to be that you could not get a tourist visa at all. It is possible now but you cannot move about freely; you have to be part of a registered tour operator, on restricted itineraries. (I have not been there, no firsthand knowledge.)
no, it’s another way of saying “subsistence agriculture” which typically involves production of food for personal consumption and not for sale.
I wonder why Colibri has not yet swooped in in judgment against political jabs in the holy realm of GQ :rolleyes:
I had forgotten about all those wealthy subsistence farmers.
Saudi Arabia puts strict limitations on non-Muslim visitors to the country. I think it used to be that you could not get a tourist visa at all. It is possible now but you cannot move about freely; you have to be part of a registered tour operator, on restricted itineraries. (I have not been there, no firsthand knowledge.)
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wikipedia Mecca article says that “non-Muslims remain formally prohibited from entering the city”. A more extensive discussion is here Google Answers: How are non-muslims kept out of Mecca?
Not that there is anything wrong with that ;). IMHO there are plenty of other places that should be off-limits to those categories of people who have no business being there.
No, I think that’s less accurate than what I said. It would be easily possible for a non-Muslim to have a valid business reason for visiting Mecca, which is a major city. But even so, he would not be allowed to visit Mecca.
This is the signat the road going to Mecca. No non-muslims allowed
Muslims do go to Mecca outside Hajj times, but it doesn’t count as fullfilling the fifth pillar of faith. In fact if you go during Hajj times but cannot complete all the rituals, you have to complete it on another moment.
I’m trying to do the math. How many Muslims can complete the Hajj per year? Is it even possible for all (roughly) 1.25 billion Muslims to be able to make the Hajj during their lifetimes?
Sorry to be kind of hijackish, in GQ no less (but MOM! HE started it, not me!), but your spirited attitude in defense of the right of poor people to be called poor seems misplaced at best and ignorant at worst.
I work in the development field, where poverty alleviation is almost always our underlying goal, even if the programming is directly about something else, such as infrastructure development, health, or education. This doesn’t make me special in any way, but it does give me some insight into whether “minimal participation in the monetary economy” is some sort of right-wing eeviilll phrase.
I assure you, it’s not. People who devote their entire careers to improving the lot of economically marginalized groups (is that okay? can I say “economically marginalized”?) talk that way all the time. At best, it is an accurate portrayal of a subset of people, characterizing them using distinctions that may be important. At worst, it’s just jargon, and every profession has that.
OK, so every Muslim who is financially able to do so must make the Hajj. You have to make Hajj during the Hajj. That is to say on a certain day of the year, every Haji will be at the same place doing the same thing. As you might imagine, it is a huge undertaking for the Saudi government and one they take very seriously.
If you do the Hajj ritual at any other time, it is call Umra. Folks from Saudi Arabia pack into a car and take a long weekend to make Umra. Umra has spiritual advantages but does not meet your requirement to make Hajj. The Prophet said making Umra during Ramadan was “equal” to a real Hajj, but you still have to do at least one Hajj during Hajj.
Oddly, not even every Saudi makes Hajj. Even my students from Meccah have not make Hajj. “Teacher, we are busy, we have to drive ambulances and give out water.”
Meccah is a real-live city. It has Starbucks, Hilton hotels and places to get your eyeglasses repaired. One odd thing is that Muslims in any other city sort of orient themselves according to the direction the local mosques face. In Meccah of course they all face the Cube, and it is slightly disorienting to a visitor.
OK, I am about to go to work, and we have smarter people on this than me, but fire away.
Mathematically, it’s not possible (except in the sense that with Allah all things are possible). They manage to squeeze in about three million pilgrims a year and that’s pretty much capacity in a city that only has a population half that size. So it would take over four hundred years just for all of the Muslims currently living to make a Hajj and that’s assuming no repeats.
I wonder if the people who actually live in Mecca view the Hajj the way, say, residents of Salem, MA, view Halloween, or residents of Boston view the Boston Marathon. “Man, is it almost Hajj season again? I hate the crowds and the traffic jams and the rude tourists. Wish they’d cancel the damn thing…”
Since there is only enough room in Mecca during hajj time to fit about one Moslem in 400 and the average Moslem lives to be 80 (and that’s a slight overestimate), only about one Moslem in 5 can ever do a hajj, even if none of them did it more than once.
It seems even worse than this, this page claims Saudi Arabia issues one Hajj visa for every 1000 muslims on a country.
http://middleeastarab.com/sa/saudi-arabia-visas.html
That would seem to imply over a 50 year period only 1 in 20 from any country can get hajj visas.
Keep in mind that not every Muslim is particularly interested in going on Hajj.
There are plenty of Muslims who aren’t really in to following the letter of the religion, just like there are Christians who are not really too worked up about church. There are people who are Muslim by default, for cultural reasons, or because they just like the sense of belonging, but who may find the rules to be archaic and irrelevant to their lives. There are Muslims who can just plain think of better ways to spend their time and money. And there are Muslims with their own interpretation of things, who might, for example, interpret the rule about Hajj to be mostly a symbolic thing and can be performed by taking a Hajj of the mind.
That said, it is amazing who all manages to get out there. I lived in a very poor, very remote corner of Northern Cameroon with very few connections to the outside world- hell, you couldn’t even really drive to the country’s capital from where I lived. But every year, they would run a chartered flight to Mecca. Usually, this would be the only time in the entire year you’d see an airplane in the sky over the region (soccer matches would be the other thing that could get a plane out there.)
The people that went were traders, mayors, traditional leaders and other moderately successful people. Often, the people who went had never travelled outside of the region. Some of them would still have parts of their house made of mud. For some of them, the largest crowd of people they’d ever seen might be a few hundred people at a village gathering. There are no supermarkets, nothing we’d recognize as a store, maybe a homegrown restaurant…but mostly you get everything at a weekly market when people come in from the hills with their produce.
They come back with the widest eyes you’ve ever seen. Can you imagine what a madhouse it would be for someone who has spent their entire life in a mud hut village?
So we have two claims, one that there are three million people in Mecca for each hajj season and the other that the Saudi Arabian government only issues visas enough for one Moslem for each one thousand Moslems in the world. One-thousandth of the world’s Moslems is somewhere between 1,200,000 and 1,570,000 people. Those two numbers are contradictory (although they aren’t wildly far apart). Perhaps the number of people in Mecca for hajj is greatly underestimated. Perhaps the Saudi government is actually issuing well above that number of visas because they don’t have a correct count of the number of Moslems in the world. Perhaps there is a black market in fake hajj visas. Perhaps citizens of Saudi Arabia do a hajj many times in their lives and this doesn’t count among the visas. In any case, we’ve answered the OP. It is not even remotely possible for every Moslem to do a hajj. Even assuming that things are handled efficiently so that no Moslem ever does more than one hajj, only somewhere between one in five and one in thirteen Moslems can ever do a hajj. Incidentally, the OP also asked, “. . . can pretty much everybody in the Middle East and Egypt afford to save up money for the hajj . . .” We should also note that only about one-quarter of the world’s Moslems live in the Middle East and Egypt. Far more live in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other countries far away from the Middle East.
This press release claims that in 2009 there was 750,000 “illegal pilgrims” who did not have visas and 2.8 million legal in 2010, 1.8 million of them from overseas. That should mean 1 million hajj pilgrims from inside Saudi Arabia (who don’t need visas).
http://www.saudiembassy.or.jp/En/PressReleases/2010/20101118.htm