Does Mecca have a modern airport capable of receiving international flights? Plenty of customs officers so there aren’t long lines? Modern highways? Enough hotel rooms? Enough police?
Also, does the Hajj happen at specific times (as in, the next Hajj will be March 17th, or whatever)? Or can any Muslim just decide to Hajj today or next week or whenever he can get the time off work?
I don’t know about travel and accomodations, but the Amanda Ripley’s book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes describes how the actual holy sites themselves have had tragic problems with crowds and stampedes over the last two decades or so. In 1990, a stampede killed 1426 people in a pedestrian tunnel, in 1994 270 people were killed, at least 118 killed in 1998, 35 killed in a crush in 2001, 251 killed in 2004, 346 killed in 2006, all told over 2500 people in the last 22 years or so. The crowds there are huge, and the holy sites weren’t designed with modern crowds of that size in mind.
Do you have a link for this story? 1426 people is a helluva lot of people. That’s half the number killed when the WTC was taken down.
Thanks, that’s the one - googling “1990 Al-Ma’aisim tunnel stampede” comes up with more, showing it to be the deadliest peacetime stampede in modern history. There was an bigger one in China during WW II, when Chinese citizens crushed into a tunnel to escape Japanese bombing, but the 1990 Hajj stampede was from a panic that occurred for no apparent reason.
Thanks.
The very notion is horrifying having not yet read the article. So . . . now I am about to actually read the article. Hmmm, wonder if I will be further horrified. (why do I do this to myself?)
An aspect of the 1990 stampede was that some of the bodies were never identified, leaving families waiting for people who never came home. This happened to a family in my city, five children who lost their parents. With help from the local authority the oldest, a girl of seventeen was able to assume the role of head of the family so they could stay together.
While the 1990 disaster was a record one, crowd-related deaths appear to be a regular part of the Haj. A few dozen to a few hundred people get trampled to death most years. You can’t really attribute this to poor management. You’re just facing a situation where literally millions of people are packing into a small area. If you somehow expanded the capacity, you’d just get more people showing up to fill it. And the main complaint made against the Saudis are over their attempts to limit the number of people coming to the Hajj.
Why does the Hajj occur at a set time? I’m not trying to be critical here, I’m Christian and of course our holidays occur at certain dates.
Is there a historical factor involved? If not, could crowds be relieved by having Hajj occur, if not constantly, then more than once a year?
There was a good article in The New Yorker this spring about the Hajj. The short answer to your question is “not really, but it’s improving.” There are deaths every year due to trampling, dehydration, and heat exhaustion, but the powers that be are spending a lot of time and money to remedy this. The basic problem is that you’re moving millions of people around a relatively small area of desert in a short amount of time, and they all participate in specific rites that involve many people in a small area (walking around the Kaaba, Stoning the Devil, etc). Part of the problem is that even as infrastructure improves, more and more people are attempting the Hajj due to increased prosperity and decreased travel costs. Whereas a generation ago only the very wealthy could afford to travel to Mecca, now those with more modest means can save up enough to go.
They fly into Jeddah airport, about 75 km away. There is a separate terminal for the teeming masses who arrive on seemingly endless charters. Regular wealthy Hajj goers with passports deplane from the regular commercial flights at the standard terminal. The Hajj terminal is off in the desert with large sculptured tents. The masses are bused from there to Mecca. Security is high. No tourism. Arrive, do Hajj, back to airport, see you. I lived in Jeddah a couple of years and it really had little impact on Jeddah. There was occasionally a checkpoint on the way to the golf course near the airport. Just meant someone had wandered off.
It actually runs smoothly except at the choke points. Thousands of folks at the height of religious rapture are tough to control when they rush an area. The organizers are always tuning things up from year to year. And if you die during the Hajj, it’s off to paradise.
112 degree heat and an air conditioned tunnel. They really didn’t understand why people stopped inside the tunnel? It was frickin hot.
It’s a really old ritual. It had already been established as an annual event on those same four days for centuries before Muhammad was born. According to Islamic history, it’s a four thousand year old ritual that goes back to Abraham.
So the chances of rescheduling it are non-existent. I mean Christmas has only been going on for two thousand years but imagine what it would like trying to move that to June.
For your edification.
I think Baker’s point was that they occur on a specific date, as opposed to throughout the year. Easter Sunday (and hence virtually all of the moveable feasts, as they occur “X days before/after Easter”) can fall on any number of dates in the Spring, but every year everyone celebrates it on the same day (well, one of two days really).
Considerable new construction has occurred in Mecca in recent years, partly in an attempt to remedy some of these problems. This has involved demolishing many historic buildings which were of historical and archaeological significance.
The Hajj occurs on the same four days every year. It’s no different than Christmas which always falls on December 25.
The reason the Hajj appears to occur on different days is because the traditional Islamic calendar does not match up to the Christian calendar. The Islamic calendar is based on the lunar year, which lasts for 354 days while the Christian calendar is based on the solar year, which lasts for 365 days.
There’s a religious issue involved also. The Wahhabi religious movement, which is the branch of Sunni that is the official religion in Saudi Arabia, has a controversial policy on historical sites. They feel that only God and the Kaaba are to be venerated and shrines and other historical sites are blasphemous because they draw pilgrims and worshipers away. So the Wahhabis often target historical sites for demolition.
Keep in mind, these aren’t rival religions. The Wahhabis are demolishing Islamic religious sites like mosques.
Incidentally, as we’ve discussed in some other threads, given the present size of Mecca, even if no Moslem was allowed to do more than one hajj in their lifetime, only somewhere between one-twentieth and one-fifth of all the Moslems in the world can ever do a hajj.