All Muslims in the world who are financially and physically capable of making a pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca in their lifetimes are required to do so at least once.
So I wonder about Muslims who were born in Mecca and have always resided there. Is their “pilgrimage” requirement essentially fulfilled by default since they are already there? They would probably still have to enter the religious sites and participate in some of the activities to “count” as having fulfilled an obligation?
IANA Muslim, but the the whole point of the haij is to do it in a community of other Muslims. If you live there, I suppose you have a place to stay that isn’t as expensive. But you still have to wear the right clothes, and start outside of town, stay with the group, etc.
Do people actually live and work in Mecca? What do they do? Is there a shop selling Louis Vuitton shoes? Who would buy them? No one goes to Mecca for sight seeing, right. In fact, no one goes to Saudi Arabia at all foe sight seeing, SA doesn’t have a process to give out tourism visas – almost no one gets to see the very unique desert land forms there. Yes, workers arrive to SA from all over the Arab world, other Muslim countries (Indonesian) and Europe and the US to do business as well. But sightseeing in SA, shopping in Mecca, I don’t see it.
Yes, there are malls in Mecca. Here’s the website for one.
Hajj is not just a visit to Mecca. It’s an event that that takes place on specific dates and entails specific actions.
A person can visit Mecca at other times, but it will be considered a different type of pilgrimage.
An Umrah.
Given that Mecca has a population of over 1,600,000, I think it is safe to say that people do, in fact, actually live and work there.
There’s a perimeter of defined points along roads going to Mecca, a few miles outside town. That perimeter delineates the Hajj zone. Anyone who’s already in Mecca and intends Hajj or ‘Umrah goes just outside that perimeter, makes the preparations to begin the pilgrimage, and re-enters as a pilgrim instead of just a resident.
Mostly, they provide goods and services for other people who live and work there. Just like any other city.
As for “no tourists”, that’s simply not true. Pilgrims might not call themselves tourists, but they’re still going to need most of the same industries to support them. They’ll need places to sleep, and places to eat, and guides to show them where to go, and so on, and each of those is an opportunity for someone to make a living. And I don’t know about the Hajj specifically, but Christian pilgrims certainly do buy souvenirs when visiting holy sites: Not all of them, maybe, but enough that there are always plenty of places to buy them.
This was, I thought, an interesting article in The New York Times in which a young Muslim Egyptian-Lebanese woman who lives in Canberra, Australia describes the preparations she makes to undertake the hajj. (For one thing, even though it’s a holy ritual, women are subject to sexual harassment during the trek, so she wears a zippered robe instead of a buttoned one.)
And this article describes the rituals in detail with pictures showing the enormous scale of the hajj.
Interesting. Sounds exactly like some similar protocol in Jewish affairs when a discrete physical situation must be re-formulated for different people.
The broadest parallel with the Hajj is the Biblical commandment to bring offerings to the Temple (==“showing up in Jerusalem”), when the Temple stood, and still today, under different circumstances, three times each year: Passover, Succot, and Shavuot. (All three are equivalent in standing religiously as “Festivals,” but for interesting reasons nowadays most people, Jews included, only know about or care about Passover.)
Other examples:
Jews around the world must pray three times a day facing Jerusalem. Jews there–I think–face the site of the destroyed Temple.
Time and place as physical realities to be dealt with: Jews around the world celebrate Passover for two nights, because says the Talmud,the onset of a new “day”–the first glimpse of three stars from observers in Jerusalem–would be faithfully transmitted throughout the land of Israel, but since the Destruction the system can’t be trusted, so better do two days in case. Jews in the Holy Land–and now, within the political borders of Israel (I do not know, although I presume within the Occupied Territories)–celebrate the Passover for only one day.
Jews in outer space orbit. Moslem(s?) also. Old joke: it gets tiring (and dizzying, although that’s not in the canonic joke) praying three times a day in rapid Earth orbit.
The Saudi Arabia embassy online visa application has “tourism” as one type of visa to be issued.
I was once at a talk with a Jewish (NASA) astronaut. He told us that he consulted with his rabbi, and his advice was that if he wanted to pray in orbit, he should do so according to Jerusalem Time, while facing the general direction of Earth.
I live in Washington DC, and I almost never go to the many museums and historical sites unless friends or relatives come to visit. I imagine that if I lived in Mecca, I would only go on hajj when my cousins came to town with their kids during Spring Break.
Leo Bloom:
Jews in Jerusalem pray toward the Temple Mount, and if a Jew were on the Temple Mount (not politically possible these days, though there are tunnels underneath it where this is applicable) he or she would pray toward the spot where the Holy Ark used to sit.
As the number of people in the world, the number of Muslims, and the number that can afford to travel to Mecca all increase, has anybody figured out what the capacity is of Mecca to absorb all these people? How many could participate in the hajj in a given year before it becomes completely impossible? Or are we already there; that article mentions a trampling last year that killed hundreds.
Many of my student who live in Mecca and Medina have not yet made Hajj. They tell me that they want to wait until they get married so they can take their wives. One young man pointed out that he was always busy during Hajj, he worked driving ambulances and handing out water and so on.
I give them hell for this of course.
This is a question of both the physical organization and the continuous investment in the infrastructure and in the management of the pilgrims.
the bigger challenge is the second. Very large numbers of the pilgrims are the older people (of low, poor or non literate backgrounds) coming from the rural and the non-city environments. And of course from many different language backgrounds. The organization of them to follow rules set in place for safety is not an easy task. This also helps explain some of the negative behavior that the NYTimes writer describes, as it is very typically the small town and the rural profile of older persons…
The Saudis have a large challenge in the next two generations to manage as there is a demographic transition in the Islamic world (the urbanized future will change the current reality).
Personally I do not even like passing through my principal home airport in the height of the Hajj season, as it becomes over-whelmed with the pilgrim groups who tend to be of this rural low literate background and they have trouble understanding how to comport themselves outside of their village context, causing a great deal of chaos, when they do not understand the airport screening rules…
(for some reason the special hajj terminal is not used any longer - that was better to have all the hujjaj there with the dedicated help)
Catholic pilgrimages also have that kind of situation; on one hand, there are situations where things “start counting” at the entrance of the church building involved (the majority), but then there are others (in Spanish romerías) where you’re supposed to follow a specific path; you can choose to join the path near the end but you won’t be able to say you “followed it”, the pilgrimage isn’t complete. Going on the road to Santiago would be an extreme example of this: someone who lives in Galicia could choose to just complete the English Path (from Ferrol to Santiago), but you don’t just show up in Santiago and claim you’ve done the French Path (from Jaca or Roncesvalles) or the Silver Road (from Seville). Completing the pilgrimage requires completing the path.
Of course Christians do pilgrimages too. Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain is probably the best known today, but many cathedrals like Canterbury in England have made a great deal of money from pilgrim/tourists. This spreads into the local countryside as well as people have to eat and (in the case of Christians) drink. They need accommodation and then transport home.
Yes but I was talking specifically about the case of the pilgrimage involving not just a point in space (such as Canterbury or Lourdes) but a more complicated and specific series of steps (such as the roads to Santiago, romería del Rocío and many others).