Hajj Tragedies Are Part of the Cost of Islam's Pilgrimage

By Tony Karon Tuesday, Mar. 06, 2001
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MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP

Muslim pilgrims go around the Kaaba in Mecca following the stoning ritual

TIME.com: Thirty-five people died Monday in a stampede during Islam's annual hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. Fatal accidents have become commonplace during the pilgrimage over the past decade, as some 2 million Muslims from around the world seek to retrace the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad. Is the scale of the pilgrimage today simply a product of air travel being more accessible to the faithful than it was, say, 30 years ago?

Scott MacLeod: Cheaper air travel may be a contributing factor, but the primary reason for the scale of the hajj today is that over the two decades of the reign of King Fahd, the Saudis have made a top priority of making the pilgrimage more accessible to Muslims. Fahd came to power when Saudi Arabia was flush with oil revenues, and he allocated many millions of dollars to upgrading the Holy sites in Saudi Arabia to make them more accessible to pilgrims. Using oil revenues, the capacity of the great mosque at Medina was expanded almost tenfold, while the capacity of the mosque at Mecca was doubled — it can now hold about 2 million pilgrims, compared with a capacity of 1 million before.

And with those numbers, some accidents are inevitable no matter how elaborate the precautions...

Yes, the pilgrimage now involves crowds on a scale never seen in history. The Saudis are generally praised for their elaborate, high-tech security and crowd control procedures. They have really sophisticated procedures for moving, housing and feeding some 2 million people, who sometimes are required to move simultaneously over large distances. They really have done a remarkable job of doing what is possible to manage these crowds. But the sheer number of pilgrims makes it almost inevitable that there will be some accidents, and in a crowd that size, accidents generally mean casualties. As one Saudi spokesman pointed out, you have to take the crowd control headache that Americans experience each year packing 100,000 people into a football stadium for the Super Bowl, and multiply it by 20 to grasp the scale of the problem faced by the Saudi authorities in managing the pilgrimage. They spend the whole year preparing for it, and there's a government ministry dedicated entirely to organizing the hajj.

Of course the easiest way to avert the risk would be not to hold the pilgrimage on this scale. But you can't say that, because the hajj is an obligation of the Muslim faith. And as the custodians of the holy sites, the Saudis feel a deep sense of obligation to accommodate as many of the faithful as they can.