Could the Hajj Be Different?

The above video details expansion plans for the mosque in Mecca. The mosque now has the appearance of a giant stadium, having been enlarged by the Saudis. The changes to this mosque are already so great that if a medieval pilgrim could visit the current mosque, he would find the place and the experience completely transformed. As far as I can tell, the only thing that would be recognizable to such a time-traveller would be the cubic Kaaba at the center of the mosque.

Part of the attraction of a pilgrimage is the sense that one is walking in the footsteps of believers from the past. Countless faithful Muslims have looked upon this same building and felt the same things. But if a site is re-made from the ground up, that experience has to be different. Imagine the Camino de Santiago de Compostela that crosses through Spain. Thousands of pilgrims walk this medieval route, but what would happen if the number of pilgrims got so great that in order to accomodate them, the main attractions had to be knocked down and rebuilt in a modern version. It would still be the same pilgrimage, I guess, but it would be that only in name. The hajj is still there, but somewhere in the 20th century it became something different than it once was.

Testimony to the radical changes at the holy sites in Saudi Arabia is contained in the book A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi. The book covers a wide range of topics, but it can be read as a sustained attack against the Wahhabi ideology. As it happens, he reserves his most biting comments for his experience of Medina, where he looked and looked but could find no evidence of a historic city.

The Wahhabi reform, supposedly intended to restore vigor to Muslim creativity and rationality, has in fact expelled sacredness from the creatures on this earth. Nothing escaped its devastation: not the hills or the desert sands, not the palm trees of the oases, not the animals, not the sanctuaries, not even the cities of venerable antiquities. Not even Medina. The lands from which the fluids of life flowed were treated without compunction; sanctuaries were torn down, and old cities razed to the ground with their old mosques, their streets, their houses, all these creations that bore the trace of human gaze and feeling since Adam.

Thinking about the Wahhabis and their emphasis on tawhid, or the unity of God, it’s not hard to see how that concept could override history. A historical landscape and “the way things were” would be seen, in this light, as idols. The important thing is the literal carrying out of the details of the hajj; history be damned.

No doubt globalization presents some quandaries for the hajj. Global population is way up, along with ease of travel. More people have the money to complete the hajj, and its completion can now be fit into the time frame of a two week vacation from work. Obviously the old facilities, for which there was substantial continuity through the medieval period and into the last century, could not hold millions of pilgrims. And we can’t forget that completion of the hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam and incumbent on every Muslim who has the ability.

So the Saudis might say: we had to do it; we had to tear down everything and build it again bigger and more modern. But was that really the only choice? I’m obviously not the one making this kind of decision, but I can think of a couple of different responses. First, there have always been “fallback” pilgrimages in various regions. People who could not go on the hajj could make a pilgrimage to a sanctuary of regional importance. As I understand it, in the Maghreb this was underpinned by official legal decisions. Reviving this tradition would take some pressure off of Mecca. A second option would be to ease the necessity of everyone being in Mecca on the 9th day of the month of Dhu al-Hijja. This is the one time in the year that a pilgrim can complete the hajj through his or her presence at Arafat just outside Mecca. A legal ruling that allowed for the hajj to be accomplished throughout the year would vastly ease the crush of people in the hajj season.

Now, some might say: this changes the hajj! But tearing down all of Mecca and rebuilding it to accommodate millions of pilgrims also changes the hajj! If it weren’t for Saudi oil money and their consequent ability to rebuild Mecca from the ground up, some solutions similar to the ones above would already have been found. The presence of millions of Muslims in the heart of Saudi Arabia gives that state and its Wahhabi clerics tremendous power and prestige in the Islamic world. Some different ways of thinking about the hajj would be a way to combat this.