Making verbal love to a donkey is not easy. Asses are stubborn beasts and don’t particularly care for your coaxing. I learnt this lesson again when I went on a pilgrimage to Mecca – the hadj – walking all the way from Jeddah with a donkey.
The hadj, the greatest annual gathering of humanity, is one of the main “pillars” of Islam. Every Muslim, if he or she can afford it, is duty-bound to undertake the sacred journey at least once in a lifetime. But the modern hadj has also become a hazardous obstacle course with the very survival of the pilgrims at stake. They have to fight to achieve a spiritual experience against the wholesale redevelopment of the environment and hi-tech overkill of the transport arrangements. The easiest, safest and spiritually most satisfying way of performing the hadj, in my view, is to walk there. My journey was designed to establish precisely that.
Pilgrims have walked to Mecca, joining one of the great caravans, since the beginning of Islam more than 1,400 years ago. I retraced the last leg of the old caravan route which started its journey from San’a in North Yemen, traversed the Arabian peninsula all the way to Jeddah, and then moved to Mecca. It took me three days to walk to Mecca, and then I walked everywhere during the five days of the hadj. I faced two problems. All the Saudi Bedouins I met en route thought I was mad and insisted on having me arrested. And my donkey ran off with all my provisions to have a homosexual affair. I eventually caught him, booked him into the compound of the Mecca Intercontinental and became my own beast of burden. I did, however, prove my thesis.
Given the opportunity, all Muslims would go to hadj every year. So a rigorous quota system, on a country-by-country basis, artificially restricts the number of pilgrims to two million, including 15,000 from Britain. The word “hadj ” means “effort” and it involves considerable spiritual and physical exertion. Unfortunately, even most Muslims do not know the hardship it involves.
The hadj is performed during the eighth to 12th Zull Hijjah, the 12th month of the lunar Muslim calendar – which, this year, falls on 26 to 30 March. It follows a strict procedure, involving an intricate set of rituals. Before entering the holy areas, pilgrims abandon all worldly thoughts and desires and change into the ihram, which consists of two white, unsewn sheets of cloth. Once in their ihram, they pray constantly and refrain from all acts of aggression. Even killing insects is forbidden.
Many of the rites of the hadj go back to Prophet Abraham, emphasising a sense of monotheistic tradition and continuous history. The hadj starts with the performance of tawaf – walking seven times, anti-clockwise, round the cube-like structure of the Kaaba. According to Muslim belief, the Kaaba, located in the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, was constructed by Prophet Abraham himself. It is the symbol of the eternal values of Islam and marks the direction faced by Muslims all over the world during prayer. After tawaf comes sa’y, which involves running seven times between the hills of Safa and Mawah. This is done in remembrance of the desperate search for water by Hagar, wife of Prophet Abraham, who found herself alone in that then desolate place with her son, Ishmail. Nowadays, these hills have been built into a covered walkway within the compound of the Sacred Mosque.
The night of the eighth Zull Hijjah is spent at the hill town of Muna, near Mecca. The ninth is the day of Arafat, the supreme moment of the hadj. The pilgrims leave Muna early and travel five miles to Arafat, arriving before midday. When the sun passes the meridian, the ritual of wquf, or standing, begins. The congregation of two million prays as a single entity. Miles and miles of the plains of Arafat are covered with a sea of humanity moving in absolute unison. Pilgrims stay in Arafat until sunset. Immediately after sunset, there is a mass exodus from Arafat to the more open area of Mazdalifah, a couple of miles away. Here, the pilgrims sleep under the open sky; and, in the words of Malcolm X, “all snore in the same language”.
The entire congregation returns to Muna on the morning of the tenth. During their three-day stay in Muna, the pilgrims sacrifice an animal, or give an equivalent amount in charity, and engage in “stoning the devil”. The “devils” are three masonry pillars marking the different spots where, tradition has it, the devil tried to tempt Prophet Abraham. Pilgrims throw three small pebbles at each as a symbolic gesture to cast out the “evil within”. Once these rites are performed the pilgrims conclude their hadj by removing their ihram and cutting their hair.
The dominant theme of hadj is the complete spiritual renewal of the pilgrim. The pilgrims seek inner peace, peace between all the diverse segments of humanity and peace with their environment. Yet peace is one thing that modern Saudi Arabia cannot offer.
The entire hadj area is a monumental planning disaster. Virtually all the historic sites have been demolished, mountains flattened, and everything has been pasted with concrete. A web of multi-lane roads, flyovers, spaghetti junctions and suffocating tunnels make the whole place look like a science-fiction nightmare. Parts of the Sacred Mosque resemble a railway station, complete with escalators. Its new extensions and walls, built a few years ago, have turned it into a fortress.
Genuinely ugly hotels and a grotesque palace overshadow the Kaaba and the Sacred Mosque. Mecca is permanently gridlocked and choked with fumes. The whole hadj environment is designed not with pilgrims in mind but to express the ostentatiousness of the Saudis, and with pathological concern for the internal security of the Saudi state. Such an environment will always be a threat to the unsuspecting pilgrims. Not surprisingly, disasters happen with painful frequency.
Tunnels that are supposed to take pilgrims straight from the Sacred Mosque to Muna are death traps. In 1990, several hundred people died when they were trapped inside a tunnel. The area where the “devils” are stoned has been designed as though it were a two-level car park. It is not unusual for pilgrims to be pushed or to fall to their deaths from the upper level, some 30 to 40 feet above the ground. In 1994, several hundred people died after falling from here. In 1997, over 400 pilgrims were burned to death in a fire in Muna that spread and engulfed 7,000 tents that were supposed to be fireproof.
But these are only the incidents we hear about. Unreported numbers die every year from suffocation in the tunnels, by falling or being crushed in Muna, en route to various ritual points by being hit by vehicles, by choking on exhaust fumes, or simply of heatstroke. I have witnessed these atrocities myself.
Mirroring the physical changes is the shift from traditional Saudi hospitality to open hostility towards the pilgrims. On arrival the pilgrims might wait up to 18 hours to clear customs and immigration. Those from Africa and South Asia, viewed as potential illegal immigrants and job-seekers, are commonly harassed and abused. Anyone carrying a non-regulation copy of the Koran – that is, one with a translation or a commentary by anyone who does not agree with the Saudi creed – will have it confiscated. All audiotapes and cassettes are seized. Notebook computers are often “unpacked” and handed back in little pieces.
Most pilgrims go to Mecca on a “package tour”. Part of the package is the service of a mutawwuf, the local Saudi agent responsible for arranging their food, accommodation and transport during the hadj. Mutawwufs are usually Meccans whose families have been in the business of looking after pilgrims for generations. Traditionally an honoured profession, today’s mutawwufs have become multimillionaires as middlemen skilled in fleecing the pilgrims. It is not uncommon for pilgrims to be abandoned by unscrupulous mutawwufs.
When the pilgrims arrive at the Sacred Mosque in Mecca they are greeted by the mutawwa, the religious police. A Saudi peculiarity, these repulsive, ignorant men get pleasure out of hitting pilgrims with their long sticks. Pilgrims performing the tawaf or praying by the Kaaba are constantly hit on the head and asked to move, and not infrequently beaten and “shooed” as though they were cattle. Women, in particular, are frequently intimidated and molested.
There is one simple solution that would drastically reduce the hazards of performing the hadj – the one that I set out to prove. Instead of forcing everyone to travel by car and bus, generating some 80 tons of exhaust fumes each day during the peak period, pilgrims should be allowed to walk. While the vehicles take everyone to each ritual point at the same time, pedestrians, walking at different speeds, arrive at ritual points at different times. As a result, there is a much better flow of pilgrims throughout all the ritual areas, easing the bottlenecks and overspills that often have serious consequences. This solution has been shown to work by computer simulation and other studies. But the Saudis have regularly dismissed it as “primitive”.
Now there may be a change of heart. The experimental pedestrian ways between Muna and Arafat, built after much pressure from the pro-walking lobby, have been hailed as a great success. This is now one of the safest and most pleasant parts of the hadj environment. Last year, for the first time, all private vehicles were banned from the hadj area. The Saudis must now take the next steps. Get rid of the obnoxious tunnels and designate the larger streets in Mecca and Muna as pedestrian ways.
And if people want to bring their donkeys with them – well, what’s the harm?
The author has performed the “hadj” five times. He was formerly on the staff of the now defunct Hadj Research Centre, King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
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