The Jet Age Hajj
1947–2000
Until the twentieth century, pilgrim travel followed a tradition almost as old as the Hajj itself. For a thousand years, people wanting to make the pilgrimage did so simply by showing up in the right month at one of several stations outside Mecca and engaging a local guide to take them in. Those coming from a distance attached themselves to an annual caravan, paid its leader something for food and protection, and proceeded overland as time allowed. As readers of these accounts now know, the pace of the overland pilgrimage hardly changed between Ibn Battuta’s journey in 1326 and Richard Burton’s in the 1850s.
In the next hundred years, it changed forever. Motorized transport led the way. Greater forces followed. By 1960, the airplane, petrodollars, and a forty-hour work week had increased the numbers of hajjis geometrically and stripped away the trappings of the medieval Hajj. The prescribed rites remained unaltered, but gone for good were the camels, the moonlit marches, the caravansary. In their place came paved roads, parking lots, and buses, airports, transportation terminals, and many more pilgrims. In 1933, when Evelyn Cobbold went to Mecca, the Hajj population was less than 100,000. After decades of unchecked growth, it has leveled off in the twenty-first century at around two to three million.
In spite of enormous pressures, the Hajj has survived and expanded for two reasons. First, the experience is still attractive worldwide: in a faith based on participation, the Hajj remains its largest participatory rite. Second, the extraordinary increase in pilgrims since 1950 has been matched by unparalleled growth in the Saudis’ economy, enabling them to enlarge the pilgrim sites.
Early Stages of Hajj Development, 1950–75
The floor space in the Haram Mosque had been expanded only a few times before 1950. The first addition, in 638 c.e., came in response to a rapid early adoption of Islam abroad and to the arrival of thousands more pilgrims every year in the Holy City. Gates, lanterns, ceilings in the surrounding halls, teak decoration, pillars, ornaments, and inscriptions were added by stages in the next century, but no further expansions took place until the mid-700s, when the need for more space reached another critical level. The walls of the mosque were set back once again in 918, bringing the total available space to nearly 100,000 square feet. And that was all: unlikely as it seems, no significant enlargement of the Meccan sanctuary occurred for the next one thousand years. Instead, a long succession of Fatimid (961–1171), Ayyubid (1169–1250), Mamluk (1250–1517), and Ottoman (1517–1922) rulers confined themselves to renovation and cosmetics. It is true that in 1572, Sultan Salim ordered a complete reconstruction of the building, replacing the wooden roof with plaster domes, but the area of the mosque was not much changed.
When expansion started again, in the 1950s, it was based as before on a crying need for more space. In the first five years after World War II, the number of visiting pilgrims from other countries tripled, to 150,000. To accommodate this increase, the mosque required immediate attention. The first work centered on the Masaʿa corridor between Mount Safa and Mount Marwa, where the rite of saʿy takes place. The course received a second floor to serve more pilgrims. Both levels were widened and split into two lanes to prevent collisions, and massive domes were placed over the Safa and Marwa hills. Sixteen additional gates, new stairways, and basement-level prayer halls appeared, too, and the exterior walls were faced with marble.
In 1959, a second building phase began, including a large southern portico, better access to the Masaʿa area, and improved storm drainage. In 1961, a northern portico was added. The Kaʿba itself was renovated, too, and area for the tawaf was greatly expanded. A third story, actually the rooftop of the mosque, now became a major prayer place. By 1965, the total surface area of the mosque had grown to more than 656,000 square feet, accommodating 400,000 people. This is the facility that Saida Miller Khalifa, Jalal al-e Ahmad, and Malcolm X describe in the following excerpts. The mosque was then six times larger than in 1950.
By the mid-1950s, oil profits were transforming Mecca from a city dependent on pilgrimage receipts to an administrative and banking center. The ten million pounds sterling derived from pilgrims in 1954 was “a drop in the ocean of oil money,” wrote one traveler. The city was becoming more modern, too. All of a sudden, construction seemed its principal industry, with paved roads, homes, and office buildings spreading through the hills. Electric power flowed to streets and houses. More than one author notes an abundance of large American cars throughout the city.
The automated Hajj came into its own after World War II. Internally, the Arabian Transport Company was already ferrying a majority of pilgrims to Arafat in 1947. By 1960, most overland pilgrims arrived from outside the Hijaz by bus too. Ten years later the roads from Iraq, Jordan, and Yemen were being paved, and the country’s first four-lane highway was in place, between Jidda and Mecca. By 1975, the number of both private cars and trucks had doubled. This huge increase was correctly read as the precursor of an automotive nightmare. Already the Rush (al-Nafra) between Arafat and Muzadalifa, a distance of a few miles, took four or five hours to cover. To reduce these new pressures, a complex highway system was developed, crisscrossing Mina Valley with numbered roads. Mile-long traffic tunnels were gouged through Mecca’s granite hills, and beltways were laid around the city.
Like cars and trucks, airplanes received their trial run in the 1930s, but World War II forestalled real development until the 1950s, when a small fleet of state-owned aircraft began opening routes throughout the Middle East. This service was globalized within ten years. The popularity of air travel proved so great that by 1974, 50 percent of all visiting pilgrims—450,000 people—passed through the Jidda airport, most arriving on charter flights arranged by pilgrim agents around the world. That year the airport, with two parallel runways, received four hundred jumbo jets in a single twenty-four-hour period at the peak of the season. A new, much larger terminal with a separate Hajj facility was already under construction north of the city. When it opened, it was the largest airport in the world.
Certainly air travel has sharply reduced the adventure of coming and going for jet age pilgrims, but it has also made attending the rites more practical, economical, and democratic. It may well have intensified them, too, by bearing pilgrims away from home in a matter of hours and depositing them quickly in a heightened religious atmosphere. After all, the essence of the Hajj is expressed as a ritual act of mass acculturation. Haram law literally strips away social difference, turning people from every corner of the earth into a participatory community, and perhaps the faster this occurs, the more penetrating the experience. Of course, one is free to walk to Mecca, and a very few still do, but the Hajj infrastructure has turned away irrevocably from the old ways.
Recent Hajj Developments, 1975–95
Saudi Arabia grew oil rich in the 1960s, but the kind of wealth required to modernize a poor, isolated desert nation did not begin to flow into the country until after the worldwide oil crisis of 1973, when the stage-by-stage nationalization of Aramco’s holdings finally made Saudi Arabia the chief beneficiary of its own production.226 Even then it took a few more years for profits to enter the treasury. Only in 1978 would oil receipts begin to grow geometrically, generating vast amounts of cash and preparing the way for a more ambitious expansion of the pilgrim sites.
It was overdue. For most of the 1970s, foreign hajjis had fluctuated between 700,000 and 900,000. In 1983, they exceeded 1 million for the first time, and an astonishing number of Saudi pilgrims joined them—1.5 million by official count—bringing the high-season population to 2.5 million. Mecca was then a city of about 400,000. That year, accommodations, transportation, water, food, and medical assistance, indeed the entire Hajj service infrastructure, were taxed past their limits. Not surprisingly, planning sessions began the next year.
A multibillion-dollar expansion program finally commenced in 1989. In a series of sweeping changes to the mosque, three-story additions went up on the western side, outer courtyards were greatly extended, prayer halls were added on the basement and first floors, and the building’s total area grew to more than 1 million square feet—enough room for 1 million worshipers. Two minarets were added, too, making a new total of nine, while the sun-drenched rooftop level was tiled with heat-resistant marble. Escalators were installed; the whole building was air-conditioned. Fifty thousand new lights, including a few thousand chandeliers spaced through the porticos, and banks of stadium lighting on the roof, now saturate the mosque from dusk till dawn. When I performed the Hajj in 1990, all these projects were under way. When I returned in 1996, most had been completed. The mosque, which can hold 1.25 million worshipers, is the largest open-air arena in the world.
Needless to say, the Hajj’s outward appearance has altered radically since the 1930s. Automobile headlights and high-pressure sodium-vapor searchlights now join the dotted campfires on the plain. Mina Valley, two miles wide by a distance of five miles, is entirely covered in a transitory city of canvas tents during Hajj week, creating stunning views from the hillsides, especially at night. The Hajj is fully televised inside the country, and segments, often hours long, are broadcast live throughout the Muslim world.
Security, Safety, and the Modern Hajj
It is hard to imagine what spies and pretenders would be doing on the pilgrimage today or how they would manage to enter Mecca. By the early 1950s, security in the Sacred Territory was already being tightened and modernized. As Idries Shah observed,
Matters of identity, documentation, and quarantine are so well attended to that I felt enormous relief that I was not trying to get past this and other posts under false pretenses. . . . I am quite certain that difficulties today are immensely greater than they were during the time of Turkish suzerainty. Saudi Arabia has all the modern methods of detention and control at her disposal; and she uses them.227
Security in Mecca has been a matter of concern throughout the Hajj record, but the word has meant different things in different periods. In our own time of rising political violence and international terrorism, the Saudis have on occasion had more to fear from internal disruption than from impostors or foreign agitators. Despite a monolithic family rule, things have not always been peaceful. On one infamous occasion, Mecca was made the staging ground for a violent grass-roots attempts at revolution. On November 20, 1979, a band of five hundred latter-day Ikhwan led by a revolutionary Utayba tribesman named Juhaiman opened fire from the Haram minarets and laid siege to the mosque for two weeks. Juhaiman’s aim was to embarrass the Saudi rulers in their role as protectors of the Holy Sites, creating the groundswell for a revolution. Although this failed, the Muslim world was shocked by streams of blood and rifle fire across the sacred colonnades, and critics in Iran and elsewhere interpreted the event to their advantage. Determined to shore up their claim as custodians, the Saudis have greatly strengthened security during the Hajj, but violence remains a matter of concern, as amply demonstrated in 1990, when over fourteen hundred pilgrims died in a bomb-blasted tunnel in Mina Valley.
In the interests of day-to-day physical safety during peak season, the Saudis have stabilized today’s Hajj population at around two to three million, a figure that stops just short of swamping the intake and control of foreign visitors. The numbers no longer multiply each year, due to a strictly enforced quota system that assigns a fixed number of pilgrim visas to Saudi embassies and Hajj agents around the world. So many hajjis, and no more, may represent each country in the rites. In holding down the number of visiting pilgrims, the quota system has also helped the Saudis to reduce the number of indigent pilgrims who used to remain in Mecca after the Hajj, often becoming wards of the state. The system has buttressed internal security, too, by allowing Saudi officials a means to limit foreign pilgrims who, in violation of haram law, mount political demonstrations during the Hajj. Iranian pilgrims, for example, were more or less banned for a period after demonstrations in Mecca in 1987 and 1989 led to bloodshed. Iraqis were also refused at the border for a period following the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Arranging for one’s Hajj today means negotiating a bureaucratic trail of visas and permits. Pilgrims seeking permission to enter Saudi Arabia must now attach a check to cover their transportation to Mina Valley, the use of a tent there for a few days’ stay, and, if they like, a round-trip journey to Medina. In Mecca, a range of lodgings are available, some more expensive than others, most rent-controlled, while many pilgrims continue to camp out on the streets. Prepaid guides help with arrangements and continue to lead pilgrims through the rites. Light and a fan in each tent, medical services, and water (no small matter in the desert) are provided free. Today food prices are fixed during the Hajj, vaccinations are required, and a pilgrimage passport visa is mandatory. In addition, applicants must present a round-trip ticket and, in some instances, a minimal warranty deposit at the border.
Between the impact of jumbo jets, bureaucratic processing, and increased numbers, the Hajj today is a qualitatively different experience from before. Especially in the cul-de-sac of Mecca, cars and a seasonal fourfold increase in the urban population can create havoc. Today’s pilgrims face a new challenge: how to conduct a spiritual rite in a state of gridlock created by hundreds of thousands of buses, trucks, and taxicabs. There are times when the whole point of the haram law, a peaceful atmosphere, seems undermined by bumper-to-bumper traffic, eye-stinging fumes, and screeching brake drums. Starting in the 1980s, pedestrian tunnels from Mecca to Mina were installed, and a miles-long shaded walkway now runs from Mina to the Plain of Arafat. A light-rail transit project has been underway since 2010, but gasoline powered transport still reigns supreme.
Half the books excerpted in this section were written by Western converts; half are by Muslims from the Middle East. Together they provide a useful time line for gauging the enormous changes in Mecca after World War II. Their authors are as at home in cars and airplanes as Ibn Jubayr once was on ships and camels. Born on wheels, they tend to measure distance in hours, not in days or weeks, and the Jidda airport is a set piece in their writings.
To varying degrees these are all insider accounts. Most are also mediating records, addressed to outsiders as well as Muslims in the dual tradition first employed by Ali Bey al-Abbasi in 1807. The general tone of the following accounts is more popular than those found in Part Four. Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s diarylike entries (1964) are the very opposite of polished prose, while Malcolm X’s autobiography assumes the tone of a confidential whisper. Hamza Bogary’s narrative (published in 1983) is intimate, Saida Miller Khalifa’s account (1970) devout yet offhand.
The economics of these travelers often differ from those in the imperial heyday, too. We find no private fortunes here and little if any support from foundations such as helped Burckhardt and Burton on their way. Jalal Al-e Ahmad traveled modestly. Malcolm X borrowed the airfare from his sister. Even Hamza Bogary, who lived in Mecca, was engaged as a teenage guide to earn some cash. As for me, I sold my share in a fishing boat to meet expenses, then wrote my book on a publisher’s advance.
Excerpts from two recent books by Muslim-born authors have been added to this new edition. Both describe the pilgrimage on the cusp of the twenty-first century. They differ from most of the others in one important way. In nearly all our preceding accounts, the Hajj is presented as the measure of the pilgrim. In these two accounts the pilgrim is more often the measure of the Hajj. Simply put, Qanta Ahmed’s memoir and Abdellah Hammoudi’s travel narrative both find aspects of the pilgrimage wanting. Both are less concerned with standard valuations of the Hajj and Hajj deportment than with performing a pilgrimage in keeping with their conscience. Both demand entry on their own terms to a rite long defined by normative practice. Both authors also concur in their sharp criticisms of the Saudi-administered Hajj, with its radical reconfiguration of Mecca and Medina. Jalal Al-e Ahmad expressed similar objections in 1964 (see pp. 455–485). Four decades later, these two new accounts convey a widely held impatience with the strictures of Saudi dress code and gender separation and with the interfering actions of the muttawa religious police at a rite that many Muslims feel belongs not to the host kingdom but collectively to Hajj pilgrims from around the world.
Written several years after the pilgrimages they describe, both books stand in the shadow of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, a period in the West when Islam was already “a matter of intense, sometimes vitriolic debate and polemic,” and neither the classroom, the media, nor the street was settled territory.228 Simultaneously across the Muslim world, militant constrictive forces were developing, complicating the religion these authors were born to. Into their uncertain lives the Hajj seems to erupt (the term is Hammoudi’s), shaking things up in unexpected ways. The resulting anxiety and upset, reported with candor, suggest that behind each author’s decision to perform the Hajj lay “the unconscious hope of an eruption.”229
Pilgrimage as the disruptive choice of a person in crisis is central to many of these Jet Age accounts. Escape, repentance, the desperate need for fresh beginnings fuel the pilgrimage of Malcolm X, for example. Yet similar motives are not confined to the twentieth century. We see them at work in medieval travelers like Ibn Jubayr. Indeed, when the Prophet Muhammad himself undertook the first Muslim Hajj in 628, he was at a low point, when all his work appeared to have come to nothing. His seemingly irrational decision, to trade arms and chain mail for two strips of unstitched cloth and a nonviolent pilgrimage to Mecca, shocked enemies and followers alike. It was the high-risk act of a person taking a radical direction. Its unexpected outcome, the treaty of Hudaybiyyah and the rapid attraction of so many tribes and factions to his fold, including his mortal enemy, the Meccans, provided a rapid turning point for the fortunes of Islam, one that few predicted at the time.
Thus from the very beginnings of Islam, the Hajj has both inspired and been defined by travelers in extremis, by pilgrims driven to seek the springs of change.
226 Aramco was the Arab American Oil Company, initially a subsidiary of Standard Oil Company of California (Socal), with whom Philby allied Ibn Saʿud in 1933 in the first concession agreement for Saudi oil. Over the years, American joint shareholders included Socal (later Chevron), Texaco, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon), and Socony-Vacuum Company (later Mobil Oil). In the 1950s, Aramco emerged as a powerful multi-national corporation controlling not only exploration and extraction of Saudi oil but also its refinement, marketing, and pricing. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded as a counter to Aramco in 1960. OPEC wrested control of world oil prices in 1973, during a protest embargo against President Nixon’s new annual 2.2-billion-dollar U.S. support package to Israel. Aramco was nationalized by the Saudi government that year.
227 Idríes Shah: from Destination Mecca, (Octagon Press, 1969), an account from the early 1950s.
228 Michael Gilsenan. “And You, What Are You Doing Here?” in The London Review of Books. Vol. 28, No. 20. 9 October 2006.
229 Ibid. Gilsenan.