Iranian pilgrims pose for a selfie throughout the hajj pilgrimage in 2022. AP Photograph/Amr Nabil
The hajj – the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, which Muslims are anticipated to make as soon as of their lives if they’re ready – is anticipated to start June 26 and final for 5 days. In 2023, roughly 2 million pilgrims will take part, near the annual numbers of pilgrims in years earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic.
Their visits, like these in generations previous, can be enhanced, and even made doable, by fashionable know-how.
Lately, the Saudi authorities has developed smartphone apps geared toward organizations of pilgrim teams. Pilgrims use apps themselves, with guides to assist them discover and pray at particular holy areas. They usually doc their journey, each bodily and non secular, on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
The nation is rolling out sensible playing cards for pilgrims to entry hajj providers and data, in addition to make cashless funds.
And in 2022, the Saudi authorities established an internet system by which potential pilgrims from the U.S., Australia and Western Europe should enter a digital lottery for visas permitting them to make the hajj. As for Muslim-majority international locations, one visa is allotted per 1,000 Muslims in every nation. Those that are granted visas should e-book their journey by the Saudi authorities, moderately than by journey businesses of their dwelling international locations.
As these adjustments have occurred, information protection concerning the hajj has typically talked about the know-how concerned, describing it as a brand new phenomenon that’s “reworking” the pilgrimage.
But as a historian of the Center East and an knowledgeable on modern Islam, I do know that know-how has been on the coronary heart of the hajj because the mid-1800s. Transportation and communications applied sciences have lengthy been elementary to governments’ administration of the pilgrimage and to pilgrims’ non secular experiences.
Journey know-how
Way back to the 1850s, steamship know-how made it doable for a lot of extra Muslims to make the pilgrimage even when they lived lengthy distances from Mecca.
Based on scholar Eric Schewe, “European transport strains sought Hajj pilgrims as passengers to complement” the cash they constructed from transport business cargo by the Suez Canal. By dropping off pilgrims at Arabian ports alongside a route their ships had been already touring, retailers had been in a position to make a bit further earnings across the time of the hajj.
And the pilgrims appreciated the security, velocity, reliability and decrease value of steamship journey. Because of this, they might attain the hajj extra rapidly and extra cheaply than at any precedent days in historical past. From the Eighteen Eighties to the Thirties, the variety of pilgrims occurring hajj every year quadrupled.
Whereas steamships helped these touring by water, rail helped these coming by land – particularly these from Russia, whose multi-leg journeys typically included journey by practice to Odessa, in at the moment’s Ukraine, or one other Black Sea port, the place they crossed to Istanbul by steamship after which to Mecca by way of caravan.
‘The honoured Ka‘bah and the Meccan sanctuary,’ 1880 images by Sadiq Bey.
Khalili Collections by way of Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Communications know-how
The telegraph additionally performed an vital position within the hajj. The Ottoman authorities used its intensive telegraph community to control and as an indication of independence from European powers; one key hyperlink was from the capital in Istanbul by Damascus, Syria, to Mecca. European consular officers, rail and steamship corporations and even particular person pilgrims used the telegraph system for hajj-related communications.
Different communications applied sciences additionally affected the pilgrimage. Colonial powers with Muslim populations fearful that the mass gathering of Muslims would result in political unrest. Additionally they fearful about public well being.
The velocity of rail and steam journey meant that pilgrims may deliver infectious illnesses dwelling with them, as occurred with the cholera epidemics that broke out repeatedly throughout the hajj within the 1800s.
Many governments launched monitoring rules that relied on print applied sciences: The Dutch in 1825 started requiring pilgrims to get passports, whereas the French in 1892 started requiring Algerian pilgrims to have journey permits. The British authorities in 1886 gave journey company Thomas Prepare dinner an unique contract for hajj journey from India, requiring pilgrims to pre-purchase tickets for every leg of the journey.
Collectively, these rules helped pilgrims get by the hajj safely. However in addition they labored to attenuate its potential political and public well being dangers for the colonial powers that ruled a lot of the world’s Muslim inhabitants.
Into the trendy period
The unfold of business air journey beginning within the Forties modified hajj dynamics additional: Flying was even sooner, cheaper and safer than steamship journey. It provided to additional open hajj participation to extra Muslims, however created huge logistical, political and financial challenges because the variety of pilgrims elevated six or seven occasions between 1950 and 1980.
New communications applied sciences additional popularized the hajj. For instance, radio stations coated the hajj, beginning within the Forties in Mandate Palestine, with pilgrim letters broadcast to listeners at dwelling. Like earlier cinema newsreels, tv from the Nineteen Sixties confirmed viewers footage of pilgrims circumambulating or strolling across the Kaaba, one of many key hajj rituals. This footage helped encourage them to need to go on hajj as properly.
In the meantime, rising literacy charges allowed Muslims to learn the rising variety of printed hajj guides serving to them navigate lodging, consuming and worship. Up to date hajj travelogues recording pilgrims’ experiences are a part of a classical style of Center Japanese journey literature, identified in Arabic because the rihla or seyahetname; each phrases describe books of travels that sometimes included pilgrimage.
As pilgrims celebrated their capability to journey to the hajj by way of airplane, glitches occurred. In 1952, the Saudi authorities’s last-minute slicing a hajj entry tax inspired 1000’s of further pilgrims to fly to Beirut, the place Lebanese airline corporations had no seats accessible. As an alternative, the USA Air Drive organized an airlift that transported almost 4,000 stranded pilgrims from Beirut to Mecca in time to make the hajj.
Once more, communications applied sciences performed an vital position in pilgrim administration. Within the Nineteen Fifties, British-governed Malaysia issued so-called “pilgrim passports,” which collected all info related to a pilgrim’s journey, from vaccination dates to subsequent of kin contact info. Saudi-issued hajj visas advanced from handwritten and handstamped within the Nineteen Seventies to digitally stamped, bar-coded visas by the late 2000s.
Huge numbers of individuals make the hajj yearly, requiring important effort for crowd management and security.
Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Company by way of Getty Photographs
Massive numbers of vacationers
Traditionally, a tiny minority of Muslims envisioned making the pilgrimage at any level of their lives. Even at the moment, most Muslims won’t ever be capable to go on hajj, and most who do will go solely as soon as.
However the international Muslim inhabitants numbers simply over 2 billion, so even a small fraction of their whole means lots of people. The two million anticipated on this 12 months’s hajj are nonetheless simply 0.1% of the world’s Muslims.
With journey and communications eased, Mecca’s capability to deal with all these guests without delay has change into the foremost problem. The stakes are excessive for the Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah: It’s anticipated to supply a protected, wholesome and spiritually significant expertise for all pilgrims, whereas avoiding any unhealthy press for the host nation. Umrah, generally known as the “lesser pilgrimage”, is really helpful however not required for Muslims. It contains most of the hajj rituals however will be accomplished at any time of the 12 months.
Now, with its personal digital instruments and units within the fingers of many pilgrims, the twenty first century hajj suits inside the longer historical past of know-how and the hajj, a narrative almost 200 years outdated. At the same time as the precise applied sciences have modified, their significance to the administration of the hajj and to pilgrims’ non secular experiences stays fixed.
Andrea Stanton doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.
