What Is the Hajj? The Pilgrimage to Mecca Explained

Pilgrims enter a state of ritual purity called ihram before they reach the boundary around Mecca. Men put on two plain white unstitched cloths; women wear simple modest clothing, usually white. From that point certain things are forbidden: cutting hair or nails, perfume, arguments, hunting and sexual relations. The plain dress is deliberate. A king and a labourer are indistinguishable, and the pilgrim is meant to arrive with nothing that marks rank.

Ihram also has a spoken side. Pilgrims repeat a short declaration, the talbiyah, which begins 'Here I am, O God, here I am', and it is chanted by the crowd throughout the journey in.

The Hajj proper runs from the 8th to the 12th or 13th of Dhu al-Hijjah. Each stage recalls an event in the lives of Ibrahim, his wife Hajar and their son Ismail, whom Islamic tradition holds built the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine at the centre of the Great Mosque:

• •Tawaf: seven anticlockwise circuits of the Kaaba on arrival
• •Sa'i: walking seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwa, recalling Hajar's search for water for her son
• •Mina: a night in the vast tent city outside Mecca
• •Arafat: the 9th day standing in prayer on the plain and hill of Arafat from noon to sunset, the heart of the Hajj without which it is invalid
• •Muzdalifah: a night in the open, collecting pebbles
• •The stoning: throwing pebbles at three pillars at Mina, recalling Ibrahim's rejection of temptation
• •The sacrifice: an animal slaughtered and the meat given to the poor, marking Eid al-Adha for Muslims worldwide
• •Hair shaved or cut, ihram ended, and a final tawaf before leaving

If the Hajj has a single centre it is the afternoon of the ninth day. Pilgrims stand, sit or pray on the plain of Arafat about twenty kilometres from Mecca, where Muhammad gave his final sermon in 632 during his own pilgrimage a few months before his death. The day is spent in prayer and reflection, and a pilgrim who misses it has not performed the Hajj at all and must make it up another year.

The scale is difficult to imagine from a description. Two million people in white on one plain in the desert heat, many of them elderly, many having saved for decades for the journey, all of them there for the same reason. Pilgrims routinely describe it as the most powerful experience of their lives, and the report of a changed person coming home is a familiar one in Muslim communities everywhere.

A shorter pilgrimage, the Umrah, consists of the tawaf and sa'i and can be performed at any time of year. It is recommended but not obligatory and does not replace the Hajj. Many Muslims perform Umrah several times before they are able to make the Hajj itself.

The purpose of the Hajj is described in the Quran and the traditions in terms of obedience, equality and the forgiveness of past sins; a pilgrim who completes it sincerely is said to return as clean as the day they were born. The equality is not only symbolic. Malcolm X wrote after his pilgrimage in 1964 that eating and praying beside Muslims of every colour had changed his views on race more than anything in his life.

The Saudi state allocates each country a quota of pilgrims roughly in proportion to its Muslim population, and places are distributed by lottery or through licensed agents. The infrastructure is enormous: a permanent tent city at Mina with air conditioning for hundreds of thousands, a multi-level bridge at the stoning pillars built after crowd disasters, a rail line linking the sites, and a schedule that moves groups through the stoning in timed waves. The 2015 crush at Mina, in which more than two thousand people died, drove much of the current system of timing and crowd control.

Heat is the other constant danger, since the Islamic calendar is lunar and the Hajj drifts eleven days earlier each year through the seasons; in 2024 temperatures passed 50 degrees Celsius and more than a thousand pilgrims died, most of them travelling without official permits and therefore outside the air-conditioned system. The Hajj is at once the oldest continuous mass gathering in the world and one of the most modern pieces of crowd management.

The Hajj is the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca that Islam requires of every Muslim able to make it: five days of rites recalling Ibrahim and his family, centred on the day of prayer at Arafat, performed in identical plain dress by two million people at once.