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.

For most of history, reaching Mecca was itself the hardest part of the pilgrimage. Pilgrims gathered in great caravans that set out from cities such as Cairo and Damascus and crossed the desert for weeks, protected by escorts and supplied at wells and forts along the route. Those from further away, in West Africa, India or Southeast Asia, might be gone for a year or more, travelling by land and sea, and some never returned. A pilgrim who came home earned the respected title hajji, and part of that respect came from the cost and danger of the journey.

Some journeys became famous. Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, made the pilgrimage in the early fourteenth century with a vast retinue and so much gold that his spending in Cairo was remembered for years, and writers of the time reported that it lowered the value of gold there. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta set out for Mecca in 1325 as a young man and kept travelling for nearly three decades, reaching India and China. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries steamships, and then railways and air travel, transformed the Hajj from a perilous expedition into the mass gathering it is today.

Three objects at the heart of the Great Mosque give the rites much of their texture. Pilgrims begin each circuit of the Kaaba at its eastern corner, where the Black Stone is set in a silver frame. Those who can reach it kiss or touch it; in the crush of the Hajj most simply raise a hand towards it as they pass. Islamic teaching is careful about what this means. A well-known report has the caliph Umar telling the stone that he knew it could neither harm nor help, and that he kissed it only because he had seen the Prophet do so.

The second is the well of Zamzam, a short distance from the Kaaba, which tradition identifies as the spring that appeared for Hajar and Ismail after her search between Safa and Marwa. Pilgrims drink its water during their stay, and many carry bottles home as gifts for family who could not travel. The third is the kiswa, the black cloth that drapes the Kaaba, woven from silk and embroidered with verses of the Quran in gold and silver thread. A new one is made each year in a dedicated workshop in Mecca, and pieces of old kiswas are given as prized gifts.

Bringing huge numbers of people together from every continent has always carried a risk of disease, and the Hajj has a notable place in the history of international health. In the nineteenth century cholera travelled along the new steamship routes, and in 1865 an outbreak among pilgrims in Mecca was carried to Egypt and from there to ports across the Mediterranean. Alarmed governments met in Constantinople the following year at an International Sanitary Conference, one of a series of meetings that laid early foundations for the international health rules used today. Quarantine stations were set up on the Red Sea routes, where returning pilgrims were held and inspected.

The same concerns shape the modern pilgrimage. Saudi Arabia requires pilgrims to show proof of vaccination against meningococcal meningitis, a rule tightened after outbreaks linked to the Hajj in 1987 and 2000 spread to pilgrims' home countries, and health authorities issue advice each year on heat, hygiene and respiratory infections. Doctors who study such events have built a specialist field, sometimes called mass gathering medicine, around lessons learned at Mecca: how infections move through dense crowds, how to treat heatstroke at scale and how to plan clinics for millions of temporary residents. For many pilgrims the medical preparation now begins months before the journey.

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.