Ever since I was born, and I am a little over a half-century old, pilgrims have been dying by the tens of hundreds during the annual performance of the Hajj to Mecca, alleged to have been exhorted by the Prophet Mohammed, may Allah be merciful to his soul, as well as the souls of the 700-plus victims who perished during the Hajj this year.
And so one would have thought that the Saudi authorities would have by now devised an effective means of conducting the massive crowds which annually converge on Mecca, thus drastically reducing any incidents of fatalities or mayhem. We are told that the place where such deadly crush has become an annual orgy, practically speaking, is called the Jamarat Bridge. The Saudi authorities are also reported to have remarkably improved traffic to and from the site in the form of architectural redesigning of the Jamarat Bridge. If this information has validity, then there clearly appears to be something ironic or paradoxical about the entire process of the redesigning and upgrading of the Jamarat Bridge Section of the Hajj.
The entire running deadly annual ritual bizarrely recalls the famous short story by the American writer Shirley Ann Jackson titled ?The Lottery,? a story based on an ancient ritual of selecting one resident from the village of the setting of the narrative through a raffle-like picking of a black-ink spotted strip of paper among a bunch of others placed in a box. Any village resident unfortunate enough to pick the ink-spotted white strip of paper is immediately stoned to death. This painful ritual, like the Hajj, is conducted annually; the ritual seems to have lost its original meaning and purpose, and yet it continues to be conducted every year by the villagers. The ballot box which contains the deadly pick is picturesquely described as exuding a casket-like aura. Anyway, at least 43 Iranian nationals have been officially reported to have perished in this year?s Jamarat Stampede. Iran?s state news agency has also been reported by the BBC to be claiming that two access routes to the Jamarat Bridge had been ?inexplicably blocked? or shut down by the local organizers of this year?s Hajj, thus causing a sharp increase in the flow of human traffic which resulted in the crushing death of the 700-plus pilgrims.
If the preceding report is accurate, then the Saudi authorities have a few questions to answer. One, how do the Saudi organizers and hosts of this year?s Hajj expect the rest of the world to interpret this disconsolately bloody annual occurrence at Mecca?s Central Mosque? That the Devil has been predestined to win the battle between Good and Evil in perpetuity? What bothers me, albeit all-too-predictable, is the scandalous attempt by some Saudi officials to fault some African Hajj pilgrims who are alleged to have ?savagely? breached the schedule established for accessing the Jamarat Bridge portion of the Hajj. ?All-too-predictable? because in our day and age, it is routine or quite pedestrian to blame the most vulnerable when things go awry.
My own well-considered position regards the apparent failure of Hajj organizers and authorities to redesign the entire festivity into two annual programs, in order to drastically reduce the virtually ritualized fatal occurrence of the annual stampede. I understand that the only way to be inducted into the College of El-Hajjis and Hajjias is for one to undertake the Hajj during the Ramadan season of the year. And so my next question is as follows: Why has the safety of pilgrims woefully failed to soberly inform global Islamic scholars and the Saudi authorities on the imperative need of preserving lives by re-scheduling the Hajj to take place at least twice a year, and then strictly ensuring that the number of pilgrims allowed to annually make the trip to Mecca is remarkably reduced for the sake of safety? Or is it because somebody higher up the hierarchy or a cabal of movers and shakers is wickedly and capriciously invested in the bloody annual fatalities that occur in the Jamarat Bridge section of Mecca?
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
