An American Muslim's Pilgrimage to Mecca

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Outside Magazine February 2004

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If It Doesn't Kill You First
Seeking enlightenment and risking death, an American Muslim takes on the pilgrimage to Mecca—the world's greatest and toughest spiritual adventure

By Murad Kalam


	The Hajj highway: pilgrims on their way to the plain of Arafat, an important way station on the holiest route in the Muslim world (Abbas)

I WANDER BAREFOOT out of the Grand Mosque through a cruel blanket of Saudi heat, floating in a sea of strangers from almost every country on earth. It's my third day in the city of Mecca, where I've come to take part in the hajj, the annual five-day pilgrimage to some of Islam's holiest places. This trek is required once in the lifetime of every able-bodied Muslim, and I'm one of two million people, part of the largest mass movement of humans on the planet.

The birthplace of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, born in the sixth century, Mecca sits at the base of the Hejaz Mountains in western Saudi Arabia, 46 miles east of the Red Sea port of Jidda. To someone watching from atop the thousand-foot peaks that surround the city, we must look like countless insects as we spill out of the high, arching gates of the 3.8-million-square-foot Grand Mosque, the most important religious site in the Islamic world.

Mecca is home to 800,000 gracious people, any of whom will tell you not to worry about your well-being when you're here. "This is Mecca," they say. "No one will harm you." Maybe not, but the less devout might steal from you—I'm barefoot because somebody ran off with my sandals this morning when I removed them, as required, before entering the Grand Mosque to pray.

Meanwhile, it's a fact of hajj life that people die all around. Earlier, I watched the Saudi religious police—the mutawaeen, stoic, hard-faced men with henna-dyed beards—carry green-shrouded gurneys holding the bodies of five pilgrims who died today, setting them on the marble floor of the Grand Mosque for funeral prayers. In one 24-hour period during my pilgrimage, 82 hajjis will die. People perish in many ways, from natural causes like heart attacks to unnatural ones like dehydration and trampling.

Trampling is what I'm concerned about at the moment, and with each frantic step I become more worried about my safety. The problem is the hajj's sheer numbers. Despite many improvements, the hajj facilities and infrastructure—which are managed by the House of Saud, the ironfisted royal family that has ruled Saudi Arabia since 1932—haven't expanded to meet the fourfold increase in attendance that has occurred over the past 35 years. The result is that people too often wind up in death traps.

In 1990, a stampede in the pedestrian tunnel leading from Mecca to Arafat, a rocky, arid plain 12 miles southeast of Mecca and one of the final way stations of the hajj, killed 1,426 pilgrims. Another 270 were trampled to death four years later at Jamarat, a site just east of Mecca where a ritual called the Stoning of the Devil takes place, and the most crowded of all hajj settings. In 1997, 343 pilgrims burned to death and another 1,500 were injured in a giant fire started by a gas cooker in the tent city of Mina, an encampment a few miles east of Mecca where all pilgrims gather near the end of the hajj.

It's a bizarre sensation, but I keep imagining my own demise, visualizing my shrouded body being carried into the Grand Mosque above the wheeling masses. Every Muslim knows that a believer who dies on this journey is guaranteed a place in paradise. Personally, though, I'd much rather live to tell about it.

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