The Hajj — Pilgrimage to Mecca

The pilgrimage to Mecca, required once in a lifetime of every Muslim who is able, is the fifth and most encompassing pillar of Islam.

At a glance

In the pilgrimage month, millions of Muslims converge on Mecca to perform the rites of the hajj: circling the Kaʿba (ṭawāf), moving between the hills of Ṣafā and Marwa, and above all standing together on the plain of ʿArafāt in prayer. The rites re-enact episodes associated with Abraham, his wife Hagar and their son Ishmael, and culminate in the festival of sacrifice, ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā.

Pilgrims enter a state of consecration (iḥrām), the men in two seamless white cloths that erase distinctions of rank and wealth, so that the vast crowd stands equal before God. Required once in a lifetime of those with the means and health to undertake it, the hajj is at once the most demanding and the most unifying of the pillars — a gathering of the worldwide community in a single place.

The rites run to a fixed calendar. Pilgrims assume iḥrām and move out to Minā on 8 Dhū al-Ḥijja; the ninth is the day of standing at ʿArafāt, from noon until sunset, which is the one act without which the pilgrimage is void; the night is passed at Muzdalifa, and the tenth brings the stoning of the pillars at the Jamarāt, the sacrifice of ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, the shaving or clipping of the hair and the ṭawāf al-ifāḍa around the Kaʿba. Two or three further days at Minā complete the stonings, and most pilgrims close with a farewell circuit of the Kaʿba. While in iḥrām a pilgrim may not cut hair or nails, use perfume, hunt, quarrel or have sexual relations — a suspension of ordinary life for the duration of the rite.

The pilgrimage predates Islam as an Arabian institution and was reordered rather than invented by it; the Prophet's own Farewell Pilgrimage of 632 became the model from which the jurists derived the sequence. For most of Islamic history getting there was the hard part. Great subsidised caravans left Damascus, Cairo and Kūfa each year under a commander appointed by the ruler, and protecting them was a test of a dynasty's competence and a claim to its legitimacy — one reason control of the Ḥijāz mattered so much to Mamlūks, Ottomans and their rivals. The caravans also carried scholars, books and news, making the hajj one of the great circulatory systems of the premodern Muslim world. Steamships, then aircraft, transformed the numbers: pilgrims now arrive in the millions each year under a system of national quotas administered by Saudi Arabia, and the management of crowds at ʿArafāt and the Jamarāt has become a permanent engineering problem, sharpened by disasters in which large numbers of pilgrims have died.

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Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.