Covid shatters hajj dreams of older pilgrims

Samia Ahmed saved up for 16 years, but like many older Muslims she fears that renewed Covid-19 curbs will prevent her from ever making the hajj pilgrimage.

Saudi Arabia has for a second consecutive year confined the annual hajj to a limited number of residents, excluding the millions of foreigners who usually flock to Mecca for the rite that every able-bodied Muslim is obliged to perform at least once.

With her advancing age and declining health foremost in her mind, Ahmed, a 68-year-old Egyptian, cried for days when restrictions were announced last year, months after the coronavirus pandemic hit.

“I had paid the travel agency and had really started to prepare everything,” the retired civil servant said.

The hajj is widely seen as the high point in Muslim religious life, bringing the faithful together with millions of fellow believers to fulfil a spiritual obligation at Islam’s holiest sites.

Pilgrims will each walk round the Kaaba — Islam’s focal point — seven times, spend a night on a plain between Mina and Arafat, and symbolically stone the devil by casting stones at three pillars, among other rites.

“I would so much like to make the hajj before I die. I don’t know if I’ll be alive next year,” she sobbed, clutching blue Muslim prayer beads.

– ‘Going to meet God’ –

While the well-heeled can do the hajj in style, lodging at luxury hotels in Mecca, in poor countries the faithful wait for years and make heavy sacrifices to become one of some 2.5 million pilgrims who take part in a normal year.

But in 2020, just months after the pandemic made large-scale events impossible, only 10,000 residents of Saudi Arabia were able to make the journey to Islam’s holiest city, in the west of the kingdom.

This year the Gulf kingdom has expanded the pilgrimage to 60,000 residents who must be aged 18 to 65 years, vaccinated against the coronavirus and not suffering from any chronic disease…..read more

 

Source: France24

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