Reading Time: 4 minutes How many quotas are allowed to each country is largely dependent on their Muslim population but the Saudi Government and the various countries allotted these quotas are constantly under a barrage of allegations of being corrupt or mismanaging these quotas.
Last week, Saudi Arabia’s Hajj ministry announced that Muslims from Europe, Australia and the Americas would need to apply to attend Hajj, which is taking place between 7-12 July this year, through a random draw on the government backed Motawif website.
This “random draw” is something that, on paper, would solve a great many problems for a great many people upset with the current system of quota allocation in other countries facing Hajj quota problems. Read about zakat and charity.
But there is a greater context when it comes to Hajj quotas and the Saudi Government when it comes to the larger market for Hajj across the globe, especially in countries with high Muslim populations.
For a great many people across the globe, the very purpose of their lives is to accumulate enough resources to be able to perform Hajj before they become too old and weak to do so. The global pilgrimage to Makkah is to be done only once in their lifetimes by every Muslim that has the capacity to do so. It is a Fard– mandatory.
People used to do so even when it took months and months by sea and land, on camels or on foot from across the globe to go back to the well-spring of Islam. The motivation for Muslims across classes to go for Hajj is immense and the economic and infrastructural requirements for catering to this high demand falls to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
There are close 2 billion Muslims in the world. And considering that it is an obligation to be performed atleast once a lifetime, that makes it so that a huge amount of people arrive each year in the month of Zilhaj to Saudi Arabia. The pilgrim will arrive in Saudi Arabia to a 12- hour long waiting line at the King Abdul-Aziz International Airport’s dedicated Hajj terminal, to begin the process of performing all the rites required to complete the Hajj pilgrimage.
Circumambulating the Kaba is not the only thing that is required for the Hajj to be considered complete, but there are more duties that need to be performed. Other rites, including the stoning of the Devil at Mina encompass an area of almost three hundred square miles. The journey needs to be completed on foot for a lot of these rites.
Taking care of all of these immigrants is a gargantuan task. Immigrants converge by the millions (there are 3-5 million pilgrims that perform the Hajj annually) and all of them are the responsibility of the government of Saudi Arabia.
To control the amount of people that arrive in the country to perform this rite, the government of Saudi Arabia has had to enforce strict quota systems. The Saudi Government assigns quotas of how many pilgrims for each country is allowed to come to the country during each Hajj season.
How many quotas are allowed to each country is largely dependent on their Muslim population but the Saudi Government and the various countries allotted these quotas are constantly under a barrage of allegations of being corrupt or mismanaging these quotas.
Indonesia, for example, has the highest populations of Muslims in a country and currently is has one of the largest quotas for Hajj across the globe. The rule of thumb is that for most countries, one spot is open per a thousand prospective Hajis. Though this fraction might be much smaller when it comes to countries with higher Muslim populations.
As sad as it is, considering that the demand is so high for securing these quotas, there is a lot of financial corruption that comes into play across the globe.
For example, it takes on average 1-2 years of savings at best for someone to pay for a spot on a waitlist for Hajj. These waitlists can extend for 20 years almost and so the rich will pay to make sure that they are the ones that can go at the earliest.
To make matters even worse, in a majority of these countries, the rich go on multiple Hajj trips, taking up spots that might have been needed by the unfortunate who saved all their lives only to have their spot taken by people that have already gone for Hajj multiple times.
Government officials that manage these Hajj funds and allocation of quotas have been exposed multiple times of corruption in this holy matter. Coming back to Indonesia, the minister responsible for the Hajj fund became embroiled in accusations of graft in the Hajj fund.
The Pakistani government conducts a drawing from applications, placing the tens of thousands of people who miss the cut on a waitlist. But petitioners have accused the government of apportioning parts of the quota among various private tour operators in exchange for bribes.
In the current atmosphere, owing to political spats with its neighbors, Saudi Arabia is being accused of allowing politics to come into biased allotment of quotas.
As part of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamad Bin Salman’s 2030 vision, the kingdom has focused on religious tourism as a vital source of non-oil revenue, with plans to significantly boost pilgrim numbers. This obviously if the goal is being shifted from a responsibility to an avenue of profit (more outright than before) than it means that less and less poor Muslims are going to be making it for Hajj as the plan moves along.
In June 2017, Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia imposed a historic land, maritime, and air blockade on Qatar. The measures were designed to strong-arm Doha into complying with a list of demands that involved alleged support for Islamic extremists throughout the Middle East.
In 2017, an estimated 60 to 70 Qataris traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj, a sharp drop compared to the 12,000 from the previous year, according to a member of Qatar’s state-linked National Human Rights Committee (NHRC). Media reports in Saudi Arabia have put that number at up to 1,200.
-Bachar El Halabi, France24.
If the draw is transparent and there are no problems or allegations of corruption in the test-run, then this system can be implemented for the larger market for Hajj quotas. The hope is that this system might take the decision of who gets to go for Hajj out of greedy hands and into the hands of providence and God.
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