As you probably know, the Hajj – the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca – is one of the Five Pillars of Islam. It’s a religious obligation for every observant Muslim to perform it at least once in their lives.
During Mohammed’s lifetime, when Islam was a smaller, regional faith, this seemed manageable. Now that Islam is a worldwide religion with almost two billion adherents, the logistical challenges of getting every one of them to the same place on the planet are becoming more daunting. And in a rapidly warming world, with a holy city in the middle of a desert climate, it’s getting outright deadly.
2024 is a case in point.
The Hajj is supposed to be performed during Dhu al-Hijja, the last month of the Islamic calendar. Because it’s a lunar calendar, the date drifts over the course of a solar year.
This year, it happened to fall in the middle of June, during a brutal Mideast summer. The weather was exceptionally hot even by Saudi Arabian standards, reaching temperatures of 125 degrees Fahrenheit at the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
The heat was more than just extreme. For over a thousand people, it was lethal:
Saudi Arabia said Sunday that more than 1,300 faithful died during the Hajj pilgrimage which took place during intense heat, and that most of the deceased did not have official permits.
“Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83 percent being unauthorised to perform Hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
What compounds the problem is that the Hajj is a cash cow for Saudi Arabia, which sells permits to would-be pilgrims. It generates billions of dollars for their repressive theocracy every year.
But many Muslims can’t afford to pay, so they try to do it unofficially. That means they don’t have access to buses, air-conditioned tents, water stations and other amenities supplied to paying customers. Some people reported “motionless bodies on the roadside” as pilgrims collapsed while walking from one holy site to another.
The world is getting hotter each year, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels that Saudi Arabia, among others, has drilled and sold. A study published last month found that average temperatures in the area are rising by almost 1 degree F each decade. When the climate was already near the limit of what humans can tolerate, even a small increase can push it over the line to unsurvivable.
The Saudis have a firsthand view of the climate crisis and its consequences. But even as their pilgrims collapse and die from heat stroke, they’re blocking all attempts to do something about it.
At the COP28 climate talks, Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest foes of a global agreement to phase out fossil fuels. Whenever there was an opening, they pushed for poison-pill language that they knew would be seen as unacceptable; when they couldn’t do that, they purposefully stalled for time and delayed every point of agreement. When even that didn’t succeed, they just flat-out stonewalled negotiators from other countries by refusing to meet with them:
“Most countries vary on the degree or speed of how fast you get out of fossil fuels,” said Linda Kalcher, a former climate adviser to the United Nations who has been in negotiating rooms this week. Saudi Arabia, she said, “doesn’t even want to have the conversation.”
Obviously, this is for economic reasons first and foremost. The Saudi petrostate is addicted to fossil fuel money. It’s their only industry of any size, despite lackadaisical efforts to diversify.
However, I think there’s a deeper problem: the attitude of religious fatalism – also on display at the last Hajj disaster, a stampede in 2015 – which holds that death is God’s will and there’s nothing humans can do to stop it. Thus, in the face of mass casualty events like this one, Islamic authorities respond with a shrug, even when those deaths could unquestionably have been prevented.
This fatalistic, hands-off attitude is intersecting with climate change in the deadliest way imaginable. It’s the literal collision of religious myth with the reality of a physical world that can’t be denied or wished away. And, with climate change still gathering momentum, it’s likely this isn’t going to be the last time this happens.
Once you decide that maybe you don’t need the god hypothesis to explain the universe, it gets easier to decide that maybe it’s not true that only certain people from a certain family can be qualified to lead a country. Perhaps it also gets easier to reject the idea that only a few people are entitled to travel in comfort while many more are forced to endure worse lives as a consequence of that comfort.
A local news story featured a retired local couple who’d saved for years to travel overseas to make the hajj. They died–the official COD is heat exposure, which is absolutely plausible. Their adult children are alleging the travel company they booked with failed to provide sufficient shade or drinks.
They are only two of many whose bodies couldn’t manage the killing heat and lack of shade. I’m wondering how bad it will be in a decade, if June is already too hot now.
I don’t know what liability the travel company may have in this situation, but I think lots of people are going to get a painful lesson about wet-bulb temperature very soon.
There’s a graph line of temperature and humidity at which the human body can’t rid itself of heat fast enough to survive. Even if you sit in the shade drinking water, you’ll still die. The only way to survive is to get somewhere with air conditioning.
The solution is obvious.
Just schedule the Hajj during the winter.
Most religions are flexible on their holidays.
It’s all make believe anyway.
The Xmas holiday is supposedly when jesus was born.
In reality, no one knows exactly when jesus was born except that it probably
wasn’t in winter.
What the early xian church did was assign jesus’s birth date to the Pagan end of year celebrations to co-opt them. The Pagans are now taking their holidays back.
That would be a sensible and reasonable solution to this problem, so we can be sure they won’t do it.
That is a common fundie xian belief as well.
I heard that one a lot during the recent Covid-19 virus pandemic.
The fundie xians would refuse to do anything to keep themselves safe from the virus.
Including getting the vaccines.
“God decides when you will die, there is nothing you can do, and you won’t live another day longer.”
The counterargument is obvious.
“God created people like Tony Fauci, Moderna, BioNtech/Pfizer etc.so that they could quickly develop a Covid-19 virus vaccine and save lives. All praise and thanks to god.”
Needless to say, these brave and fatalistic fundie xians will almost always go to the hospital ERs when they get sick with the Covid-19 virus and start having problems breathing.
Almost all but not all. During the pandemic, a lot of people ended up dying at home.
No doubt the summers will continue to warm.
Fortunately, for now, the difference between calendars means that the 2025 hajj will come in early June, the 2026 hajj in late May, etc. Since the Intelligent Designer chose to set moon phases and solar years so stochastically, and since I can’t find a table showing hajj dates very far ahead (apparently the Quran requires not just a crescent moon, but for an imam or mullah to see same, so no Muslim dares make predictions for that), I can only offer a rough guess that hajj heat stress will diminish for a couple of decades – then get really fierce in the latter 2040s as it moves into September, August, July…
How many people will remain living on the Arabian Peninsula by then?
The lunar year is about 11 days shorter than the solar year. 32 solar years are 33 lunar ones. So I expect the 2040 hajj to be in December. And the 2056 one will be like this year, in June.
Per Islamic (Hijri) Calendar Year 2050 CE (Based on Global Crescent Moon Sighting Probability)”, the 2050 hajj will occur at the end of August.
No temperature forecasts available yet. [Insert sweating emoji here]
The Moon becomes visible about 1 or 2 days after new Moon, so that is not a problem.
That means that one can easily watch the Hajj month go through the seasons as the years go by.
Imagine dying so that you can see or touch or stand by, whatever it is…..a rock. A big boulder in a tent.
Well, all other religions have had equally fatal imaginary requirements from their imaginary gods.
1. What compounds the problem is that the Hajj is a cash cow for Saudi Arabia, which sells permits to would-be pilgrims. It generates billions of dollars for their repressive theocracy every year.
2. The Saudi petrostate is addicted to fossil fuel money. It’s their only industry of any size, despite lackadaisical efforts to diversify.
I see some tension between those two claims.
So, basically, the story is that the trip is arduous (as it should be!) and the bulk of the deaths are from those who don’t pay for their permit. Those should be discouraged.
“Saudi Arabia said Sunday that more than 1,300 faithful died during the Hajj pilgrimage which took place during intense heat, and that most of the deceased did not have official permits.
Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83 percent being unauthorised to perform Hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the official Saudi Press Agency reported.”
(I know, I know… some have called me cynical when I make this sort of observation)
From what I understand, the Hajj generates a few billion dollars for Saudi Arabia every year. It’s not a trivial sum, but it’s nowhere near enough to support the entire country’s economy by itself.
[ack!]
Sorry, garnetstar, Adam, everyone.
I started to write a response to you (garnetstar) regarding other things people do and did, like taking selfies on a mountain ridge or planking on top of a train, but then decided better.
But by then I’d clicked on ‘reply’; I thought I’d backed out and written a new comment, but I obviously left it as a response to you.
[I thought I should clarify]
The Saudi petrostate is addicted to fossil fuel money. It’s their only industry of any size, despite lackadaisical efforts to diversify.
Well, yeah, they NEED that oil money to diversify away from oil. You don’t think Mohammed Bone-Sawman’s Neom fantasy is gonna pay for itself, do you?
Just schedule the Hajj during the winter.
Or maybe have it quarterly instead of just annually. That way they can still stick with the lunar calendar if they want to, while a) still having a “winter” date for those who need it, and b) adding three more dates per year so all of one year’s pilgrims won’t have to converge on one date.