I contemplated writing this before Qurbani this year. I didn’t, thinking I would be interpreted as someone who just doesn’t want the good and the pious to enjoy their festivities and celebrate their faith.
Then there was the stampede, so let’s take that as a sign from above that I am supposed to be raising my concerns.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made itself ostentatiously rich by regulating the fifth pillar. There are luxurious resorts and comfortable arrangements to ease the rigour normally required of the pilgrimage.
This part is not such a bad thing, since many of us are familiar with older relatives, sometimes confined in wheelchairs, who wish to fulfill their duty while they can. Many of us are grateful for the options that allow us to take our fragile parents and grandparents to Makkah, for some additional costs.
The problem is, the costs have been rising for a long time. It is no longer an affordable pilgrimage for the majority of Muslims outside of the Middle East. In 2011, Saudi Arabia made $10 billion off of Hajj; in 2014, revenues rose to $18.6bn. Land prices continue to rise, and more glitzy buildings, including hotels, malls, and spas, are replacing historical buildings.
There were reports last year about plans for the House of Mawlid to be razed. This destruction is also a travesty for non-believers who value heritage and history.
Some scholars put forward the reasoning that Muslim believers should not worship Mawlid or other sites that make devotion too similar to idolatry. (This reasoning of course doesn’t get in the way of selling “holy” souvenirs made in China, or gallons of zamzam water that might not be safe to consume. Wasn’t the essence of the message from God about the importance of your faith, not material things imbued with superstitious magic?)
The advantageous imposition of free market principles aside, the Kingdom is frankly not Islamic in its practices, and it does harm with its claim to this holy ground.
Many devotees say that Islam respects women more than the other Abrahamic religions in their original forms. To an extent, this makes sense.
In the Middle Ages, upper class Arab women were indeed better off than women in many other parts of the world, because they had property rights and rights to do business.
Don’t forget Khadija was a successful merchant who chose to employ Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), and then chose to ask him to marry her.
Now? While much of the rest of the world has advanced, Saudi women can’t drive, can’t travel without a sanctioned male companion, and until recently couldn’t vote.
The monarchy, established in 1932, is no caliphate. A series of old men with absolute control over their wives and daughters have done a very good job of confirming the Orientalist stereotype of the savage sheikh. And while women’s rights have regressed since the Middle Ages, the justice system has sadly maintained old standards.
Why, in this day and age, are there public floggings, beheadings, dismemberments? As a Muslim in the 21st century, who wants to support these barbaric and medieval punishments? We have already chosen to put aside a terrible and inhumane system: Slavery.
ISIL aside, no one is looking to bring back the system of slavery.
The fact that we recognised the evils of slavery and put it aside, despite indirect endorsement in the Qur’an, says we are able to rationalise outside the Qur’an and the Hadith, and act to improve society and civilisation.
We do not need public floggings and executions; we do not want the destruction of historic sites; we do not want the cost of Hajj to rise to the point that only the rich find it affordable.
Why give our decades of hard-earned money to the royal family so they can squander it on their extravagant shopping trips and luxurious holidays in Europe and America?
When the process of doing your duty as a Muslim simultaneously supports such a blatantly immoral family and state, should you not hold back?
Soon after this past Eid, during a discussion on the blogger murders, I heard many put forward the opinion that no one should say anything that offends any religion, whether Islam or any other.
That the greater wrong is murdering someone for what they have to say, but that the bloggers too should not have offended Islam.
But it seems no one wants to acknowledge that there are real problems in the way we practice Islam, in the way we engage with others about it -- these problems need to be discussed.
Among other issues, the enrichment of the Saudi royal family with our Hajj and Umrah fees is something we should question.
How can it be blasphemy to question what the Sauds are doing to Makkah, and how they are spending our money?
Yet, here in Bangladesh, we arrest people for “insulting” Islam when they criticise the pilgrimage, or the recent stampede that killed hundreds.
Is the greater insult not from the Kingdom that takes pilgrims’ money and puts them in danger? Isn’t the stampede and the subsequent deaths an insult to believers who saved, who trusted, who had faith?
