Because of the lunar calendar, the Hajj can happen twice in one year
The Islamic year runs about eleven days shorter than the solar one, so the great pilgrimage to Mecca slides earlier through the seasons every year. Roughly once every 33 years it lands twice in the same Gregorian year, as it last did in 2006. Some years, over three million pilgrims attend.
The Hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam, a duty every Muslim must fulfil once in life if they are physically and financially able and can provide for their family while away. Its rites run over five or six days in Dhu'l-Hijja, the final month of the lunar calendar, with the ninth day, the Day of Arafah, regarded as the heart of the pilgrimage. Official figures for 2000 to 2019 put average attendance at about 2.27 million a year, peaking at 3,161,573 in 2012. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Saudi authorities admitted only very limited numbers of residents.
The name echoes the Hebrew hag, meaning festival, used for the three annual Israelite pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. Islamic tradition traces the rituals back to Abraham. When he left his wife Hajar and infant son Ishmael in the desert, she ran seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah looking for water before a spring burst from the ground beneath the baby's foot. Abraham and Ishmael later built the Kaaba. By pre-Islamic times the shrine was surrounded by idols; Muhammad cleared them in 630 and in 632 performed his only pilgrimage, teaching his followers the rites that became fixed practice.
Pilgrims begin by entering ihram, a state of consecration. Men wear two seamless white cloths, women ordinary modest dress, and all must avoid perfume, cutting hair or nails, harming plants or animals, and carrying weapons. The identical garments are meant to erase distinctions of wealth and to recall burial shrouds. They then circle the Kaaba seven times anticlockwise, touching or pointing toward the Black Stone, and retrace Hajar's search between Safa and Marwah, today enclosed within the mosque and reached through air-conditioned tunnels. Later come a vigil on the plain of Arafat, a night at Muzdalifah, the symbolic stoning of three pillars representing the devil, an animal sacrifice and the cutting of hair, followed by the festival of Eid al-Adha.
In medieval times pilgrims gathered in Syria, Egypt and Iraq to travel in caravans of tens of thousands, escorted under the Mamluks and Ottomans by soldiers and physicians. Travellers such as Ibn Battuta left detailed accounts of the journey.
Source: Hajj
