Politics v pilgrimage: some Muslims call for Saudi haj boycott

Report by the Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion, August 9, 2019. 

As mil­lions of Muslims don robes and flock to Mecca for haj, a small counter move­ment to boy­cott the pil­grim­age in protest at Saudi Ara­bi­a’s polit­ics has won lim­ited sup­port online.

Although the num­bers are dwarfed by the 1.8 mil­lion who have arrived in Mecca for Fri­day’s haj, more than 100 Muslims from Aus­tralia to Tan­zania are con­trib­ut­ing to a Twit­ter hasht­ag #boy­cot­thajj in response to Saudi Ara­bi­a’s polit­ic­al record.

They cite its role in the war in Yemen, stance on human rights and unequal treat­ment of women among top concerns.

“#Boy­cot­tHajj is an import­ant dis­cus­sion for Muslims to have. It is about being crit­ic­al and recog­nising the atro­cit­ies that the Saudi regime com­mits against fel­low Muslims,” Mari­am Par­wa­iz, a pub­lic health doc­tor in New Zea­l­and, said on Twitter.

For Ella, attend­ing haj now would be incom­pat­ible with Islam’s wider oblig­a­tions to stand up to injustice.

“It’s Saudi for­eign policy and the oppress­ive nature of Saudi soci­ety that’s stop­ping me,” the 28-year-old Brit­ish aca­dem­ic told the Thom­son Reu­ters Foundation.

“It’s not me say­ing I don’t want to go — I would love to be able to ful­fill my reli­gious oblig­a­tion. But for as long as that would mean being com­pli­cit in viol­ence, I won’t do it.”

A Saudi-backed coali­tion has waged war in Yemen since 2015 and aid work­ers say some 24 mil­lion people — almost 80% of the pop­u­la­tion — will likely need human­it­ari­an assist­ance in 2019.

The Gulf king­dom also faces heightened scru­tiny over its human rights record after last year’s murder of journ­al­ist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.

And women — who have won some high-pro­file rights — face a bar­rage of male con­trols in this socially con­ser­vat­ive kingdom.

Riy­adh has urged Muslims to focus on wor­ship, not politics.

A Saudi offi­cial dis­missed the boy­cott as “unwise” and said its small num­ber of back­ers stood in sharp con­trast to the fact that more pil­grims chose to vis­it Mecca each year, with coun­tries seek­ing ever lar­ger haj quotas.

“Those people are try­ing to politi­cise haj,” he told the Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion. “Haj is sep­ar­ate. Haj has noth­ing to do with all this — this is a spir­itu­al trip.”

Riy­adh was seek­ing “polit­ic­al solu­tions” in Yemen, he said, and “wit­ness­ing con­sid­er­able change” on women’s rights.

Holy guardian

Every able-bod­ied Muslim who can is sup­posed to go on haj at least once in their life­time and Saudi Ara­bia takes great pride in its role as the guard­i­an of Islam’s holi­est sites.

It also sees haj as key to expand­ing tour­ism and mov­ing away from an eco­nom­ic depend­ence on oil, with haj gen­er­at­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in rev­en­ue for the kingdom.

Some boy­cott sup­port­ers said they do not want their money to go towards a gov­ern­ment whose policies they abhor.

Ella, who pre­ferred not to use her full name, said she had noticed a “real shift” in her gen­er­a­tion, which refuses to divorce Saudi polit­ics from faith.

“We’re asked much more strongly to behave eth­ic­ally and to stand against oppression…than to go on haj.”

De facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sal­man was praised after tak­ing power in 2017 for loosen­ing social restrictions.

The king­dom swept aside a ban on women driv­ing and earli­er this month made pro­vi­sions to erode the male guard­i­an­ship sys­tem, a key plank in restrict­ing female autonomy.

The min­istry in charge of the haj said the num­ber of inter­na­tion­al pil­grims had ris­en 5% this year com­pared to last and that Saudi Ara­bia did not “pay any atten­tion to mali­cious calls or media cam­paigns seek­ing to dis­turb the haj,” the offi­cial said.

For Elisa­beth Kend­all, seni­or research fel­low in Arab­ic & Islam­ic Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, the boy­cott was unlikely to gain much trac­tion, with the world’s grow­ing Muslim pop­u­la­tion now estim­ated at 1.8 bil­lion people.

“First and fore­most, haj is a duty for all Muslims to per­form at least once in their lives, if they have the phys­ic­al and fin­an­cial means to do so — wheth­er one agrees with the policies of the Saudi regime is thus irrelevant.”

Oth­ers take a dif­fer­ent view.

“Muslims should boy­cott haj, because to do so only feeds the regime,” said Ani Zon­neveld, pres­id­ent of Muslims for Pro­gress­ive Val­ues, a U.S.-based non­profit organisation.

“(They) will only con­trib­ute to the dev­ast­a­tion and star­va­tion of the Yemeni people, empower the very regime that has imprisoned many women and human rights advocates.”

For teach­er Sohaib El-Nahla, speak­ing by phone from Mecca, “haj is the jour­ney of a life­time” with no link to politics.

“In our under­stand­ing haj is a divine invit­a­tion to the sac­red pre­cincts,” El-Nahla told the Thom­son Reu­ters Foundation.

“Boy­cot­ting haj to a Muslim would be the same as apply­ing a boy­cott to their own reli­gion and their own spirituality.”

Fea­tured image: Pil­grim in sup­plic­a­tion at the Sac­red Mosque. By Ali Mansuri (CC BY-SA 2.5) via Wiki­me­dia.

Source: The Thom­son Reu­ters Found­a­tion, the char­it­able arm of Thom­son Reu­ters. Report­ing by Adela Suli­man; edit­ing by Lyndsay Griffiths.