“ is an extraordinary piece of news,” says Simon Henderson, a Saudi Arabia expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Restaurants, travel agents, airlines and mobile phone companies all earn big bucks during the hajj,” notes the BBC Arabic’s Ahmed Maher, “and the government benefits in the form of taxes.”Īccording to Reuters, the hajj and other pilgrimages to Mecca during the year, known as Umrah, normally generate about $12 billion per year, or roughly 20 percent of the country’s non-petroleum GDP. Though the hajj is attended by pilgrims from a range of economic backgrounds, food, visa, and lodging costs for the multi-day ritual can run into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per person, and many save their entire lives to attend.

In addition to the religious implications of limiting the hajj, the economic impact also will be significant. In more recent memory, political disruptions and diplomatic issues have prevented some pilgrims from converging on Mecca. Cholera has cost tens of thousands of pilgrims’ lives in the 19th century in 1821, for example, 20,000 died, and in 1865 pilgrims from the Ganges Delta brought the disease to Mecca where it spread to pilgrims from other countries and eventually contributed to a worldwide death toll of 200,000. Qarmatians also stole and held for ransom one of Islam’s most precious relics, the Black Stone of the Kaaba, and the hajj was suspended for a decade until the stone was returned to Mecca.Įpidemics have also interrupted past pilgrimages. 632, the pilgrimage has been subjected to “wars, famines, diseases, and political interruptions,” Safi says.Īccording to historians at the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, the hajj has been interrupted at least 40 times since 930, when members of a Shiite sect called the Qarmatians sacked Mecca, and murdered 30,000 pilgrims. While this is the first time Saudi Arabia, considered the custodian of Mecca since the country’s establishment in 1932, has shut the door to all Muslims outside the country, it’s certainly not the first the hajj has been interrupted: Since the first official hajj was led by the Prophet Mohammed in A.D.

History of mecca