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The Changes to Hajj Could be a Saudi Soft Power Game

13 Jul 2022
By Professor Ihsan Yilmaz
The Hajj in 2008. 
Source: Al-Jazeera English, Flickr, https://bit.ly/3ATAaGS.

A last-minute announcement by Saudi Arabia has turned this year’s pilgrimage to Mecca into a financial and logistical nightmare for Western Muslims. But, while Riyadh’s decision was in part influenced by economic and logistical interests, there is also a soft power dimension to this change.

The Hajj pilgrimage is a foundational pillar of Islam — it is compulsory for all able-bodied Muslims of age to travel to holy sites in Mecca at least once in their life if they are wealthy enough to afford it.

Although millions of Muslims are eager to make the journey, the hajj has logistical constraints. Due to an excess of demand, a system was established to control the number of Muslims making the pilgrimage each year. Specifically, there is a quota that assigns a certain number of pilgrims to each country, followed by a lottery system within these countries to allocate the spots. In Muslim-majority countries these lotteries are run by governments. However, in the West, several Hajj tour operators called munazzams (“organisers”) in each country are allocated a small number of Hajj visas by the Saudi government. Since 2006, pilgrims living outside of Muslim-majority countries had been required to purchase a Hajj package – including a visa, flight, accommodation, and other services – from one of hundreds of these munazzams. The cost of these packages usually range US $10-20,000 per person.

Last Minute Change

For the last two years very few Muslims were allowed to perform Hajj due to COVID-related restrictions. This year, however, Saudi authorities announced that a million Muslims from all over the world would be allowed to participate. This is about the half of pre-COVID numbers. Almost all of these pilgrims had finalised and paid for their travel plans when the Saudi government made a surprise announcement that has frustrated Muslims communities across the Western world: on 6 June, the Saudi government told Muslims from Western countries to immediately cancel any existing flights and hotel bookings. Effective immediately, these Muslims would have to apply for the pilgrimage at a fixed price through a new lottery system on the government-backed website Motawif.

Frustration

Since this change was made only about a month before the trip, many of these Western Muslims have reported frustrating experiences as they hurry to adapt to the new requirements: payments that don’t go through, unconfirmed application status, mismatched flight and accommodation dates, changes of hotels, and a customer hotline that cannot be reached. Many Western Muslims who booked travel to Saudi Arabia for the pilgrimage were turned away at the airports amid chaos. Frustrated travellers have told of being denied boarding as airlines had no record of their bookings despite paying thousands of dollars. Many of these Western Muslims have poured out their anger in social media under the hashtag #PaidButFailed. Some of them argued that the new system “takes ownership away from the pilgrims and into control of someone you’ll never see or know.” Because of the chaotic roll-out process, many pilgrims have not felt confident enough to travel this year.

Why the Change?

It is unclear why Saudi Arabia changed the system at the last minute, particularly given that Hajj was only a month away.  Saudi Arabian authorities claimed that the new system is designed to crack down on Hajj-related scams run by fraudulent agents. Experts have speculated that the country might be piloting a direct-to-consumer Hajj experience in the hope of “cutting out the middleman” in future years. They suggest that the previous system based on munazzams had its problems: a significant number of munazzams sold their allocations to sub-agents and this sometimes resulted in pilgrims not receiving what they were promised. However, it remains unclear what new consumer protections will be available under the Motawif system.

Some experts argued that there is an economic rationale behind the new system. Saudi Arabia has been trying to diversify its economy away from oil and since the 1990s, and sees religious tourism as a key means of doing so. It has been suggested that the new system based on online buying and selling Hajj packages direct from Saudi Arabia is a part of this strategy.

Soft Power Games at Play?

In addition to the Saudi’s attempt to get rid of the middleman, tackle scams, decrease costs, and generate an additional religious tourism revenue, I think there is a soft power dimension here too. Saudis have for decades claimed to be the leaders of the Muslim world or the global spiritual community of Muslims (ummah). If the petro-dollars since the 1970s were the hard power element of this global leadership claim, attracting poor Muslim nations ‒ such as Pakistan ‒ into the Saudi sphere of influence, then controlling the two most sacred places in Islam (Mecca and Madina) has served as a soft power element. Saudis have used this soft power as much as possible. They have spent enormous amounts of money modernising, cleaning, and maintaining the pilgrimage sites and facilities in both cities, while millions are visiting. They have always known that Hajj represents a great opportunity to win the hearts and minds of millions of pilgrims who will hopefully go on to share their positive experiences with their relatives and friends.

Saudis also enabled many Muslim elites such as scholars, journalists, and politicians to perform Hajj free of charge and accommodated them in luxury hotels as guests of the Saudi king. Indeed, many opinion leaders in Muslim countries have been hesitant to criticise the Saudis, fearing that they may not be allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj.

Crucially, Saudi Arabia increasingly has a competitor for its global leadership of the ummah in Turkey. Despite the botched start to the new system, the Saudis may be aiming to provide a superior service to win the hearts and minds of Western Muslims whom have been reached by Turkey in the last decade. Additionally, the munazzams that have now been made redundant by Saudi Arabia provided spiritual guides for the pilgrim groups. These were important to provide lessons, guidance, and motivation on the journey, and pilgrims naturally want to go with spiritual guides they know and trust. This void will now most probably be filled by Saudis who would be more than happy to propagate their version of Islam to these Western Muslims.

Hajj has always been an international affair in many respects and with this new Saudi soft power initiative targeting Muslim citizens of Western countries, its international dimension seems to be more complexified.

Professor Ihsan Yilmaz is the Research Chair in Islamic Studies at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Melbourne. He has conducted research on Muslims in majority and minority contexts, Muslims in the West, transnational Islam, and political Islam in comparative perspective.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.