By Babatunde Jose
On Monday 25th May, the 9th day of Dhul Hijjah, the last month of the Islamic calendar, over 1.8 million pilgrims will converge on Mount Arafat for the annual Hajj festival.
Based on historical trends from 2023 to 2025, for 2026, Saudi authorities anticipate around 1.8 million pilgrims, maintaining a similar scale to recent years despite ongoing regional security concerns. This includes both domestic pilgrims and international arrivals from over 170 countries.
Gathering on the plains of Arafat is an important highpoint of the Hajj. Day of Arafat is the day Hajj is consummated. Pilgrims spend the afternoon there praying and supplicating to Allah to wash away their sins and make them whole again: Failure to be present on the Day of Arafat invalidates the Hajj: 15 years ago, my late sister, Dupe who was on admission in Mecca was conveyed to Arafat in a hospital ambulance in order to allow her fulfill the requirement of Hajj.
The Day of Arafat is therefore an essential part of Hajj, and Aisha (RA) reported that the Messenger of Allah (SAW) said: “There is no day on which Allah sets free more slaves from Hell than He does on the Day of Arafat”. (Muslim) It was on this special day in the afternoon of the Day of Arafat during his first and only Hajj that the Prophet (SAW) made his famous farewell speech to a crowd of over 120,000 Companions.
Hajj is mentioned in several ayahs in the Quran: ““And proclaim the Pilgrimage among men: they will come to thee on foot and (mounted) on every kind of camel, lean on account of journeys through deep and distant mountain highways;”(Quran 22:27) See also (Quran 2:125), (Quran 2:158), (Quran 2:189), (2:196-203) and (Quran 3:96-97)
Hajj attracts a very diverse multitude from all over the world, but it is important to clarify the largeness of the gathering as there has been a misconception on the part of many Muslims. Hajj is the second largest annual religious gathering.
Arba’een Pilgrimage is the world’s largest annual religious gathering that is held every year in Karbala, Iraq, at the end of the 40-day mourning period following Ashura, the religious ritual for the commemoration of martyrdom of the grandson of Prophet Mohammad (SAW) and the third Shia Imam, Husayn ibn Ali. The number of participants in the annual pilgrimage reached 25 million or more in 2026.
The Arba’een pilgrimage is non-obligatory compared to Hajj which is obligatory for those who can afford it. Secondly, the spiritual significance of the Arba’een trek is of limited Islamic significance as it is restricted to Shiites who are for all intents and purposes renegades in the mainstream of Islam. Thirdly, Islam recognizes only the Hajj as a fundamental pillar of Islam.
There is however a Nigerian connection to this Shia event. Pilgrims in West Africa who are unable to go to Karbala instead head toward Zaria in Nigeria to be addressed by the Shia leader Ibrahim Zakzaky. These include pilgrims from Nigeria as well as Ghana, Chad, Cameroon, Benin and Togo. The Shiite problem has since developed into a political conundrum with its leadership under detention and Zakzaky’s Islamic Movement of Nigeria proscribed and declared a terrorist organization.
However, the largest religious gathering of all time is the Kumbh Mela festival of the Hindus in India. According to the Economist, the attendance figures “implausibly imply that half of all Indians made the pilgrimage”. Attendance numbers were computed from a mix of manual counts, train arrivals, satellite imagery and camera footage. It is considered the largest peaceful gathering in the world, with devotees bathing in the sacred confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati rivers to cleanse sins and seek spiritual liberation.
The Maha Kumbh 2025 witnessed millions of devotees participating making it the largest human congregation in history. The temporary city set up for the Mela covered 4,000 hectares, with 150,000 tents and extensive infrastructure to accommodate pilgrims.
The Uttar Pradesh government invested heavily in infrastructure, including: Roads and bridges: Over 450 km of roads and 30 pontoon bridges. 150,000 toilets, 10,000 sanitation workers, and river cleaning teams. 40,000 police officers, surveillance cameras, and underwater drones for safety. Medical facilities: Over 2,000 medical personnel deployed across the Mela area.
This leads to the contentious issue of government involvement in pilgrimage, its organization and logistics. This has been an issue in our religiously charged political firmament. It, however, need not be so as there are historical and contemporary facts to suggest that governments all over the world have always been involved in the affairs of their citizens who embark on pilgrimage in their tens of thousands.
In Britain, for instance, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2000 helped fund the British Hajj Delegation to provide consular support and medical services for its citizens on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
Despite being officially secular, the French government posts a consul in Jeddah to help French nationals making the hajj.
Russia, which has over 14 million Muslim citizens; the largest population of any European country, has perhaps done the most to support its citizen-hajj pilgrims. Since the early 2000s, under the Putin government, Russia’s Muslims have enjoyed discounted flights to Jeddah during hajj season on Aeroflot, the state airline.
A state-created hajj liaison office arranges visas and transportation. And in another twist, after annexing Crimea from Ukraine, Russia offered Crimean Tatars generous Hajj subsidies ($1000 per person, about a third of the cost of an economy package tour).
Having inherited a hajj tradition with their colonial conquests, Europe’s imperial powers had to decide what to do with it. In the mid-nineteenth century, as hajj traffic between European colonies and Mecca began to grow, colonial officials nursed anxiety and fears of the hajj as a spreader of cholera and other infectious diseases; some even suggested banning the hajj.
This was especially true after 1865, the year a massive cholera outbreak in Mecca became a global epidemic, spread far and wide by dispersing crowds of hajj pilgrims. After this epidemic—which killed more than 200,000 people worldwide in cities as far away as New York—the European powers convened the first in a series of conferences that identified the hajj as a sanitary and security threat. But attempts to ban the hajj proved impossible: as a pillar of Islam, and a duty for Muslims, the hajj could not be easily banned or stopped.
By the end of the nineteenth century, and for various reasons all of the European powers began to sponsor the hajj. They subsidized travel between their colonies and Arabia during hajj season, opened foreign consulates along routes to Mecca, and passed new laws to protect pilgrims from physical harm and financial scams.
In order to ease transportation, the Ottoman Caliph organized the construction of the Hejaz Railway from Damascus to Medina in 1906; though it stopped operations after the First World War when the Ottoman Empire was defeated and its colonies divided among the victorious European powers.
In Jeddah, the Dutch had set up a multi-service “Hajj Bureau.” The British ran a medical dispensary out of their consulate: And European doctors and nurses staffed the two main quarantine facilities set up to screen hajj pilgrims in El Tor (at the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula) and on Kamaran Island (in the Red Sea). By sponsoring the hajj, European colonial powers were simply trying to control or contain the problems created by a mass, annual movement of people.
It is however very clear to all observers that the Nigerian State does not underwrite the pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca: But our excesses in all things and proclivity for corruption often mar the good intentions. However, the government has a duty and responsibility in offering Consular service, medical aid and welfare to pilgrims and being involved in the logistics of moving over 100,000 of its citizens to a foreign land for pilgrimage: This is not strange or unknown to international best practice.
But sponsoring state officials, their wives, girlfriends, concubines, children, and friends of the state on a junket to the Holy Land is not only condemnable but spiritually sinful.
We therefore wish our pilgrims which include my favorite cousin Abdul Fatai Akintota Kekere-Ekun and his amiable wife, Justice Kudirat Olatokunbo Kekere-Ekun, CJN, Hajj Mabrur. May Allah accept their Hajj as acts of Ibadah.
Barka Juma’at and Happy weekend
