Saudi Failure at Hajj - Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi

The appalling death toll of the Hajjis at Mina is the unique responsibility of the Saudi regime.

The case against the Saudi family and its system has got three distinct strands which must be understood. The first strand of evidence against the Saudis lies in the grim statistics of Hajj deaths under their authority. There has been a series of disastrous Hajjes, including the horrific statistic where thousands were killed at the same spot about thirty years ago. The dismal failure of the regime to facilitate the Hajj, on site, is one aspect of the matter. It follows from this that since the weak point of the Hajj logistically has been the Stoning, it is quite clear that the Saudis simply have not dealt with this completely soluble technological problem.

However, the second strand of culpability is equally causal to the disaster. The wahhabi regime has always had an ambiguous and uncomfortable relationship with the Hajj itself. On the one hand it is an absolutely necessary annual boost to the Saudi economy, which has always served to cover the wild extravagance of the rulers and the failure of their social services. In order to increase the number of Hajjis the regime sent out Mutawwifs and their agents all round the world targeting distant and poverty-stricken areas where the Hajj catchment would net those once-in-a-lifetime Hajjis who would thus come to Arabia with their life-savings. This has led in turn to extending Saudi corruption into Muslim nations. The Anwar Ibrahim - Dr. Mahathir scheme of the Hajj Fund has seen the creation of a usurious institution, utterly haram both in its principles and its method. On the other hand, alongside this marketing of the Hajj there has been a further corrupt institution, which is the National Allocation strictly controlling the numbers of Hajjis that may come from a particular country. This statistical application is not only illegal for us, but it is prejudicial. The most blatant example of this injustice is the small allocation allowed to Turkey, which is an all-Muslim nation. Just as in Soviet Russia the constitutional allocation per district of permitted numbers for the KGB to put under arrest, far from reducing the number of victims found the local police obliged to "meet their quotas", so if they were allowed a thousand victims and they only had ten guilty ones, they would go out and make up the numbers with the innocent, so in the same way the Hajj allocations also invite to the "stuffing of the statistics". Without this systematic interlinking of structural systems the number of Hajjis would be radically reduced.

The third strand is of grave significance to this Saudi regime in its last phase. All Muslims recall the uprising at the Ka'aba and its termination effected by Fahd ibn Abdulaziz's recourse to an elite French commando unit. This showed the world a double crime against the Deen of Islam and the Muslim Nation. Firstly, they had failed to protect the Ka'aba. Secondly, they had desecrated it with kafir troops shedding Muslim blood inside the Haram. Thirdly, the regime took advantage of this, basically to wipe out the tribe of the Quraish from among whom the rebel leader had come. The slaughter of Quraishi men, women and children was not even a primitive vengeance caused by Saudi humiliation, but by the perpetual underlying fear of the regime that one day they as usurpers would be swept away by the return of a Quraishi Khalifate.

Now we come to the crime which resulted in the deaths of Hajjis this year. The phrase, "adding insult to injury", could not be more appropriate. That the Hajjis died is the unique responsibility of the Saudi regime. Given their wealth and the means available to them, this has no excuse, but the matter is much more serious. The direct cause of the Hajjis' deaths was that the rulers of the Arabian Peninsula saw fit to assign the majority of their security forces to protect the terrified cohort of the Saudi Princes. It was only after the event that they pulled back the security guards and placed them where they should have been, protecting the pilgrims.

After the disaster of the Hajj uprising, and only then, did Fahd ibn Abdulaziz take on himself the Khilafal title that was and remains the property of Khilafa, "the Guardian of the Haramayn". Having failed to guard it, he titled himself the Guardian!

Following this year's disaster the insult swiftly came. Significantly, not only the Minister of Hajj but the Saudi prince in charge of security were dragged in front of the world's cameras. Their pronouncement seemed to be based on the assumption that the world's television audience was even more stupid than they were. After a disaster involving the death of hundreds, you do not appear on television saying your government has done everything to protect the Hajjis and tell us how much money you have spent on the matter, and most insultingly of all, you do not openly imply that those Hajjis who died were a primitive mob from underdeveloped countries. They died because the security system of the Arabian Peninsula is already in panic-stricken mode. It has already blown up a compound of immigrant workers in order to claim that they too are victims of a terrorism of which they are the authors and the ongoing planners throughout the Muslim world. That same security system knows perfectly well that the common people living in Arabistan are poor, under-educated and in the desert villages suffering from malnutrition. They know it is a country on the edge of civil war. They also know that the movement against them has come FROM them. They also know that at the slightest hint of trouble, their darling guardians will enter the country and it will prove an easier task than the invasion of the atheist-christian-shi'a land of Iraq.

The conclusion of this terrible tragedy must be that following all these disasters and the shame of the attack on Makkah, for which they have never been called to account, the Saudi regime is not fit to govern either the people of the Arabian Peninsula or the Haramayn which do not belong to them, have never belonged to them, and are the property of all the Muslims.