DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 131

traveled from Kufa and Basra in eastern Iraq across the desert to Jeddah as the stopping-off
point for Mecca. This larger region from Jerusalem to Jeddah is the epicenter of religious
pilgrimage. Jerusalem is considered sacred by all three of the desert faiths: Judaism, Chris-
tianity and Islam. For all these faiths, the “journey” is one of the most ancient and deeply
felt similes. A faith journey tells of conversion and redemption. An actual pilgrimage is an
act of faith.
In earlier years, making the Hajj could be a dangerous proposition. Bedouin tribes
robbed the pilgrims as their primary source of income until the Ottoman Empire took over
the peninsula and put an end to the attacks. Instead, they paid the Bedouins to protect
the foreign pilgrims on their way to Mecca and Medina. The pilgrims who bought camels
from the Bedouins and lodging and food along the route were the main source of money
for the region. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Ottoman rulers built a rail-
way connecting their capital, Istanbul, to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. That was
the railroad that was attacked by Lawrence of Arabia in the Arab revolt against the Turkish
Ottomans during World War I. Then oil was discovered and Saudi Arabia became one of
the world's wealthiest nations.
Today the antique Hajj railroad is gone and most pilgrims arrive in Jeddah by airplane.
The Hajj has become a multibillion-dollar business fueled by the religious requirement
for billions of Muslims to make the pilgrimage and the mathematic reality that no more
than 3 million are chosen to make the Hajj every year.
That's the sort of situation that gives pilgrims a sense of joy to be given visas and opens
up unwelcome possibilities of all kinds of sweetheart deals, if not corruption, for those
making the selections.
As the custodian and protector of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, the king of Saudi
Arabia and his government are in charge of all things Hajj, deciding how many pilgrims
can come from each country, approving changes to the holy sites and building new rail
systems and airports. It would be as if the government of Italy decided which Catholics
could visit the Vatican and fulfill an absolute requirement of their faith as well as decide
how to alter the appearance of the churches and St. Peter's Square.
The pilgrimage is so critical that Islamic countries have cabinet ministers just for the
Hajj. They lobby Saudi officials for more Hajj allotments, and they set up elaborate bur-
eaucracies for doling out who receives a spot, which travel agents work with the govern-
ment on Hajj and how much it will cost—systems that often have room for hidden bribes.
The government of Indonesia, the nation with the world's largest number of Muslims,
holds deposits of $2.4 billion from citizens who are on the waiting list to make the Hajj
at Mecca. In 2006 ministry officials were convicted of “misusing” these Hajj funds and
bribing government auditors to approve the Hajj accounts. Anticorruption groups have
launched a campaign to open to the public how the Indonesian government spends the
pilgrims' money to buy air tickets and lodging in Saudi Arabia, acting on reports that the