DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 132

current closed-door system hides several million dollars in bribes. The campaign is pop-
ular since the least expensive package to make the Hajj is nearly $3,500—which for the
average Indonesian is their entire life savings.
In Bangladesh, political groups successfully lobbied against “irregularities” in the gov-
ernment's handling of Hajj travel that left thousands of Bangladeshi pilgrims without ac-
commodation or meals. Pilgrims will now receive regular passports, not flimsy “pilgrim
cards,” and the government promised that the housing will be adequate and food catering
will last through the entire visit.
The temptation to make money off of devotees doesn't disappear even in wartime. In
Afghanistan the minister of Hajj and pilgrimage fled to Britain after being accused of em-
bezzling $700,000 of Hajj funds from the poor. Mohammad Sidiq Chakari denied the
charges against him but refused to return to the country to stand trial.
The Hajj itself is a voyage of a lifetime. Pilgrims routinely describe their trip as a reli-
gious reawakening. Dubai has made itself an essential part of that trip. Terminal Two in
Dubai is a stopover for Hajj flights, a gateway to Mecca. Emirates Airlines offers a spe-
cial twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week telephone service in English and Arabic to keep
everyone informed of any changes and to answer complaints. In 2008 the demand proved
so great that Emirates Airlines added thirty flights from Dubai to Jeddah at the last minute.
For wealthier travelers, Emirates has a deluxe religious Hajj package with private tours and
five-star hotel accommodations.
I was in Dubai at the time of the 2010 Hajj, and could see the commotion and excite-
ment at the airport. Like all non-Muslims, I am forbidden to enter the Holy City. Instead,
I followed the pilgrimage in the local newspapers, impressed by photographs of the Grand
Mosque in Mecca awash in pilgrims. It was a miracle how they all performed the rites
in such packed spaces and with reverence and harmony. Photographs showed believers
throwing pebbles seven times to symbolize human attempts to cast away evil. Others gave
us a snapshot of the multitudes walking seven times around the Kaaba, the black enclosed
stone that symbolized God's oneness and God's center at the heart of human existence.
Many were reciting the pilgrim's prayer: “Lord God, from such a distant land I have come
unto Thee. . . . Grant me shelter under Thy throne.”
Unmentioned was the dramatic physical change in this sacred landscape. Rising in the
center of Mecca, near the Kaaba, is a cluster of new luxury skyscraper hotels and con-
dominiums, a shopping mall and a clock tower that bears a striking resemblance to Lon-
don's Big Ben. This new construction was built by some of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest deve-
lopers with the enthusiastic approval, and sponsorship, of the government and against the
protest of religious preservationists who sought to protect the centuries-old buildings and
neighborhoods that were torn down to make way for the glittering new commercial center.
Sami Angawi, an expert on Islamic architecture and the public voice of the preserva-
tionists, has written treatises on the need to save the traditional character of Mecca, its