A Narrow Escape In a Stampede At Mecca

DOHA: In 2004, It was winter.

As Islam follows the lunar calendar, Every ritual happens in all seasons. In 2004 when I had narrowly escaped a stampede, which killed 251 pilgrims, I was shivering. Last week, when few of my friends narrowly escaped another stampede, which again killed 717 people, they would have been burning under the scorching heat of the desert summer.

I assume, it would have been a pleasant climate in 1990 when 1142 pilgrims have been killed in Mecca. Climate never mattered.

“Pilgrims were rushing early to avoid scorching mid-day heat,” - I have been reading this everywhere since the big stampede recently. In 2006, if we desperately needed anything, it was a little heat. Most of us were suffering from cold as we were standing on Arafah ground on one day and sleeping on an open field in Muzdalifah on the next, both part of Hajj rituals.

Early morning at five, We had just finished Subhi prayer, two men from our “group” tells me “Are you ready, we have to rush now.”

It is mandatory for pilgrims to travel with a “group” to Hajj. They are the ones arranging accommodation, food and travel for the pilgrims. As a 11th hour guy, I always end up with the worst. My “group” was managed by a very regressive cult in Kerala, which we call Kanthapuram-group. I hated their Self-righteousness, my wife hated their misogyny and mother hated their inflexibility. The toddler was too young to hate anything.

“But, we are supposed to go after 2 pm, according to timetable given. aren’t we?” I ask.

The Hajj organizers prepared a timetable to reduce crowd congestion at the deadly pinch point called Jamarah, where pilgrims stone Satan.

“Timetable !” one of them exclaimed “Do you take such jokes seriously ?”

“We have to rush now, the earlier we reach the more we get blessed” added the other one rather philosophically.

Rush. We have to rush everywhere. For early bird advantage, for a little more blessing, for a better place in paradise. We are not here to respect earthly things like crowd management rules.

Then we walk.

Hajj is all about walking. You walk slow, You walk fast. You walk seven times around the Kaaba, You run seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah, you walk to drink holy water ZamZam, You walk to Muzdalifah, You walk to Arafa, You walk to Mina,

“Can we walk over the pedestrian bridge ?” I ask.

There was a bridge to reduce crowd congestion even before the year 2006. Now they built four more.

“No, we have to do the stoning in the same place where the Prophet did it” The philosophical guy says. “there were no concrete bridges 1400 years back, you must know Mr.Engineer” the other guy added as mockingly as always.

We walk. My aging mother hanging on my right shoulder, toddler on the left, swelling legs, aching back. We walk.

The crowd started building up on each step. As people came closer and closer, our steps became shorter and shorter. We were afraid that our next step would be on another’s foot. That worry waned when it became a norm. Our space shrunk, we could hardly breath. We walk.

My mother pushing and moving as much she could. All she wanted in life was to finish the Hajj rituals, to wash off all her accumulated sins. She wouldn’t mind being killed, only to be taken to paradise, rather than continuing her endless suffering after multiple heart surgeries.

I moved my son from shoulder to neck when he started crying. He wasn’t enjoying other shoulders bumping all over his body. He hadn’t had sins to wash out either. Me, Yet to commit all the sins, hadn’t visited Las Vegas so far, I decided to move out and go to the pedestrian bridge. My wife didn’t object, after all she was pretty sure that I could never commit any sin under her watch.

It was a war. We were cowards. When we started the retreat, we heard our group members asking us to stop and fight on. They were shouting to be heard. Going back wasn’t easy either. Devotees with muscular physique were pushing forward. Indonesian pilgrims - short, polite and peaceful, were holding each other’s hands, forming unbreakable arrays which made moving even more difficult.

We fought. I saw my wife pushing men around her. Those men had muscles all over their bodies. I saw my mother begging for nothing but little space to breath. I could see her already weak chest being pressured by many. My son stopped crying to stretch his body up for air, I moved him to the top of my head. That didn’t help him much as my neck bended. My advantage of being tall had vanished. I started suffocating.

Everyone except my son was speaking, crying or shouting. Everyone thought someone would help them, to breath or to stand up. The air was deafeningly loud. No one heard a thing. Most of us lost the sense of direction and started moving randomly. Everyone was walking, running, shouting and crying. I smelt death. It was present in the air.

I have heard many men and women reciting Shahada-Kalimah - a verse from Quran that Muslims recite at imminent death. I wasn’t. Not because I am a great fighter, but because I always had a strange optimism of my survival. I had survived a whirlpool in Kerala backwaters, I had also survived once when I was lost in a desert. I knew God would send his angels at the right time.

Eventually, he did. We walked without falling. Slowly, I started feeling the crowd thinning, and the air reaching my lungs. We started moving fast, our steps became longer. We walked until we reached a place where we could sit and drink some water that my wife kept in her hand amid all the chaos. “I couldn’t even drop that.”. she would later say.

I was wondering where I dropped the seven pebbles I collected for my face off with Satan. I always lost to him, but I wanted to win that day.

My Nokia 3310 started vibrating, my colleague in IBM was calling.“CNN ticker says there was a stampede in Mecca, are you safe? ” He asks.

That evening, thousands of pilgrims gathered in the holy mosque to pray for 251 lucky souls who had already reached paradise. Janazah is the only prayer in which Muslims need not bend or bow. That made it easier for all the aching men and women to join.

With heavy hearts and aching bodies, we all stood for Janazah. Unlike the morning, I noticed that at least civic sense wasn't missing there.

(Farooq Kalpana is a Data Security Consultant based in Doha, Qatar)