From Open Ground to an Air-Conditioned Corridor

The physical setting in which sai is performed has changed more dramatically over the past century than almost any other pilgrimage rite, entirely because of the scale the pilgrimage itself has reached. Until the mid-twentieth century, pilgrims walked between Safa and Marwa along an open, unroofed route exposed to Mecca's severe heat, a route that at times of high pilgrim numbers became dangerously congested and where deaths from heat exhaustion and crush injuries were a recurring hazard documented in pilgrimage accounts from earlier centuries.

Saudi authorities undertook major expansions of the Sacred Mosque through the second half of the twentieth century and again in the twenty-first, enclosing the route within a long, air-conditioned, multi-level marble corridor now built to accommodate vastly increased pilgrim numbers, with separate lanes for those walking at ordinary pace and for wheelchair users and litter-bearers moving those unable to walk the distance themselves, and modern crowd-control engineering, including one-way flow systems and capacity monitoring, has been applied to the route specifically because the annual number of pilgrims performing sai now runs into the millions each Hajj season. These changes have not altered the rite's prescribed form, the seven lengths beginning at Safa and ending at Marwa, the men's quickened pace over the marked stretch, but they illustrate a pattern common across the Hajj rites generally: the ritual content stays fixed while the built environment around it has been almost entirely rebuilt to manage a scale of participation the rite's seventh-century origins could not have anticipated.