Pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime

Muslims affirm the duty of Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca, once in a lifetime for every believer who is physically and financially able. It is the fifth Pillar, commanded in the Quran as a duty owed to God by those who can make the journey (3:97), and performed in the appointed days of the month of Dhu al-Hijjah. Its rites, circling the Kaaba, the running between Safa and Marwah, the standing at Arafat, the stoning at Mina, re-enact events the tradition associates with Abraham, his wife Hagar, and their son.

The tradition holds that Abraham and Ishmael built or rebuilt the Kaaba as a house of pure monotheism, and that by the time of Muhammad's mission it had become a shrine crowded with idols belonging to the pre-Islamic Arabian tribes who had long made pilgrimage to it for reasons predating Islam entirely; the Prophet's clearing of those idols after the conquest of Mecca is remembered as a restoration of the site's original purpose rather than the founding of something new. Distinctively, Islamic tradition names Ishmael, not Isaac, as the son Abraham was commanded to sacrifice, a divergence from the account in Genesis that is central to how Muslims understand their own descent from and connection to the patriarch, and it grounds the festival of Eid al-Adha, kept at the close of the Hajj, which commemorates that averted sacrifice with the ritual offering of an animal.

The obligation is held across Sunni and Shia Islam, with only procedural differences among the legal schools, and the lesser pilgrimage, umrah, may be undertaken at any time of year without discharging the once-in-a-lifetime duty. Before entering the sacred precinct, pilgrims adopt ihram, a state of ritual consecration marked outwardly, for men, by two simple seamless white cloths, and governed by restrictions on cutting hair or nails, wearing perfume, hunting, or quarreling, all of which are read as stripping away the ordinary markers of wealth, nationality, and status so that pilgrims stand before God as equals.

The Hajj expresses the unity of the community on a scale unmatched by any other religious gathering, drawing pilgrims from across the world into a single set of rites performed within days of one another, and the logistics of managing that crowd, controlling access to the Kaaba, regulating the stoning at Mina, providing water and shelter across the pilgrimage sites, have become one of the Saudi state's major administrative undertakings, reflecting how a rite rooted in seventh-century Arabia has had to be continually re-engineered for a modern mass pilgrimage of a size the earliest generations could not have anticipated.

As a Pillar it belongs with the fast, the prayer, the alms, and the testimony of faith; its once-in-a-lifetime obligation, conditioned on ability, distinguishes it from pilgrimages other traditions commend but do not require of every adherent.