Sai between Safa and Marwa

The sai is the rite of walking seven times between the two low hills of Safa and Marwa, now enclosed within the Sacred Mosque of Mecca, performed as part of both the greater pilgrimage and the lesser umrah. The pilgrim begins at Safa, walks to Marwa and back, counting each leg as one of the seven, ending at Marwa. Men traditionally quicken to a light jog between two points marked with green lights, in the low ground where the valley once ran, while women keep a steady pace. The Qur'an names the two hills directly as among the symbols of God and permits the going between them, and it is this verse that establishes the rite.

The sai commemorates a specific story: the search of Hagar, the wife of Abraham, who, left in the barren valley with her infant son Ishmael, ran back and forth between the two hills in desperate search of water, until the spring of Zamzam broke open at the child's feet. In retracing her steps the pilgrim re-enacts a mother's trust and struggle, and the ever-flowing well of Zamzam beside the Kaaba is understood as its answer.

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.