Devotees praying al-Fajr at the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque complex in Mecca. (AFP)
Riyadh:
Saudi Arabia would have allowed about 1,000 pilgrims living in the state to perform the Hajj this year, a minister said on Tuesday that it was announced that the ritual would return due to coronovirus.
“The number of pilgrims will be around 1,000, maybe less, maybe a little more,” Haj Minister Mohammad Benten told reporters.
“This year this number will not be in the tens or hundreds,” he said.
The pilgrimage, scheduled at the end of July, will be limited to people under 65 and with chronic illnesses, Health Minister Taufiq al-Rabia said.
The pilgrims would be tested for coronovirus before arriving in the holy city of Mecca and would need to quarantine at home after the ritual, Rabia said.
Saudi Arabia announced on Monday that it would conduct a “very limited” hajj this year, as it moves to prevent the largest coronavirus outbreak in the Gulf.
It has been said that the ritual will already be open to people of different nationalities.
The decision marks the first time in Saudi Arabia’s modern history that out-of-state Muslims have been barred from performing Hajj, which attracted 2.5 million pilgrims last year.
Benten did not say how the pilgrims would be selected.
But he said the government would work with various diplomatic missions in the state to select foreign pilgrims residing in Saudi Arabia that fit health criteria.
Hajj – a must for competent Muslims at least once in their lifetime – typically packs millions of pilgrims into crowded shrines and can be a major source of contagion.
The ruling comes with a major spike in Saudi Arabia’s transition, which has now risen to more than 161,000 cases – the highest in the Gulf – with more than 1,300 deaths.
But the move to roll back the five-day event is fraught with political and economic risk and comes after several Muslim countries were removed from the ritual, one of the main pillars of Islam.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and published from a syndicated feed.)
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