ROBERT FISK MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT Haj pilgrims stoning a pillar in Mina, where almost 300 people were trampled to death yesterday EPA
YET ANOTHER tragedy befell the Islamic haj pilgrimage yesterday when up to 300 pilgrims were crushed and trampled to death while stoning the three pillars at Mina which millions of Muslims regard as the impersonation of Satan.
It is almost as routine as the haj itself. Seventeen years ago, the death toll at Mecca was 402 - largely caused by violence between Saudi security forces and Iranians - and in 1990 it was an extraordinary 1,426. In 1994, 270 pilgrims were killed in a stampede at the haj, my own Beirut barber among them. There was no formal word of what happened. He simply never came back to Lebanon.
Three years later, a fire ripped through the pilgrims' tent city and burnt 340 men and women to death. A hundred and eighty were trampled to death in 1998, another 35 in 2001. And a further 244 pilgrims were crushed and hurled to their deaths yesterday afternoon.
The figure, if past catastrophes are anything to go by, will reach at least 300 by today, all of the pilgrims dying as they approached the pillars of stone in Mecca which represent - symbolically, as the Saudis keep pointing out - the devil.
The site is supposed to mark the spot where the devil appeared to Abraham, and the Prophet is said to have himself thrown 49 pebbles at the same rocks. If more intellectual Muslims disdain such practices, the hurling of the pebbles - the jamarat in Arabic - has for centuries been a traditional part of the haj. A thousand frustrations may account for this otherwise bizarre ritual, yet the throwing of the pebbles, along with shoes and insults - after a sleepless night of prayer - remains as dangerous as ever.
As usual, and to the fury of the pilgrims themselves, the Saudis blamed God for the disaster. "All precautions were taken to prevent such an incident," the Saudi haj and endowments minister, Iyad Amin Madani, announced. "But this is God's will. Safety is not as strong as fate."
Increasingly, however, wounded pilgrims - and the relatives of those who simply fail to return from the haj - blame Saudi Arabia's hopeless bureaucracy and its fear of the religious police, whose functionaries ought to prevent this kind of tragedy, for the deaths. Indeed, when almost 1,500 pilgrims were killed in 1990 in a tunnel stampede, the Saudis managed to blame both God - "God's unavoidable will," King Fahd called it - and the construction company that made the tunnel for the tragedy.
Two million pilgrims - and to be fair, the Saudis do have to control a virtual human wave of religiosity at the haj - were yesterday walking and running in their white robes to Jamarat Bridge in Mina to throw stones at the pillars on the very day of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice. And as so often happens, the authorities were overwhelmed. Most of the dead were crushed to death, their bones snapping as the tens of thousands pushed inexorably towards the pillars, their corpses pulled from the mass of screaming people as the ritual stoning continued.
In the event, there was no deliberate violence at the haj, although Islamic clerics spent much time denouncing "holy warriors" - for which read Osama Bin Laden, himself a Saudi - as an affront to the Muslim religion. "Is it holy war to shed Muslim blood?" Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia's senior divine, asked in a sermon at the Namira mosque. "Is it holy war to shed the blood of non-Muslims given sanctuary in Muslim lands? Is it holy war to destroy the possessions of Muslims?"
His sermon, watched on television by millions of Muslims in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, will have provoked almost as many questions as it answered. Are American troops - Bin Laden's targets - among the "non-Muslims" who have "sanctuary" in Islamic lands? Did the "possessions" of Muslims refer to the Saudi compounds in Jeddah recently attacked by al-Qa'ida? The Namira mosque stands next to Mount Arafat, whence the Prophet Mohamed gave his final sermon AD632, exhorting the faithful to remember that "every Muslim is a Muslim's brother and the Muslims are brethren - fighting between them should be avoided".
The eight-year Iran-Iraq war and the five-decade history of internal suppression within the Arab dictatorships suggests that the Prophet's words have not exactly earned the adherence of Middle East leaders these past few years. And the suicide bombings in Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia prove that Islam's most doctrinaire adherents can differ with the sheikh's interpretation of the Koran.
Indeed, one of the pillars so furiously stoned by the emotional crowds at Mecca yesterday had the letters "USA" scrawled upon it. Slaughtering camels, cows and sheep - and eating their barbecued remains - is not, it seems, the only way in which pilgrims can celebrate the Eid.
