Whoever wrote this article did not know what he was talking
about. He is probably not a Muslim, and if he is, he probably did not make the
Hajj and saw the multibillion dollars the government has spent and continues to
spend to develop the places of Hajj ritual to make the journey safe and
comfortable. The present expansion of the Holy Mosque is worth 22 billion
dollars, including the matrix of subway under the city slated to be completed in
2020.
To even suggest that Islam should allow pilgrimage to other
holy sites in other countries to decongest Mecca of the annual pilgrimage is
blasphemy because there is one and only one first house of worship built by the Prophet
Abraham and his son Ishmael, and that is the ‘Kaaba.’
You cannot compare the time when pilgrims came by donkeys, camels
and steamships to today’s means of modern transport and with the growing affluence
of Muslims around the planet, not to mention the mind-blowing rise of Islam in
numbers – the number of pilgrims will continue to grow immensely.
The only way you can stop the rising number of pilgrims is
to uproot the ‘Kaaba’ and bring it to the moon because then – not many will be
able to make the pilgrimage, but given time, even the moon will be overwhelmed It is better to
believe it!
Please read the whole article:
SNIP:
Even when faced with calamitous death tolls, the Saudi establishment is unlikely to change its approach. It is up to the rest of the Muslim world to provide alternatives to the modern idea, championed by Saudi Wahhabis and other arch-conservatives, that Mecca is the inexorable and inevitable center of the Muslim world. There is nothing stopping Muslim governments from taking a page out of the Saudi handbook and promoting the neglected shrines in their own territories.
Doing so would not only reduce the number of pilgrims traveling to Mecca, making the visits safer; it would also force Saudi Arabia to share the enormous profits of religious tourism. Even more important, moving beyond the modern hajj to a more plural pattern of pilgrimage could help stem the Wahhabi takeover of the faith.
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