Mona Siddiqui - 27/05/2026

On Monday over one and a half million Muslims from around the world began filling a vast tent city in Mecca for the annual hajj pilgrimage. Each year this religious practice which Muslims hope to perform at least once in their life, tests people’s faith and physical stamina. But this year, there’s another more sobering reality. Air defence batteries are positioned on the outskirts of Mecca, responsible for protecting the skies over the holy sites. And this is a consequence of the continued US-Israeli war in Iran and the most recent Israeli military strikes in eastern Lebanon, wars which are reconfiguring who gets to travel, how they get there, and at what cost.
And amidst the hopes for an end to the war, I wonder how people living and affected by it think about such momentous rituals as Hajj, how they plan, save and travel only to return to continued uncertainty once the pilgrimage is over. Perhaps people have learned how to live beside ruins without letting the ruins destroy their soul. It is said that Lebanon in particular has always sung while burning. Its poets turned ruins into hymns and mourning into the resistance of stubborn hope. But it seems to me that wherever there is war and destruction in the world people learn to live with both grief and hope. Cafés and shops reopen after explosions, children play on the streets, weddings happen during ceasefires, cities still wake up to make coffee by the sea; survival itself becomes a kind of ritual.
Maybe that is why so many people want to perform Hajj this year - ritual isn’t escapism from the world’s violence. It is resistance against becoming spiritually shaped by that violence. People who live close to loss ask deeper questions about God, justice, and meaning. The pilgrimage is a kind of surrender to a greater reality – everyone moves in the same direction, recites the same prayers, dressed in similar garments, and despite their different burdens, the crowds repeat the simple but powerful call ` here I am O Lord, here I am.’
And for one suspended moment, as the pilgrims stand as the guests of God, they begin to realise something terrifying and beautiful- that every empire, every militia, every border, every war will one day become dust. That it isn’t suffering but the need for divine mercy for us all which is the final truth about humanity.