c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) The Aug. 31 stampede during a Shiite religious pilgrimage in Baghdad, which left nearly 1,000 dead, was not the first time a large number of Muslims have died as they performed religious rituals.
As recently as last year, almost 250 pilgrims died in a stampede near Mecca during an annual Muslim pilgrimage. An earlier stampede during the hajj, in 1990, left more than 1,450 dead in a pedestrian tunnel.
Experts say mass religious gatherings always carry the danger of stampedes _ and that such danger is sometimes seen as a sacrificial aspect of the pilgrimage. Nonetheless, they say practical steps, such as clear signage, can and should be taken to control crowds and save lives.
“Any environment where millions of people converge has a significant risk associated with the dynamics of crowds,” stated G. Keith Still, founder of the British consulting company Crowd Dynamics, in a statement on the British company’s Web site.
While religious events have claimed the lion’s share of casualties over the years, secular events have posed similar hazards.
Stampedes at sports stadiums and entertainment venues claimed 1,952 lives worldwide since 1988, according to data compiled by Crowd Dynamics. In that same period, 2,586 died in tramplings at religious events _ all of them in Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan.
A particular trouble spot has been the Jamarat Bridge in Mina, Saudi Arabia. On a single day during the annual three-day hajj ritual, 2.5 million pilgrims attempt to gather around one of three stone pillars representing the devil and cast small stones at it in an act of purification. In the past 11 years, four stampedes have left a total of 699 dead and many more injured.
Michael Wolfe, an American Muslim who has written two books about the hajj,said that one problem has been the crowd flow around the three pillars.
When people finished throwing their stones, and they turned to leave, others were pressing forward to cast their stones, he said.
“But there is also an enthusiasm factor. Stoning the pillars is the last rite of hajj, and throwing the stones can be a physical release. People really want to get into it,” said Wolfe, explaining why pilgrims surged forward even before others cleared the way.
In response to the recurrent tragedies on the bridge, Saudi officials have started a multi-year expansion and renovation project that will eventually allow 4 million pilgrims to pass over the bridge in one day. Part of the project was already completed by the 2005 hajj season and was credited with the lack of fatalities.
An important aspect of crowd control at the Jamarat bridge was providing more information, like signage, wrote Still, whose Crowd Dynamics consultancy was hired by Saudi authorities to help redesign the bridge.
“Lack of information can turn a passive crowd into a stampede. The consequences of a crowd crush can be much worse that the incident” that triggers it, wrote Stills in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper in 2003. In the same article he warned that public fears about terrorism make a crowd especially vulnerable to stampedes _ all factors that seemed to be at play in Baghdad in August.
The stampede on the al-Aima bridge was reportedly sparked when rumors about a suicide bomber caused a panic. With little information and no exit routes, many died when they jumped or were pushed into the Tigris River below.
Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, few Shiites were allowed to visit their holy sites, and religious leaders have urged worshippers to turn out in large numbers to show their strength in the post-Saddam era, according to Iraq observers. Yet Iraq’s infrastructure and law enforcement do not yet seem capable of safely handling large crowds.
Iraq’s Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, after initially describing the stampede as the tragic result of a false rumor, later said that insurgents were to blame and could expect retaliation. The Iraqi branch of Al-Qaida, headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, posted a statement online denying any involvement in the stampede. Others blamed badly positioned barricades and security checkpoints along the bridge.
Safe mass pilgrimage is possible, as demonstrated by the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadaloupe in Mexico, the largest pilgrimage site in the Western hemisphere.
More than 1 million worshippers gather there for a special feast day each year, but no major stampedes have occurred, said Timothy Matovina, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame who has attended the event.
Matovina described how site planners have constructed a sort of conveyor belt system, with several moving walkways that pass in front of the image of Our Lady of Guadaloupe, which is the main sacred attraction at the basilica.
“You can ride the walkway back and forth as many times as you want, but it prevents you from parking yourself in front of the image and having too many bodies up there at once,” he said.
As desirable as it may seem to make all pilgrimages safe and comfortable, a certain degree of hardship has always been part of the pilgrimage experience, according to Kerry Walters, a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College who has studied the phenomenon.
“Medieval accounts of Westerners going to Jerusalem are filled with stories of harrowing dangers,” Walters said. “The quality of the pilgrimage was proportionate to the amount of danger faced. It became a virtue in and of itself.”
This twinning of pilgrimage and peril was present at the recent tragedy in Iraq.
Shiite tradition recommends that pilgrims walk to Imam Musa’s mosque in Kadhimiya, rather than take more convenient transportation like camels or their modern-day motorized equivalent, according to Shiekh Fadhel al-Sahlani, an Iraqi-born imam of the Imam Khoie Islamic Center in Jamaica, New York.
The point of this hardship, he said, is for pilgrims to “show love and their ability to sacrifice.”
The same spirit explained why so many pilgrims, including women, children and the elderly, turned out for the pilgrimage, in spite of the danger of insurgent violence, Sheikh al-Sahlani said.
“Some of them were ready to sacrifice no matter what.”
Those who died in the stampede would not technically be considered martyrs in Shiite jurisprudence, said Sheikh al-Sahlani, as that term usually refers to one who was killed on a battlefield. In a larger sense, though, their deaths would not be vain, he said.
“If their intention (in going on the pilgrimage) was pure and clear for the sake of God, then definitely (the victims) will gain a great reward in the next life.”
MO/JL END RNS
Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a file photo of a large crowd of Muslims at a festival in Tajikistan. Photo is slugged RNS MUSLIMS TAJIK (no hyphens) and the story is slugged RNS-MUSLIMS-TAJIK. Also search the Web site for a photo of a massive crowd at the annual three-day hajj ritual in Saudi Arabia.
Search the site for a graphic listing tramplings at religious events. The same list can also be found in a sidebar, RNS-STAMPEDE-LIST.
