In the deadliest tragedy to strike during the Hajj in over 25 years, more than 800 pilgrims have been killed and another almost 900 injured in a stampede in the valley of Mina near the holy city of Makkah during the ritual of stoning the pillars meant to be a symbolic incarnation of the devil. During the ritual, “a great number of pilgrims” converged at one point resulting in a stampede. Many of the dead were crushed, and others died due to suffocation and the stifling heat. In response, 4,000 emergency workers and 200 ambulances were deployed. At the time of writing, the tragedy is still under investigation and the number of casualties may rise. More than 2 million Muslims have descended in Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj this year, and every year the number of those making the pilgrimage keeps on rising. The annual Hajj, which always features a congregation of millions of people from all over the world who speak many different languages in a single spot at the same time means that organising the event to go smoothly and ensuring the safety of the participants is a serious challenge given the huge number of people to manage and linguistic barriers that inhibit effective communication. Previously, almost every year featured a similarly depressing but predictable tragedy due to a lack of infrastructure and poor management. In the past decade, however, due to the implementation of better infrastructure and safety measures, Hajj had been relatively incident-free since the fatal stampede of 2006. Unfortunately this year ominous signs of Saudi negligence had been popping up over the past month, and today’s catastrophe is the culmination of a series of incidents showing poor management. First, on September 11th, a huge crane came crashing down onto the Grand Mosque housing the Ka’abah just two weeks before the peak of the Hajj season. That calamity was the single worst accident as it killed 118 worshippers and injured 394. The Saudi response to it was slow and inefficient, while the belated preparations for the Hajj that necessitated such huge construction equipment to be present at the scene this late showed a poorly prepared regime. While the poor handling of this initial tragedy continued in full view of the world, two major hotels in Makkah caught fire within one week of each other, which required evacuation of more than a thousand pilgrims and 1,500 pilgrims respectively. In the light of these tragedies and the one we were witnessing yesterday, it is difficult to not draw the conclusion that Saudi management of the pilgrimage is thoroughly incompetent and an overhaul is needed.The case to make Hajj’s management an international matter is doubly justified when we see the response of Saudi officials in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. Trying to absolve the administration of any blame, Health Minister Khaled al-Falih laid the blame squarely on the pilgrims themselves for not “respecting the timetable” established by the authority. If anything, a failure to follow poorly given instructions by a group of linguistically diverse people reflects a management breakdown. The head of the central Hajj committee, Prince Khaled al-Faisal, was even more odious in his response as he seemed to be resorting to racism when he put the blame on “some pilgrims with African nationalities”. The indifference with which top members of the Hajj administration are responding to a tragedy on this scale makes one shudder. Conveniently making the suffering pilgrims a scapegoat is not only obtuse, it may turn out to be a criminal falsehood, as according to the head of Iran’s Hajj organisation, the two paths close to the scene of the incident had been inexplicably closed off by the Saudi authorities, resulting in the build-up of pilgrims.The Hajj is an event for all Muslims, and yet Saudi Arabia claims the sole right to organise it, purely on the grounds of geography. The Saudi regime is barely a century old; it has no innate right to lord over this global event. Though the ruling Saudi royals have made incremental changes and efforts to accommodate more pilgrims, their approach of marrying laissez faire capitalism with an exclusionary puritanical Wahhabi Islam has proved to be not only inadequate, but also a cause of anguish to the heterogeneous Islamic community. The constant building and rebuilding of hotels, high rises and commercial centres around the holy sites and the desecration of historical sites that hold meaning for many Muslims reveals a commercially interested, insensitive regime. The Muslim community should work towards achieving a collective responsibility for organizing Hajj to avoid such a disaster in the future. It is lamentable that Eid-ul-Azha, an event of celebration, will be overshadowed by such gloomy circumstances. *