World's Largest Pilgrimage - Hajj Documentary

SUROOSH ALVI: And this is about as quiet as it gets. Hajj is the largest annual pilgrimage in the world. It happens in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. And for Muslims, it's a requirement that you have to do once in your lifetime. The Saudi government estimated that last year there were over 3 million pilgrims who attended, but the unofficial number is much higher. My parents are originally from Lahore, Pakistan. They're practicing Muslims, and last year they decided it was time for them to perform Hajj. So I went with them to help them with their journey, but also for myself as well. It was the first time for all of us. And I didn't go thinking I was going to make a VBS documentary. I just took the smallest handicam we had the office and literally shot from the hip. You're not allowed to shoot in most of the holy places. So this is the footage I managed to sneak out. We flew on Saudi Arabian airlines. It was about a 10 hour flight from JFK to Medina, where we spent 6 days getting mentally prepared for the Hajj that we were about to embark on. In pre-Islamic times, Medina was a place where the travelers who were crossing the desert in camel caravans would come to rest. It was kind of like a desert oasis. In modern times it's kind of the same thing, but there are less camels and more shopping malls and hotels. There's also stunning mosque there called the Prophet's Mosque, which is the second-holiest site in Islam. When you're there, you basically just go to the mosque five times a day, for six days straight, to get into a meditative state. The mosque is huge. It holds almost 700,000 people. And when we were there for the Friday prayer, it was pretty much full. Flying to Mecca from Medina was really interesting. Before we went to the airport, we cleansed ourselves in a very specific way. And then we had to put on a white seamless garment made our of terrycloth that all the pilgrims have to wear. And it's a renunciation of the life that you come from and is supposed to put everyone on the same level. There is no upper class or lower class. Everyone's the same. It's just you and the sheet, and that's it. [PRAYING] This is called getting into a state of Irham. Besides the clothes, there are a lot of other rules. You can't smoke. You can't have sex. You can't shave. You can't cut your nails, and there are a bunch of other no-no's. So we got this charter, just for the pilgrims, and 10 minutes after the plane took off from Medina, the captain announced that we'd flown over a designation, and we were in the zone near Mecca. And we all had to start saying a prayer. And our group guide got onto the loudspeaker system of the airplane and started yelling the prayer. Everyone started chanting it. And I had a moment where I looked around and saw all of these men and women in their white robes, the men with their beards, and just thought, if someone from the West could see us right now, they would think we were a bunch of fanatical Jihadis on some kind of an insane mission, when in reality, it was just pilgrims excited to go on this spiritual quest. I think what was most odd about this flight were the flight attendants, who were all Filipino, wearing their normal Saudi flight attendant outfits, looking like they would rather have any other gig in the world than this one. We landed in Jeddah and took a bus into Mecca. And that ride into the city was one of the wilder scenes I've ever seen in my life. There were all these pilgrims coming from all directions in all kinds of vehicles. And you see them riding on the tops of cars, and vans, and buses. I remember seeing a pilgrim jumping from the roof of one bus to another. Everybody's just trying to get to the city. Mecca is not a very big city. And during the year, it's a relatively mellow place, except during the week of Hajj. The city completely transforms and half the challenge of completing your Hajj is getting all these rituals done in a very strict timeline, dealing with the fact there are about three million other people there who try to do the exact same thing at the same time. After we checked into our hotel in Mecca we walked towards the Grand Mosque, which is also known as Masjid Al-Haram. It's the holiest place in Islam. And it's a massive structure. This Moscow can hold upwards of four million people with its outdoor and indoor space, which, during Hajj, is technically the largest gathering of people in the world at any given time. This mosque is what Muslims pray towards from all over the world. And as you're walking towards it, you feel the anticipation build. People have been waiting their whole lives to come to this place. And once you enter the mosque, then you see the Kabeh. The Kabeh is a black box in the center of the Grand Mosque. And it was built around 2000 BC. And people have been praying towards it since before Islam started. And when Prophet Muhammad finally showed up, he cleaned up the place, got rid of all the idols that the pagans had been worshipping, and reordained the building as the House of God. So in the Grand Mosque, we had to do our first ritual, which is called the Tawaf, which is basically doing seven counterclockwise laps around the Kabeh. And it's kind of like being in a mosh pit with hundreds of thousands of people, but instead of it being full of angry young punk kids, we were up against aggressive Bangladeshi grandmothers. I had my parents on each arm interlocked, and we held each other as we went around the structure seven times. You're staring at the Kabeh. It's a very intense and heavy vibe. But the one thing that's a total bummer is you look up and all you see are these massive, luxury five-star hotels for the super-rich Muslims who want to pray from the confines of their room. After running around the Kabeh seven times you have to do a bunch of other rituals in order to complete your Hajj. You have five days to get it done. And it's kind of like being on a scavenger hunt. You have a checklist. You have to be smart. And you have to use strategy in order to make this happen on schedule. You have to do the Sa'i, which is walking and running back and forth between two hills. Back in the day he used to be outdoors and now it's been turned into indoor structure with two very, very long corridors. You have to spend a day at Mount Arafat. It's where the Prophet delivered his last sermon from. And you spend the day in prayer, and contemplation, and beg for forgiveness for all of your sins. It's a very important day, and, after spending the majority of it in a tent, I walked out and went in the direction of the mountain. And I walked through this wild scene with people everywhere camped out with their animals. And as I got closer to mount Arafat, it was such an incredible sight because it had been completely transformed. It looked like a snow-covered peak. Our tour group operators, before we went on this trip, gave us some guidelines. And the last point on the sheet said, be patient. Be very patient. Be very, very patient. I fully grasped the meaning of this when we had to take a three-kilometer bus ride, and it ended up taking eight hours. It was the middle of the night, and we had to collect stones, it was one of our rituals, in a place called [INAUDIBLE]. And so we got off the bus. We navigated our way around sleeping bodies all over the ground, found the stones. And then it was time to pray, and so we just threw the prayer rugs down on the side of the highway and hit the mats. After picking up the stones, we got back on the bus and drove to Mina. The Valley of Mina is where the majority of the pilgrims stay. It's a tent city that fills up with, essentially, the population of Seattle for a week and then, after Hajj ends, it clears out again and goes away. It's tents as far as the eye can see. [SINGING IN PRAYER] From [INAUDIBLE] we arrived in Mina, and that's where we had to stone Satan. That's the next ritual. And this one was actually a lot of fun. You had to throw 21 stones, seven at three separate Satan-stoning stations. And I finally got to see what Satan looks like. Up until a couple years ago, Satan looked like three big pillars sticking out of a large pit. But the space wasn't big enough, and there was a stampede and people died. So the Saudi government, they built three ramps the size of a multi-lane highway, and there were three pillars inside of it that represent the devil. They're lit in shades of green. And there's a strange rumbling loud sound coming out of them. And as my dad pointed out, the whole thing made Satan look quite surreal. Before we finished the Hajj, we had to repeat some of the rituals that we'd already done. So we had to revisit Satan, throw rocks at him two more times. We had to go back to back to Mecca from Mina and do another seven counterclockwise laps. And then it was time for Eid, which marks the official end of Hajj, which is a big celebration. It's the end of the state of Irham that we've been in. And we slaughter an animal to celebrate it. And then the last thing you do is you shave your head. This is the line for the barber shop. This is the line. Soon, they will all be bald, all of these men. The barber shops in Mecca have these massive lines outside of them. And you see hundreds of thousands of baldos walking around town. And those people have all succeeded in completing their Hajj. And they're called Hajjis. Dealing with the Hajj every year is a huge logistical challenge for the Saudi government-- to the point where they've actually set up a Ministry of Hajj. In the past, there have been incidents where pilgrims were trampled, when ramps collapsed and pilgrims died, and the Saudi government has invested billions of dollars to create an infrastructure to make this work, with complex crowd control techniques. And what I saw when I went last year was something that somehow manages to work. But it kind of goes without saying that bringing 3 million people into such a small place is going to bring up some complications. There's a bit of a dark side. This many people in such a small place, it really gets unwieldy. And despite the Saudi government's best efforts to deal with this profound logistical challenge, the bottom line is that there are too many people. And people need things. They need places to sleep. They need food. The need toilets. And the poor people who were there, you see them basically camped out on the side of the road for days on end. It really felt like Mecca was maxing out by the end of Hajj. And the whole scene starts looking and feeling rather apocalyptic. No matter where all these people come from. No matter what they do. And no matter how rich or poor they might be, during this pilgrimage to Mecca it felt like everyone was just the same. It was unlike any place I've ever been and unlike anything I've ever experienced. I was there standing amongst millions of people, I was there with my family, but, on some level, I felt like I all alone, on a personal trek. And everyday life felt like it was hundreds of thousands of miles away. We flew back to New York. We landed in the morning, and I went straight back to the Vice offices, which may not have been the wisests of ideas. I felt like I'd been catapulted from one end of the universe to the other.