Saudi authorities have agreed to allow Nigerian women pilgrims who were deported over lack of male guides to return to the holy land for this year’s Hajj, Speaker of the House of Representatives Aminu Tambuwal has said.


Tambuwal, who led a Presidential delegation to Saudi Arabia on Sunday to discuss the mahram impasse, returned to Abuja yesterday, announcing the decision of the Saudis, which paves way for over 1,000 deported women to perform the pilgrimage.



“The first good news is that all of those pilgrims who have secured valid visas are being taken back and the understanding we have secured with them is that they will be allowed entry into Saudi Arabia,” he told journalists soon after his arrival at the Presidential Wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport.

“The second success story is that we have reinforced the beautiful long standing relationship between Nigeria and Saudi Arabia. Assurances have been given to that effect.

“Also if need be we have requested that they extend the time of airlift of pilgrims and also to extend the time of issuance of visa to intending pilgrims.”

The Saudi authorities sent back over 1,000 women pilgrims because they had no male guides (maharam) which they said was an entry requirement for women pilgrims aged below 45.

But Nigeria reacted angrily, suspending airlift of pilgrims for 48 hours.

President Goodluck Jonathan then set up a committee headed by Tambuwal to interface with Saudi Arabia on the matter. Tambuwal’s team waited for over a week before they received the go-ahead to meet with officials in Jeddah.

In the meantime, the Saudis refused to buckle, forcing Nigeria to eat the humble pie and re-start ferrying pilgrims while ensuring each woman had a male guide thenceforth.

Airlift is scheduled to end in two weeks, but with thousands of intending pilgrims yet to be airlifted Nigeria is likely to require an extension of the deadline.

Tambuwal said a request for extension of airlift time and visa issuance still being considered “but we have secured understanding with them that those who have valid visas will be taken back to Saudi Arabia.”

On the issue of male guides, Tambuwal said: “Under Islamic jurisprudence, muharram (sic) is a requirement but there are different kinds of muharram.

“We have the Maliki, the Shafi’i, the Hambali and the Hanafi (schools of thought). These are the more pronounced schools and they have their different classification and definition of muharram and we have passed across that message to them and we believe they understand and reason with us that here in Nigeria the predominant Islamic school of jurisprudence is Maliki school of thought which allows for a group muharram.”

He said at their meeting, the Saudi Arabian team was led by their minister for Hajj affairs Bandar Al Hajjar.

Members of the Nigerian delegation are Emir of Zuru Alhaji Sani Sami, Alhaji Aminu Dantata, chairman of the Nigerian Hajj commission Alhaji Mohammed Bello, Professor Shehu Galadanchi and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs II Nuruddeen Mohammed.

Also in the trip were the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Defense, Bashir Adamu; deputy chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Anwalu Dahiru Saleh; and Rep. Mohammed Shamsuddeen Ango Abdullahi.

Speaking earlier on Sunday in Jeddah, Tambuwal urged deported pilgrims not to lose hope of returning.

“With the prompt intervention by the Federal Government and the levels of talks held so far, we can only urge the people affected not to be discouraged. A reasonable level of understanding had been reached with the Saudi authorities and it is believed that an amicable truce would be achieved with our visit,” he said.

http://www.dailytrust.com.ng/index.php/other-sections/lead-stories/178388-saudis-agree-to-take-back-deported-pilgrims

Nigeria: Hajj and the Saudis [I]

By Adamu Adamu, 5 October 2012

opinion

The news came that Saudi Arabia has detained for four to five days at two of its international airports without adequate food or drink and under deplorable condition, and then turned back more than a thousand of our women pilgrims who were not accompanied by a Mahram, a husband or a non-marriageable close relative.

Only in Saudi Arabia is it possible to detain a thousand helpless women--and pilgrims at that--and then deport them. And the Saudi attitude is that they don't listen to entreaties or have time to see the logic of any counter argument once they have made up their minds. And they have made up their minds that these female pilgrims from Nigeria will go back home. And home they did go back to, a move that threatened to spoil a Hajj that was on its way to becoming better than many before it.

It was clear that something strange was happening: it didn't even look like there was any new policy as such at all; because while our women were being detained at the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah, they were free and unmolested at the Prince Muhammad bin Abdul Aziz International Airport Medina, where they went through checks by security, customs and immigration without any hassle, besides the customary humiliation that all pilgrims have come to accept as normal in Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, even in Jeddah, 15 flights from Nigeria had discharge without any problem; problem started there with the 16th flight and in Medina with the fifth to that holy city. Ironically, it was in fact only after Nigerian officials had protested the novelty of the new procedure, pointing to the free passage that Nigerian female pilgrims were getting at Medina airport that Saudi officials clamped down on that airport too, suggesting that it was no policy at all. Or that they discovered the Mahram hadith last Saturday. And only when the news was publicised internationally and Nigerians started condemning this discriminatory treatment that the Saudis extended it to a contingent of pilgrims from Mali.

It is still difficult to understand exactly what was happening then; and because a non-policy suddenly became policy and apparently no one was able to do anything about it or be able to help the situation, this has led some to conclude that perhaps some power drunk Saudi official, most likely a prince on paramilitary probation at the immigration, for instance--at that post at that time, decided to give the order--that Nigerian women pilgrims not accompanied by a Mahram be stopped from entering the kingdom. Hitherto, this was not a requirement for the Hajj; but it shouldn't really be surprised when it is given or when it is arbitrarily and so discriminatorily applied.

Saudi officials are notorious for their disrespect to pilgrims, for racism especially against blacks, for disrespectful asabiyyah to other non-Arabs. You see Saudi subservience and real obsequiousness only when they encounter White Americans or when other foreigners speak English to them. To them, deporting irritating Hujjaj was therefore no big deal.

The deportations began even as Vice President Alhaji Namadi Sambo was discussing the issue with the Saudi ambassador to Nigeria. And the Federal Government was forced to call off the presidential committee raised under the leadership of House of Representatives Speaker Alhaji Aminu Waziri Tambuwal to negotiate with Saudi leadership, when, in a clear snub, it was advised that there would be no official to receive it.

By all standards these acts constituted insults to Nigeria; and though the diplomatic response was vigorous, it should have been swifter and more hard-line. Perhaps Nigeria's ambassador should have been temporarily recalled immediately, and the Saudi ambassador sent home after the expiration of the ultimatum that the Federal government gave. And if the matter was still not rescinded, Nigeria should have considered boycotting the Hajj this year. That should at least begin to teach them a lesson.

Our intending pilgrims would not have to suffer any loss spiritual because God had seen their intention and efforts and would recompense that with the reward of those on whose paths obstacles had been placed. The only thing they would have lost was "that which is of benefit to them," which every successful pilgrim ought to realise and experience, either collectively or individually.

In the end, the real loser will be the Saudi economy, though, awash as it is with petrodollars, it is going to be immune from this type of miniscule shock; it will hit harder at the innocent sector--the middle and lower classes, the restaurateurs, the shopkeepers, tentmakers, pharmacists and the taxi and bus drivers, the very sector that services the pilgrims directly and whose individual economies depend on pilgrim spending. If Nigeria boycotts the hajj, these people will lose the $321,505,000 that the pilgrims will be spending on them from their basic travelling allowance and the payment of royalty, not counting rates for tent and rent. But these are small fishes, and like all small fishes everywhere, they are eaten by Big Fish.

On the other hand, it is difficult to fight for or speak on behalf of Nigerians, especially when they are outside their country in large numbers whatever the reason for their outing, not least because of their unruliness--and in this, Muslims are no exception: they also are typically unruly, they are often less than tidy and they are mostly ignorant of the basic tenets of Islam, more especially the rites of the Hajj. But this doesn't give the Saudis the right to manufacture excuses to use to obstruct the path to the House of God for Nigerian pilgrims. Defenders of the Saudi move have spoken of immoral behaviour and ignorance as justification for what has been done; but the Saudis themselves have not given these reasons. They said they acted because female pilgrims came to their country without male escort.

No doubt, there is an injunction in the hadith disallowing women from travelling out alone on journeys that take more than three days. Shafi'iyyah holds that for a woman to perform Hajj, she must be able to undertake the journey in security, which can be found if she is accompanied by a husband or a Mahram or a group of trusted women; and further holds that it is permissible for a woman to perform Hajj if she finds only one trusted woman with whom to go. In Shafi'iyyah it is permissible for a woman to travel alone if she fears nothing on the road. Malikiyyah holds that a woman who does not find a Mahram or husband to travel with a secure group, which can be made up of men or women or a mixture of the two.

The classical scholars of Shafi'iyyah and Malikiyyah and almost all contemporary scholars have understood the prohibition in context, and accepted that it was occasioned by the prevalent lack of security of that age; so that when the environment became secure as it had today, the need for a Mahram to accompany a woman no longer subsisted. And the best proof for this is the Saudis' own attitude for not insisting on it all these years, despite the rigidity of its own Hanabilah on following the letter rather than the spirit of the Shariah; and the fact that even this year, they only remembered the hadith after 25 flights [15 in Jeddah, 10 in Medina] had landed in the kingdom with Nigerian women without Mahram in the manner they have now interpreted it.

The memorandum of understanding signed between the National Hajj Commission of Nigeria and Saudi authorities like all similar agreements signed over many years had no provision on the issue. The groups formed by the pilgrims and the agreement extracted by the Hajj commission satisfy the conditions set by our Madhhab, and the Saudis have no basis to return our female pilgrims. As an excuse therefore, this pretence must be discounted when a female pilgrim was returned to Nigeria despite the presence of her husband on the same flight.

But it is perhaps good hat this is happening to pilgrims from Nigeria, these Muslims whose love for the Holy Land and the two spiritual icons in contains has often been erroneously directed at the monarchy in charge of it, and who, in this, have been more Catholic than the Pope. A few years ago, no criticism of the Saudi regime would have gone without shrills of protests and rebuttals from some of the very preachers who are today condemning it.

This single act has done more to lift the blinkers from the eyes of some of its supporters such that, with luck, this may in future lead them to see more clearly and accept and finally realise the full implications of what the fact of its origin has done to Islam, and its continuing pro-Western and anti-Islamic stance in Middle Eastern geopolitics is doing to the Muslim world--and this much is more than all that its critics may by their own effort achieve. This deliberate and shabby insult to Nigerian pilgrims provides a suitable backdrop against which to examine and expose their mismanagement of the Hajj and their claims to the custodianship of Islam's Two Holy Places.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201210051006.html

Nigeria: Hajj and the Saudis (II)

By Adamu Adamu, 12 October 2012

column

In the last days of the Ottoman Empire, the people of the Arabian Peninsula had gone back to their pre-Islamic tribal existence of warfare and banditry. This was the time of European intrusion into the Muslim World, a world that became the victim of a web of international intrigue the like of which the world had not as yet seen. The careers of TE Lawrence [Lawrence of Arabia], Lady Gertrude Bell, RVC Bodley, Sir Richard Burton, St. John Philby, sir Percy Cox, Christian Hurgonje, Sir Henry McMahon, and, especially, Captain William Shakespear, who in fact died in the Battle of Jarrab by the side of Abd al-Aziz bin Saud, patriarch of the Saudi monarchy, ought to have made the nature of this intrigue. It was an intrigue that was spurned to secure the defeat of the Ottomans in order to grab Palestine and create Israel on other people's and Islamic auqaf land as a permanent colony in the heart of Islam.

The British were looking for hirelings ready to do their bidding, and they found willing accomplices in Sharif Husayn ibn Ali of Mecca and Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud of Najd. They funded and supplied ibn Saud with weapons, money, intelligence and even troops to defeat the tribes of Najd. They then subdued Hail in the centre of the peninsula and the vast Rub al-Khali and handed them over to him; and after they had got what they wanted from the Sharif of Mecca--the Arab Revolt--they armed ibn Saud to drive him out of Mecca. And when the Ikhwan of Wahhabiyyah, the ones who put his family in power, turned against him on account of his dealings with the British, he turned the British guns on them, with the support of fighter aircrafts. The rest--which is all past--is now history; it is the present that we must always remember--that they were created by the British, maintained in power by the United States, and had been doing their bidding ever since.

But Abd al-Aziz knew that it was not possible for anyone to occupy and claim title to the Haram; and to be fair to him, after worldwide Muslim opposition to his declaration as King of Hijaz prior to the unification of the Hijaz to Najd to create Saudi Arabia, he had accepted that he was not qualified, but that he was forced to declare himself king because of the indifference of foreign Muslims to answer his repeated requests for advice about the management of holy places. Even as recently as 1932, ibn Saud was declaring that he would seek the advice of the Ummah about its proper administration. But the British would not allow that; and they have very good reasons. Captain William Shakespeare had told them that whoever controlled the Haramayn would control the Muslim World.

And as late as 1881, the British Consul General in Jeddah, the Armenian James Zohrab, had spelled out in very clear terms the significance of the Hijaz and Hajj to the Foreign Office; and in his despatches he had warned the British of the danger: he wrote that he was sure some pilgrims "proceed on the Hajj for political reasons. Mecca, being free of European intrusion, is safe ground on which meetings can be held, ideas exchanged... Up to the present time we have kept no watch on those who come and go... thus meetings may be convened at Mecca at which combinations hostile to us may form without our knowing anything till the shell bursts in our midst..." what Zohrab feared was in fact the most important aspect of the Hajj.

And the king was dissuaded from handing over the management of the Haramayn to the International Council of Ulama that he had in mind when he innocently made the pledge, not by the indifference of foreign Muslims but by the British who realised that they could control the Muslim World by controlling whoever controlled the Hajj and Haramayn.

The Haramayn are the collective patrimony of all the Muslims of the world and no nation state or kingdom can have legitimate controlling rights over them. The real meaning of the Haramayn is that piece of divine real estate whose certificate of occupancy is held by God in Mecca and by the Holy Prophet [SAW] in Medina on behalf of Muslims. The caliph Umar bin Khattab understood this so well that during his Caliphate he disallowed whoever was in the precinct of the Haram from locking his house during the Hajj. He said the land belonged to the guests of God and they had more right to the houses than those living in them. So who gave the Saudis the right to tamper with and desecrate of the Haramayn along with all the memorabilia of the Holy Prophet [SAW] and his companions?

Even without the religious significance of the presence of these holy personages, the Islamic past and the Haramayn that held most of it should be preserved. Allah challenged Muslims to travel the wide world and see the evidence of the end of those who rejected faith: the structures they erected, the ruins of the civilisation they built, the artefacts that they left behind as legacy, the somersaulted cities in which they used to live and the images and concepts of the partners that they set up in competition to Allah. In the case of the greatest and most insolent of them, the Pharaoh, Allah even promised: 'This day shall we save your body, that you may be a sign to those who come after you! But verily many among mankind are heedless of Our Signs.' [Holy Quran 10:92] Allah wants us to take lessons from the life, actions, death and even body of Fir'aun but artefacts related to the Holy Prophet [SAW] and Islam must be destroyed to stop us from committing shirk!

A fatwa issued by Saudi Arabia's senior council of ulama in 1994 declared that preserving historical buildings might lead to polytheism. But the reality is that: it is not that the Saudis don't like preserving the past; in fact, they do, because they do preserve aspects of the past that they deem important and worthy of preserving: it is just the remembrance and legacy of the Holy Prophet [SAW] that they wish to destroy. Their opposition to celebrating Maulud al-Nabi is for the same reason, because they always eagerly celebrate their so-called National Day. Ask them: which of the Salaf celebrated national days?

And today, they are busy erecting museums dedicated to Arabia's pre-Islamic past. Darat al-Malik Abd al-Aziz in Riyadh is one of such dedicated to the memory and legacy of the founder of the modern Saudi kingdom and father of its current king, while the blessed house where the Holy Prophet [SAW] was born was one of the first targets of the Nejdi zealots who razed to the ground in 1924. Initially they turned it into a cattle market; and after an outcry and a campaign by some people in Mecca, it was temporarily turned into a library before it was put under lock and key. Now, in the frenzy for real estate development by construction magnets, it is slated for conversion into a parking lot. The house where the Holy Prophet [SAW] was born!

The graveyard of Amina, the Blessed, mother of the Messenger [SAW] was destroyed in 1998. And today, in place of the House of Khadijah, the Glorious, who, while she lived was the Holy Prophet [SAW]'s only wife, mother of Fatima al-Zahra, the Radiant and leader of the women of the world, is now a public toilet!

In place of the house of Sayyidna Abubakar [RA], close companion and father-in-law of the Holy Prophet [SAW], the first adult male to believe in Islam, and he who was distinguished by being "one of the two," and the first caliph to succeed the Holy Prophet [SAW] after his death, now stands in all its imperial glory the Mecca Hilton Hotel!

Dar al-Arqam, the place that served as the first school and mosque and sanctuary for the earliest Muslims during the heat and at the height of the Jahiliyyah in Mecca, a spot that Muslims should have given everything in the world to preserve and protect, has been demolished and is replaced by escalators!

The graveyard of Hamza [RA] and the other martyrs of Uhud have been demolished and the road leading to them as well as the one leading to the martyrs of Badr have been obliterated so that pilgrims should not go there to commit shirk!

Jabal al-Nur that houses the cave of Hira where the Holy Prophet [SAW] received his first revelation, and the cave in Mount Uhud where he was taken to be treated for his injuries have been fatwaed for destruction. But who is talking of caves when even the famous Seven Mosques of some of the Holy Prophet [SAW]'s companions--Abubakar, Umar, Salman, Ali, Bilal [RA] , his daughter Fatima and Masjid Qiblatayn and also al-Fath--have all been demolished. Their place has now been taken over by cash dispensing ATM machines! All so neat and modern!

And suppose all this massive Las Vegas-like spree of construction that is being done around the Haram today is not environmental and architectural destruction and constitutes what they say is custodianship of the Two Holy Places, so what? 'Do you consider the provision of drinks to pilgrims, or the maintenance of the Sacred Mosque equal to [the pious service of] those who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and strive with might and main in the cause of Allah? They are not equal in the sight of Allah. Allah guides not those who do wrong.' Holy Qur'an 9:19.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201210120725.html