CONTEMPORARY HAJ CROWD MANAGEMENT – AN ISLAMIC PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:The personnel involved in managing hajj must have tried their best to provide a smooth, safe, and effective way in managing all aspects of hajj pilgrims. One of the most critical aspects that necessitate a serious attention is the crowd management of the hajj pilgrims. 'Crowd' here refers to gathering of a huge number of human beings that creates a compact and crowded situation, and may entail with all sorts of risks and threats (Lofland, 1985:3; Musse and Thalman, 1997:39; Brown and Lewis, 1998:649; and Sharma, 2000:298). Being a limited space, that holds hundreds of millions of pilgrims at the specific time especially in Arafah, Mina and Mekah, the pilgrims and their movements inevitably have to be carefully, skillfully, and effectively managed. Otherwise, disasters such as human stampede and health problems originating from the crowd are inevitable1. In other events like sports, politics, and entertainment, even fights could also occur.Due to the above mentioned reasons, one may not reject the importance of crowd management in any case (Imran Khan, 2013), hence the emergence of various forms of crowd management is the need of the hour. Fruin, (1993), for example, proposed that all organizers, or any organization that is involved in crowd management to use FIST which contains four elements. Firstly, be alert at all time of the threats and risks of the crowd; secondly, having knowledge in crowd types that intend to be managed; thirdly, continuous monitoring; and fourthly, give a serious attention on time. Soo Chin Pin, Fazilah Haron, Siamak Sarmady, Abdullah Zawawi Talib and Ahamad Tajudin Khader (2010) suggest TRIZ Theory (in Russian, Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch), which includes compartmentalization principles, nesting principles, pre-action principles, dimensional movement principles, and feedback principles. There are various studies conducted such as by Mohammad Yamin, M. Mohammadian, X. Huang, and Sharma (2008), Mohammad Yamin (2009), Mohamed Mohandes (2010), Alnizari (2011), Al-Hashedi A. H., Muhammad Rafie Mohd Arshad, Hasimah Hj Mohamed, and Ahmad Suhaimi Baharudin (2013), Nabeel Koshak and Akram Nour (2013), and Mohammad Rahami Roslan, Noor Asmawati Samsuri, Mohd Kamal A Rahim, Mohd Afiq Abdul Majid and Mohd Hazmi Mokhtar (2013) which suggest the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) - a technology that is able to automatically identify and detect human beings, objects, businesses, and incidents using radio frequency (Finkenzeller, 2003; Hodges and McFarlane, 2005; Landt, 2005; and Hossain and Prybutok, 2008).However, the hajj crowd management should not be similar to the crowd management adopted in sports, political, and entertainment events. Unlike the crowd at sports, political, and entertainment events, the hajj pilgrims are all Muslims. The ultimate aim of all activities of each Muslim is for the sake of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala (SWT) to accomplish the pleasure of Allah SWT (mardhatillah), through implementations that are not in contrary to shari' ah (Yusuf al-Qaradawi, 1996). Since hajj is an Islamic religious activity, like any other Islamic activities, the hajj crowd management, logically, should be based on a concept that emerges from within Islamic epistemological and philosophical underpinnings, namely the Islamic crowd management itself (Muhammad Syukri Salleh, 2003). But what is meant by Islamic crowd management? How does the hajj crowd being managed now? How far does the current hajj crowd management system is in compliance to the Islamic crowd management?This paper attempts to seek for answers to these three questions. In doing so, the paper is divided into three main sections. Firstly, the concept of Islamic crowd management; secondly, the current practice of crowd management; and thirdly, the contemporary hajj crowd management system vis-a-vis the Islamic crowd management.THE CONCEPT OF ISLAMIC CROWD MANAGEMENT:The concept of Islamic crowd management has yet to exist indeed. …