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As this year’s Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca draws to an end with Muslims celebrating the festival of Eid al-adha, thousands of pilgrims will be returning home now – some in the hope of spiritual transformation, some relieved to have made the journey safely and others already planning how they might be able to return next year. Seen as the fifth pillar of Islam, the Hajj re-enacts many of the rituals connected to the Qur’anic story of Abraham’s sacrifice, Abraham, the patriarch and prophet, known as the friend of God, who with his wife and son, faced God’s trials and his blessings. Each year alongside the personal stories of the pilgrims, we hear of the infrastructure around hajj, the hajj, is after all big business, with Saudi Arabia pulling an estimated 12 billion dollars annually from hajj tourism. It has to continually invest to ensure peoples safety, decent sanitation, make sure everyone has water, facilities for the disabled, and minimise accidents and deaths. When 2-3 million are gathered in the same place, the whole hajj experience, has to be memorable for all the right reasons. But in their efforts to accommodate the rising number of pilgrims, the Saudi authorities have come under much criticism for destroying ancient sites and homes in Mecca. And in recent times, geopolitical events have resulted in some Muslims feeling that the pilgrimage has become too politicized, and that maybe the sacrifice one should make is actually not going to hajj. That hajj can no longer only be seen as an act of faith – it’s an issue of conscience. There are also a small number of clerics who have called for a boycott of the hajj. Earlier this year, Libya’s prominent and controversial Muslim Sunni cleric, went so far as to claim that anyone who embarked on a second pilgrimage was conducting “an act of sin rather than a good deed.” They argue that while ritual matters in religion, faith is far more than the observation of a ritual even when it is as significant as a pilgrimage – its essence must always be the call for justice, that is the ultimate Qur’anic message. Saudi Arabia for all its hospitality and efforts to modernize, is caught between political allegiances and religious ideologies. And yet despite the divisions, the two cities of Mecca and Medina remain sacred and aspirational for Muslims. The ordinary pilgrim wants to visit them, pray for forgiveness, be humbled and inspired by a story of sacrifice and submission. Hajj is a defining moment, for some, its life changing, and the desire to pray in these cities with the echoing sound of `Oh Lord I am here’ alongside thousands of others remains a rare and unifying act of piety.