Hajj 2024: Unmasking Media Hypocrisy in Reporting Pilgrim Deaths

Khalid Afolabi

On May 28, 2022, what was supposed to be an exciting and suspense-filled show became an avalanche of anxieties and frustrations at Stade de France in Paris. A confederation of football fans across various club affiliations was stranded at the entrance of the stadium where Liverpool and Real Madrid must fight to finish to claim the most coveted football trophy in club football, the Champions League trophy. This started from the failure of the train lines to work fully, leading to traffic congestion and overcrowding, to the struggle against ticket forgery and the subsequent intervention of the Merseyside police with poor tactics. The chaos attained the climax with the occurrence of a stampede, which necessitated the pulling out of women and children from the crowd so they would not be crushed. One would expect that the following sunrise would stir uproar in the media when various news outlets compete to broadcast the tragedies that accompanied the game. But that would be demanding too much from the supposed most uniting factor of men in the contemporary world. It would be too expensive for the lucrative football world. So, the next day, since the media cannot feign obliviousness because of the virality of the matter, they embroidered the shortcomings of the game with sufficient subtleties in their broadcasts.

Conversely, in the last few days, various news outlets have published reports on casualties recorded in the just concluded Hajj exercise. Some of these reports came with seeming insidiousness. The BBC, for instance, in her headline on 21 June, writes, “What’s behind deaths at this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia?”. Reuters, in their own headlines on 19 June, reported, “Hundreds die of extreme heat on haj pilgrimage”. CBS News, in her own reports on 20 June, captions, “More than 1,000 people die at hajj pilgrimage 2024 amid extreme heat in Saudi Arabia”. Hindustan Times, on 24 June, also captions, “Hajj 2024 death toll crosses 1300; 100 Indians among the deceased”. Beneath these headlines, most of the contents did not consider the sensibilities of Muslims and how the hajj is one of the major fundamentals of Islam that Muslims refer to and practice. Phrases and clauses like “bodies laying on the streets around the Grand Mosque” (CBS News) the hajj pilgrimage tragedy (Hindustan Times), amongst others, manifest this supposition. Reuters even went as far as refreshing their readers’ minds on stampedes, tent fires and other accidents that had occurred during the exercise in the past thirty years.

While it is veritable that about 1,300 pilgrims lost their lives during this year’s exercise and that the rigour of the hajj exercise and the harsh weather conditions of the period may have created strains for the pilgrims, one may argue that most media broadcasts on the subject reeks of sinister motives if not Islamophobic tendencies. That most news outlets that reported the news in such an aggravated manner were non-Muslim sources cannot but affirm this hypothesis, even though they might have used innocent or mischievous Muslim reporters as sacrificial lambs.

One wonders why it is different stroke when it comes to football matters. With the tapestry of excitements, emotions, banters, rivalries, anxieties, dissatisfaction and congestion that orchestrate football games, particularly the knockout stages, one is astonished by how death reports hardly surface in news outlets in the aftermath. One of the captions of BBC of the earlier referenced 2022 Champions League Final drama was even interesting; “Champion League final review: ‘It is remarkable that no one lost their life’”. Similarly, with all the chaos that ensued from Roma vs Sevilla’s 2023 Europa League Final, the media did well in silence.

Perhaps such media energy on a football event was the 2022 World Cup that was hosted in Qatar. But an etiological exploration of that energy would reveal the energy had more to do with Qatar as a Muslim nation and not the football game. Reuters’ report, for instance, “World Cup 2022: how many migrant workers have died in Qatar?” largely centred on migrant workers’ rights in Qatar, death of migrant workers in Qatar and Qatar labour laws, not the football tournament itself.

By and large, if the CIA World Factbook estimates the global death rate to be 7.9 per 1000 population, one cannot but question if 1300 deaths from 2 million pilgrims that stayed at Makkah for about 2 weeks is really any spectacular. Going by the CIA estimation, the death rate would not even be spectacular if approximately 16,000 pilgrims (from such a population) had died during the exercise. How much more, most dead pilgrims, as reluctantly reported by some of the news outlets, were even unauthorised.

While this, therefore, calls for more objectivity, sincerity, and accountability from the media in reporting matters across spheres, it does not absolve Saudi Arabia from its inequities. Stricter measures should be taken to mitigate the penetration of unauthorized people into the exercise, and more innovations are needed to mollify weather conditions for the pilgrims.