A Brief History
On July 2, 1990, 1,426 faithful Muslims attending the annual pilgrimage to Mecca called the “Hajj,” were trampled and suffocated to death in a tunnel. Sadly, the Hajj is no stranger to such disasters, although not necessarily on this scale.
Digging Deeper
The incident happened as several people fell off a pedestrian bridge over a huge column of other faithful passing through the 550 meter long tunnel. When the crowd below had people land on them, a rush followed causing constriction of the crowd in the tunnel, resulting in trampling and suffocation. The tunnel, designed for only about 1,000 people, quickly tried to accommodate about 5,000, an impossible task.
Many other religious activities have suffered catastrophic and tragic events, a fact we have previously discussed. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia said the event was “God’s will, which is above everything.” We ask you, does God really cause the faithful to suffer tragedy?
Question for students (and subscribers): Which religious related tragedy do you consider the worst? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Jones, Clay. Why Does God Allow Evil? Harvest House Publishers, 2017.
Raza, Hasan. Natural Disasters In Light of Quran and Sunnah. Kindle, 2014.
The featured image in this article, a diagram by AsceticRose of the locations and rites of Hajj, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
