Deal facilitates traveling of Israeli Muslims to Mecca

[sonz]

The Jerusalem Post reported that an unwritten agreement between Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia permits 4,500 Israeli Muslims to travel every year to Saudi Arabia for the Haj.

Israeli Arabs are leaving this week to Saudi Arabia to perform one of the five pillars of Islam - the pilgrimage to Mecca.

"It's with the agreement of the Saudis," said Sheikh Hashem Abdulrahman, the mayor of Umm el-Fahm, and formerly the head of the Haj Association in Israel. "They know we are Israelis."

According to Abdulrahman, the number of Israelis performing Haj this year is the highest in the world in proportion to the country’s number of Muslims.

Saudi Authorities only allow in 1,000 pilgrims per every million Muslims in a country. There are 1.1 million Muslims in Israel, however, "they let us send four and a half times more than is allowed," Abdulrahman said.

The Muslim organizations send a list with the names of Haj pilgrims to the Islamic Wakf in Jerusalem which passes it on to the Wakf in Jordan, which later requests temporary Jordanian passports from the Jordanian Interior Ministry for the pilgrims. Then the passports are brought to the Saudi Embassy in Amman, where they get visas.

Once the Israeli pilgrims arrive in Amman, they deposit their Israeli passports with the Islamic Wakf and get their temporary Jordanian passports, already stamped with a Saudi visa.

So far about 622,000 Muslims from various countries arrived in Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca which will begin on the 7th of January this year, and continues through the 13th of the same month.

In recent years around 2 million Muslims performed the annual Hajj, or pilgrimage, one of the five main pillars of Islam and required from every devout and able Muslim.

Source: The Jerusalem Post- Middle East Times