Pilgrimage: Conditions making it
due
Q428 :Are there any conditions which make the duty
of pilgrimage due?
A428 : In order that pilgrimage becomes due, a
person must be sane and must have attained puberty. Moreover, he must
be able to afford and undertake it. This means that an insane person is
not required to do the pilgrimage, nor is it acceptable from him. A
child below the age of puberty may do the pilgrimage and his parents or
guardian who take him will also be rewarded for that pilgrimage, but
pilgrimage in his case is not a duty. Therefore, when he reaches the
age of puberty and pilgrimage becomes a duty, he is not considered to
have fulfilled it because when he did the pilgrimage he was very young.
This is the same like offering Dhuhr prayer before it is due. It would
not count as an obligatory prayer, but as a voluntary one. When Dhuhr
falls due, the person is required to offer it then. The ability,
according to scholars, is both financial and physical. In the early
generations of Islam, scholars used to speak of food and transport and
the ability to provide these for oneself during the pilgrimage.
Nowadays, there are other expenses involved in undertaking the journey
to do the pilgrimage. Therefore, with food we must include what a
pilgrim reasonably needs during his stay in the pilgrimage until he
returns home, such as a reasonable accommodation, any fee he may have
to pay on his journey as in the case of pilgrims who must travel
through one or more countries and have to pay fees for their visas.
While in the past transport meant a camel, owned or leased, today we
may speak of fares of a plane or a boat. It is a condition of
financial ability that the prospective pilgrim should have enough to
cover all this in excess of what he and his dependents may need of
accommodation, food, etc. If he has incurred some debts, whether to
other people or to Allah, as in the case when he may not have paid some
zakah which is due, the money he needs for his journey should also be
in excess of money required to cover his debts or he should first
settle his debts. If a person does not own enough to cover his
expenses during his pilgrimage, but someone else, say a friend or a
relative, or any other person or a company, offers to pay his expenses
it is not obligatory for him to accept the offer. If we were to say
that he must accept, then pilgrimage becomes due from him. It is not
the case, because the financial ability must be his own. Nevertheless,
if he accepts and undertakes the pilgrimage, he has fulfilled his duty.
It is important to point out that Islam takes everything into
consideration. In some cases, accepting such an offer may put the
person concerned in a position of moral indebtedness to the one who has
offered him that. What Islam is telling him is that if he declines that
offer, he incurs no sin and he has not failed to fulfill his duty.
Someone may ask whether he should change his lifestyle in order to meet
the expenses of pilgrimage. Well, there can be no rigid rule in this
regard. Suppose that a married couple have no children and are unlikely
to have any, but the man has a big house or a villa to live in, yet he
has not much money of his own. If he sells his house to buy a smaller
but perfectly adequate one, he will have the required money, then he
should sell it. On the other hand, if a man needs his house for the
accommodation of his family, or to use its rent for maintaining his
dependents, he need not sell it. If he has something in excess of his
needs, he should sell it to meet the expenses of pilgrimage. On the
other hand, a person is not required to decrease the level of his stock
in his business if that will mean a decrease in his regular income. If
he has tools which he needs for his work, he need not sell them. But if
he does not particularly need them, then he should sell them. Debt is
another point of consideration. The normal situation is that a debtor
need not offer the pilgrimage until he has settled his debts. However,
if he has bought a car on installments and his regular income makes him
perfectly able to pay each installment on time until he clears the
debt, and yet he has enough money to meet the pilgrimage expenses, he
should do the pilgrimage.
Our Dialogue ( Source : Arab News - Jeddah )