If Al Saud is deciding who is and is not Muslim I say the rest of us just voluntarily leave Saudi Islam. See how well they do when their hajj is domestic instead of international.
We can then change the hajj location yearly, give everyone a fair chance to participate and host. Like the Olympics.
Just pick a magic rock that a country or sect is in charge of for the year before they hand it off to someone else for the next hajj. The pageantry would be fun, and then every country who wants one can have their own box that we can circle around.
I would love to see the monopoly broken.
I completely agree, three. In fact, Ethiopia already has one - the
oldest in Africa, in fact. It would be of huge interest, both spiritually and historically, to me personally as an African American.
Its stones are also original, unlike the one at Makkah which can only boast a fragmented meteorite as ancient while the rest of its rocks were instated during the "renovations" of 1995.
As the site of the first Hijra, Ethiopia also houses some rare graves of Muhammad's early companions - marked unlike the ones at Madina - from a time when Islam was decidedly tolerant and peaceful. Again, I would not mind visiting those.
I also like the idea of rotating it on some sort of basis, lest the regimes that be capitalize on any given site for too long. Of course, there would still be some practicalities and logistics to work out there.
And incidentally, on a recent D.C. trip, it dawned on me that even we have a cubical Temple of Abraham here in the States. Of course, our Abraham is credited with abolishing slavery and saving democracy, which ain't too shabby as legacies go. We could get in on this thing, too.