The hajj was an enormous undertaking, even for the powerful in a society. While all Muslims are encouraged to try to go on hajj at least once in their lives, that doesn't necessarily make it realistic.

The chronicle of Baha ad-Din ibn Shaddad, who served as a sort of biographer for Salah ad-Din/Saladin, discussed Saladin's desire to go on hajj near the end of his history. At the end of Saladin's life, according to ibn Shaddad, Saladin expressed regret that he had never made the journey himself. He had spent much of his life fighting in wars with the ifranj (Franks), first under the sultan Nur al-Din and later in his own name, and establishing a large Sunni dynasty in much of the Levant and in Egypt. Now, I'm a little skeptical of this claim by ibn Shaddad. His history is basically a glorification of Saladin as the ultimate Muslim ruler. He promotes good religion in his subjects and his conquests are a part of God's plan for the world. Saladin's failure to go on hajj might have been an inconvenience to this narrative, so ibn Shaddad might have been trying to explain it away by saying, "Oh, well, he wanted to go on hajj, but he got sick and died before he could." With that said, if Salah ad-Din was as faithful as so many of his chroniclers seemed to think he was, it's not unreasonable to think that he might have genuinely wanted to go on hajj and just couldn't find the time. He was a busy man; those Franks aren't going to fight themselves. What I'm trying to get at is that even for someone as illustrious as Salah ad-Din, hajj wasn't a quick trip. He couldn't just pop over to Mecca in between campaigns.

Another example I'd like to point to is the famous hajj of Mansa Musa. Musa was the mansa/ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa in the fourteenth century CE. He's since gained a historical reputation as the 'richest man ever to live,' based on accounts of his voyage to Mecca. Since hajj is supposed to be a holy undertaking he made enormous gifts to the areas he passed through and allegedly hurt the Egyptian economy, basically through the inflation from the enormous gifts that he gave to the people there. Musa's hajj took him two years. Now, as someone who primarily focuses on the Crusades, I should say that that's a time that the warriors of the First Crusade would be envious of. More importantly, he stayed in Egypt according to one source for a full year, basically arriving two months before Ramadan of 724 hijri/1324 CE and staying long enough that he actually attended hajj during the Ramadan of 725 hijri. His hajj was an enormous undertaking. It promoted his rule and made him a legend in the annals of history. While his name has become well-known since then, we should take a step back and consider what all this means. He left his seat of power and was away for two years. While obviously a ruler doesn't rule on their own, so he wasn't abandoning Mali to go on this pilgrimage, he still needed to bring guards (10k+), slaves (allegedly also in the tens of thousands, though this number might be embellished), transports for his gifts, etc., etc. Clearly he thought that it was worth the enormous expenditure, and his journey was especially extravagant, but this is no small thing. He stepped away from his rule for multiple years in order to go on hajj. It served a dual purpose, but it might be said that that's the only way it ever could have been. Journey from West Africa to the Arabian Peninsula was not easy or short or simple, whatever excesses Musa indulged in. I think that only a journey that made Mansa Musa a world figure could have justified such an enormous trip.

I realize that this is a limited picture, and I haven't done extensive study on the hajj specifically, but I thought that these two pictures might go a ways to demonstrating some of the complexities of the hajj.

Gabrieli, Francesco. Arab Historians of the Crusades. New York, N.Y: Routledge. 2009.

Gomez, Michael A. African Dominion : a New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.