By BADEA ABU AL-NAJA | ARAB NEWS

Published: Oct 16, 2011 23:38 Updated: Oct 16, 2011 23:38

MAKKAH: Until about 30 years ago, the Haj season was seen as an important source of income for Makkah residents. It helped them to earn money that enabled them to meet their daily expenses for a whole year.

The Makkawis would rent their houses, which were mostly not more than four stories, to the pilgrims and live for the rest of the year on the income from the rent.

The Makkawis would live in a room or two on the roof known as the “annex”. No matter how big the family, they would squeeze themselves into a small space, leaving the entire building to the pilgrims.

This trend has lately become a nightmare for residents. The municipality established special committees to check the buildings in order to decide whether they were suitable for renting out to pilgrims.

Though most of these residents spent most of their lives in these buildings without any accident, the committee said these old buildings were no longer suitable to accommodate pilgrims. This deprived the residents of an assured income during the holy season.

“We used to wait patiently for the advent of Haj. It was an opportunity for us to make money,” Talal Mahjoub, a mutawif, told Arab News.

“We would squeeze ourselves in a room or two on the roof or go out to live with our relatives and completely vacate our buildings for the pilgrims.”

Mahjoub said the pilgrims used to come to Makkah two months before Haj and leave a month later. “Now pilgrims come to Saudi Arabia only a few days before Haj and leave as soon as the rituals are over. They don’t even stay for a month,” he said.

Amina Zawawi, an old Saudi woman, said though their buildings were simple and not properly built, they would fetch a lot of cash in rents from pilgrims. “We could rent out a building of only a few stories to pilgrims for SR40,000 during the Haj season. This was enough money to sustain us for 12 months,” she said.

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NOTE BY THE EDITOR: We stayed in such a Makkawi house during our Hajj in 1970. It felt much more ‘real Makkah’ than later Umrah visits, where we stayed at Hilton Hotel, which could just as well have been in New York, London or Paris. I for one feel sorry on this development.