Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [82]
That night, the hotel operator took Hussain on the back of his motorbike to the two local hospitals. At the second one, Hussain found a photograph of his wife posted on the wall. She was wearing bangle bracelets in the photograph, just as he remembered. Sadiq, forty-seven, had been killed in the crush. Days later, a distraught Hussain tried to distill his wife’s essence into one sentence in an interview with the Yorkshire Post. “She was a brilliant girl, very hard-working, a really good wife and a very lovely lady who was always pleased to see people and happy to help people where she could.” Sadiq was buried in Saudi Arabia, along with more than 345 other victims.
The Physics of Crowds
After the stampede, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki blamed the victims. “Some of the pilgrims were undisciplined and hasty to finish the ritual as soon as possible,” he said. From the vantage point of the pilgrims themselves, specific nationalities seemed responsible. The Indonesians had held hands, rupturing the crowd like earthquake fault lines; the Nigerians were pushing; and on and on. It wasn’t hard to place blame. “You have all of these people from all these different places, people who may have never left their villages before, who don’t know how to line up, and they are moving simultaneously,” says Mohammed Abdul Aleem, CEO of Islamicity.com, an Islamic web portal run out of California. Aleem last went on hajj in 1999, and he remembers being lifted off his feet at one point, which was terrifying.
But here’s the puzzle: the crowd at the hajj is not a crowd of hooligans. It is, overall, better behaved than the vast majority of crowds. Imagine a million people seeking enlightenment. As frightening as the sheer density of the crowd could be, Aleem remembers, the crowd could also be surprisingly soothing: “You are in this sea of humanity, and when it is not threatening, and people are just moving calmly, it is one of the greatest feelings of being connected.”
That human connection, literally the opposite of panic, is what makes people want to go back to hajj, even after they’ve completed their required one trip. “Everyone is aligned, and the alignment creates harmony,” says John Kenneth Hautman, a Muslim in Washington, D.C. Hautman came to the hajj with few points of reference. He was a white, Catholic lawyer from Ohio before he met his future wife, a Muslim woman, on Match.com in 2005. Later that year, they got married, and Hautman converted, quit his job as a partner at Hogan & Hartson, a major law firm in town, and began to offer spiritual and legal advice on his own. Months later, he went on the hajj, and it was unlike anything he had experienced.
I met Hautman in May 2007 at the National Islamic Center, the main mosque in D.C., after Friday prayers. Over lunch outside the imam’s office, Hautman explained that he does not, in general, like crowds. If asked to watch the Fourth of July fireworks celebration on the National Mall, he would politely decline. But the hajj feels radically different, he says. There was a noticeable absence of rage, he remembers, despite the heat, despite the long waits, despite everything. “This was a colossal traffic jam, but I never heard anyone yelling.” He learned to just let the crowd carry him along, something he’d never done before.
So what happens to suddenly transform this wave of believers into a stampede? Why does the crowd coexist peacefully most of the time, only to devolve suddenly on certain occasions?
G. Keith Still is a Scottish mathematician who has spent years studying the hajj crowds and advising Saudi safety officials. His own obsession with crowds began in 1992, when he was