ABSTRACT
The entrepreneurial bureaucratization of pilgrimage and its transformation into a mass phenomenon have entailed a transformation in the relationship to the religious sphere. Basically, the true uniqueness of Iran, and more generally of Muslim countries, lies in the way that the practice of pilgrimage is now a mass phenomenon, in the modern social engineering on which it rests, and in the political economy. In the Islamic Republic of Iran alone, the number of pilgrims travelling abroad to make their devotions rises each year, according Hojjatoleslam Hassan Malek Mohammadi, the President of the Hajj and Pilgrimage fraction in Parliament, to 4 million, out of a population of some 72 million inhabitants. Management of hajj has been entrusted to a public institution, the Organization for the Hajj and Pilgrimage (OHP). Pilgrimage has become a mass phenomenon and has thus inevitably become, on the one hand, bureaucratized, and on the one hand rationalized like a business, with the possible risk of secularization.
