Hajj and Umrah in Data

2026 · Balady Atlas

A bilingual data story on the world’s largest recurring pilgrimage. For the Royal Commission for Makkah and Madinah, made at Méridien.

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The task

Made at Méridien, as part of my work there, for the Royal Commission for Makkah and Madinah through Balady Atlas. The subject was the world’s largest recurring pilgrimage, told for a general reader in two languages.

The result

A bilingual data story, English and Arabic, live on balady-atlas.mrdn.world. It covers crowd density at the Kaaba, country quotas, the 33-year drift of Hajj through the seasons, and the cooling infrastructure behind it.

Project sheet

My role: Research, script, and prototypes of every visualization. Made at Méridien.
Client: Royal Commission for Makkah and Madinah, through Balady Atlas.
Languages: English and Arabic.
Data: Temperatures in Makkah from Open-Meteo.
When: 2026.

From the story

The Islamic calendar and the heat on the days of Hajj, drawn as a spiral. The form does real work here. The Islamic year is 10 or 11 days shorter than the solar one, so the dates of Hajj move earlier every year and come back to roughly the same place after about 33 years. Plot that against the months and the calendar makes a spiral by itself, there is nothing to invent. Colour every Hajj by the temperature in Makkah on those days, from Open-Meteo, and you can watch the pilgrimage go into the summer and out of it, and see that the last turn is hotter than the one before: Hajj nights are 5 to 6°C warmer than 30 years ago. The prototype is mine, the production version is the Méridien team's.

The opening screen, the Kaaba ringed by the trails of circling pilgrims — The opening screen. The Kaaba, and around it the trails of the tawaf.

A world map of the flight routes pilgrims take to Mecca — Where the pilgrims come from, and the routes that carry them: Casablanca, Istanbul, Karachi, Dhaka, Jakarta.

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