Travel delay for Mecca-bound N.Va. Muslims

For months, the 17 Northern Virginians had excitedly prepared for the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is sacred to devout Muslims.

They had saved thousands of dollars for a package trip to Saudi Arabia, taken classes on the pilgrimage and promised to make prayers for friends and relatives. A California travel agency had arranged their tickets and gotten the visas for their passports, shipping them overnight via UPS.

But according to the travelers, the passports, which were supposed to have all been delivered last Tuesday, never arrived.

“The UPS guy came,” said Cemal Gumus, the imam at Dar AlNoor mosque in Manassas and one of the travelers. “I said, ‘Man, where is my package?’ He said, ‘No, there is no package for you.’ ”

It took three days to track it down, Gumus said. At first, UPS said the package was lost. On Friday, hours before the group was scheduled to depart from Dulles International Airport, the group learned that the package had been seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

After a flurry of phone calls, the passports were released and arrived Saturday. But by then, all but one of the travelers had missed their flight.

“Grown men were crying,” said Rafi Uddin Ahmed, vice president of the mosque and of the Manassas-based Muslim Association of Virginia. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Who knows if we’ll be alive next year, and if they miss out on this one important tenet of their religion, they may not have another chance.”

The hajj season comes once a year, and there is a limited window to enter Saudi Arabia before entries are cut off. The pilgrimage attracts more than 2 million Muslims; about 10,000 American Muslims go each year.

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Please make dua for these travelers and any others who may be facing difficulties in their hajj travels.  CAIR is asking any American Muslims who have experienced similar actions by UPS or CBP to file a report with CAIR.

“The American Muslim community needs to know whether packages sent from point to point within our borders are being screened based on the religion of the sender or recipient, and whether or not such packages can be seized and opened by government officials without a warrant,” said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper.