Saudi Arabia manages the Hajj’s immense pilgrim flows through permits, assigned periods and controlled routes. The Ministry of Hajj and Umrah describes official permits as essential to crowd management and the balanced distribution of pilgrims across the holy sites, while data systems support movement forecasts and dispatch.
The order of waiting is therefore not determined only by who arrives first. Allocating when and where people may move helps prevent millions of individual acts of worship from becoming one dangerous mass.