Married couples will find themselves separated for much, if not all of the trip to make hajj. Unless you pay for separate accommodations, you will find that hotels typically divide guests into all-male and all-female rooms. Like everything else at hajj, communication between couples becomes more complicated. Messages are conveyed–through that brother to his wife to your wife to meet you here or there at this or that time. Or you will knock and deliver the message to your wife through the door to her hotel room, because she is sharing it with 2 or 3 or more other women. You will wait patiently in the hallway until your wife is covered properly and may leave her room, or until the other women have time to move out of the line of sight and your wife will open the door just a crack for a brief conversation between you. During your stay at the hotel, issues of propriety are usually not a problem.
At Mina, accommodations are again divided by gender. The huge tents may hold as many as 50-75 people. Yet somehow, because there are tents and not rooms, canvas and not walls, tent flaps and not doors, some men seem to think that these less substantial barriers call for less regard for the privacy of the women. Husbands will call out to their wives and look through a crack between the tent flaps at the same time. At least one man stuck his entire head through the flaps while trying to find and communicate with his wife.
Does not the probability of seeing that which should not been seen deter you? It should. Hajj is no time to forget the rules of conduct between men and women. Call to your wife. You may walk around the outside of the tent and call from various locations, but that is all you may do. If she or another of the women in her group do not answer, then leave and come back later or wait outside of the tent for her to return. Or wait until someone else in the group emerges and can carry a message for you.
Whatever the need or the urgency, there is nothing else to be done. It is hajj and in all matters great or smalll, hajj is first and foremost a test–a time to trust in Allah–even in matters of communication between husband and wife.
Do not act with impatience (which is one wrong deed) and breach the privacy of the women (a second wrong deed) simply because the tent is just the tent and there are more women in it. Hajj is not the time for gaining new sins while trying to ask Allah to forgive the old ones. So please, brothers, don’t do it.
