In Arabic hajj means heading for something, or, some lexicographers say, for something honoured; in legal usage it is heading for a specific place, the Sacred House and Arafa, at a specific time, the months of hajj, to perform specific acts, which for most scholars are the standing at Arafa, the tawaf and the sa'y, under specific conditions 1. Umra is heading for the Sacred House for tawaf and sa'y 1. Hajj is an individual duty, once in a lifetime, on every legally responsible person who is able, and one of the pillars of Islam, established by the Book, the Sunna and consensus 1. Its proof from the Book is Al Imran 97, which the Kuwaiti Encyclopaedia of Fiqh reads as an explicit text for the obligation 2 1.
The jurists differ on whether it falls due at once when its conditions are met: Abu Hanifa (in the sounder of two reports from him), Abu Yusuf, Malik (in the preferred report from him) and Ahmad held that it does; al-Shafi'i and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan held that it may be deferred 3. The Shafi'is argue that the Prophet ﷺ took Mecca in year 8 of the Hijra and did not perform the hajj until year 10 4. Five conditions, agreed among the scholars, make it obligatory: Islam, sanity, maturity, freedom and ability 5. Among its purposes the encyclopaedia names the gathering of Muslims from across the earth, where they come to know one another and grow close, and differences of wealth and poverty, race, colour and language fall away 6 5.
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