Hajj makes Muslims more tolerant, study suggests

Observing hajj to Mecca for Muslims tends to make them more religiously observant and also more tolerant a huge study of Pakistani pilgrims suggests:

Muslims who undertake the hajj “return with more positive views towards people from other countries,” are more likely to say “that people of different religions are equal,” and are twice as likely as other religious Muslims to condemn Osama bin Laden, the study found.

“People become more orthodox yet more tolerant,” one of the study’s authors, Asim Ijaz Khwaja of Harvard University, said of hajjis — those who make the pilgrimage.

He described the study’s findings Monday, as this year’s annual pilgrimage reached its climax, the symbolic stoning of the devil on the festival of Eid al-Adha, an Islamic holiday that traditionally marks the end of the hajj.