Answer
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
All praise and thanks are due to Allah, and peace and blessings be upon His Messenger.
In this fatwa:
If you have a serious skin disease and it is not curable, and you are afraid of infecting others, you should not undertake Hajj.
Focusing more on your question, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a senior lecturer and Islamic scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, states:
As for your question, governments now conduct medical checkups and prevent those with contagious diseases from traveling to the holy places. If there are no such authorities, the question is whether a Muslim should make Hajj with the possibility of harming others. The answer is that your disease prevents you from making Hajj until you recover.
The Fiqh-based rule states that “preventing evil takes priority over bringing about benefit”, especially in the Hajj situation where the benefit goes to the individual while the harm will afflict a great number of people.
If you have a serious skin disease and it is not curable, and you are afraid of infecting others, you should not undertake Hajj. You are freed from the obligation to perform Hajj. However, if you wish, you can delegate someone to perform Hajj on your behalf.
By doing Hajj in this condition you may harm other people, while the principle of the jurisprudence states ‘let there be no harm or reciprocating harm.’
Remember, in Islam if we have been prevented from rendering an act of charity, we have other substitutes for what we have missed. So you don’t have to feel diminished or guilty.
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.