Answer
Wa `alaykum As-Salamu waRahmatullahi wa Barakatuh.
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:
1- You cannot perform Hajj for yourself and for another person at the same time.
2- During hajj, you are allowed to run business as long as your primary intention is hajj.
Answering your question, Sheikh Ahmad Kutty, a Senior Lecturer and an Islamic Scholar at the Islamic Institute of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, states:
If you are asking whether you can do Hajj for yourself and another person at the same time, the answer is no. You can do hajj or Umrah only for one person at a time.
Furthermore, to do hajj on behalf of another person, you need to do hajj first for yourself. In his farewell Hajj, the Prophet (peace be upon him) saw a person saying, “O Allah, I am here to answer your call for hajj on behalf of Shubrumah’. Then the Prophet asked him, “Who is Shubrumah?’, he said, “my brother or a relative,’ then he asked, “Did you do hajj before for yourself?’. The man, said: No. The Prophet said, “First do it for yourself, then you can do it for your brother or relative (next year).” (Ahmad and others).
If, on the other hand, you are asking whether you can combine the intention of performing hajj and visiting the holy places or doing hajj and exploring business opportunities in the holy cities, then you are allowed to do that as long as your primary intention is hajj.
Allah says: “[However,] you will be committing no sin if [during the pilgrimage] you seek to obtain any bounty from your Lord.” (Al-Baqarah 2:198)
Almighty Allah knows best.
Editor’s note: This fatwa is from Ask the Scholar’s archive and was originally published at an earlier date.