Description
Book SynopsisNarrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them emotionally. Together, the written memoirs and oral accounts discussed in the book offer unique insights in Islam’s rich and evolving tradition of hajj and ʿumra storytelling. Contributors Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Notes on Contributors Notes on Transcriptions of Arabic and Other Terms Introduction. Narrativizing a Sensational Journey: Pilgrimage to Mecca Marjo Buitelaar Part 1 Historical Accounts 1 Hajj Narratives as a Discursive Tradition Richard van Leeuwen 2 ‘Coplas del peregrino de Puey Monçón’: A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Poem about the Hajj Miguel Ángel Vázquez 3 Sufism and the Hajj: Symbolic Meanings and Transregional Networks; Two Examples from the 16th and 18th Centuries Neda Saghaee and Richard van Leeuwen 4 Religious Emotion and Embodied Piety in the Ottoman Turkish Hajj Accounts of Evliyā Çelebī (1611–c. 1683) and Yūsuf Nābī (1642–1712) Yahya Nurgat 5 Comparing Two Persian Hajj Travelogues: Yaʿqub Mirzā (1868) and Farhād Mirzā (1875/76) Thomas Ecker 6 Othering and Being Othered: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Hajj Accounts by Iranian Shiʿi Women (1880–1901) Piotr Bachtin 7 Experiencing the Hajj in an Age of Change: Tuning the Emotions in Several Hajj Accounts of Pilgrims Travelling from Morocco and Egypt in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Ammeke Kateman 8 Inconveniences of the Hajj: The Arduous Journey of a Moroccan Shaykh in 1929 Richard van Leeuwen 9 From Moscow to Mecca: Entangled Soviet Narratives of Pilgrimage in the Unlikely 1965 ḥajjnāme of Fazliddin Muhammadiev Vladimir Bobrovnikov Part 2 Contemporary Accounts 10 Coming of Age in Mecca: Pilgrimage in the Life Stories of Two Young Adult Dutch Pilgrims Marjo Buitelaar 11 ‘Beyond Words’: Moroccan Pilgrims’ Narrations about Their Ineffable Hajj Experiences through Stories about the Senses Kholoud Al-Ajarma 12 Newlyweds and Other Young French Muslims Traveling to Mecca: Desires, Motivations and Senses of Belonging Jihan Safar and Leila Seurat 13 Patience and Pilgrimage: Dutch Hajj Pilgrims’ Emergent and Maturing Stories about the Virtue of ṣabr Marjo Buitelaar and Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany 14 Crowded Outlets: A North American Khoja Shiʿi Ithna Asheri Pilgrim’s Auto-ethnographic Memoir Zahir Janmohamed 15 Curating Post-hajj Experiences of North American Pilgrims: Information Practices as Community-Building Rituals Nadia Caidi 16 Mediating Mecca: Moroccan and Moroccan-Dutch Pilgrims’ Use of the Smartphone Marjo Buitelaar and Kholoud Al-Ajarma Epilogue. Narrating Mecca: Between Sense and Presence Simon Coleman Glossary Index
