Pilgrimage and the Making of the Islamic World
AS ISLAM’S HOLIEST CITY AND THE BIRTHPLACE OF THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD (570–632 CE), Mecca’s world-historical significance is almost self-evident. It is both the historical cradle of the faith and the global Islamic community’s spiritual center of gravity. When Muslims kneel to perform their five daily prayers, it is toward Mecca that they must face. It is also the site of the annual pilgrimage, the hajj.
All great cities conjure certain images in our minds. When one thinks of New York, one inevitably imagines the Statue of Liberty set against the city’s jagged skyline. Likewise, the Eiffel Tower is synonymous with Paris. When one imagines Mecca, the image that invariably comes to mind is an aerial panorama of the Grand Mosque (Masjid al-Haram). The massive mosque’s nine minarets towering over the Ka‘ba and its great open-air courtyard, overflowing with a sea of pilgrims hailing from every corner of the globe, is among the most awe-inspiring displays of man’s shared humanity. Dressed in their simple white garments, pilgrims proclaim the equality of all believers in the eyes of God, regardless of their age, class, gender, language, nationality, or race. Standing shoulder to shoulder, circling around the black and gold cloth of the Ka‘ba, and performing their prayers in unison, these markers of difference melt away as the pilgrims affirm their collective identity as Muslims.
As one of the five pillars of Islam, the performance of this ritual is an obligation for all Muslims at least once in their life, so long as they are physically and financially able. Each year nearly three million Muslims descend upon Mecca and its environs to participate in a series of sacred reenactments, physically and spiritually linking them to their forbearers. In addition to marking the personal zenith of Muslim spiritual life, these rituals also reinforce the individual’s connection to the approximately 1.5 billion believers who make up the global Islamic community.
Despite its centrality to Islam, historians have shown a remarkable indifference to the hajj. Owing in part to its global nature, historians have struggled to capture the dynamic encounters between the local and regional authorities governing Mecca and its surrounding region, the Hijaz, and the diverse populations of pilgrims they host. However, Mecca’s sacred status has often led scholars to treat it as almost beyond the bounds of the mundane politics that constitute the history of ordinary cities. Although many would point to the challenges of conducting research in Saudi Arabia or the fact that non-Muslims are prohibited from entering the Holy Places in Mecca and Medina as the greatest hindrances to Western academics, I would argue that these are actually not the biggest obstacles facing scholars. When we think of Mecca as the center of the Islamic world, we are implying a relationship between the local and the global. However, these questions cannot be adequately handled only by experts of Saudi Arabia or the Arab world. Some of the most penetrating explorations of Mecca’s global significance have come from scholars of non-Arab societies such as Indonesia, India, Turkey, and West Africa. Thus, rather than thinking of Mecca’s history only as Arab history, we must begin to take more seriously the cross-cutting webs of exchanges connecting Mecca to the rest of the Islamic world.
These tangled webs were precisely what first sparked my own interest in Mecca. When I began my graduate studies, I initially planned to study India. When asked to explain how my interests migrated from India to Arabia, I have often joked that I followed the pilgrims. What started as an essay on cholera outbreaks among India’s pilgrims has become a career-long obsession with sketching Mecca’s global tentacles. This project has led me to destinations as diverse as Britain, Egypt, India, Turkey, and Yemen. To the casual observer these locations might appear completely unrelated; however, even the most obscure routes to Mecca are littered with traces of the cross-cultural encounters the hajj generates.
I vividly remember visiting a tiny, barren island located just off the coast of Yemen. By most measures Kamaran Island is the definition of insignificance. However, a brief survey of the island’s history reveals its position as a strategic gateway to the Red Sea. It was here that Afonso de Albuquerque, Viceroy of the Estado da Índia, anchored the Portuguese fleet in 1513 in preparation for an offensive against the Hijaz. De Albuquerque’s grandiose scheme included plans to attack the Hijazi ports of Jidda and Yanbu‘, destroy Mecca, and steal Muhammad’s body from its tomb in Medina in the hope of ransoming it for the return of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount to Christian hands. Later, in 1882, Kamaran served as a fortification of different kind. In an often losing battle to halt the spread of deadly outbreaks of cholera carried aboard steamships from India, Ottoman and European statesmen established an international quarantine station to prevent infected pilgrims from reaching Mecca. While on Kamaran I was fortunate enough to interview several elderly men who recalled the bustling steamship traffic arriving from India and Indonesia prior to the station’s closure in 1952. As we talked, I began to better understand how those pilgrims, having braved long and arduous voyages across the Indian Ocean in overcrowded, often unsanitary vessels, must have been disheartened by the suffocating heat and invasive medical inspections that awaited them upon their arrival on this windswept desert island. I cannot help but marvel at the bravery and solemn piety that drove pilgrims to endure discomfort and even face death to reach their sacred destination as well as how Kamaran and thousands of other long-forgotten places bear witness to the centripetal forces that pull and connect every corner of the Islamic world to Mecca.
MECCA AND THE WORLD:
From the Age of Ignorance to the Dawn of Islam
Mecca is located approximately forty-five miles (seventy-two kilometers) west of the Red Sea port of Jidda in the Hijaz region of present-day Saudi Arabia. Founded around 400 CE, it sits in a barren valley situated between two ranges of steep hills. Like much of the Arabian Peninsula, rainfall is scant and irregular. However, when it does come, it often causes violent floods. Mecca is also plagued by extreme heat, with summer temperatures often soaring above 40º C (104º F). As the medieval Arab geographer al-Maqaddisi bluntly put it, Mecca’s climate is characterized by “suffocating heat, deadly winds, and clouds of flies.”
Due to its inhospitable climate, the Hijaz was a land of scarcity and deprivation compared to the climates of the Fertile Crescent to its north and Yemen to its south. In contrast to these agriculture-rich cradles of civilization, the Arabian interior could only support nomadic pastoralism. Farming was limited to scattered oases. Thus, unlike the complex societies of the Fertile Crescent, Arabian pastoralism produced a tribal culture of considerably less material sophistication. Although less hierarchical than the powerful states to the north, these more egalitarian tribal societies were chronically anarchic, as they were plagued by blood feuds and warfare.
This did not mean that the Arabian Peninsula was isolated from the outside world. In the sixth century Arabia had substantial contacts with Byzantine Syria as well as the Persian Sassanids, who dominated Mesopotamia and the Arabian coasts of the Persian Gulf. Although the golden age of the Arabian incense trade had long since passed with the collapse of its Roman markets, the contraction of the Byzantine and Sassanid frontiers to their north reinvigorated the Arabian caravan trade. Operating within this modest trading zone, Meccan merchants exchanged leather, raisins, and dates for items like textiles and oil more readily available in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Yemen. Owing to these contacts, Meccans were well acquainted with Byzantine and Persian affairs.
Like most of their fellow Arabs, Meccans were polytheists. Indeed, prior to the Islamic era Mecca was an important pagan pilgrimage center. Because pre-Islamic Arabia was plagued with tribal conflict, religious mechanisms were developed to ensure periods of truce, during which pilgrimages and commercial activities could be conducted without the threat of violence. According to this system, Mecca was defined as a haram (sacred space) where bloodshed was strictly prohibited. The haram contained a cubical shrine, called the Ka‘ba, which housed the sacred idols of the surrounding tribes of the region. This attraction positioned Mecca as a nexus of intertribal trade and diplomacy.
The Prophet’s Mecca: Muhammad and the Birth of Islam
To understand Mecca and its global connections, it is important to understand Islam’s development and relationship to the city. By the sixth century outside influences had begun to challenge the region’s pagan traditions. There were well-established Jewish populations in the Hijaz and Yemen. In Syria and among the Arab tribes of the northern desert the prevailing Christian doctrine from the fifth century onward was Monophysitism, a theological position espousing that Jesus Christ’s human and divine natures are unified. Monophysitism had also gained importance in both the Axumite Empire in Ethiopia and across the Red Sea in Yemen.
In the decades preceding Muhammad’s birth, conflict between Monophysites and Jews in Yemen sparked an interimperial rivalry among the Byzantines, Axumites, and Persians. In 525 the Byzantine Emperor Justinian backed an Axumite invasion of Yemen to avenge the slaughter of the Christian community in Najran at the hands of the Jewish king of Yemen. Following the conquest of Yemen, the Ethiopian viceroy Abraha had a magnificent church built in Sana‘a’ in an attempt to divert Mecca’s lucrative pilgrimage trade to Yemen. Not satisfied with this, Abraha’s army marched on Mecca in 570, intent on destroying the Ka‘ba. Abraha’s forces included one of the ancient world’s greatest psychological weapons, the elephant. This episode is remembered in Sura al-Fil (The Elephant, Qur’an 105):
Has thou not seen how thy Lord did with the Men of the Elephant?
Did He not make their guile to go astray?
And He loosed upon them birds in flights,
Hurling against them stones of baked clay
And He made them like green blades devoured.
According to the great Muslim historian Ibn Ishaq, Abraha’s army was likely the victim of an outbreak of measles or smallpox rather than divine intervention. However, the result was the same. Abraha retreated and was soon ousted from Yemen by the Persians.
According to Islamic tradition, the Year of the Elephant coincided with Muhammad’s birth, illustrating the degree to which, even before Muhammad’s prophetic career, monotheism had already begun to encroach on Mecca’s pagan traditions. This episode also underscores the privileged status of Muhammad’s Quraysh tribe as the guardians of the Ka‘ba. After all, it was Muhammad’s grandfather, ‘Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim (d. ca. 578), who led the effort to defend Mecca against Abraha’s army. Five generations before Muhammad, the Quraysh were united by Qusayy ibn Kilab. Around 400, Qusayy gathered his scattered tribesmen, settled them in Mecca, and built the city’s first permanent habitations. Under Qusayy’s leadership, the Quraysh also established themselves as the guardians of the Meccan sanctuary. Qusayy’s grandson, Hashim ibn ‘Abd Manaf, is credited with having obtained edicts of protection from the Byzantine Emperor, thereby allowing Quraysh caravans to operate unmolested in Byzantine lands; his brothers negotiated similar concessions with Persia, Yemen, and Ethiopia. These alliances shaped the Mecca into which Muhammad was born. Despite his tribe’s prominence, however, Muhammad’s position was by no means secure. He was an orphan in a society dominated by kinship ties. Having lost his father, mother, and grandfather by age eight, he was eventually taken in by his uncle. While the Qur’an says little about Muhammad’s life before his prophetic mission, biographies (sira) and reports of Muhammad’s sayings and deeds (hadith), provide a fuller picture. A wealthy widow named Khadija hired Muhammad at age twenty-five to oversee her caravan trade with Syria. Muhammad performed well and, in time, Khadija married him. At this stage Muhammad remained a somewhat marginal figure, owing much to his wife’s wealth and status. Although Muhammad’s life up to this point offered few hints of his eventual importance, numerous hagiographical sources report miraculous signs of his future prophecy. For example, on one occasion when Muhammad accompanied his uncle on the caravan to Syria, he was recognized by a Christian monk who is reported to have foretold the boy’s role as God’s messenger.
In 610, at age forty, Muhammad’s prophetic career began on nearby Jabal al-Nur. Following pagan tradition, Muhammad was in the habit of withdrawing to the mountain cave of Hira’ to meditate. One night while Muhammad was sleeping in the cave, the angel Gabriel (Jibril) appeared before him and commanded him to “recite!” Over time Gabriel’s visits revealed the scriptures we now know as the Qur’an. For twelve years between this initial revelation and Muhammad’s departure from Mecca in 622, Gabriel introduced Muhammad to the new moral code and system of ritual, which we now know as Islam.
Above all else Muhammad’s message was one of strict monotheism. At its heart was the concept of tawhid, which declares the absolute oneness, unity, and uniqueness of God as the creator and sustainer of the universe. This was a rebuke of both Arabian idolatry and the Christian Trinity. The strongest statement of this critique was revealed in Sura al-Ikhlas (the Purity, Qur’an 112), which declares that, unlike Christian conceptions of God as both father and son, Allah neither “begets nor is He begotten; and none is like Him.”
Despite critical differences between Islam and its monotheistic relatives, Islamic traditions go to great pains to connect Muhammad and Mecca with the biblical history of monotheism. This revision of biblical genealogy takes the story of Abraham (Ibrahim) as its point of departure. According to the Book of Genesis, Abraham’s wife Sarah was able to bear him a son, Isaac (Ishaq), only extremely late in life, by which time he already had a son, Ishmael (Isma‘il), by his Egyptian concubine Hagar. This led to bitterness between the two women, and upon Isaac’s birth, Hagar and Ishmael were sent away. During her flight into the wilderness Hagar ran out of water. Ishmael was on the verge of dying of thirst when again an angel came to their rescue, miraculously revealing a well. The angel promised Hagar that Ishmael would father a great nation. Although the Bible records that Ishmael did indeed have twelve sons, giving rise to the twelve Ishmaelite tribes, Abraham’s heir was Isaac. Thus, it was with Isaac and his Israelite descendents that God made His everlasting covenant. From this perspective, the Ishmaelite lines seemed to dead-end.
However, Islam reopened the Ishmaelite line as an alternative Arabian branch in the history of monotheism. According to Islamic tradition, in the wake of the quarrel between Sarah and Hagar, Abraham took Hagar and Ishmael to an uninhabited location and left them there. As in the Bible, Hagar and Ishmael ran out of water and an angel intervened. In the Islamic version, however, Gabriel appears, striking the ground with his foot, from which a spring bursts forth. As it turns out, the spring was the holy Well of Zamzam, marking the site of the Meccan sanctuary. The Qur’an then takes this connection a step further. In Sura al-Baqara (The Cow, Qur’an 2:125–127), Allah commands Abraham and Ishmael to build a sanctuary and establish the rites of pilgrimage to it. Thus, Muslims claim Abraham and Ishmael as the architects of the Ka‘ba.
In addition to tying Abraham to Mecca, the Qur’an also emphasizes that Abraham’s monotheism predates the advent of either Judaism or Christianity. Abraham is described as a believer in the true faith (hanif) and one who submits to God (muslim). By describing Abraham as a Muslim, Muhammad’s prophecy is framed not as a heretical offshoot of Judaism or Christianity but rather as a reassertion of the “pristine” monotheism that the Arabs had inherited from Abraham and Ishmael. Just as the Israelites had periodically fallen away from God’s message and figures like Moses and Jesus had warned them of their errors, the Arabs had likewise fallen into what Muslims call “the age of ignorance.” From an Islamic perspective, however, unlike previous prophets, Muhammad was not merely warning a particular people or nation; as the “Seal of the Prophets,” Muhammad was God’s final messenger to all mankind before the end of the world and Judgment Day.
Islam Challenges Mecca’s Social Order
For three years Muhammad’s message remained private. His first converts were confined to his immediate family. However, Allah eventually commanded him to make his revelations public. Although the initial reaction was relatively tolerant, he endured much mockery and cynicism. Although Meccans were accustomed to accommodating a variety of belief systems, as it became clear Muhammad’s message was in fact a direct challenge to Mecca’s entire social order, the opposition stiffened. The nascent Muslim community represented a grave threat to the values of tribal tradition and loyalty to clan kinship. Meccans also feared that Islam’s militant opposition to polytheism and idol worship would ruin the city’s lucrative pilgrimage trade and unravel the region’s delicate system of intertribal politics. As the rift between Muhammad and the rest of Meccan society grew wider, an economic boycott against the Muslims prevented them from purchasing food in the markets.
As the harassment grew, a group of Muhammad’s followers sought refuge in Ethiopia in 615. Muhammad appealed to the Christian king of Ethiopia to shelter his followers. Muhammad reasoned that it was preferable for his fledgling community to seek shelter among fellow monotheists and “People of the Book” than to risk its destruction at the hands of the pagan Arabs. This was a prelude to the migration (hijra) of the entire Muslim community to Medina in 622, marking the first year of the Islamic calendar. The move marked a critical transition from a pagan society based on kinship ties to a Muslim one bound together by common faith. During this period Muhammad was able to consolidate the Muslim community and forge a confederation of tribes strong enough to challenge his Meccan rivals. After weathering eight years of Meccan attacks, in 630 the Muslims finally recaptured Mecca. Upon entering the city, Muhammad granted amnesty to almost everyone and offered generous gifts to the Quraysh, paving the way for his tribe’s absorption into the Islamic community. He also destroyed the idols housed in the Ka‘ba. Rather than ending Mecca’s pilgrimage tradition, however, Muhammad reinterpreted it both as a key symbol of Islamic unity and of Islam’s connection to earlier traditions of Abrahamic monotheism. Shortly before his death in 632, Muhammad made his “Farewell Pilgrimage,” which still serves as the model for the rituals performed today. This ensured that Mecca would remain the geographical center of the new globalizing faith.
The Spread of Islam and the Marginalization of Mecca
The unification of the once-fractious Arab tribes under the banner of Islam was a decisive turning point in Middle Eastern and world history. Within a decade of Muhammad’s death the Arabs swept through Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, forcing the Byzantines to retreat to Anatolia. To the east the Arab onslaught in Iraq and Persia completely shattered the Sassanid Empire. By 750 Arab-controlled territories stretched from Spain and North Africa to the frontiers of India in the East. These rapid victories carved out a new geographical space for a massive Arab migration, spawning a wave of urbanization, economic expansion, and the organization of a dynamic new Islamic empire, laying the foundation for the eventual conversion of much of Afro-Eurasia to Islam.
The Caliphate Moves North: The Sunni-Shi‘a Rift
Despite the breathtaking expansion of these conquests, this did not guarantee that Mecca would continue to play a leading role in the new Islamic order. Following Muhammad’s death in 632 the Prophet’s companions elected a successor, or Caliph (khalifa), who functioned as both the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic community. By virtue of their close personal connection to the Prophet and their loyalty to Islam, the first four Caliphs (Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, and ‘Ali), the so-called Rashidun or “Rightly Guided Caliphs,” were accepted as Muhammad’s successors and God’s earthly deputies. However, infighting over the rightful succession of the Caliphate sparked the first Muslim civil war (656–661), spawning a schism that would ultimately split the faith into Sunni and Shi‘a sects. The supporters of the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali (d. 660), eventually identified as Shi‘is, believed that only ‘Ali and his descendents were the legitimate heirs of Muhammad’s spiritual legacy. Conversely, according to the Sunni position, the Caliph needed not be a member of the Prophet’s blood line; only the consensus of the Muslim community was necessary to claim the title. Thus, they accepted the Caliphal claim of the civil war’s eventual victor, Mu‘awiya ibn Abi Sufyan (r. 661–680).
Mu‘awiya transferred the Caliphate and imperial capital away from Arabia to Damascus, where he had served in the early Muslim campaigns against the Byzantines prior to his appointment as governor of Syria. This northward shift proved permanent. Even when the ‘Abbasids toppled the Umayyad dynasty in 750, the Caliphate moved to Baghdad, not Mecca. As a result, both Mecca and Medina slid from the center of the Islamic world to a distant, unruly periphery. Mu‘awiya’s reign is generally regarded as a transition from the more religiously legitimate Rashidun era to a new imperial age in which the military and political realities of ruling the expanding Muslim domains decisively eclipsed the Caliphate’s religious aspects. (See Map 8.1.) Under the Umayyad dynasty (661–750) the Caliphate morphed into a hereditary monarchy, blending Islamic ideals with Arab tribal institutions and administrative, economic, and military methods borrowed from the Byzantines and Sassanids.
Although most people assume that Mecca has always been an important Islamic cultural, political, and religious center, by almost every measure it played little role in the flowering of Islam’s cosmopolitan culture. By contrast, Damascus and Baghdad emerged as the urban engines of Islamic civilization’s “golden age.” In these cities Arab-Muslim culture incorporated Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid influences into its art, architecture, literature, science, philosophy, and theology. Perhaps the greatest expression of this dynamic fusion of civilizations came under ‘Abbasid Caliph Ma’mun (r. 813–833), who established the famous Bayt al-Hikma (“House of Wisdom”). Scholars at this academy translated into Arabic political treatises, great works of folklore and literature, and the best of mathematic, philosophical, and scientific thought from Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Sanskrit.
Another indication of Mecca’s marginalization was its comparatively anemic population growth. In the eleventh century the Iranian pilgrim Nasir-i Khusrau estimated that the permanent population of Mecca was no more than two thousand and that there were no more than five hundred foreign sojourners present during his visit. Even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, Mecca’s permanent population was only around eighty thousand. By contrast, ninth-century Baghdad boasted a population of between three hundred and five hundred thousand, making it the largest city in the world outside of China.
Though the ‘Abbasid Caliphs survived until the Mongols devastated Baghdad in 1258, in reality, ‘Abbasid decline had been evident since the second half of the ninth century. By the tenth century, the ‘Abbasid state was conquered by the Shi‘i Buyid dynasty of northern Iran. Reduced to little more than a figurehead, the authority and prestige of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate was irrevocably damaged. This point is underscored by the Fatimid dynasty’s rival claim to the Caliphate and their administration of the Hijaz.
However, Islam’s imperial capitals could not afford to neglect Mecca entirely. Beginning with the Umayyad but especially during the ‘Abbasid period, it became customary for the Caliphs to make major investments in the Hijaz in order to demonstrate their piety and legitimate their political power. The Caliphs organized the pilgrimage caravans to Mecca. Each year they appointed an official, known as the Amir al-Hajj, to lead the pilgrimage. They took responsibility for maintaining the roads connecting the Hijaz and Syria and Iraq, and they protected them from Bedouin raids. They repaired the Ka‘ba, expanded the Meccan sanctuary, and made improvements to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Even more critical than the upkeep of Mecca’s monuments was the need to maintain constantly the network of springs and aqueducts that supplied the city with a reliable source of fresh drinking water and to provision the region with grain transfers from Egypt.
Despite this patronage, from the seventh through the tenth century Mecca remained an unstable frontier, ripe for various forms of anti-Caliphal Shi‘i resistance and insurrection. During the Caliphal succession crisis that sparked the second Muslim civil war (680–692), the Umayyads found themselves completely cut off from the Hijaz when ‘Abd Allah ibn Zubayr claimed the title of Caliph for himself. Although the Zubayrids were eventually crushed in 692, the revolt is thought to have prompted Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (r. 685–705) to construct the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in hopes of building up an Umayyad-dominated shrine to rival Mecca.
In the early tenth century Mecca was once again a major site of Shi‘i resistance. Around 900, the radical Qaramatian movement led a series of anti-‘Abbasid revolts across Syria, Iraq, and northeastern Arabia, culminating in a bloody campaign against ‘Abbasid pilgrimage caravans. The Qaramatian reign of terror climaxed in 930 when they attacked Mecca itself, slaughtering thousands of pilgrims, desecrating the well of Zamzam with the corpses, and stealing the Ka‘ba’s sacred Black Stone in an ill-fated attempt to redirect the pilgrimage away from Mecca.
Caliphs, Sultans, and Sharifs: Servants of the Two Holy Places
Although the Mongol destruction of Baghdad and the execution of the last ‘Abbasid Caliph in 1258 is generally accepted as the effective death of the Caliphate, in reality this merely confirmed nearly three centuries of decline. Rival claims to the Caliphate by the Shi‘i Fatimids (909–1171) of North Africa and Egypt had already begun to undermine the prestige and universality of the Caliphate. Although the infamous Ottoman ruler Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) successfully revived the title during the late nineteenth century, for most of the last millennium the Caliphate has ceased to function as the center of Islamic authority. Despite this, Middle East historians have tended to lavish attention on the Caliphate and the numerous Muslim rulers who subsequently attempted resurrect it. By contrast, Mecca is curiously absent from the main narrative of Islamic history after the transfer of the Caliphate to Damascus in 661.
With the decay of ‘Abbasid power, by the tenth century Mecca was increasingly left to its own devices. This paved the way for the growth of what has been called the Hijaz’s “national dynasty,” the Sharifs of Mecca. Although the Sharifs would eventually embrace Sunni Islam, in many respects their claims to nobility based on Qurayshi descent from ‘Ali suggest that their origins were closely related to the anti-Caliphal Shi‘i sentiments of the period. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries the formal title of Sharif evolved into a form of kingship over Mecca and the Hijaz. Although the Sharifs never achieved total independence from the militarily superior Fatimid (909–1171), Ayyubid (1169–1250), and Mamluk (1250–1517) Dynasties of Egypt or the later Ottoman Empire (ca. 1300–1923), the Sharifs largely maintained their autonomy by acknowledging the sovereignty of their imperial masters and pledging their cooperation in ensuring an orderly and stable pilgrimage. This tradition of semi-autonomous compromise with the great Muslim dynasties sustained Sharifal leadership in Mecca until ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud conquered the Hijaz in 1924, incorporating it into what is now the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
By the thirteenth century Mecca and the pilgrimage once again regained prominence as a source of political legitimacy. Because the title of Caliph had become so debased, however, a new claim to Islamic leadership emerged. Gradually the term Khadim al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn (“Servant of the Two Holy Places”) gained currency. Curiously, no Caliph had used the title, presumably because protecting the Holy Places had always been considered an inherent duty of the office. The appearance of this novel method of claiming Islamic leadership is likely related to the fact that the leaders of the Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman Dynasties were all of Kurdish or Turkic origins. In other words, none of them could legitimately adopt the Caliphal title because they were not of Arab or Qurayshi descent.
The title first appears in a twelfth-century inscription associated with Saladin (d. 1193), the famous defender of Muslim lands against the Crusades and founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. The importance of the title continued to grow under the Mamluk sultans who took control of Egypt and Syria in 1250, and the Ottomans subsequently adopted it following their conquest of Egypt in 1517. In essence, the title came to function as a de facto claim to political leadership of the global Islamic community. Even today the title lives on: mired in a propaganda war with Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran, the Saudi monarchy resurrected the title in 1986 in an attempt to bolster its sagging credibility.
The Rise of the Hajjis
Although the title Khadim al-Haramayn was naturally part political theater, it does appear that the duties the title implies were taken seriously. Each of the dynasties that adopted it took a lively interest in both the pageantry of the hajj and the efficient administration of the Hijaz. Taken together, these shifts of title and administrative functions signal both a usurpation of the duties previously reserved for the Caliph and the growing importance of the hajj. Particularly under the Ayyubids and the Mamluks, this meant a greater emphasis on securing the caravan routes. A judicious mixture of financial and food aid along with military threats, usually in the form of troops deployed alongside the annual pilgrimage caravans, was generally enough to secure the Sharifs’ cooperation. For the Ayyubids and Mamluks, investing in the hajj was certainly good politics, but it was also economically lucrative. The hajj route from Cairo and Damascus was also the main artery of trade connecting Egypt and the Hijaz with the spice trade from India and Southeast Asia. Especially under the Mamluks, the port of Jidda blossomed into a flourishing Indian Ocean economic hub.
As Islamic societies from East Africa to China gradually took root, from the eleventh century until well into the age of European imperialism Muslim trade in the Indian Ocean expanded. (See Map 8.2.) Although historians have long understood the important role that seafaring merchants and colonists from Yemen and Oman played in the spread of Islam to parts of India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kenya, and Zanzibar, less attention has been paid to the role that hajj-related travel and commerce played in integrating the Indian Ocean’s economic system or the role that this increasing traffic played in diffusing civilizational norms and intellectual trends from Islamic heartlands of the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula to the farthest reaches of the expanding Islamic world.
Owing to the increased security and economic potential of pilgrimage-related trade, we see both an increase in the popularity of the hajj and the reemergence of Mecca and Medina as centers of Muslim intellectual life. During this period the hajj appears to have taken on a new importance at the individual level. Prior to 1200, surveys of Arabic biographical dictionaries of important Muslim personalities reveal no evidence of returning pilgrims adopting the title of hajji or al-hajj. By the early 1300s, however, the title had become fairly common. The growing popularity and respect for these titles was likely related to the increasing stability of the Hijaz during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods.
The increasing popularity of the hajj likely stems from an overall rise in the number of converts to Islam. Despite the rapid conquest of North Africa, the Middle East, and Iran, as late as two centuries after this military expansion Muslims remained an elite minority. Substantial Christian populations remained in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. Likewise, Iran continued to be home to large Zoroastrian populations. From the available evidence, it is unlikely that Iran and Iraq gained Muslim majorities until the eleventh century. However, in northern Mesopotamia and Syria conversion proceeded much slower, and the population retained a Christian majority until perhaps as late as the latter half of the thirteenth century. Taking into consideration the lag between Muslim conquests and the slow process of mass conversion helps explain why it took several centuries for the hajj to achieve its mass cultural appeal.
Map 8.2. Principal Routes of Long-Distance Trade and Pilgrimage in the Islamic World, ca. 1500
By the dawn of the sixteenth century, Islam had spread well beyond its original Arab heartland. Across the caravan routes of West Africa and the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean, Muslim merchant, pilgrimage, and missionary networks forged an increasingly cosmopolitan Islamic civilization. Despite the increasing diversity of the global Islamic community, however, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca helped to ensure that Islamic cultural norms diffused widely across vast distances.
A closely related clue concerning the hajj’s increased accessibility and popularity, particularly among non-Arabs, was the emergence of the powerful guilds of pilgrimage guides (mutawwifin) during the Mamluk period. At the most basic level they were responsible for guiding non-Arabic-speaking foreigners through the required prayers and rituals of the hajj. However, in time they became highly specialized, full-service guides and brokers, acting as interpreters; securing camel transport, lodgings, and food; and overseeing virtually every aspect of their customer’s stay in the Hijaz. The mere existence of a demand for these services indicates that by at least the fifteenth century Muslims from Africa, Central Asia, India, and Southeast Asia were beginning to represent a larger portion of the pilgrimage traffic. Another indication of the growing security of the Hijaz was that prior to this period lengthy sojourns in the Hijaz were much less common than they were in subsequent years. This was most likely due to the unreliability of food supplies needed to support a large year-round urban population. Both a lack of security and inadequate provisioning may also explain why institutions of higher learning (madrasas) were not established in Mecca or Medina prior to the late twelfth century. With the establishment of generous waqf funds (pious endowments) for these institutions, in later centuries pilgrims often combined the hajj with extended periods of study. The growth of these schools also provides important evidence of the Islamic world’s increasing orientation to the Indian Ocean. Of the twenty-three madrasas founded prior to 1517, six were founded by Yemeni rulers and officials and three by Indian rulers. As these schools took root they became increasingly popular among non-Arab Muslims, attracting large numbers of students and permanent settlers from across the Indian Ocean, especially from India and Indonesia.
Another sign of the increasing importance of the hajj is the emergence of pilgrimage narratives as a distinct genre of Islamic literature. This genre was especially prominent in Islamic Spain and North Africa between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, but they eventually became common across the Islamic world. Though normally centered on Mecca and the hajj, these accounts provided rich descriptions of the famous personages, shrines, and academic institutions across much of the Islamic world. Not unlike today’s Lonely Planet guides, these manuscripts created popular itineraries and warned of hazards along the way. The most famous of these works is undoubtedly the Rihla (travels) of Ibn Battuta (1304–1368). As his travels illustrate, particularly for the Islamic world’s learned classes the comingling of the pilgrimage with higher learning provided access to far-flung professional and commercial contacts. This fostered a high degree of social mobility, which in turn facilitated the flow of intellectual trends, goods, and technologies between the Muslim heartland and the frontiers of Islamic civilization.
GLOBAL ENCOUNTERS AND CONNECTIONS: A Coveted City in the Colonial Crossfire
In many respects Ibn Battuta’s travels belong to a lost age of Muslim dominance. Virtually everywhere he roamed between Morocco and China was under some form of Muslim rule. Despite crossing numerous cultural and linguistic boundaries, his writings exude the cosmopolitan confidence of a man whose Islamic learning and legal skills were marketable across much of the known world. Unlike European travel narratives, which emphasize the author’s “discovery” or “exploration” of exotic locales, the unity of Islamic civilization almost always mitigated Ibn Battuta’s experience of difference.
After 1500 that Islamic world began to unravel. In coming centuries European maritime exploration and expansion would bring conflict and exploitation to most of the Islamic world. Neither Mecca’s remote location nor its sacred status completely shielded it from the changes that Europe’s expansion wrought. The first harbinger of this global power shift came when Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. In a matter of a few years the Portuguese established themselves as the preeminent naval power in the Indian Ocean. Until then internal Muslim rivalries had posed the greatest danger to Mecca’s security; the closest that a European military force had come to Mecca was during the famous Crusader Reynaud de Chatillon’s surprise attack on the Hijaz’s Red Sea ports in 1181. Although Crusader piracy in the Red Sea had been a nuisance, it never posed a sustained threat to Mecca.
The Portuguese threat, however, was of an entirely different order. As the Portuguese seized control of Indian Ocean commerce they began to systematically strangle the Mamluks’ lucrative spice trade by blockading the Red Sea. In addition to gravely undermining the Mamluk economy, Portuguese naval superiority left Mecca painfully vulnerable. Fearing an attack, the Mamluks (and later the Ottomans) worked feverishly to fortify Jidda. Although the attack never materialized, Mecca was in fact in grave danger. As the Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque made clear in a letter to his king, he intended nothing short of the destruction of Mecca and the conquest of the spice trade.
Although the Mamluks and their Ottoman successors were able to fend off the immediate Portuguese threat, in the long run European supremacy was inescapable. By the nineteenth century the British, Dutch, French, and Russians had all seized sizable colonial possessions in Muslim lands. Especially as Britain’s power in India grew, so too did its naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. The development of steamship routes between the Mediterranean and India and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 further intensified British interest in the Red Sea. These transportation advances put the once-peripheral Ottoman Hijaz alongside the main artery of trade between the Indian Ocean and Europe. As a result, the region became an object of British strategic interest. British influence on the Hijaz ultimately culminated in an alliance with Sharif Husayn during World War I, leading to the 1916 Arab Revolt that overturned four centuries of Ottoman rule and completely redrew the map of the Arab Middle East. However, Sharif Husayn’s British-backed rule proved exceedingly short. In 1924 Saudi expansion from the east overran Mecca. With the Saudi conquest came a stricter, more puritanical version of Islam known as Wahhabism; to this day Wahhabism is the official religious doctrine of the Saudi state. Through a combination of its petroleum-based economic might and control of Mecca and Medina, the monarchy has successfully exported its extreme brand of Islamic thought across much of the Muslim world.
The advent of steamship travel and colonial-era interventions also had other unforeseen consequences. The steamship led to a dramatic increase in the number of ordinary Muslims who could afford to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Owing to the rising numbers of pilgrims crowding aboard steamships, the hajj became a conduit for the globalization of epidemic cholera and plague. As Europe and the Ottoman Empire struggled to prevent further outbreaks, the pilgrimage became a constant subject of international scrutiny. For the first time ever non-Muslims would regulate pilgrimage transportation, require passports, and enforce public health controls. Thus, although Mecca itself never came under direct colonial control, virtually every aspect of the hajj did come under European administration.
With the rise of air travel most twenty-first-century pilgrims no longer endure tortuous camel caravans or dangerous oceanic passages. Today pilgrims arrive at Jidda’s state-of-the-art hajj air terminal and are whisked away by the brand-new Mecca Metro system. Indeed, pilgrims arriving at the Grand Mosque, now ringed by gaudy skyscrapers, would scarcely recognize the tiny Ottoman town of a century ago. Yet in many respects the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s bureaucratization of the hajj is in fact a continuation of the policies hammered out between the Ottomans and their European counterparts over a century ago. The Saudi oil wealth that has funded Mecca’s redevelopment and modernization is likewise an echo of the Arabian Peninsula’s absorption into the European-dominated world economy of the nineteenth century.
The primary sources below represent two very different eras of Meccan history. The first comes from The Travels of Ibn Battuta and reflects his experience of the fourteenth-century overland pilgrimage caravan. The second comes from a late nineteenth-century Ottoman physician’s observations of the biological and political hazards facing pilgrims of the steamship era.
Often dubbed the Islamic Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta left his native Morocco to perform the hajj in 1324. Though he initially planned to make the hajj and study Islamic law, instead he embarked on a twenty-nine-year odyssey taking him across much of North and West Africa, Arabia, Central Asia, the Indian Ocean, and even to China. Here, Ibn Battuta describes his experience of the camel caravan between Damascus and Mecca in 1326.
•What are Ibn Battuta’s primary concerns in this text?
•What does Ibn Battuta’s account tell us about the nature of travel in the fourteenth century?
•What is the importance of water for the overland pilgrimage?
The enormous caravan camps near the spring, and everybody satisfies his thirst. The pilgrims stay here for four days to refresh themselves, water their camels, and stock up on water for the even more fearsome emptiness between Tabuk and Ula. The water bearers set up buffalo-hide tanks beside the spring, filling them up like reservoirs. They water the camels and also fill water bags for the caravan and smaller skins for individuals. Each amir and person of rank has a private tank; the rest of the pilgrims make arrangements with the bearers for a fixed amount of money. Then the whole caravan leaves Tabuk and pushes on with haste, traveling night and day without stopping, for the wilderness is at its worst here. Halfway through lies the valley of Ukhaidar, which might be more aptly named Valley of Hell. One year the hajjis suffered terribly in this place, for the samoom [poison wind] began blowing, their waterskins dried up, and the price of a drink rose to a thousand dinars. Both seller and buyer perished. The story is inscribed on one of the rocks as you pass through the valley. . . .
Five days beyond Tabuk the pilgrims reach the well of Thamud, which is full of water. In spite of their violent thirst, however, nobody draws a single bucket from this well, for the Prophet, when he passed there, told his people not to drink from it. (A few had already used the water to make dough; they subsequently fed it to their camels.) Here the dwellings of ancient Thamud stand carved into the hills, hewn out of reddish rock with elaborately decorated thresholds that look quite modern. Their builders’ bones lie turning to dust inside them, “a real sign for those with eyes to see.”
From Thamud to Ula is about a half-day journey. It is a large, pleasant village with palm groves and springs. Here the pilgrims stop for four nights to re-provision and to wash their clothes. The local people are honest and many pilgrims leave surplus provisions on deposit with them for the return journey, taking along only what they may need to reach Medina. Ula marks a boundary line, south of which the Syrian Christian merchants may not go. These people trade in provisions and goods with the pilgrims.
The day after the caravan leaves this town, the pilgrims camp in the valley of Itas. The heat here is killing and the fatal samoom is common. The last time it blew in this season, only a few pilgrims escaped with their lives. Past Itas they camp at Hadiyya, a place with underground water in a valley, where they dig shallow pits and water magically appears, but it is brackish. On the third day out we caught sight of the sanctified city of Medina, the City of the Prophet. . . .
When it came time to leave Medina and head for Mecca, we halted near Dhu al-Hulayfa mosque, where the Prophet himself put on his pilgrim clothes for the Farewell Hajj. The mosque is five miles from Medina near the stream of Aqiq. It marks the limit of Medina’s sacred territory. Here, I put away my tailored clothes, bathed, put on my consecrated lengths of unstitched cotton, and performed the customary prayers. I entered the life of a pilgrim at this stage, stating my intention to perform the Hajj as a rite separate from the Umra. I felt such enthusiasm then that I took up the chant of the caravan and went on with it through every hill and valley until we reached the pass of Ali, where we stopped for the night.
Source: The Travels of Ibn Battuta, in One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage, edited by Michael Wolfe (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 62–63.
The second excerpt comes from the recollections of an Ottoman physician, Mehmed Şakir Bey, who was dispatched from Istanbul to report on the public health conditions of the Hijaz and Yemen in 1890. His account demonstrates just how much the administration of Mecca and the hajj evolved over time. By the late nineteenth century the Ottomans could no longer attend to the affairs of the Hijaz without consulting the European colonial powers. His report also underscores how the personal experience of pilgrimage had changed. The hazards and obstacles facing pilgrims had been transformed from the foreboding desert expanses Ibn Battuta described into a deadly gauntlet of poverty, lethal epidemics, quarantines, and international border controls.
•How has transportation technology evolved between Ibn Battuta’s and Mehmed Şakir Bey’s accounts?
•How does Mehmed Şakir Bey’s perspective on the hajj differ from Ibn Battuta’s because he is a government official and a doctor as opposed to a pilgrim?
•What does Mehmed Şakir Bey’s description of the administration of the hajj tell us about European influence over Mecca and the rest of the Islamic world?
England’s Acting Consul in Jidda, named Doctor ‘Abd al-Razzaq, an Indian Muslim doctor, is an individual of medium height and build and very heavily deaf. When we went to visit him with another Indian man, he respectfully welcomed us at the door. After shaking hands and having coffee with this very deaf disabled physician, first I wanted to check his opinion concerning how this terrible cholera epidemic came to the Hijaz. His translator, a young teen-ager from Jidda, yelled loudly into his left ear so that he could hear our reply.
After collecting himself for a moment, he answered our question in the following way:
“[Cholera] came by sea from Kamaran [Island]. It was brought by the steamship, the Deccan. The Deccan’s 1,200 passengers, consisting of pilgrims, waited on Kamaran for 70 days. I received news that approximately 50 pilgrims from among them died as a result of spending the hajj period at the Kamaran Island quarantine station. Prior to that cholera was not present at Mecca.
Later, they loaded 1,200 Indian pilgrims onto an English steamship called the “Hive.” However, the capacity of this steamship was only 900. I received news that between Jidda and Aden 300 Indian pilgrims were thrown overboard into the sea because they overloaded the steamship with 400 more pilgrims than the ship’s capacity. Even though I have not actually gone on the hajj this year, in years past I have seen that if the rains come at Mina it causes cholera to appear immediately afterwards.”
[Doctor ‘Abd al-Razzaq says], according to his research: “Cholera first originated from a few of your naval troops on the corvette, the Muzaffer.” Upon Doctor ‘Abd al-Razzaq saying that, signaling with my hand to the translator, [Mehmed Şakir Bey says], “I have something to tell the Consul. Please speak into his ear. My statement is this: Thank you for saying that cholera first appeared in Kamaran with the Deccan steamship. With his permission I would also like to say that this year in Mina cholera was first seen among the elderly Indians. Since the outbreak could not be put under observation, when the Indian pilgrimage guides came to the health administration to apply for the death certificates of those poor Indians who died in the tents in order to bury them in the cemetery of Masjid al-Khayf in Mina they were officially asked the cause of death. To which they replied: ‘yâ efendim miskîn vecâ’ân mine’z-zaman! Yemşi batnî.’*
That is to say, the corpse was that of a very poor man who had been suffering from this illness for a long time and whose stomach was distended. In the beginning they could not diagnose cholera on the corpses of the Indians. By confessing that he died from this they were claiming that this situation was a deadly illness which is specific to the Hijaz and which causes many deaths, such as either a chronic diarrhea or a severe case of bloody hemorrhoids.
Many times I saw that they were brought to the basement of the Mina hospital in a state in which their skins clung to their bones specifically because people who are extremely thin like the Indian poor become twice as emaciated under the effects of cholera. However, two soldiers from the navy were extremely sick in their tents and had to be brought to the hospital. Even those with light cases had to be brought to the hospital. However, those two who were very ill had to be carried on their friends’ backs.
When they entered the hospital cholera was officially announced. Since within a few hours Mina’s hospital was filled with poor Indians and in Mecca and other places most deaths were among the Indian poor and destitute I thought that it would not leave any room for objection. However, the translator said, “Sir, since it would take a long time to explain all these things and, in any case, the disease has already subsided in Jidda. If there is any other important question that you would like to ask I would be happy to translate it.” In response to this, [I asked the following question.] “Well, as for India’s poor, by coming to make the hajj without enough money for shelter, by begging they act in a manner that is discouraged in Islamic law (shari‘a) and [socially] inappropriate. They wander the streets until dawn crying out ‘yâ Rab, yâ Kerîm’ [oh Lord, oh Most Generous]. Later many pass away and one witnesses that those who come after [the completion of] the hajj experience many hardships and difficulties. What is your opinion of not allowing those thousands of poor and beggars to come to the Hijaz?”
Answer: For the last four years I have been writing to the Governor of India about poor Indians not coming to the hajj. The answer that I received, which I still have, roughly states: ‘Since there is freedom of religion among the English, I can never be in a position to prevent the poor from coming to the hajj.’
The Governor of India’s position was motivated by his fear of provoking a great disturbance and a revolt. Owing to this fear he could not find any other solution. Thus, they offer every form of social assistance to intending pilgrims.
In short, the reports that I submitted four or five times concerning this important issue were left unanswered. Recently, I received news that my dear friend Doctor Dickson, the Embassy’s doctor in Istanbul, wanted to raise this matter with the Board of Health. However, the Vice President of the Board of Health would not grant permission and immediately responded by saying “this is a matter of religion. This is not the appropriate place to discuss it.” There is only one way for the extremely poor people of India to be prohibited from going on hajj. This can only be accomplished by the central government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs sending a memorandum to the embassies in Istanbul. Future Indians intending on making the hajj should have to show their passports to the Ottoman şehbender [Ottoman commercial representative or Consul in a foreign port] in Bombay. The Ottoman Consulate should be able to examine whether or not Indians intending on making the hajj have enough money for the journey to Mecca and back. Those without money should not have their passports approved. . . .
Primary source title: Hicaz’ın Ahval-ı Ummumiye-i Sıhhiye ve Islahât-ı Esâsiye-i Hâzırasına Dair Bazı Müşahedat ve Mülahazât-ı Bendegânemi Hâvî Bir Lâyiha-i Tıbbiye (A Medical Memorandum Concerning Some of My Observations and Thoughts on the Current Public Health Conditions and Fundamental Reforms of the Hijaz).
Source: Gülden Sarıyıldız and Ayşe Kavak, eds., Halife II. Abdülhamid’in Hac Siyaseti: Dr. M. Şakir Bey’in Hicaz Hatıraları (The Caliph Abdülhamid II’s Politics of Hajj: Dr. M. Şakir Bey’s Memoirs of the Hijaz) (Istanbul: Timaş, 2009), 297–300. English translation by Michael Christopher Low and Züleyha Çolak.
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*The phrase “Yemşi batnî” is an Ottoman Turkish corruption of the Arabic phrase “Yamshi alá batnihi.” By comparing the poor to those who creep upon their bellies, the speaker is referring to the following passage from Sura al-Nur: “And Allah has created every animal of the water. So of them is that which crawls upon its belly, and of them is that which walks upon two feet, and of them is that which walks upon four. Allah creates what He pleases. Surely Allah is Possessor of power over all things.” See Qur’an 24:45.
