The peak days of the great pilgrimage in 1688 fell on October 5 to 7. The pilgrims came from all the places where the Islam had taken root. It was a portable religion, but one highly focused on a single place. Mecca, set among rocky, low mountains in the stunning heat and desolation of the Arabian Peninsula, did not seem to the nonbeliever an attractive or impressive place. But Muslims wept with joy as they arrived, fulfilling one of their prime religious obligations and the dream of a lifetime.
The Prophet Muhammad (570–632 C.E.) had been a merchant. Already in his time Mecca had been a trading city and a center of pilgrimage, its people, many of them Christians and Jews, aware of tensions and changes elsewhere. Muhammad’s teaching was accepted by the faithful as the purest and most complete way of submission (Islam) to the God of the Jews and Christians. The deeds performed at Mecca by Abraham at God’s command had made it a sacred site, but it became supremely significant for Muslims as the site of the final revelation, recorded in the Quran, of God’s way for man. Nearby was the cave where the angel Gabriel had dictated the Quran to Muhammad. As it spread, Islam might adapt to other cultures, but always with an impulse toward a purity of belief and practice that had little use for non-Islamic sources of wisdom or knowledge. A prime source of this impulse toward purity and exclusivity was the Hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca, where the Muslim encountered his faith in all its purity and intensity and non-Muslims were unwelcome.
At the edge of the sacred zone surrounding Mecca the pilgrims put on special clothing, exactly alike for all, a white wrapper around the middle and another over one shoulder, leaving the head and some of the torso exposed to the ferocious sun. The dress of women pilgrims covered much more but was equally austere and uniform. This was a moving demonstration of the spiritual democracy of Islam: King, rich merchant, small farmer who had saved all his life for the event all were dressed alike. They all entered the state of ihram, or pilgrim purity, abstaining from sexual activity and many kinds of luxury. All now hired guides so that they would go to the proper places and perform the ceremonies correctly. As they entered Mecca, they stopped to wash. Then they came to the Gate of Peace and stopped on the edge of the central Haram, or mosque courtyard, facing the modest, nearly cubical Ka’aba, which many simply called Beit Allah, the House of God. Holding up their hands toward the Ka’aba, they wept. Abraham had built the Ka’aba. Ishmael had handed him the stones. The angel Gabriel had taught Abraham the form of worship in which they now followed their guide’s instructions, walking around the Ka’aba seven times and prostrating themselves twice toward it.
It had not been easy getting there. Some brought boxes and bales of goods, which they hoped to sell after the pilgrimage ceremonies were completed to finance the return trip. Most had traveled with the great caravans, supervised and subsidized by the Ottoman state, that came from Cairo and from Damascus. For many of these the experience had begun to build in intensity as they celebrated Ramadan, July 1 to 30 in 1688, in the city from which the caravan would depart. Ramadan was the month in which Muhammad had withdrawn from Mecca to a cave where he received the Word of God, the Holy Quran, from the archangel Gabriel. In Ramadan Muslims fasted from sunrise to sunset, spending much of their time in devotion and religious reading, making more charitable gifts than usual, gathering with friends after sundown to break the fast. The fasting and the reversal of day and night activities left one a bit light-headed, but purified and renewed.
About fifteen to twenty days after the end of Ramadan the Damascus and Cairo caravans set out. Each was the organizational equivalent of a military expedition, with a commander appointed by the sultan—always a high official and sometimes the governor of Damascus or Cairo himself—an escort of several hundred soldiers, and even some cannons. The financial burden on the Ottoman state was substantial, including a subsidy for the authorities at Mecca, the pay of the troops, the hire of camels provided free of charge to high dignitaries, and the sums used along the way to enlist the local Bedouin as auxiliaries or at least to buy safe passage through their areas. But the state-backed pilgrimage also represented an annual reassertion of Ottoman control over the Holy Places. The commanders inspected the cities and the shrines, gave orders for their upkeep, and could even depose the sharif, the descendant of the Prophet with general authority over the Holy Places, and install another in his place. Each expedition brought, amid the best troops and a great deal of pomp and music, a fine camel bearing the mahmal, a splendid litter containing a beautiful copy of the Quran and a fine carpet that would be a new covering for the tomb of the Prophet at Medina. This too was understood to be an assertion of Ottoman sovereignty in Mecca.
The pilgrims who gathered at Damascus came not only from Syria but from Istanbul, all Anatolia, the cities and steppes of Central Asia, perhaps a few from China, Iraq, and, most uneasily, Shia Iran. The Ottoman authorities, wishing to minimize contact between the Iranians and their own Shia subjects around what we call the Persian Gulf, would not let the Iranians take a more direct route. Most travelers rented their camels from brokers at rates that gave pilgrims their first taste of the limits of Muslim charity in the management of the expedition. Travelers who tried to get around the high rental rates by using their own camels would be regularly harassed en route, their animals the last to be allowed to the water holes. The huge throng, numbering perhaps twenty thousand people, had every reason to stay in good order and within sight of one another. As the caravan moved out of cultivated areas into the deserts of present-day Jordan, everyone slept lightly, listening for thieves, and scanned the horizon while on the march for a cloud of dust raised by Bedouin marauders. The Ottoman state maintained a string of forts, each with a well or cistern within it, but the sorry little bands of soldiers serving in them on rotation from the Damascus garrisons were not so much protectors as intermediaries in buying off the Bedouin and selling food and supplies to the pilgrims at extortionate markups.
We know a bit more about the Cairo caravan than the Damascus, thanks to a number of eyewitness accounts by European travelers. One of these was Joseph Pitts, an Englishman captured in the Mediterranean, enslaved and converted in Algiers, who made the trip with his master in 1685 or 1686. Pilgrims gathering in Cairo and Alexandria had come by sea from the Maghreb—Tunis, Algiers, Morocco—and the Balkans to join the large numbers from Egypt; the total was at least as large as for the Damascus caravan. In addition to its mahmal, this caravan had the special honor each year of bringing eight large pieces of fine cloth, embroidered with passages from the Quran, that would form a new kiswa, the cloth covering over the stone Ka’aba. Outside Cairo the expedition stopped to water its camels at a great pool formed by the inundation of the Nile. Then it set out, traveling mostly at night to avoid the daytime heat. At Suez some pilgrims, including the official party accompanying the mahmal and the kiswa, continued by ship to Jidda, the port for Mecca. The winds were erratic, the waters full of coral reefs; the damp heat was stunning. The alternative, which quite a few preferred, was days of camel riding across the Sinai and on to the south.
There were other pilgrim routes, less important in numbers but adding much in variety. One came up the peninsula from the mountains of Yemen. Africans made their way along the southern edge of the Sahara, from the Niger basin or even from as far away as the Senegal, to Suakin on the Red Sea, then by ship to Jidda. Those who came from the Indian Ocean had been waiting for months; their ships had had to sail from the Indian ports by March in order to catch the monsoon winds. They may have stopped to trade in Yemen and had spent their months of waiting visiting the tomb of the Prophet in Medina and other holy places and selling the goods they had brought. As soon as the joyful days of the pilgrimage ceremonies were over, they would have to head back south quickly if they wanted to catch the winds home that year. The Muslim calendar consists of twelve lunar months, so that its festivals shift through the solar calendar; there were times when the Indian Ocean pilgrims could stay and profit from the sales of their cloths and spices in the great markets after the ceremonies and then sail home. In 1688 they must have disposed of their goods earlier to local middlemen, who would get most of the profit.
Excitement built as the caravans arrived and the peak days approached. Individuals and groups hired local guides who knew where to go and just what to do at every stop. As the pilgrims neared the gate to the Great Mosque, they stopped first in areas set aside for them to wash and then left their shoes with men who would watch over them all day. Then they were at the Gate of Peace, looking out at the Haram, the sacred enclosure of the Great Mosque. Each of the small structures in the big square was of enormous importance: the small dome of the Station of Abraham, the colonnade of the well of Zamzam, the two wells of al-Safa and al-Marwa. But their eyes were fixed on the nearly cubical building of the Ka’aba, with its splendid cloth cover. Everywhere there were crowds of pilgrims, praying, running between the two wells, washing and filling containers at the well of Zamzam, but above all hurrying around and around the Ka’aba, looking for a moment of thinning in the crowd surrounding one corner so that they might approach it and kiss the Black Stone, moving in on the door six feet up one side of it where some lucky people were scrambling up a little ladder to the inner chamber, prostrating themselves toward the Ka’aba in prayer. Bosnian peasant and Malay merchant prince, blond slave from the Caucasus, and black warrior from the Niger: All were dressed alike, most weeping, often running, caught up in a frenzy of movement that often suggested the urgency of man’s search for God.
Some traditions said that Adam had built the first Ka’aba and that the Black Stone from his building had been miraculously preserved on a nearby mountain during the Great Flood. All accepted that it had been built or rebuilt by Abraham when he brought Hagar and her son, Ishmael, to live at Mecca to avoid the jealousy of Sarah and Isaac. Abraham and Muhammad were seen as parallel prophets, setting out to purify a world in which most people were “associators” who worshiped the True God but also “associated” other gods with Him. Each had preached a return to a pure monotheism: “There is no God but God.” God had commanded Abraham to build or rebuild the Ka’aba, to worship there by walking around it, and to summon all the people of the world to come there. Under the dome of the Station of Abraham was a stone preserving his footprint. God’s instructions to Muhammad on the ceremonies of the Hajj had taken them as already well known and simply in need of fuller definition and purification, which accounts for something of their fragmented and cryptic quality. The small and unassuming room inside the Ka’aba where so many waited long hours to scramble in and say a few prayers had something of the air of a shrine to any or many gods that had been radically purified, deprived of names and images.
Abraham had left Hagar and the young Ishmael in this forlorn desert. The little boy had cried out for water. His mother rushed back and forth between two places where she heard strange noises but found no water; the running between al-Safa and al-Marwa commemorated her desperation. Then the boy had scooped at the earth and found water; this was the sacred well of Zamzam. Pilgrims drank it, contemplated the expensive purchase of a burial shroud that had been soaked in it, and certainly hoped to take a bottle or two home with them. They washed in it but were careful to wash their lower torsos only after they had first washed them in ordinary water. Joseph Pitts reported that those who drank large quantities of it were “purged” by it and their faces broke out, “and they call this the purging of their spiritual corruptions.” Thirst and its relief as a metaphor for longing for God and finding Him; washing as a representation of the cleansing of sins: These are familiar themes to all Jews and Christians and all readers of the Old and New Testaments, all the People of the Book.
Pilgrims might repeat the circumambulation of the Ka’aba and other ceremonies many times in these days. Pitts, moved by their devotion even in memory after his return to England, recalled that he had heard quite a few stories of men who had led lives of violence and debauchery but then had suddenly changed, much as a Spanish swashbuckler might turn Franciscan, to spend the rest of their lives in austere “dervish” dress, reading the Quran and praying. But Pitts had kept a certain detachment even when he was in Mecca; there were great flocks of “pigeons of the Prophet,” and everyone told him they never flew over the Ka’aba; but he watched and saw that they often did so.
After the ceremonies in the Haram some pilgrims might briefly abandon the state of ihram (pilgrim purity), but then they would return to it for the climactic ceremonies outside Mecca. On the eighth of Dhu al-Hija, October 5 in 1688, their guides led them off to the north to the town of Mina. The next day they went on to the plain surrounding the Hill of Arafat. This was the real core of the Hajj. All the many thousands of pilgrims and their guides crowded into the holy area. This was the day when God showed his mercy to repentant sinners. The pilgrims prayed without ceasing until sundown, shedding many tears and seeking mercy for all their sins and shortcomings. Pitts remembered: “It was a sight, indeed, able to pierce one’s heart to behold so many thousands, in their garments of humility and mortification, with their naked heads and cheeks watered with tears, and to hear their grievous sighs and sobs, begging earnestly for the remission of their sins and promising newness of life.”
After dark the pilgrims left Arafat. They spent the next three days at Mina. Here was the stone that had been cleft when God turned aside Abraham’s sword as he struck to sacrifice his son—in Muslim tradition, Ishmael, not Isaac. Each day each pilgrim threw seven stones at one of a number of small pillars, symbolizing their attacks on the devil and all his minions.
Each pilgrim sacrificed a sheep, cooking some of the meat to eat and giving the rest to charity. The pilgrims now were Hajjis, and would use this title of wonderful pride and distinction for the rest of their lives. The scene became festive, with fireworks and the shooting of guns. All the new Hajjis returned to Mecca to repeat their devotions there at least once. Mecca now became a great market center, as the new Hajjis disposed of the goods they had brought to finance their trips. A great deal of silver, most of it ultimately of American origin, changed hands as pilgrims from around the Mediterranean bought spices, coffee, and Indian fabrics.
As they left Mecca for the last time, the new Hajjis walked backward out of the Haram, not turning their backs on the Ka’aba, weeping and praying. There too was the Station of Abraham, where according to one tradition, Abraham had grown as high as the highest mountain and had summoned all the earth, putting his fingers in his ears and facing the four directions in turn, calling out, “Oh you people! The pilgrimage to the ancient House is written as an obligation for you, so answer your Lord!”
The Indian Ocean pilgrim ships already were late for their return voy-ages to India; we do not know how many of them made it, and I suspect that some pilgrims spent another six months in Jidda or in the Yemen ports. The caravans returned to Cairo and Damascus by about the end of the year, and the new Hajjis continued on their long voyages home, to Algiers, Isfahan, and Beijing.