Nineteenth-Century
Changes
1853–1908
In the last half of the nineteenth century, as Western interests consolidated their hold on world trade, Europe’s influence over Hajj travel reached a new zenith. During this period, Britain ruled India, held the purse strings in Egypt, and dominated traffic in the Red Sea, effectively controlling the flow of goods between Suez and Bombay. Not as a joke did Richard Burton, the first author in this section, call Great Britain the largest Muslim empire in the world. Similarly, Russia absorbed a large swath of Ottoman lands along its borders, while Dutch and British shipping took the lead in longtime Muslim maritime zones like Southeast Asia and the China Sea. In all these regions, trade routes forged or appropriated by European powers were often popular as Hajj routes, too. Already in 1814, Burckhardt noted a growing contingent of Malay pilgrims visiting the Hijaz, some of whom considered themselves Dutch or British subjects. A century later, Joseph Conrad would convey their numbers in Lord Jim, a novel that begins with eight hundred hajjis of the Far East boarding a steamer for Mecca:
They streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by faith and the hope of Paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship—like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the brim. Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. They came from solitary huts in the wilderness, from populous campongs, from villages by the sea. At the call of an idea they had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their fathers.
By the 1860s, more than half of all hajjis came from European colonies around the world. As the following accounts indicate, the French, British, and Dutch all introduced controls on pilgrim travel at this time. They issued passports, visas, and health certificates to their subjects, then transported them to the Hijaz. With steamships circling the globe and with the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, pilgrims from Jakarta to Cairo began arriving in Jidda on European vessels. By 1885, the trip from Beirut to Yanbu took seven days, and half of all Meccan pilgrims came by sea. Trains played a large part, too. The most important to our story was an Ottoman-financed line from Damascus to Medina. Finished in 1908, it carried millions of pilgrims in the next six years. Old hands at package touring, Hajj travel representatives throughout the Near East simply treated a line of rail cars as a faster caravan, charging pilgrims a lump sum for the round-trip journey, complete with lodgings in Mecca and Medina. Caravan traffic shrank as a result of all these innovations. By 1914, the only camel routes of consequence to hajjis were the few internal roads between Mecca, Medina, and the Red Sea. As Arthur Wavell’s 1908–09 excerpts demonstrate, the Medina train struck a blow to the raid-based Bedouin economy, upsetting the balance of power in the Hijaz.
Modern transport raised disturbing cultural issues for pilgrims, too. In eastern Europe and much of Russia, the routes to new ports and terminals exposed traditional Muslims for the first time to societies outside the ambit of Islamic law and customs. Was the water in a train station in Baku clean enough for Muslim ablutions? Was the meat ritually slaughtered? Public drunkenness and unrestrained mixing of the sexes were likewise deeply disturbing to many rural pilgrims, as the 1885–86 excerpts here by Mohammad Farahani record. These were significant problems, yet the attractions of modern transport overrode them. Pilgrims flowed—Conrad’s watery metaphor is a good one—in the direction of least resistance. Steam and rail increased the journey’s speed and comfort, at the same time reducing cost and risk.
Finally, the European administration of Hajj travel profoundly affected pilgrim health and welfare. Repeated cholera epidemics early in the century led to modern quarantine stations on Hajj routes, installed at the insistence of an international body of observers convened in Paris. During this period, the colonial powers also began placing monetary conditions on their pilgrims, so that more and more often only travelers with sufficient means and a roundtrip passage might leave a colonial port to start their journey. Although this step created resentment among hajjis it inadvertently reinforced Quranic law.109 Responding to the world as they found it, the travel writers gathered in this section find a lot to say on all these matters.
Europeans affected the Hajj, but they did not advance into the Sacred Territory. Britain’s first Vice-Consul to Jidda arrived in 1838; his Italian, French, and Dutch counterparts were there to greet him. Yet the city remained completely in the hands of the Sharif, who taxed every side of its lucrative trade in a facile alliance with the Turkish Pasha. Europeans might walk around the town, might occupy rented properties for years, but the gates leading to the Hijaz remained closed to them. A few miles past the eastern walls, in the steep ravines leading up to Mecca, haram law remained supreme. Muslims still took direction from the stone cairns bounding the territory. All men still donned the two white seamless cloths, and women put off veils and perfume. Here everyone obeyed special codes of behavior while non-Muslims went in fear of their violation. As our travel accounts continue to bear out, these laws remained inviolable for both cultures. No nonbeliever ever entered the Haram Territory and returned to write about it, except by deception. Moreover, despite a growing hold on the Near East, no Western nation ever gained a foothold in the Hijaz. The Sacred Territories remained exclusive.110
Orientalists trying to grasp Islam on paper also found the Hajj impregnable. Conditioned by their imperial milieu, convinced of Europe’s moral superiority, these scholars were largely unprepared to deal with the pilgrimage, the feeling of the rites, the actual significance of Mecca. Leading European academics were still quick to treat “the Arab” as substandard. Joseph-Ernest Renan, to take one example, considered Arabic an inferior language, its sole value being to prepare the student for reading ancient Hebrew. Handicapped by received ideas forged in the Spanish Inquisition, nineteenth-century scholars like Silvestre de Sacy, Caussin de Perceval, and Edward Lane were loath to admit that complex social realities might exist outside Europe. Instead, they presented “the Arab lands” as monolithic, static, inferior, libidinous, and despotic, backward territories inhabited by minor populations requiring Europe’s protection and tutelage. When, alternatively, they romanticized “the mysteries of the East,” it was to possess them—as authors, authorities, privileged specialists. A despotic East and a mysterious East were two sides of one coin.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of Western travelers to Mecca writing in French, English, and German contested these long-established views, drawing instead on experience and travel. Of those who went to Mecca, Richard Burton remains the best known, but there were others.111 Richard Burton, John Keane, and Arthur Wavell, the three Europeans presented here, all enjoyed a warm rapport with the Near East. Although writing for a British audience, they were not completely “of “ Britain or very often in it. Burton, an exile by temperament, conceived his trip and wrote his book in India. Keane, born in Calcutta, ran away to sea in his youth. Wavell spent most of his adult life in Africa. None of these men suffered culture shock as a hajji or compared Mecca’s mosque to the London stock exchange. Versed in Muslim manners, proficient linguists, they were young men with military backgrounds, adventurers shaping careers from an avocation, for whom Mecca was a place to make one’s mark. In their view, Mecca had everything: romance, mystery, inaccessibility, and danger. Lying between India, Britain’s richest colony, and Egypt, its location attracted interest among a readership in England avid for information about the world. And of course, the city was “forbidden.” The Hajj-account genre gained new impetus in this period. By 1910, enough Europeans had visited Mecca and written up their trips to warrant a book on the subject, Christians at Mecca, by Augustus Ralli.
Works by these Western authors alternate here with accounts by an Indian princess and a Persian bureaucrat. The motives for such thoroughly Muslim books were naturally different from the European ones. The Begum of Bhopal (1864) is less concerned with the Hajj than with its high-handed and venal management by sharifs and pashas. By challenging corrupt Hijazi institutions, she sought to improve the Hajj for her Indian subjects. Mohammad Farahani’s 1885–86 account of a trip from Tehran by land and sea has another goal, that of educating contemporary Persians to the changes brought about by modern transport and social engineers.
Both these Muslim travelers tried to improve matters for their people, and both books were somewhat official. The Begum governed a million people; the Shah of Persia commissioned Farahani’s book. Although there is little to recommend them as literature, they are crucial for what they tell about the rapidly changing Hajj. Burton, Keane, and Wavell, on the other hand, left substantial narrations in their own right. Their more self-exposed narrations place a new emphasis on personal experience, and each one employs ironic dialogue and painterly description to register and heighten new effects. As real-life encounters grew increasingly important for modern readers, authors like these supplied them, shedding new light on the men and women who undertook the Hajj.
109 “Pilgrimage to the House of God is a duty to Allah for everyone who can afford to make the journey.” (Quran III:97)
110 “As for the unbelievers, Allah can surely do without them.” (Quran III:97)
111 Léon Roches (1841), Georg Wallin (1845), and Christian Snouck Hurgronje (1885) are three examples. Of them, only Wallin performed the Hajj (but wrote nothing about it). Roches left an adventuresome account of his years as an undercover Muslim but was forced to leave Mecca before making the Hajj. Although Hurgronje fared likewise, his twin studies of Mecca and the Hajj remain the century’s principal studies on these subjects. While of great interest, none of these men produced a pilgrim narrative.