A ceremony is like a book in which a great deal is written. One ceremony often contains more than a hundred books.
—George Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men
The Hajj, or annual pilgrimage to Mecca, is one of mankind’s most enduring rites. For almost fourteen hundred years, it has provided a spiritual destination to millions of men and women around the globe. Its attractive power has outlasted great empires, shaped trade routes through half the world, and persisted despite war, famine, and plague. Today, Islam is the world’s second largest and fastest growing religion; the Hajj is its greatest public rite. Over two million Muslims from 183 countries perform the Hajj every year, forming the largest single gathering in one place at one time for one purpose on Earth. The point of this journey has always been the same: to detach a representative number of people from their homes and, by bringing them to Islam’s birthplace, to emphasize the unity of all human beings before their Creator. The Hajj’s first requirement is to arrive on time, to keep an appointment with God and the Muslim community. Once in Mecca, pilgrims perform a week-long set of rites.
The Hajj is both a collective celebration and an intensely personal experience, the religious apex of a Muslim’s life. From early times, it has also been a central theme in Islamic travel writing. Called rihla in Arabic, safarnameh in Persian, these accounts have informed and entertained readers since the early Middle Ages with firsthand descriptions of cities, exotic regions, and local mores encountered on journeys to and from Mecca. In addition, beginning with the European Renaissance, Mecca became for about four centuries the occasional destination for a handful of writers from the Christian West who, through pretense and connivance, managed to enter a city forbidden to non-Muslims. Read in counterpoint, these two quite different traditions supply opposing voices in a spirited conversation for which Mecca and Islam are common ground. Filled with feats of daring and endurance, with moments of heightened religious perception and great risk, the travelers (whether Muslims or pretenders) were close observers of their journey. Accounts drawn from both these traditions form the body of the book before us. In order to appreciate them, readers should first know something more about Islam, Mecca, and the rites of pilgrimage.
The Tradition of Islam
Viewed outside its divergent history, Islam is as much a “Western” religion as Judaism or Christianity. Semitic at heart, these three related faiths touch so profoundly at so many points that they clearly form contiguous layers in a single cultural substratum, the ancient West Asian tradition of prophetic monotheism. This relationship is more than geographic. Like its elder cousins, Islam is an Abrahamic faith and has frequent recourse to the contents of the Torah. On this score alone, it may be likened to the third panel in a spiritual triptych. Its own sacred book, the Holy Quran, defines Islam as a continuer of a perennial religion that existed long before Judaism, one that Jews revived, as Jesus would do later. As the Quran says,
We believe in God
and in what has been sent down to us,
what has been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael
and Isaac and Jacob and their offspring,
and what was given to Moses and to Jesus
and all the other prophets by the Lord.
We make no distinction among them.
In one of the book’s many comments on itself, we also read that “the Quran is not a story that was forged. It is the confirmation of what preceded it.” Two thirds of its chapters contain allusions to the Bible and its prophets. Adam, Eve, Abraham, Noah, Lot, Jonah, Moses, Aaron, David, Enoch, as well as John the Baptist, Jesus, and Mary, are singled out as spiritual heroes inspired by the same “Lord of all the worlds.” This is not a literary trope; it is the prophetic lineage in which Muslims believe. In daily prayers, they speak of Muhammad and Abraham as prophets in one tradition. Allah1 and the God of the Flood are identical.
Unlike the Torah and the Gospels, however, the Quran does not aspire to set an historical record in a context. In the Quran, the time is always now, and the words on every page are the voice of God. In this sense, its relation to Islam is akin to that of Jesus for Christianity. In place of the Word incarnate, we have what might be called the Voice inlibrate. The Book, not the man who delivered it, is the truth and the way. Muslims venerate Muhammad as an exemplary human being and a great prophet. He worked for a living, married, had children, transformed his society, and died at sixty-two. He mourned the death of several children; he could be angry, even peevish; he had a sense of humor. Every step of his life is well recorded, and his words and deeds are considered useful guides, but he was mortal. He is not worshiped or even prayed to. He considered himself a servant and advised his followers to do the same.
Today, of course, we have more than books and a common tradition to help locate Islam as a Western religion. We have population statistics. With roughly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, projected to increase to 2 billion by the year 2030, Islam appears to be the world’s fastest growing religion. In Europe, it is the second largest religion. In the United States, there are now more Muslims than Episcopalians or Jews, and half of them were born here. There are more Muslims in the United Kingdom than in Lebanon. Islam’s expanding numbers in the West are due to immigration and conversion. Its roots, however, reach back to a distant period and to a distant city, Mecca. To understand Islam today and the meaning of the Hajj for modern Muslims, readers of the accounts to come need some acquaintance with the city’s background.
Mecca, the Birthplace of Islam
Mecca lies midway along the west coast of Arabia in a mountainous barrier region named the Hijaz. (See Figs. 1 and 2.) This is a narrow tract of barren land about nine hundred miles long with the Tropic of Cancer passing through its center. The second-century Greco-Egyptian geographer Ptolemy called the city Makoraba, the Temple. It occupies a north-south basin two miles long by half a mile wide fifty miles east of the Red Sea. Mecca owes its existence to the Zamzam Well, the sole water source in a barren valley surrounded by rugged, treeless peaks. (See Figs. 3 and 4.) Its usual climate has been described as a combination of “suffocating heat, deadly winds, and clouds of flies.”2 No crops seem ever to have grown there. In its prehistoric period, this place “without sown land” was considered too sacred for regular habitation. Perhaps a special status was connected to its well or to the falling of a meteor in the area. In any case, its plants could not be cut nor its wildlife hunted. In spite of these prohibitions, a town gradually grew up there and derived a modest income from visiting pilgrims. By the late sixth century, when Muhammad was a boy, his own tribe, the Quraysh, controlled Mecca, occupied its central hollow, and were providing visitors security and water.
In the town’s principal crossroads stood the Kaʿba, a cube-shaped building of ancient origins located a few yards from the Zamzam Well. It seems to have been there from time immemorial. Buildings like it are known to have existed, marking similar asylums, in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula from Jordan to Yemen. As with most Semitic shrines, the Meccan Kaʿba’s surrounding area formed a sacred territory with special laws of sanctuary and dress. Here many Middle Eastern cults set up idols, creating a preIslamic pantheon that included Hubal (a Nabatean god imported from Jordan), Venus, the moon, and the Virgin Mary, among many others. The principal deity of the Meccans, Al-Llah, the High God of the Arabs, was probably linked in forgotten ways with the God of Abraham. In any case, the city welcomed the gods of many tribes. Thus people throughout the region were drawn to Mecca as pilgrims to pay their respects and execute old rites, traveling by seasonal caravan from Yemen, Syria, and the Persian Gulf. Once arrived, they circuited the Kaʿba seven times and (probably depending on their cult) ran between two hills, lit fires to rain gods, cast stones at solar obelisks, and held poetry contests, fixing verses inscribed on animal skins to the Kaʿba’s walls. The pre-Islamic rites at Mecca embodied an inexplicable element, something ancient and almost precerebral, that matched the volcanic landscape all around it. Then gradually the place began to change.
Even before Muhammad’s birth, earthen buildings were replacing tents in the central district and an urban establishment was growing up, supplanting older, more nomadic tribal codes. Increased income among the ruling clans finally promised to free a portion of Meccans from the perennial grip of desert poverty. At the same time, old forms of loyalty were dying. The Quraysh’s quick transition to urban independence seems to have eroded their social fabric, concentrating wealth in a few successful families while slighting the needs of the weak and less well born. Judging from reforms a few decades later, the society into which Muhammad was born in 570 c.e. was polytheistic, plutocratic, and deeply divided along economic lines. Female infanticide was rife, interest rates were uncontrolled, and most women and orphans had no rights or real property. When Muhammad was forty, in 610, he retreated to the mountains outside town for a period of fasting and reflection. After a numinous experience with the archangel Gabriel, he returned to town shaken, with the first revelation of the Quran. From this experience, there gradually developed the core of a monotheistic religion called Islam, or Self-Surrender. It met with immediate resistance from the Meccans and only slowly attracted followers. Muhammad’s insistence on worshiping one God threatened his people, who housed the principal gods of the Middle East and earned their revenues from many cults. To the landlords of the Kaʿba, a claim that God is everywhere appeared subversive. In September 622, Muhammad and his few hundred followers were forced into exile.
The Muslims moved north to the oasis of Medina, where they prospered, absorbing most of that city’s population, forming a new community, and rebuffing occasional attacks from Mecca. Battles raged, trade routes were interrupted. Finally, in 628, treaties were signed between Muhammad and the Meccans permitting a Muslim contingent to visit Mecca for a pilgrimage. When the Quraysh broke the truce a year later, Muhammad marched on the city with an army, and the Meccans gave up without a fight. Much to their surprise, the city prospered under Islam, although Muhammad continued living in Medina. Between the two cities a few hundred miles apart, Islam spread quickly.
About three months before he died, Muhammad led ninety thousand followers on a march to Mecca called the Farewell Hajj. Two years earlier, returning in triumph from Medina, he had swept the Kaʿba of its idols, and pronounced it the Muslim House of God. Now, on his final visit, he designated a pilgrim route that looped between the city and the desert, requiring several days to move around it. Along this route, he led a great procession, integrating as he went diverse pagan rites into a coherent ritual performance that pilgrims still execute today. In the process of performing it, Muhammad redefined the ancient Hajj as a concentrated expression of Islam. By retaining certain of its timeless rites, he preserved in ritual form a profound evocation of the ancient impulse that first gave birth to religion. He also broadened the context of the Hajj ceremonies, linking them and their Meccan sites to the legends of five prophets—Abraham, Hagar, Ishmael, Adam, and Eve. The Farewell Hajj completed Muhammad’s role as a spiritual messenger. At its climax, in the desert on the Plain of Arafat, he delivered the last verses of the Quran, completing the foundation of the Muslim religion, making the Hajj and the sacred book its capstones. This creation of a distinctly Muslim Hajj was his final public act. It is sometimes called Islam’s last pillar.
Mecca was probably never a great commercial center.3 Even in pre-Islamic times, it was neither easy to reach nor rich in any commodities we know of. From the beginning, people seem to have flocked there because the place was sacred. In a stark desert made more inhospitable by raiding and intertribal wars, the attractions of such an asylum, where safety is guaranteed and water free, must have been great. After Muhammad, from about 750 on, the tour was supported by powerful rulers in distant capitals like Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo who subsidized regional caravan routes with way stations and wells. These prestigious public works were meant to benefit their Muslim subjects and connect their reign to the service of religion. They were not undertaken to better trade but, rather, to accommodate an enormous increase in pilgrims as Islam spread through the world.
Little has stayed the same in Mecca from one age to the next. Fire, flood, adobe, and dynastic building projects have wrought consistent rapid change in the city’s appearance through the centuries. Wells, dams, walls, gates, houses, markets, neighborhoods, and thoroughfares have come and gone with dramatic speed. One might almost say that the literary record is all that remained of Mecca from era to era. There have only been two constants in this flux. The rites and sites of the Hajj itself have undergone surprisingly little variation over time; and for more than seven hundred years, the city was governed continuously by a single family. Claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad, they called themselves the nobles, or sharifs.
This line emerged around the time our book begins, in the late 1100s, when a handful of regional rulers were vying for control of the Hijaz. One, named Sharif Qitada, governor of the Red Sea port of Yanbu, sent cavalry troops against Mecca in 1201 and captured it. Making the city their capital, branches of his family continued to rule the Hijaz until 1925. Successions were frequently bloody, involving war and fratricide, and corruption was endemic. But by cleaving to their role as caretakers of the Hajj and its sacred sites, they maintained their throne and prospered. The sharifs in turn were patronized by more distant and powerful rulers who, with annual gifts to the sharifal treasury, purchased the prestige of supporting Mecca. The family earned added revenues from taxes on goods and pilgrims; in return, they guaranteed secure roads. The results of these complex arrangements are discussed by almost every pilgrim author throughout the sharifs’ protracted reign.
The twentieth century brought enormous changes to the balance of power in the Hijaz. Reduced to a pawn in a game during World War I, the last sharif fled Mecca, and a new regime, led by Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud, took over the city. By 1933, Ibn Saʿud had unified most of the Arabian Peninsula, reviving the first Saudi Empire of his ancestor Saʿud Ibn Abd Al-Aziz Muhammad Ibn Saʿud (d. 1813). He also reorganized the Hajj administration and put an end to raiding on the roads. A few decades later, rapid transportation and the introduction of modern technology in the Hijaz led to a physical transformation of Mecca. Yet the city’s principal role remains unchanged. With a resident population of 1.2 million Mecca continues to host the pilgrimage and care for the well and shrine that gave it birth.
The Rites of the Hajj
In the twenty-five selections in this book, the serial rites of the pilgrimage are described from many angles. Before they are outlined here, it is worth remarking that pilgrims who perform them are taking part in a drama that reaches back to the first prophets and to the testing of the human family’s faith in God. In this sense, the Hajj is a journey through time as well as space for the purpose of bonding people to a primordial religion, the ethical monotheism of Abraham. This is the secret dimension of the Hajj that penetrates its entire ritual process, connecting the present moment to the past so that even today’s very modern pilgrims, with their ritual choreography and ancient-looking robes, seem to have stepped out of the pages of Scripture. Most of the rites described here are like bookmarks in a very ancient story. As pilgrims perform them, the old drama unfolds.
THE HARAM, OR SACRED TERRITORY The word haram, meaning “sanctuary,” runs through all the Hajj accounts. The term may be applied in different ways. For pilgrims arriving in the Hijaz, it refers to the whole of Mecca and its surrounding lands as marked by pillars at five principal stations beyond the town. “All of Mecca is a sanctuary,” the Meccans say. Only Muslims may pass into this precinct, where special laws of the sanctuary take over. In addition to this wider area, the word haram is also applied to the Great Mosque at Mecca. Pilgrims routinely refer to it as the Haram Mosque or Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. They may also call it Bayt Allah, God’s House, or simply the House.
HARAM LAW AND IHRAM DRESS Most religions protect their rites with special codes and dress. Pilgrims entering the Haram territory assume a sanctified condition, called ihram. The term indicates an adopted state of consecration or dedicated abstinence, symbolized by special ihram clothes. Arriving at one of the five stations, called miqats, all haijis bathe and state their intention to make the Hajj. Women may wear national dress, although many change into robes of a light color, leaving their hands and faces bare. For men, the demands are more specific. They must go bareheaded and unshod (sandals are acceptable) and replace their daily clothes with two plain lengths of unstitched cloth, one worn around the waist (it may be belted), the other draped over the left shoulder, leaving the right shoulder bare. The custom is pastoral, prehistoric, and symbolic: ihram clothes are an outward sign that while inside the territory, pilgrims agree to obey the haram laws and to behave in ways conducive to peace and spiritual dedication. Sexual activity is suspended for the time being. Violence is forbidden in all its forms, right down to disturbing local wildlife and expressing anger or impatience. Likewise, unseemly attention to one’s appearance is proscribed, from cutting the hair and nails to wearing cosmetics. Haram law also requires pilgrims approaching Mecca to repeat in unison a round of verses, the Talbiyya, indicating spiritual readiness: “Here I am, Lord, at your service. Here I am.” Ihram is the recommended condition for anyone entering the Haram Territory and is required for a pilgrimage. Its simplified, uniform appearance blunts the usual distinctions of wealth and station and helps to render everybody equal, in keeping with the Hajj’s purpose.
THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE HAJJ Islam is a world religion with a journey at the center of its practice. All Muslims are required to go on the Hajj once in a lifetime, provided they are healthy, sane, mature, and unindebted, endangered by neither war nor epidemic, and have the means both to make the journey and to support any dependents left behind. The annual pilgrimage is a strict appointment, too. It begins on the eighth day of the last month of the Muslim lunar year, and those who miss its central rites commencing on the ninth day miss the Hajj altogether, although they may return another year. By contrast, the Lesser or Minor Pilgrimage, the Umra, contains some but not all the rites of the Hajj and may be performed at any time. Every Muslim who enters Mecca is obliged to perform one or the other. Exceptions are made for those whose work requires frequent visits, but the obligation is generally viewed as an opportunity. People are not simply required to make the Hajj. Most long to go, save up for years to do so, and consider the trip a blessing in their lives.
THE HARAM MOSQUE All the initial rites of the Hajj take place inside the Haram Mosque in Mecca. The core of this building is an immense open courtyard with the stately granite cube of the Kaʿba at its center. The Zamzam Well stands nearby, and at some distance runs a straight course, called the Masaʿa, a quarter-mile stretch of covered mall running on a tangent between Safa and Marwa, two hills adjacent to the Shrine. A glance at this eccentric floor plan (see Fig. 5) makes it clear that the “surrounding” mosque has been arranged to preserve these ancient ritual locations.
The Meccan Haram is the only mosque in the world built in the round. Its surrounding prayer halls all face the Kaʿba, and the whole building is organized around it. The Kaʿba, the lodestone of Islam, stands fifty feet high and is draped in an embroidered black silk cover called the kiswa. Pilgrims often refer to this sanctum sanctorum as the Shrine. It contains no relics and is not itself an object of prayer.4 Rather, it provides spiritual focus, marking the direction in which all Muslims pray throughout their lives. Set squarely on the compass points, its monolithic lines symbolize God’s location at the center of creation. Simply to have the Kaʿba physically before them brings tears to many pilgrims’ eyes, and day or night it serves as an object of prayer and meditation.
Many legends surround the Haram Mosque, but the chief ones form a cycle of myth reflected in the building’s architecture. These stories and the Hajj rites that express them illustrate in different stages the birth of ethical monotheism in the Middle East. To commemorate the founder of this project, there stands to one side of the Shrine a smaller, booth-shaped station, the Maqam Ibrahim, named for the Kaʿba’s original architect, Abraham. On the Kaʿba’s northwest side, enclosed by a marble railing, lie the legendary graves of Hagar and Ishmael, Abraham’s wife and son. The lives of these three foundational figures are familiar to every Muslim child. They form a mental geography of which pilgrims are inescapably reminded as they move about the sites of the Hajj and execute its rites. Particular parts of the saga are emphasized in Mecca: how Abraham, in deference to Sarah, first consigned Hagar and her son to exile in a desert sanctuary; how in repentance he constructed the Kaʿba there; how the family’s faith was tested by God’s command to sacrifice the son; and how his life was spared at the last moment by the substitution of a ram.5 This timeless test of faith and mercy forms the ethical backbone of the Hajj. It runs through all the forthcoming accounts.
THE SEQUENCE OF THE HAJJ The Hajj may be divided into two groups of ritual performances: a three-fold set of urban rites performed in a matter of hours at the Haram Mosque in downtown Mecca and a four-part procession that carries the whole pilgrim population on a fifteen-mile march to and from the desert over a period of several days. The initial, city-centered ceremonies include completing seven circuits around the Kaʿba, visiting the Zamzam Well, and walking seven times between the Safa and Marwa hills.
TAWAF The seven circuits around the Kaʿba are called the turning, or tawaf. Their number and counterclockwise direction suggest the ancient world’s seven planets circling the sun. They have more recently been likened to the nuclear paths of atomic particles. The tawaf is a form of prayer at the Meccan mosque, and visitors may perform it often. In season, the turns are inevitably made in a wheeling band of many thousand people. During the Hajj, the rite is required on three occasions. A pilgrim’s first Turning of Arrival should take place sometime before the desert procession from Mecca on the eighth day of the month.
ZAMZAM AND SAʿY Immediately after their last circuit, pilgrims repair to the Zamzam Well in a symbolic act of spiritual refreshment. The story of the well is linked to the rite of running (saʿy), which follows next. To perform it, pilgrims cross the mosque to the east side of the building, where a course about a third of a mile long, the Masaʿa, stretches between the Safa and Marwa hills. Here Ishmael’s mother, Hagar, is said to have run back and forth seven times in a frantic search for water in the desert. During her final lap, the child cried out. Returning, she found an unearthed desert spring. Today, this rite gives pilgrims a participatory taste of a timeless drama in which parental love and religious faith are weighed in the balance. At an ethnic level, the story explains the survival of all Arabs, Ishmael being their progenitor.
THE DESERT PROCESSIONAL On the eighth day of the Hajj month, pilgrims, wearing their ihram, all leave the city and move five miles east, into Mina Valley, where they spend the night in tents. This exchange of urban comfort for a more timeless desert life further dissolves class distinctions and binds the Hajj community more closely. The next morning the exodus pushes another five miles east, to Arafat. Here the zenith of the Hajj takes place in the form of a group vigil, called the Day of Standing Together before God (Yawm al-Wukuf). Arafat, with its signature hill, Mount Mercy (Jabal al-Rahma), forms a broad plain lying a short distance outside the Haram Territory. Appropriately, the legends informing this supreme Hajj rite transcend remembered time, stretching back past Abraham to the days of Genesis. Here, in a volcanic negative of the Garden, mankind’s parents, Adam and Eve, are said to have rendezvoused after the Fall and been taught by Gabriel to pray—in a stone niche on the west face of Mount Mercy. Muslims, then, see Arafat as a place set aside for spiritual reunion, where pilgrims travel to re-form family ties, seek pardon, reclaim faith, and re-collect their spirits. In addition to a limitless past, Arafat has an impressive future too, being a yearly rehearsal place for the Day of Judgment.6 In every sense, the Hajj reaches its outer limits here.
THE MUZDALIFA VIGIL From the moment the Hajj leaves Arafat, at sunset, the procession becomes a recessional, turning back on a westward path to Mina Valley. The first night, the crowds accomplish half the journey, stopping at Muzdalifa, a group of hills three miles down the plain. Here they camp beneath the stars and undertake a second vigil, this time within the Haram Territory. During the night they meditate and gather pebbles for the next day’s rite.
THE DAYS OF STONING AND FEASTING At dawn, the hajjis begin their return to Mina Valley, a few miles farther west, where they celebrate the Feast of Sacrifice (Id al-Adha), a major holiday throughout the Muslim world. Before the feast, however, pilgrims first proceed to a part of Mina specially reserved for three tall pillars (jamarat). These mark three legendary spots in another chapter of the Abrahamic story. Here it is said that the angel of darkness appeared to tempt Ishmael, arguing that God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son was a product of Satan’s work and Abraham’s madness. Ishmael, who knew the difference between Satan’s voice and God’s, responded by stoning the devil seven times. Pilgrims today follow his example, stoning one pillar on the first day and all three pillars on the next two days. In the vicinity of the third pillar, it is said, there grew a bush in which the sacrificial ram was caught and slain.
THE RETURN TO MECCA Pilgrims are freed from most of the ihram restrictions after their first throws. They are, however, required to return to Mecca sometime in the next three days to perform a return tawaf. In coming days, most pilgrims who have not already visited the Prophet’s Mosque (Masjid al-Nabi) in Medina will travel north to pay their respects at Muhammad’s grave site. Before departing, however, pilgrims should perform a final tawaf, after which they leave the mosque by the Farewell Gate.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HAJJ Even today, when travel is comparatively easy, only two in a thousand adult Muslims perform the Hajj each year. The largest part of this population is composed of middle-aged people. They have earned and been able to set aside the money for the journey. Their children have been raised, their obligations met. Now they turn to fulfilling religious duties or younger family members may pool resources to send their parents. Newlyweds often go to Mecca, too, to cement a marriage. People who have suffered a powerful crisis in their lives—the loss of a relation or mate, a period of personal depression—may go on the Hajj to regenerate their spirits. Its successful completion confers new social status too, marked by a voluntary name change: the addition of a title (hajji for men or hajja for women) before their name. As we shall see, this chance to join a social elite has remained a powerful inducement to pilgrims as different as the fourteenth-century Moroccan Ibn Battuta and the twentieth-century American Malcolm X. The real goal of the Hajj, however, is to perform it well. In the final analysis, its admissibility is up to God. It is something one offers.
Muslims are drawn to Mecca like filings to a magnet, attracted by the integrative power of a journey to the heartland. More than a city, Mecca is a principal part of speech in a sacred language and the direction Muslims pray in throughout their lives. Simply to set foot there may answer years of longing. Muhammad’s story takes on new meaning in Mecca too, as that of an exemplary human being who, when he went to make the Hajj, made it over in the spirit of Islam. Over the centuries, in times of peace and war, Mecca has offered its visitors a dependable retreat, a sort of ritual greenhouse reserved for forcing the spirit into blossom no matter what may be going on beyond the Haram borders. As a reminder of how life ought to be lived, the journey has inspired peasants, princes, mystics, and revolutionaries. For all these reasons, it represents a literal trip of a lifetime.
Hajj Travel
Those who find the sinuous rites of the Hajj confusing should know in advance that pilgrims themselves usually require the help of a guide, or mutawwif, to execute them. Neither simple nor self-evident, they are, however, so frequently described, referred to, and repeated in these pages that even non-Muslims will come to know them better as they read. At this stage, it is more important to understand that the pilgrimage is not just a matter of traveling to Mecca. Arrival is only a beginning. The Hajj itself is a protean event composed of many stages, each one marked by a collective rite. Changing its shape and purpose day by day, the ceremony does not take place so much as it unfolds, first in a city, then on a desert, becoming by turns a circle dance, a spiritual racecourse, a procession, a camping trip in the dunes, an athletic event, a trade fair, and a walking meditation. It is a kind of Muslim United Nations, too, in which people from around the world collaborate and even live together. And yet of course the Hajj means travel, too.
As these accounts make clear, the journey to Mecca has always been more than a means to a destination. Until the advent of modern transportation, the trip required months or even years. Not surprisingly, most of the writing in most of this collection concerns going and coming, crossing mountains, seas, and sandy wastes, encountering sacred shrines, enormous cities, exotic ways, strange customs, and stranger people. Hajj literature is fraught with trouble too: earthly trouble, social trouble, physical injury, fateful loss, and unexpected pathos. Pilgrims have never been immune to risk and danger—thieves and tricksters, greedy border agents, war, enslavement, financial ruin, political upheaval, prejudice, disease, bad faith, foul play, and false protectors. It is a principal truth of travel writing that trouble goes with the territory, even (perhaps especially) for pilgrims. Of three Hajj authors picked almost at random, Ibn Battuta returned home in 1350 with a plague licking at his heels, Joseph Pitts (in Mecca ca. 1685) spent fifteen years in slavery, while John Lewis Burckhardt (in Mecca, 1814) died in Cairo of an illness contracted on the Hajj.
Getting to Mecca has never been a picnic. Perhaps the most brutal irony of all, repeated in account after account, is that until about 1930 the nearer pilgrims came to their hallowed goal, the more dangerous life became for them. Raiding clans like the Banu Harb and the Banu Utayba, who made travel through the Hijaz a living hell, appear often in these pages. These and other Bedouin tribes derived their wealth by extorting payment from traders and pilgrims passing through their territories and by raiding their caravans mercilessly when they could not pay. This was no quaint medieval tactic. As recently as World War I, the lion’s share of subsidies from Istanbul and London went to buying off these predatory tribes in order to keep the land routes open, especially during the months of pilgrimage.
The Hijazi tribes were not unique in these predations, nor were pilgrims the only victims of attack. Identical nightmares attended any caravan traveling through Syria, Arabia, Iraq, Libya, or Egypt. They did not abate until new forms of transportation began to outpace the camel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1922, for instance, the American novelist John Dos Passos, traveling with a caravan of five hundred camels from Baghdad to Damascus, encountered precisely the same protection racket that our first Hajj author, Naser-e Khosraw, endured east of Mecca in the eleventh century. Both men were forced to ransom their baggage over and over as they proceeded, paying one tribe to defend them from all comers, only to watch attackers and defenders change their roles the moment the caravan entered a new fiefdom. In Dos Passos’s case, this happened every fifty miles.
The journey, however, was not all hardship. Along the way, pilgrims stopped at well-established stations, famous mosques, saints’ shrines, and Sufi centers. According to their status, they worked in cities, earning the means to travel on, or were hosted in the courts of lavish rulers. The caravans they joined ranged from a single string of camels to giant tented cities on the move. Readers who enter the medieval version of this trip, in Part One of this volume, will be rewarded with portraits of Cairo and Damascus at the height of their glory. By the fourteenth century, the Muslim world had greatly exceeded its birthplace in the Arab Middle East. Stretching from Morocco across India to China, it formed a vast, interconnected global society through which pilgrims could travel toward Mecca from any corner and not lose touch with Muslim culture. Once these more distant Hajj routes opened, they did not close. Burckhardt, in the early 1800s, joins a largely Malay caravan to Medina. In the 1930s, large numbers of pilgrims from Indonesia cross thousands of miles of ocean to make the Hajj. With its anecdotes and personal observations over time, the Hajj literature records this international and cosmopolitan character of pilgrim travel, which modern transportation has expanded.
The dangers and risks of the Hajj were steeply reduced in the twentieth century by technology, advances in hygiene, and new administrative methods. As with all modern travel, the structure of the journey was radically altered. In a period of seventy-five years, the old pilgrim routes to Mecca were rendered largely obsolete by steamships, trains, and other means of automated transport. The airplane, a few decades later, made the roads all but superfluous. By the 1980s, 90 percent of foreign pilgrims were arriving for the Hajj on chartered flights while overland pilgrims from around the Middle East used high-speed freeways, reducing the desert to a blur. Pressed by economics, a very few hajjis still were walking across Africa to Mecca when I performed the Hajj in 1990, but this practice will probably vanish soon. Airplanes have made the Hajj less costly, in terms of both the price of travel and the greatly reduced absence from business and family. Air travel is the main cause of the geometric rise in pilgrim numbers during the last half of the twentieth century.
The Contents and Organization of This Book
THE TEXTS The excerpts included here are drawn from the accounts of twenty-five travelers from around the world. They appear in chronological order, grouped in five sections according to their era, from medieval to contemporary times.
Part One contains three classics from the Islamic Middle Ages, a period of global ascendancy for Islam. The section opens with an eleventh-century account of a trek to Mecca by the classical Persian poet and mystic Naser-e Khosraw. It continues with a late-twelfth-century book by Ibn Jubayr, who sailed east from Muslim Spain, and ends with excerpts from Islam’s most famous traveler, the fourteenth-century Moroccan, Ibn Battuta. Damascus and Cairo loom large as the overall sponsors of the Hajj in this period. Here we also witness the emergence of the sharifs as local governors in Mecca and the Hijaz, rub shoulders with Crusaders as they invade the Arab world, and view the capitals of great rulers like Saladin. These opening selections, all from works important in their time, should help ground even uninitiated readers in the complexities of the Hajj and pilgrim travel. The introductory essays are slightly longer here, to establish points important throughout the literature.
Part Two introduces the Western side of the travel ledger. It consists of five accounts bridging the Renaissance, the Enlightenment period, and the early Romantic Age, written by Europeans from Italy, Britain, Spain, and Switzerland. They begin with the unlikely Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna, who slipped into Mecca in 1503, attached as a guard to a pilgrim caravan, and who wrote his account in Latin. Varthema’s work is followed by an anonymous report in the 1580s of the Damascus-to-Mecca caravan and leads, a century later, to a most unusual book by an English sailor, Joseph Pitts, containing some of the first accurate writing about Islam in Western sources. The section concludes with works by two highly educated observers, the Spanish Muslim noble Domingo Badia y Leblich (1807), traveling under the name Ali Bey al-Abbasi, and the Swiss explorer John Lewis Burckhardt (1814). During all but the first few years of this long period, the Ottoman government in Istanbul financed, protected, and oversaw the Hajj.
Part Three continues in a European vein with Sir Richard Burton’s famous 1856 Personal Narrative, then alternates between accounts by an Indian princess, the Begum of Bhopal (1864), and a Persian diplomat, Mohammad Farahani (1885), on the one hand, and works by the later European pretenders John Keane (1877) and Arthur Wavell (1908), on the other. With Burton’s romantic treatment of Hajj travel, the participating eye of the expert traveler replaces the cooler observers of the Enlightenment. The tone of the traditional Muslim rihla changes too in this period. With Mohammad Farahani’s encyclopedic treatment, a scientific approach enters the record. Modernity no longer belongs to Europeans only. A modern tone and a modern world are being shaped to serve the needs of Muslim travelers.
The end of Part Three forms a watershed in this literature: To our day, Arthur Wavell’s 1908 account remains the last representation of the Hajj by a non-Muslim. In retrospect, it is possible to view these works by pseudo-pilgrims as products of a long historical project that joined European and Middle Eastern territorial and trade interests. Like their Muslim counterparts, the Hajj masqueraders traveled in response to forces built into their culture. But whereas for Muslims this meant fulfilling religious commitments and social expectations, the forces that summoned Westerners to Mecca were a call to adventure as old as Ulysses, a wish to add to the sum of human knowledge, and personal desires for fame or fortune. It is easy to slight them on moral grounds as mere intruders, yet the fact remains that they contributed substantially to the Hajj genre and in some instances helped to correct Europe’s flawed vision of Islam. At the same time, the shortcomings inherent in their efforts should not be lost on modern readers. The Hajj they undertook to describe remained an experience only Muslims may have.
Part Four moves on to the interwar period of the twentieth century, with five works by European converts to Islam. It begins in 1925 with the English Muslim Eldon Rutter’s two-volume account written in the last decade of the camel. It continues with works by two English-speaking women converts: a spunky, offhand memoir by Winifred Stegar detailing her family’s third-class pilgrimage from Australia in 1927 and Lady Evelyn Cobbold’s more mandarin volume written in 1933. Due to chronology, these two accounts are separated by excerpts from the philosophical memoir of scholar-adventurer Muhammad Asad, a Galician journalist who embraced Islam and lived for some years at the court of Ibn Saʿud, and by a Hajj memoir by Harry St. John Philby, the British Middle East diplomat and explorer, who, like Asad, lived at the Saudi court for years. Although Part Four spans only a decade, the period is crucial for the Hajj. During this time, the House of Saʿud put an end to sharifal rule in Mecca, and in the wake of World War I the Ottoman Empire dissolved. The foundations of the modern Hajj all date from this period. For the first time in many centuries, it came under direct local control.
Part Five concludes the collection with seven records of the postcolonial, Jet Age pilgrimage. These accounts by Muslims from Mecca, Afghanistan, Iran, Britain, Morroco, and the United States were composed after World War II, when a war-torn Europe at last began to relinquish its global empire, granting independence to Muslim colonies and mandates and ceding strategic authority to the United States. They bear witness to Islam’s spread into the West, to the arrival of global modernity in Saudi Arabia, and to the physical transformation of the Hajj, including the replacement of camels by cars and airplanes and a massive expansion of the pilgrim sites. Opening this section Hamza Bogary’s childhood memoir of 1940s Mecca provides a baseline for the rapid changes that follow. Readers may track the stages of this process through subsequent accounts by a pair of notable pilgrims of the 1960s, the Iranian novelist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and the African American leader Malcolm X. Al-e Ahmad (1964) used the Hajj to point up Islam’s continued importance in the radically secularizing Iran of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi; Malcolm X enlisted Islam in the last year of his life as a liberation theology in his struggle against American racism. Both were countercultural figures. Part Five continues with selections from two less politicized accounts: Saida Miller Khalifa’s The Fifth Pillar of Islam, detailing her 1970 pilgrimage from Cairo, and my own book on the 1990 Hajj. The anthology concludes with accounts by Abdellah Hammoudi, a U.S.-based anthropologist of Moroccan origin and by Dr. Qanta Ahmed, a British-born Pakistani practicing medicine in New York.
The twentieth century will probably be remembered as the century par excellence of the diaspora. As for Islam, about half the world’s Muslim population now lives in countries where Islam is a minority religion. In keeping with this trend, most of the Hajj accounts in Parts Four and Five were written by converts from countries outside Islam’s more traditional borders. Among born Muslims, only Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1964) returned to his traditional homeland after the Hajj. Just as technology reshaped the look and timetable of the Hajj, so has modernity infused its literature and intellectural traditions. There is nothing antique in the points of view expressed by these modern Muslim hajjis. Muhammad Asad and Bogary both know their Freud, Al-e Ahmad and Malcolm X their Marx. Sorbonne educated Abdellah Hammoudi teaches courses at Princeton on ethnographic theory and political anthropology, while Dr. Qanta Ahmed is a sleep disorders specialist with an Honorary Professorship at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. Whether world travelers or local figures, they inhabit a global culture and have shaped it to their needs. All are at home on trains (and, later, airplanes), just as their predecessors were on camels. Westerners who treat modernity as exclusive territory may be surprised to meet it here, not as a form of ineffectual imitation but as an adaptable methodology put to local uses around the world.
THE ESSAYS A general essay precedes each of these five sections, touching on some of the main forces of the period, particularly as they affected Mecca and the pilgrimage. Each traveler’s account is prefaced, too, by shorter essays placing the authors in their time and context and addressing specific aspects of the Hajj. All these introductions are historical in nature, their purpose being to present and frame the excerpts. They focus on the pilgrimage itself and on the travelers who wrote about it. I have not paid much more attention to Meccan politics than they did. Where an author demonstrates interest in a ruler or regime, I have tried to shed light on that for readers. Otherwise, the attention remains on the Hajj, not on the palace. Each excerpt adds a small part to a larger story. Presenting the excerpts in chronological order may help illuminate the subject as a whole; they do not, however, add up to an overview of Islamic or Middle Eastern history. In some cases, hundreds of years separate one traveler from the next, and inevitably a lot has been omitted. Readers seeking more historical background are directed to the Bibliography.
Setting aside chronology for a moment, it is easy to distinguish three categories among these travelers.
In the Islamic group, we have nine insider accounts composed by Muslims born and bred that run through all five periods. On the Western side, we find eight outsider works by travelers from Europe, grouped together in Parts Two and Three. Finally, we have a third cluster of eight twentieth-century converts from the West, whose works bulk large in the last two sections. The yawning differences between these groups, in motive, temperament, and point of view, will be touched on again and again throughout this volume. By and large, we will find that the Muslim traveler treats Mecca as a well-known capital in an enormous and unified social system, a place where in addition to spiritual fulfillment one may properly pursue one’s education and, even, professional career. Non-Muslim travel writers, on the other hand, treat the East as closed, mysterious, inimical. For them, the Holy Land (whether Muslim or Christian) lies elsewhere, while for Muslims the sacred territories (Mecca and Jerusalem) are centers of a more familiar world. Finally, Muslim travelers are more intimately aware of where they are going, while the outsiders explore a strange unknown. Paradoxically, the latter group tells us much about Mecca and the Hajj because their appointed role is usually to report new facts to unaccustomed readers. From the ill-informed Varthema (1503) to the studious Burckhardt and Burton, readers may watch this Western advance guard improving and transmitting its new knowledge.
For some readers, the continued appearance of non-Muslim interlopers on the Hajj may be contradictory, even repugnant. Barred from the city by religious law, they seemed to think nothing of making the Hajj their masquerade. And then there are the uses to which their books were put. Whether by dedicated, sympathetic scholars, author-adventurers, or professional spies, these reports almost invariably flowed back to rulers with conquest in mind. Especially during the colonial nineteenth century, one generation’s works of exploration often provided the maps for political domination a few years later. In that light, even these Hajj accounts may be read as products of a global exploitation, of what is referred to in academic circles as the Western hegemonic thrust—that lawless free-for-all for the rest of the planet’s resources that began with the Renaissance and is now entering a computerized phase in the transnational trade zones of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, however broadly true the interpretation, it does not very well apply to Mecca, which after all was never colonized. Such blanket theories also have the dismal effect of causing Mecca and the Hajj to vanish into their framework. Nor are they very sensitive to good writing.
This is a sample collection of works that span a millennium. They were composed by a band of travelers who, following various routes for different motives, moved toward the same destination, Mecca. Their pages constitute a literal journey with a thousand roads.
1 Allah is simply the Arabic word for God, used alike by all Arabic speakers regardless of religion, and not a separate sacred figure peculiar to Islam.
2 From the Arab geographer Maqdisi’s description, ca. 966 c.e.
3 See Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam.
4 The Black Stone, the only surviving part of the original building, is lodged in a silver band in the Shrine’s east corner, at shoulder height. Pilgrims ritually circling the Kaʿba start their circuits here and salute or try to touch or even kiss the stone in passing. A few other sanctified spots around the building command special reverence; however, the Kaʿba is not sacred due to them but, rather, because of its symbolic value as a marker of the qibla, the direction of prayer.
5 Non-Muslim readers may want to consider the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac and this later, somewhat different Muslim legend as two versions of a common narrative concerned with the themes of covenant and origins.
6 “Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.”—Franz Kafka.