Narrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them emotionally. Together, the written memoirs and oral accounts discussed in the book offer unique insights in Islams rich and evolving tradition of hajj and umra storytelling.
Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
| Acknowledgements |
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ix | |
| Notes on Contributors |
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xi | |
| Notes on Transcriptions of Arabic and Other Terms and Names |
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xv | |
| Introduction. Narrativizing a Sensational Journey: Pilgrimage to Mecca |
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1 | (44) |
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PART 1 Historical Accounts |
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1 Hajj Narratives as a Discursive Tradition |
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45 | (29) |
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2 `Coplas del peregrino de Puey Monon': A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Poem about the Hajj |
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74 | (17) |
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3 Sufism and the Hajj: Symbolic Meanings and Transregional Networks; Two Examples from the 16th and 18th Centuries |
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91 | (22) |
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4 Religious Emotion and Embodied Piety in the Ottoman Turkish Hajj Accounts of Evliya Celebl (1611-c. 1683) and Yusuf Nabi (1642-1712) |
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113 | (25) |
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5 Comparing Two Persian Hajj Travelogues: Ya'qub Mirza (1868) and Farhad Mirza (1875/76) |
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138 | (23) |
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6 Othering and Being Othered: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Hajj Accounts by Iranian Shi'i Women (1880-1901) |
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161 | (22) |
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7 Experiencing the Hajj in an Age of Change: Tuning the Emotions in Several Hajj Accounts of Pilgrims Travelling from Morocco and Egypt in the First Half of the Twentieth Century |
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183 | (21) |
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8 Inconveniences of the Hajj: The Arduous Journey of a Moroccan Shaykh in 1929 |
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204 | (17) |
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9 From Moscow to Mecca: Entangled Soviet Narratives of Pilgrimage in the Unlikely 1965 hajjname of Fazliddin Muhammadiev |
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221 | (24) |
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PART 2 Contemporary Accounts |
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10 Coming of Age in Mecca: Pilgrimage in the Life Stories of Two Young Adult Dutch Pilgrims |
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245 | (32) |
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11 `Beyond Words': Moroccan Pilgrims' Narrations about Their Ineffable Hajj Experiences through Stories about the Senses |
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277 | (22) |
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12 Newlyweds and Other Young French Muslims Traveling to Mecca: Desires, Motivations and Senses of Belonging |
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299 | (24) |
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13 Patience and Pilgrimage: Dutch Hajj Pilgrims' Emergent and Maturing Stories about the Virtue of sabr |
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323 | (31) |
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14 Crowded Outlets: A North American Khoja Shi'i Ithna Asheri Pilgrim's Auto-ethnographic Memoir |
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354 | (15) |
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15 Curating Post-hajj Experiences of North American Pilgrims: Information Practices as Community-Building Rituals |
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369 | (22) |
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16 Mediating Mecca: Moroccan and Moroccan-Dutch Pilgrims' Use of the Smartphone |
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391 | (31) |
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| Epilogue. Narrating Mecca: Between Sense and Presence |
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422 | (9) |
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| Glossary |
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431 | (7) |
| Index |
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438 | |
Marjo Buitelaar is professor of Contemporary Islam at the University of Groningen. Her most recent co-edited books are Muslim Womens Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond (Routledge, 2021, with Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Viola Thimm) and Religion as Relation: Studying Religion in Context (Equinox Publishing, 2021, with Peter Berger and Kim Knibbe).
Richard van Leeuwen recently retired as lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on Middle Eastern history and Arabic literature. Most recently he published The Thousand and One Nights in 20th Century Fiction (Brill, 2018).
Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
