Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca

Marjo Buitelaar is professor of Contemporary Islam at the University of Groningen. Her most recent co-edited books are Muslim Women’s 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.

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Transcriptions of Arabic and Other Terms



Introduction. Narrativizing a Sensational Journey: Pilgrimage to Mecca

 Marjo Buitelaar



Part 1 Historical Accounts



1 Hajj Narratives as a Discursive Tradition

 Richard van Leeuwen



2 ‘Coplas del peregrino de Puey Monçón’: A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Poem about the Hajj

 Miguel Ángel Vázquez



3 Sufism and the Hajj: Symbolic Meanings and Transregional Networks; Two Examples from the 16th and 18th Centuries

 Neda Saghaee and Richard van Leeuwen



4 Religious Emotion and Embodied Piety in the Ottoman Turkish Hajj Accounts of Evliyā Çelebī (1611–c. 1683) and Yūsuf Nābī (1642–1712)

 Yahya Nurgat



5 Comparing Two Persian Hajj Travelogues: Yaʿqub Mirzā (1868) and Farhād Mirzā (1875/76)

 Thomas Ecker



6 Othering and Being Othered: Religion, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Hajj Accounts by Iranian Shiʿi Women (1880–1901)

 Piotr Bachtin



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

 Ammeke Kateman



8 Inconveniences of the Hajj: The Arduous Journey of a Moroccan Shaykh in 1929

 Richard van Leeuwen



9 From Moscow to Mecca: Entangled Soviet Narratives of Pilgrimage in the Unlikely 1965 ḥajjnāme of Fazliddin Muhammadiev

 Vladimir Bobrovnikov



Part 2 Contemporary Accounts



10 Coming of Age in Mecca: Pilgrimage in the Life Stories of Two Young Adult Dutch Pilgrims

 Marjo Buitelaar



11 ‘Beyond Words’: Moroccan Pilgrims’ Narrations about Their Ineffable Hajj Experiences through Stories about the Senses

 Kholoud Al-Ajarma



12 Newlyweds and Other Young French Muslims Traveling to Mecca: Desires, Motivations and Senses of Belonging

 Jihan Safar and Leila Seurat



13 Patience and Pilgrimage: Dutch Hajj Pilgrims’ Emergent and Maturing Stories about the Virtue of ṣabr

 Marjo Buitelaar and Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany



14 Crowded Outlets: A North American Khoja Shiʿi Ithna Asheri Pilgrim’s Auto-ethnographic Memoir

 Zahir Janmohamed



15 Curating Post-hajj Experiences of North American Pilgrims: Information Practices as Community-Building Rituals

 Nadia Caidi



16 Mediating Mecca: Moroccan and Moroccan-Dutch Pilgrims’ Use of the Smartphone

 Marjo Buitelaar and Kholoud Al-Ajarma



Epilogue. Narrating Mecca: Between Sense and Presence

 Simon Coleman



Glossary

Index