Perceptions of the Haj

Perceptions of the Haj

Author: Virginia Matheson Hooker

Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 71

ISBN-13: 9971902834

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A study of the five Malay accounts of the haj; recorded between the 11th century and 1979. The authors are concerned not merely with the substance of the description of the pilgrimage but also with the way in which the pilgrimage is presented.


The British Empire and the Hajj

The British Empire and the Hajj

Author: John Slight

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-09-21

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0674915828

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The British Empire at its height governed more than half the world’s Muslims. It was a political imperative for the Empire to present itself to Muslims as a friend and protector, to take seriously what one scholar called its role as “the greatest Mohamedan power in the world.” Few tasks were more important than engagement with the pilgrimage to Mecca. Every year, tens of thousands of Muslims set out for Mecca from imperial territories throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea. Men and women representing all economic classes and scores of ethnic and linguistic groups made extraordinary journeys across waterways, deserts, and savannahs, creating huge challenges for officials charged with the administration of these pilgrims. They had to balance the religious obligation to travel against the desire to control the pilgrims’ movements, and they became responsible for the care of those who ran out of money. John Slight traces the Empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. The story draws on a varied cast of characters—Richard Burton, Thomas Cook, the Begums of Bhopal, Lawrence of Arabia, and frontline imperial officials, many of them Muslim—and gives voice throughout to the pilgrims themselves. The British Empire and the Hajj is a crucial resource for understanding how this episode in imperial history was experienced by rulers and ruled alike.


The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey

Author: Eric Tagliocozzo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0195308271

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The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims making the journey in any given year could come from Southeast Asia. The Longest Journey, spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.


Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence

Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence

Author: Saurabh Mishra

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-12-06

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0199088373

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The epicentre of the Muslim universe, Mecca attracts hundreds of thousands of believers every year. Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence studies the organization and meanings of the Haj from India during colonial times and analyses it from political, commercial, and medical perspectives between 1860, the year of the first outbreak of cholera epidemic in Mecca, and 1920, when the subject of holy places of Islam became a very powerful political symbol in the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the general belief about colonial policy of non-intervention into religious subjects, the book argues that the state, in fact, kept a close watch on the pilgrimage. Saurabh Mishra examines the 'medicalization' of Mecca through cholera outbreaks and the intrusion of European medical regulations. He underscores how the Haj played an important role in shaping medical policies and practices, debates and disease definitions. The book explores how the Indian Hajis perceived, negotiated, and resisted colonial pilgrimage and medical policies in their quest of an intense spiritual experience. The author recovers the hitherto unexplored perspective of pilgrims' voices—in travelogues, memoirs, newspaper reports, and journals—to present a nuanced analysis of the interaction between religious faith and colonial public health policies during the age of steamships and empire.


Guests of God : Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World

Guests of God : Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World

Author: Robert R. Bianchi Formerly Associate Professor of Political Science University of Chicago

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2004-09-09

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0198038194

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Each year, more than two million pilgrims from over 100 countries converge on the holy city of Mecca to reenact the ritual dramas that Muslims have been performing for centuries. Making the hajj is one of the most important duties in the life of a Muslim. The pilgrimage-and its impact on international politics-is enormous and growing every year, yet Westerners know virtually nothing about it. What is the hajj and what does it mean? Who are the hajjis? What do they do and say in Mecca and how do they interpret their experiences? Who runs the hajj and what are their political objectives? How does the hajj encourage international cooperation among Muslims and can it also promote harmony between Islam and the West? In Guests of God, Robert R. Bianchi seeks to answer these and many other questions. While it is first and foremost a religious festival, he shows, the hajj is also very much a political event. The Muslim world's leading multinational organization, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has established the first international regime explicitly devoted to pilgrimage. Every large Muslim nation has developed a comprehensive hajj policy and a powerful bureaucracy to enforce it. Yet, Bianchi argues, no authority- secular or religious, national or international-can really control the hajj. Pilgrims believe that they are entitled to travel freely to Mecca as "Guests of God"-not as guests of any nation or organization that might wish to restrict or profit from their efforts to fulfill a fundamental religious obligation. Drawing on his personal experience as a pilgrim and a wealth of data gathered over the course of ten years of research, Bianchi has produced a fascinating look at the hajj filled with personal, candid stories from political and religious leaders and hajjis from all walks of life. A wide-ranging study of Islam, politics, and power, Guests of God is the most complete picture of the hajj available anywhere.


Pilgrimage and Religious Travel: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

Pilgrimage and Religious Travel: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide

Author: Oxford University Press

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2010-05-01

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13: 0199804133

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This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. A reader will discover, for instance, the most reliable introductions and overviews to the topic, and the most important publications on various areas of scholarly interest within this topic. In Islamic studies, as in other disciplines, researchers at all levels are drowning in potentially useful scholarly information, and this guide has been created as a tool for cutting through that material to find the exact source you need. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Islamic Studies, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of the Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.aboutobo.com.


Muslim Travellers

Muslim Travellers

Author: Dale F. Eickelman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 113611260X

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Pilgrimage, travel for learning, visits to shrines, exile, and labour migration shape the religious imagination and in turn are shaped by it. Some travel, such as pilgrimage, explicitly intended for religious purposes, has equally important economic and political consequences. Other travel, not primarily motivated by religious concerns and thus neglected by many scholars, nonetheless profoundly influences religious symbols, metaphors, practices and senses of community. These studies, encompassing Muslim societies from Malaysia to West Africa, also suggest how encounters with Muslim `others' have been as important in shaping community self-definition as encounters with European 'others'. This volume brings together historians, social scientists and jurists concerned with pilgrimage, scholarly travel and migration in both medieval and contemporary Muslim societies and explores basic issues. Can 'Muslim travel' be regarded as a distinct form of social action? What role does religious doctrine play in motivating travel and how do doctrinal interpretations differ across time and place? What are the strengths and limitations of various approaches to understanding the transnational and local significance of pilgrimage, migration and other forms of travel? An image of Muslim tradition and change in local communities in relation to travel emerges, which competes with the myth of the universality of the Islamic community.


Hajj Travelogues

Hajj Travelogues

Author: Richard van Leeuwen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2024-06-06

Total Pages: 1078

ISBN-13: 9004514031

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In Hajj Travelogues: Texts and Contexts from the 12th Century until 1950 Richard van Leeuwen maps the corpus of hajj accounts from the Muslim world and Europe. The work outlines the main issues in a field of study which has largely been neglected. A large number of hajj travelogues are described as a textual type integrating religious discourse into the form of the journey. Special attention is given to their intertextual embedding in the broader discursive tradition of the hajj. Since the corpus is seen as dynamic and responsive to historical developments, the texts are situated in their historical context and the subsequent phases of globalisation. It is shown how in travelogues forms of religious subjectivity are constructed and expressed.


The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India

The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India

Author: Biswamoy Pati

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-11-19

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1134042590

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This book analyzes the diverse facets of the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. It explores a unique set of themes that capture the diversities of India, such as public health, medical institutions, mental illness and the politics and economics of colonialism. Based on inter-disciplinary research, the contributions offer valuable insight into topics that have recently received increased scholarly attention, including the use of opiates and the role of advertising in driving medical markets. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars in the field, incorporate sources ranging from palm leaf manuscripts to archival materials. This book will be of interest to scholars of history, especially the history of medicine and the history of colonialism and imperialism, sociology, social anthropology, cultural theory, and South Asian Studies, as well as to health workers and NGOs.


A Shi'ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886

A Shi'ite Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1885-1886

Author: Mirzâ Mohammed Hosayn Farâhâni

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2015-01-28

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0292716516

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Western accounts of the Hajj, the ritual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, are rare, since access to Mecca is forbidden to non-Muslims. In the Muslim world, however, pilgrimage literature is a well-established genre, dating back to the earliest centuries of the Islamic era. A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca is taken from the original nineteenth-century Persian manuscript of the Safarnâmeh of Mirzâ Moḥammad Ḥosayn Farâhâni, a well-educated, keenly observant, Iranian Shiʿite gentleman. This memoir holds a wealth of social and economic information about Czarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Northern Iran, and Arabia. The author is a meticulous observer, recording details of distances, currencies, accommodations, modes of travel, and so on. He records the experiences encountered by pilgrims of his day: physical hardships, disease, generosity and compassion, banditry, hospitality, comradeship, and exaltation. And, without prejudice, he discusses the tensions between the Shiʿites and the Sunnites in the holy places—tensions that still exist and have erupted in bloody clashes during recent pilgrimages. A Shiʿite Pilgrimage to Mecca will appeal to a wide audience of general readers, Middle Eastern scholars, anthropologists, and historians.