Muslim Women S Pilgrimage To Mecca And Beyond

This book investigates female Muslims pilgrimage practices and how these relate to women’s mobility, social relations, identities, and the power structures that shape women’s lives. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and regional expertise, it offers in-depth investigation of the gendered dimensions of Muslim pilgrimage and the life-worlds of female pilgrims. With a variety of case studies, the contributors explore the experiences of female pilgrims to Mecca and other pilgrimage sites, and how these are embedded in historical and current contexts of globalisation and transnational mobility. This volume will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across pilgrimage, gender, religious, and Islamic studies.

This book investigates female Muslims pilgrimage practices and how these relate to women's mobility, social relations, identities, and the power structures that shape women's lives. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and regional expertise, it offers in-depth investigation of the gendered dimensions of Muslim pilgrimage and the life-worlds of female pilgrims. With a variety of case studies, the contributors explore the experiences of female pilgrims to Mecca and other pilgrimage sites, and how these are embedded in historical and current contexts of globalisation and transnational mobility. This volume will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across pilgrimage, gender, religious, and Islamic studies.

Explores changing attitudes to the holy through a study of 5 centuries of Bosnian Hajj literature Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy focuses on conceptualisations, images and descriptions of Hajj and Islamic geography by Bosnian Muslim authors in different writing genres from the 16th to the 21st centuries. It shows how meanings of Hajj differed across time, while its significance for the believers remained unchanged. The analysis of conceptualisations includes looking into meanings that are ascribed to rites, narratives used to explain the ritual, emotional expressions that are connected to the pilgrimage, and social meanings attached to the gathering. On another level, because Hajj entails a journey as well, the book observes changes in the perception of travel - including mechanisms of narrative and descriptive inclusion and exclusion, the image of Others (generally non-Muslims, but occasionally Muslim women), the role of transportation, food and lodging. Finally, the book shows what Bosnia meant for pilgrims in the creation of the sacred Islamic geography. This is the first critical and theoretically grounded book-length study of Hajj literature as a medium. Covering a period of several centuries and encompassing literature written in several languages, it redefines the ways pilgrimage can be understood and offers new methods for investigating the meaning and importance of Hajj for generations of premodern and modern believers. Dzenita Karic is a senior researcher at the Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

It is not only the holy cities of Mecca and Karbala to which Muslim pilgrims travel, but a wide variety of sacred sites around the world. Journeys are undertaken to visit graves of important historical and religious individuals, the tombs of saints, and natural sites such as mountaintops and springs. Exploring the richness and diversity of traditions practiced by the 1.5 billion Muslims across the world, Sophia Rose Arjana provides a rigorous theoretical discussion of pilgrimage, ritual practice and the nature of sacred space in Islam, both historically and in the present day. This all-encompassing survey covers issues such as time, space, tourism, virtual pilgrimages and the use of computers and smartphone apps. Lucidly written, informative and accessible, it is perfectly suited to students, scholars and the general reader seeking a comprehensive picture of the defining ritual of religious pilgrimage in Islam.

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 Islam’s rich and evolving tradition of hajj and ʿumra 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.

When thinking of intrepid travelers from past centuries, we don't usually put Muslim women at the top of the list. And yet, the stunning firsthand accounts in this collection completely upend preconceived notions of who was exploring the world. Editors Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma recover, translate, annotate, and provide historical and cultural context for the 17th- to 20th-century writings of Muslim women travelers in ten different languages. Queens and captives, pilgrims and provocateurs, these women are diverse. Their connection to Islam is wide-ranging as well, from the devout to those who distanced themselves from religion. What unites these adventurers is a concern for other women they encounter, their willingness to record their experiences, and the constant thoughts they cast homeward even as they traveled a world that was not always prepared to welcome them. Perfect for readers interested in gender, Islam, travel writing, and global history, Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women provides invaluable insight into how these daring women experienced the world—in their own voices.

“Wolfe does an exemplary job of detailing the ceremonies performed at Mecca and the reasons behind them . . . Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review This updated and expanded edition of One Thousand Roads to Mecca collects significant works by observant travel writers from the East and West over the last ten centuries—including two new contemporary narratives—creating a comprehensive, multifaceted literary portrait of the enduring tradition. Since its inception in the seventh century, the pilgrimage to Mecca has been the central theme in a large body of Islamic travel literature. Beginning with the European Renaissance, it has also been the subject for a handful of adventurous writers from the West who, through conversion or connivance, managed to slip inside the walls of a city forbidden to non-Muslims. These very different literary traditions form distinct impressions of a spirited conversation in which Mecca is the common destination and Islam the common subject of inquiry. Along with an introduction by Reza Aslan, featured writers include Ibn Battuta, J. L. Burckhardt, Sir Richard Burton, the Begum of Bhopal, John F. Keane, Winifred Stegar, Muhammad Asad, Lady Evelyn Cobbald, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, and Malcolm X. One Thousand Roads to Mecca is a historically, geographically, and ethnically diverse collection of travel writing that adds substantially to the literature of Islam and the West. “Serves as an excellent introduction to a religion, people, culture, and philosophy.” —Santa Cruz Sentinel

The present volume focuses on the political perceptions of the Hajj, its global religious appeal to Muslims, and the European struggle for influence and supremacy in the Muslim world in the age of pre-colonial and colonial empires. In the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, a pivotal change in seafaring occurred, through which western Europeans played important roles in politics, trade, and culture. Viewing this age of empires through the lens of the Hajj puts it into a different perspective, by focusing on how increasing European dominance of the globe in pre-colonial and colonial times was entangled with Muslim religious action, mobility, and agency. The study of Europe’s connections with the Hajj therefore tests the hypothesis that the concept of agency is not limited to isolated parts of the globe. By adopting the “tools of empires,” the Hajj, in itself a global activity, would become part of global and trans-cultural history. With contributions by: Aldo D’Agostini; Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste; Ulrike Freitag; Mahmood Kooria; Michael Christopher Low; Adam Mestyan; Umar Ryad; John Slight and Bogusław R. Zagórski.