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

In: Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca
Author:
Piotr Bachtin
Search for other papers by Piotr Bachtin in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
Open Access

Abstract

This chapter discusses four Iranian hajj accounts written between 1880 and 1901 by the following women belonging to the Qajar aristocracy: Mehrmāh Khānom ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, an anonymous woman from Tabas, ʿĀliye Khānom from Kerman, and Sakine Solṭān Vaqār al-Dowle Esfahāni Kuchak. It is argued that, apart from their class affiliation, three particular factors shaped the authors’ hajj experiences. First, they were all Shiʿi pilgrims and their responses toward the representatives of the Sunni majority they met during the pilgrimage tended to be coloured by fear and dislike. Moreover, while describing their encounters with the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, the diarists would express their belief in being culturally superior to local people. Finally, the female pilgrims’ experience of the hajj was strongly determined by their gender. In their travelogues, they wrote about being subject to control exerted over them by their male relatives who accompanied them on the road. However, although their freedoms were restricted, some of them would undertake various strategies of resistance.

1 Introduction

In early modern Iranian society, where gender segregation was highly valued and strictly observed, women lived their lives concealed behind the walls of their houses (or, more precisely, the interior parts inaccessible to strangers, called andarun). When entering the public sphere, they would do so behind the ‘portable wall’ (Milani 1992, XII) of their hijabs. Significantly, among the traditional terms applied to women in Persian, one was parde-neshin, ‘(the one) sitting/living behind the curtain’, and ḍaʿife, ‘the weak one’, both clear indications of the common image of women’s nature and role in society. However, the personal narratives of the hajj written by Iranian women with high status before the 1900s, and successively published from the manuscripts during the last twenty-five years, challenge this vision and prove that Iranian women not only participated in the hajj before the recent era of technical revolution and globalization, but also actively contributed to the pre-modern travel/pilgrimage writing.

In Iran, travel writing gained particular popularity under the rule of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh (r. 1848–1896) from the Qajar dynasty (1794–1925), who himself wrote several travel accounts covering his trips in Iran and abroad. Travelogues were generally referred to as safarnāme-hā, ‘travel books’, although travel writers of that time would also use the term ruznāme, ‘a diary’, which modern Persian designates as ‘a newspaper’.1 In the late 1800s, travelogues became a prominent type of writing both among the members of the royal court in Tehran and the provincial aristocracy. Many of these accounts were commissioned by the shah or by people from his entourage, and they were treated ‘(…) as a means of information gathering and reporting on general conditions, both at home and abroad’ (Farāhāni 1990, XXIV). William Hanaway, who attempted to summarize the chief traits of the Qajar travel accounts, similarly points at the informative function of these texts, which would serve, as he put it, a ‘didactic purpose’ (Hanaway 2002, 265). This also applies to the subtype that is the focus here: hajj accounts (safarnāme-hā-ye ḥajj or ḥajjnāme-hā). Focusing on ‘mundane’ aspects of a pilgrimage journey, such as the state of the roads, the stations along the way, prices, security issues, etc., these pilgrimage diaries served as guidebooks for future pilgrims. They complemented the religious manuals called manāsik al-ḥajj that contained descriptions of the hajj rites, which people resorted to in cases of uncertainty.

Importantly, however, the female-authored hajj narratives from Qajar Iran seem to possess qualities that differ from those of guidebooks.2 Apart from reporting on current events inside and outside the pilgrim caravans, Mehrmāh Khānom ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, a high-born woman from Tabas, ʿĀliye Khānom, and Sakine Solṭān Vaqār al-Dowle convey their thoughts and emotional states, and they often do so by using blunt language and resorting to irony and sarcasm. The difficult travel conditions, diseases affecting them and people around them, and finally death—an inseparable companion of pilgrims in those times—results in complaints that are apparently shared, as one would put it today, for auto-therapeutic purposes. In the preface to the travelogue by the woman from Tabas, Nāzilā Nāẓemi points out that:

[p]erhaps it might be said that the writing of diaries (ruznāme-nevisi-hā) gave to the literate women from the court [and from the aristocracy, pb] an opportunity to express their hidden emotions and thoughts without shame and embarrassment.

Nāẓemi 2018, 11

Nāẓemi emphasizes the astonishing frankness of the female travel writers as well as noting the satirical tone present in their accounts (ibid.). In the foreword to the journal of ʿĀliye Khānom, Raṣul Jaʿfariyān shares a similar observation: he remarks that the writer ‘has no self-censorship whatsoever’ and regrets that she did not leave any other writings behind (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 13).

The Qajar noblewomen performed a double act of transgression: first, by setting off for a journey, some of them ‘alone’, that is without a male relative acting as their ‘guardian’, which was ‘against the social convention’ (Nāẓemi 2018, 10). Second, keeping a diary as such might have been frowned upon by men. ʿĀliye Khānom therefore preferred to conceal her writing from her controlling travelling companion Vali Khān (Bachtin 2020, 15).

Leaving aside for the moment the question of the possible reasons why those women chose to write, it is worth emphasizing that it was while travelling abroad that they apparently discovered and, to a greater or lesser degree, exploited the transgressive potential of literary self-expression. Needless to say, the hajj, apart from possessing religious and spiritual meanings, was a long, tiring, and hazardous journey. Despite the limitations that the female pilgrims faced, particularly in terms of freedom of mobility within the entourage in which they travelled, they would inevitably face the new, the uncanny, and the dangerous.

My reading of the travelogues is inspired by the approach of Nasrin Rahimieh who in her book Missing Persians: Discovering Voices in Iranian Cultural History interprets some of the half-forgotten or unacknowledged pieces of Iranian life writing and social history as mirroring the ‘identity trouble’ of their authors. As Rahimieh observes, ‘(…) what remains constant, even in the least seemingly self-reflexive of these accounts, is the issue of identity, which at different moments of history finds varying designations and terms of reference’ (Rahimieh 2001, 1). If we agree that the Self is defined in an encounter with its negative ‘term of reference’, the Other (understood as ‘other than the Self’), to show the image of the Other that emerges from the hajj accounts by the Qajar noblewomen is also to reveal the way their selves were being (re)defined, negotiated, and (trans)formed outside a familiar environment. Since the otherness of the Other, albeit contingent and hence changeable, is significant in regard to the existing socio-cultural structure (Sarukkai 1997, 1406–1409), such reading may allow some conclusions to be drawn about the social perception of the Other in Qajar Iran, and consequently about the self-definition of Iranians in that time.

What I find particularly interesting in these travel accounts is that they were written by those who at the moment of performing the hajj might have been considered ‘thrice Other’ themselves: first, as the representatives of the Shiʿi religious minority in a predominantly Sunni land; second, as belonging to an ethnic and linguistic minority in what they would call ‘Arabia’ (ʿArabestān); and finally, as a gender minority, since in the nineteenth century most pilgrims were men. Their being Shiʿi had an effect on the course of their pilgrimage. As was usually the case with pilgrims from Iran, all women combined the hajj with sacred visits in today’s Iraq to the mausoleums of imams, in Persian called ʿatabāt-e ʿāliyāt, ‘the sublime thresholds’, or just ʿatabāt, ‘thresholds’. What is more, their texts are shot through with instances expressing fear of falling prey to the Sunnis driven by an anti-Shiʿi resentment. On the other hand, their descriptions of Sunni Muslims are often marked by dislike and contempt, apparently derived from their conviction that the Sunnis were not the ‘true’ Muslims. Speaking of the second factor that shaped these women’s pilgrimage experience, that is their ethnic and linguistic background, they would often express a sense of great pride on account of belonging to a more ‘civilized’ culture. It must be noted that the boundaries between ethnic and ‘racial’ features of the Other were blurred, and the diarists would comment either with disgust or with a certain fascination on physical traits of ‘Arabs-“blacks” ’. Finally, I discuss the various societal and personal implications of the diarist-pilgrims’ gender. As some of them disclose, they were subject to limitations and control was exerted over them by their male relatives who accompanied them on the road. Importantly, however, some of their travelogues also inform us about different strategies of resistance and disobedience to men.

2 The Writers and Their Works

The oldest known personal account of the hajj written by an Iranian woman dates back to the end of the Safavid era (1501–1722). This extensive poem (mathnawī) of 1200 bayts (verses) was composed by a widow of Mirzā Khalil, a royal scribe who worked for the last shah of the Safavid dynasty, Solṭān Ḥoseyn (r. 1694–1722), in the then royal city of Isfahan (Babayan 2008, 240). Ḥājiyeh Hamdam Kafshgar Sichāni identifies the poet as Shahrbānu Beygom, based on an oral statement by Shahrbānu’s supposed descendants who live in the city of Gaz in the neighbourhood of Isfahan (Kafshgar Sichāni 2007, Dāl; He-Ṭā). If this identification is correct, the account must have been written between 1694, the year of coronation of Solṭān Ḥoseyn, and 1707–1708 when Shahrbānu Beygom passed away.

Aside from this solitary example from the Safavid era, we currently know about four hajj accounts written by Iranian women between 1880 and 1901, that is, during the reign of two Qajar monarchs: Nāṣer al-Din Shāh and his son and successor Moẓaffar al-Din Shāh (r. 1896–1906). Although this number may appear small when compared to around sixty similar texts written by men in the Qajar period (Jaʿfariyān 2010; 2013), one must bear in mind various restrictions to which women were subject, both in terms of mobility and in terms of literary creation. Nevertheless, it may be assumed that more travelogues written by the Qajar women await unearthing and publication.

The author of the oldest narrative examined in this chapter is Mehrmāh Khānom ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, daughter of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh’s uncle, Farhād Mirzā (Jaʿfariyān 1996), whose 1875–1876 hajj narrative is discussed in this volume by Thomas Ecker. Her journal covers a pilgrimage made in 1880–1881. ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane departed from Tehran on 24 ramaḍān 1297AH/31 August 1880. In what is present-day Iraq, she visited the ʿatabāt-e ʿāliyāt and headed south-west proceeding with a caravan to Mecca and Medina. From Medina she went to Jedda, where she boarded a ship to Bushehr, an Iranian port on the Persian Gulf. On the way back to Tehran, she passed through Shiraz, Isfahan, Kashan, and Qom and entered the capital on 9 rajab 1298AH/7 June 1881.

The second account was written between 1886–1887 and belongs to an anonymous woman from the city of Tabas in eastern Iran, who on her paternal side was a granddaughter of Fatḥ ʿAli Shāh (r. 1797–1834), the second Qajar king, and on her maternal side a granddaughter of Nāder Shāh (r. 1736–1747) from the Afsharid dynasty (Nāẓemi 2018). She began her pilgrimage on 21 shaʿbān 1303/25 May 1886. After having passed through the Iranian cities of Kashan and Qom, she crossed the Iranian-Ottoman border and made her first pilgrimage to the ʿatabāt. Then, she proceeded to Basra, took a ship to Bushehr and continued travelling the Arabian Sea around the Arabian Peninsula to reach Jedda, from where she went to Mecca and Medina. After the hajj, on her way back home, she visited the ʿatabāt for the second time. She entered Tabas after 11 dhū al-ḥijja 1304/31 August 1887.

The third travelogue was written between 1892 and 1894 by an aristocratic woman from Kerman. In the first edition prepared by the historian Raṣul Jaʿfariyān (Jaʿfariyān 2007), the author, whose identity back then was unknown, is tentatively called Ḥājiye Khānom ʿAlaviye Kermāni (Ḥājja ʿAlawiyya from Kerman). It was later discovered that it was the diary of ʿĀliye Khānom and the second edition of her travelogue was published under that name (Torābi 2018). Originally from Shiraz, she was a niece of the imam of the Friday mosque in Kerman and a wife of Āqā-ye Shāpur Khān, son of ʿAbbāsqoli Khān, and grandson of Ebrāhim Khān Ẓohir al-Dowle, governor of Kerman from 1803–1824 (Gozarestan, n.d.). ʿĀliye Khānom departed from Kerman, headed south to Bandar-e Abbas and went aboard a ship to Mumbai, in which city she spent ten days before boarding another ship to sail again to Jedda. On her way to the Arabian Peninsula, she stopped for the obligatory quarantine on the island of Kamaran, close to the Yemeni shore. In Jedda, she joined a caravan to Mecca. After the hajj and a pilgrimage to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, ʿĀliye Khānom proceeded on the Iraqi route in the direction of the ʿatabāt. Upon arrival in Qom, she decided to travel to Tehran instead of returning to Kerman. In Tehran, where she spent about eighteen months before finally returning to Kerman, she acted as a ‘society lady’ (Khosravie 2013, 133–134), was a frequent guest at the royal harem of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh, participated in numerous betrothals and weddings, and engaged herself in matchmaking (Bachtin 2015).

The last account examined in this chapter belongs to Sakine Soltān Vaqār al-Dowle Esfahāni Kuchak, a widow of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh who performed the hajj in 1899–1901 (Jaʿfariyān and Kiyāni Haft Lang 2010). Vaqār al-Dowle departed from Tehran on 1 rajab 1317AH/5 November 1899 and passed through Qom in the direction of the ʿatabāt. After visiting the shrines of the imams, she proceeded with a caravan on the Syrian route to Aleppo and İskenderun, where she boarded a ship to Beirut. From there, she continued the trip on board ship through Port Said and the Suez Canal and arrived in Jedda from where she reached Mecca and Medina. On the way back from al-Ḥaramayn, she made a second pilgrimage to the ʿatabāt. In jumādā al-ʾawwal 1318AH/September 1900, she entered the Iranian city of Borujerd, where she joined her husband, Moʿtaṣem al-Molk, ‘who was living there at the time on a government assignment’ (Mahallati 2016, 846). She spent almost a year in Borujerd before returning to Tehran on 4 dhū al-ḥijja 1318AH/25 March 1901.3

3 ‘Bloody Sunnis’ and ‘Neat Shiʿi Boys’

During the hajj performance, and also during the pilgrimage journey to Mecca and back, adherents of different denominations of Islam share space and time. This diversity is mirrored in the following passage from the diary of ʿĀliye Khānom. After boarding the ship from Mumbai to Jedda, she described various reactions of pilgrims afraid of the sea voyage:

Someone was throwing up, someone was like in lethargy (bi-ḥāl), another one was crying and someone else was praying. May God not grant the disbelievers [with such a fate, pb]. May God make all fulfil their obligation [to make the hajj, pb], but [may God let them travel, pb] on land. We were in that state for ten days. From evenings to morning you would hear ‘Yā Allāh!’, ‘Yā Muḥammad!’ and ‘Yā ʿAlī!’ The Sunnis were calling for prayer. All of us were constantly reciting the shahāda. (…) From evening to morning you hear Yā Allāh! The Sunnis are calling for ill-time prayers. The dervishes from Herat, Kabul and India are saying ‘Huwa, huwa’. The Shiʿis are beating their chests. It’s like the Day of Judgment (Qiyāmat ast, methl-e ṣaḥrā-ye maḥshar).

Jaʿfariyān 2007, 57–58

This seemingly ‘anthropological’ description quickly turns into a blunt and contemptuous remark when, after having pointed out that the Sunnis make up the vast majority on the ship (600–700 people) in comparison to the only twenty three Shiʿis, ʿĀliye Khānom uses the epithet sonni-ye pedarsukhte (‘bloody Sunnis’) and associates them with a lack of hygiene, dirt, and stench: ‘All naked, bloody Sunnis, they don’t perform the ablutions, the bastards smell so bad that you could suffocate’ (ibid., 59). Such a remark not only dehumanizes the Sunnis who are described as disgusting, but also implicates that they are not ‘real’ Muslims. Although initially it seems that the diarist’s aim might have been to present the fear of travelling by ship as a common experience that unifies the pilgrims, it rapidly turns out that, according to ʿĀliye Khānom, the difficult conditions at sea could not justify an overt violation of religious principles that was committed by the Sunni majority.4

Particular indignation toward Sunnis is elicited in the Shiʿi pilgrims when the inhabitants of Arabia organize the fireworks show on the night of ʿashūrāʾ. In the travelogue of Mirzā Moḥammad Ḥoseyn Farāhāni from 1885–1886 we find a possible explanation of this tradition. As stated by Farāhāni, the Meccans would feast on 10 muḥarram under the pretext that, according to the Qurʾan, on that day Noah’s ark came to rest on Mount Judi near Mosul (Farāhāni 1990, 228). Interestingly, Farāhāni notes that under the reign of sharīf ʿAbdullah (r. 1858–1877) and Sharīf ʿAwn al-Rafīq (r. 1882–1905), since they ‘(…) were not hostile towards Shiʿism, this practice was abolished and stopped out of respect for the death of the Prince of Martyrs (Ḥusayn)’ (ibid.). However, the observations of ʿĀliye Khānom, who also made the hajj during the reign of sharīf ʿAwn al-Rafīq, contradict Farāhāni’s statement:

On the day of ʿāshūraʾ they organized the feast, because it was Friday. Apparently, they feast on Thursday night and on Friday, and play on instruments because of a holiday for Muhammad and his companions. On the night of ʿāshūrāʾ, on the 11th [of muḥarram, pb], the excellencies of Medina organized the fireworks show. They fired cannons and pistols and played on trumpets, drums and other instruments. I remembered what they did to the family of the Master of Martyrs in Karbala. I can’t express what it did to me. When I heard those sounds, I wanted to kill myself. May God increase their torment and torture, for the sake of Muhammad and his companions.

Jaʿfariyān 2007, 74

Unlike Farāhāni, ʿĀliye Khānom spends ʿāshūrāʾ in Medina and provides a different explanation of the ways Sunnis celebrate it. Similar to Farāhāni, she notes that the feast itself, and especially the way the Sunnis celebrate it, is a deliberate, malicious slander against the Shiʿis and imam Ḥusayn in particular. The actual meaning of these celebrations notwithstanding, it is interesting to observe that even though she acknowledged that the reason for organizing the fireworks show and firing cannons is a religious holiday commemorating the Prophet, she suggested that the holiday is of lesser importance than ʿāshūrāʾ. This, in turn, might suggest that imam Ḥusayn is of greater importance than the Prophet. Quite ironically, she recalls Muhammad and his companions for a second time, wishing the Sunnis ‘torment and torture’.

Such remarks are evidence of a profound resentment. One may look for the roots of the Shiʿi dislike for the Sunnis in the early history of Islam, or in the doctrinal differences. Yet while speaking of Iran, the political context is worth discussing as well. Iran became predominantly Shiʿi as late as in the 1500s, after the founder of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), shah Esmāʿil (r. 1501–1524), forcefully established Twelver Shiʿism as the state religion in 1501. This decision was at least partially driven by the desire to distinguish the Turkish-speaking Safavids from the Sunni Ottomans. Over the following centuries, Iran would remain in more or less intense conflict with its Sunni neighbour, on whose territory Mecca, as well as the Shiʿi ʿatabāt were located. Predictably, the political tensions would affect the lives of ordinary people, too. As many accounts of the hajj written in the Qajar period testify, the Shiʿi pilgrims travelling through the Arabian Peninsula might have been subjected to persecutions by the Ottoman authorities on the one hand, and to violence by local people on the other (Jaʿfariyān 2000, 54, 61–63).

In the account of ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, the Sunnis are portrayed as menacing bandits who threaten the health and lives of innocent Shiʿis. This is how she relates an unpleasant event she witnessed on 6 muḥarram 1298AH/8 December 1880 in a small settlement between Mecca and Medina:

(…) one person from among the [Iranian, pb] pilgrims went to the garden to convey the information about having been stripped of his belongings. A couple of gunmen followed him back in order to release the aforesaid one from the claws of pain, and then it turned out that if they had not come, the aforesaid man would have been killed. Imagine to what extent they must be hostile toward the Shiʿis, if they want to kill the poor men!

Jaʿfariyān 1996, 79

Although ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane does not label the raiders as Sunni, she clearly explicates that the robbery and threat of murder were fuelled by a strong anti-Shiʿi resentment. In the case of the Shiʿis from Iran, many of whom did not know Arabic, ethnic and linguistic differences made them particularly vulnerable. However, the danger of robbery put all pilgrims at risk. As demonstrated by the case of Sikandar Begum—a Sunni ruler of the princely state of Bhopal in central India (r. 1844–1868), who is celebrated as the first Indian Muslim monarch in history to have made the hajj—it was rather the pilgrims’ wealth that attracted raiders, not the branch of Islam to which they belonged. In a Persian-language abridgment of her pilgrimage narrative covering the hajj made in 1863–1864 and originally written Urdu, the begum, who initially planned to follow the same route as ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, declares having abandoned the idea of going to Medina after the hajj ‘because of the calamity of threatening Bedouins’ (Ḥassanābādi 2009, 643).

Even though the woman from Tabas does not share overtly hostile views toward Sunnis, her observations perpetuate the stereotypical image of ‘bad Sunnis’ juxtaposed with ‘good Shiʿis’. The following passage demonstrates that according to the author the ‘inferiority’ of being a Sunni might have been overcome by converting to Shiʿism:

All people here [in Khān-e Khākestari, a caravanserai near Baghdad, pb] are Shiʿis. In the evening, a sentinel came to stand next to the women. Our people talked with him. I was listening. He said: ‘I’m a cavalry commander (yuz-bāshi savār), from Istanbul, and I came to Baghdad with the pasha. I used to be his servant. The pasha died. I fell in love with a girl. She was a Sunni Arab, from Baqubah. I told her that if she wanted me to marry her, she must become a Shiʿi. She agreed. She became a Shiʿi and I married her. My parents were trying to make me come back to Istanbul, but I didn’t agree. My heart was with the girl.’ Apparently, she must be a good girl. He was a good young man, too. A neat Shiʿi.

Nāẓemi 2018, 53

Retelling her arrival in Medina, the noblewoman from Tabas expresses her excitement upon hearing the following words of a young Syrian adjutant: ‘O Thou who forgive the guilt of sinners!’ She remarks that she almost screamed of joy despite the fact that the boy was a Sunni (ibid., 91). It is interesting to note that these travelogue writers share strikingly similar comments when mentioning the ‘disbelievers’ (non-Muslims), as if they were as foreign to them as the Sunnis. This is how the same woman from Tabas empathizes with an old European woman (‘They say she is 120 years old’) she met in Bushehr, who was denied boarding a ship by the captain: ‘They threw her out in such a way that in spite of her being a disbeliever it was really hard to watch’ (ibid., 68). ʿĀliye Khānom, in turn, shares conventional expressions such as, already quoted, ‘May God not grant the disbelievers [with such a fate, pb]’ (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 57–58) when she describes difficult situations and emotionally exhausting moments.

4 Who Is an ‘Arab’ and Who Is a ‘Black’?

Grounded in a range of categories including ethnicity, language, and, broadly speaking, culture (or rather the alleged lack of it), the othering statements of the diarists demonstrate that they construed the Other not only as a non-Shiʿi or an anti-Shiʿi. Very often, the differences overlapped: the Arabs and Bedouins, both of whom are referred to with the term ʿArab, in addition to being predominantly Sunni, also belonged to another ethnic group and spoke a different language. On the whole, the diaries reveal the Arabophobic attitude of their authors that is summarized well in the words of Vaqār al-Dowle who left the following note during her stay in Port Said in March 1900:

After waking up in the morning and having drunk some tea, Ḥājji Ḥoseyn and Ḥājji Gholāmʿali went to the city to buy something. My brother did not go. When they came back, they were complimenting [the city, pb] a lot. But no matter how much you praise these cities, you don’t want to dwell there. I’m so tired with those Arabs (bas ke az in ʿArab-hā badam āmade) that I only repeat ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ so we will reach our destination and survive at sea, in šāʾAllāh.

Jaʿfariyān and Kiyāni Haft Lang 2010, 84

Elsewhere in her account, Vaqār al-Dowle depicts local people with epithets such as ‘mice-/rat-eating Arab’ (ʿArab-e mush-khor) (ibid., 38) or ‘stinking Arab’ (ʿArab-e gandide) (ibid., 104). Also, when her brother has to pay customs in Jedda, she ‘thanks God’ that she does not have to ‘wrangle’ with zabān nā-fahm-hā (imbeciles, literally meaning ‘not understanding the language’) herself (ibid., 90). However, it is worth noting at this point that there were moments when the whole perspective changed and despised Arabs disappeared from Vaqār al-Dowle’s sight. After completing the second series of pilgrimages to ʿatabāt-e ʿāliyāt, she writes in her journal that she wants to return to Iran as soon as possible. It is not only the ‘spoiled Arabs’ that tire her (ibid., 130), she is also exhausted by ‘the heat of Arabia’ (ibid., 131). Yet right after arriving in Iran, she is close to ‘dying of grief’ at the sight of Iranian pilgrims heading toward ‘the paradise’: the ʿatabāt (ibid., 134). Soon after, she calls Karbala her vaṭan or ‘homeland’: ‘I had Karbala as my home, and now I have moved away from my homeland’ (ibid., 140). The narrative of Vaqār al-Dowle shows that space may be perceived differently depending on whether it is seen as belonging to sacred or mundane geography. It also points to the ambiguity of the notion of homeland in a pilgrim’s experience, for sometimes it may refer to the ‘earthly homeland’, and at other times to the ‘spiritual homeland’.

In ʿĀliye Khānom’s account, Arabs are described as stupid, clumsy, and dangerous. According to her report, at the moment they entered Mecca she and her companions were the only eleven pilgrims who had not performed the ritual ablution and entered the state of iḥrām yet. Therefore, they started to look for a donkey to take them to the mīqāt in Saʿdiyya (Yalamlam) as soon as possible. Since they could not find a donkey, they finally hired a mule and went to Qarn al-Manāzil instead. During the trip, ʿĀliye Khānom fell off the mule and injured her head. Expressing her distress that she could not perform a proper ablution in such a state (‘Those who could, made ablution and became muḥrim. But my head is wounded, covered with blood; [anyway, pb] having apparently cleaned dirt (nejāsat), we became muḥrim in a mosque’; Jaʿfariyān 2007, 67), she blamed the mule driver and repeatedly called him with no other epithet than that of ‘a bloody Arab’ (ʿArab-e pedarsukhte thrice and pedarsukhte ʿArab once; ibid., 65–67).

ʿĀliye Khānom’s narrative demonstrates as well that apart from being an object of derision and contempt, Arabs were also an object of fear. Writing about washing the corpse of her female travel companion who had died on the road from Mecca to Medina, she explained that this was done in great haste: ‘Every hour they were saying: “Don’t be long, because the Arab bandits (ʿArāb-e ḥarāmi) will come and kill us!” ’ (ibid., 71). The diarist did not claim that the threat of falling prey to ‘the Arab bandits’ was due to the fact that she and her companions were Shiʿis (as ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane did in the already quoted excerpt). The Qajar hajj journals demonstrate, however, that Iranian pilgrims tended to equate Arabs with Sunnis (and thus: with ‘anti-Shiʿi’).

Imposing one category (ethnicity) on another (religion)—which may appear quite odd given the fact that Iranians would inevitably meet Shiʿi Arabs during the pilgrimage—can be observed in the travelogue of Mirzā Abdolḥoseyn Khān Afshār Orumi, who performed the hajj in 1299–1300 AH (1882–1883). Reporting on his pilgrimage made on the day of ʿāshūrāʾ to the Janna al-Baqīʿ cemetery in Medina, he wrote: ‘(…) I said the ʿāshūrāʾ prayer, but in secret, because if any Arab saw me and found out what I was reciting, nothing would stop him from killing me’ (Afshār Orumi 2007, 172). The woman from Tabas, in turn, uses a religious-geographical category when describing her fear of the Turkish soldiers she and some other women had to confront after the obligatory quarantine in Jedda: ‘We have no courage to step ahead, because these Sunnis and inhabitants of al-Hijaz mistreat Iranians (ʿAjam). They discriminate [them, pb] on religious grounds’ (Nāẓemi 2018, 74). Afraid of the Ottoman soldiers, she apparently includes Turks in the class of ‘inhabitants of al-Hijaz’. Her words prove that the self-identification of Iranians paralleled their understanding of the Sunni Other that they encountered during the pilgrimage: even if she does not declare it, it is evident that she equates ʿAjam with the Shiʿis, as she identifies Arabs and Turks with the Sunnis.

One more conspicuous feature complemented the image of Arabs: their ‘black’ (siyāh) skin. Within a domestic context inside Iran, the word siyāh would usually denote a black enslaved person. As noted by Behnaz A. Mirzai, it ‘(…) was the most commonly used term by which enslaved Africans were designated in nineteenth-century [Iranian, pb] manuscripts’ (Mirzai 2017, 24). However, in the following derogatory remark made by ʿĀliye Khānom, ‘blackness’ is emphasized as a distinctive, negative feature of Arabs: ‘All people here [in Qarn al-Manazil, pb] are black (siyāh) as coal, bloody Arabs’ (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 67).

Still, the diarists would apply the same term siyāh with reference to people of African origin, too. ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane discloses that during the hajj journey she was accompanied by her kaniz-e siyāh, a black female servant (Jaʿfariyān 1996, 60). The noblewoman from Tabas also travelled with her Ethiopian servant (kaniz-e ḥabashi) whom she mentions by name: ‘Dowlat, my Abyssinian servant who since the beginning is my right hand in housekeeping, is a good maid (…)’ (Nāẓemi 2018, 33). It is interesting to note in the context of the hajj that black male servants were also called ḥājji and black female servants ḥājiye on account of being often brought to Iran from Mecca (Mirzai 2017, 24). Confirmation of this practice can be found in the journal of the woman from Tabas, who mentions having bought ‘new female servants’ (kaniz-hā-ye now) in Mecca (ibid., 88).

In contrast to Western racist discourse, in Qajar Iran ‘blackness’ was not perceived as a ‘scientific’ category. As the hajj accounts testify, dark-skinned people would not necessarily be described as ‘black’ in accordance with a racial or an ethnic key, but rather on the basis of an obvious physical difference. Still, as the quoted excerpts demonstrate, ‘blackness’ was more often emphasized as a negative feature rather than a positive one, and dark skin traditionally carried connotations of evil and sin. It should be noted that the term ru-siyāh, a possibly self-belittling epithet, quite often used by the diarists in the sense of a sinful person, in its basic, literal sense means a person with black face (Farhang-e feshorde-ye Sokhan 2011). Even Tāj al-Salṭane, a daughter of Nāṣer al-Din Shāh who in her famous, unfinished memoir from 1914 fervently disapproved of the terrible treatment of black slaves and servants by their owners and championed racial equality, did not fail to dwell on the perceived negative appearance of her black nanny:

This dear nanny of mine, having also brought up my mother, had risen to the rank of ‘Matron Nanny.’ (…) She was very affectionate to me and very formal and serious with others. I had grown so accustomed to her presence that, despite her fearsome looks and dreadful physique, if she was parted from me for a day, I cried the entire time and nothing could console me.

Taj al-Saltana 1993, 114, emphasis added, pb

In Qajar Iran, black people usually ranked among the lowest social strata: as slaves and enslaved domestic servants. Bearing this in mind, it appears significant that the noblewomen despise and even animalize the siyāhs who are placed low on the social ladder and serve as menial workers. For example, ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, who repeatedly complains about the slowness of the camel drivers, once calls them ‘black dogs’ (sag-hā-ye siyāh-e jammāl) (Jaʿfariyān 1996, 79)5 and Vaqār al-Dowle compares black people working in the port of Jedda to monkeys: ‘All dockers (balamchi-hā) are black. The black slaves (kākā-hā) go up the ropes [hanging from the ship, pb] like monkeys to throw the luggage [from the ship, pb] into the boats’ (Jaʿfariyān and Kiyāni Haft Lang 2010, 89). On the other hand, the same Vaqār al-Dowle did not even mention that Khāzen-e Aqdas, Moẓaffar al-Din’s confidant whom she visited before the pilgrimage to humbly ask for the shah’s blessing, was a former black slave of her late royal husband. Elevated to an esteemed position at the royal court, she had, according to Vaqār al-Dowle, ‘blessed eyes’ and her mouth would utter ‘blessed words’ (ibid., 27–28). Hence, black skin was sometimes pejoratively emphasized and at other times glossed over in silence, depending on the social position and importance of a particular siyāh.

It should be noted that black skin might also have been conventionally aestheticized: when the woman from Tabas enters Mecca, she poetically contrasts the black skin of a ḥaram servant with the whiteness of his clothing: ‘(…) I saw that a person blacker than tar wearing clothes whiter than milk (shakhṣi siyāh-tar az qir bā lebās-e sefid-tar az shir) appeared’ (Nāẓemi 2018, 81). In yet other situations, the mention of black skin may be considered either as a ‘neutral description’ or as an emphasis put on a significant, negative trait of the Other. Such interpretative ambivalence arises from the following account of a visit to the mausoleum of four imams in Medina, included in the journal of the woman from Tabas:

A few black slaves (gholām-e siyāh) sit on top of the cupola [of the mausoleum, pb] and they take one qerān from each two people. If they don’t take money once, [or rather, pb] if they don’t take [it, pb] one thousand times, they won’t let you come in. And the imams’ ḥaram is in such a bad shape and poor state that a man’s heart aches [seeing that, pb]. They [the imams, pb] have always been oppressed (maẓlum), and they still are.

ibid., 92

Reporting on her arrival in Medina, the woman from Tabas mentions the local Shiʿis (apparently members of the Nakhāwila community), among whom she and some other Iranian pilgrims stayed.6 According to her description, those ‘black-skinned’ (siyāh-jald, equivalent to the modern siyāh-pust) people lived in ‘an area of small houses’ next to the cemetery of Janna al-Baqīʿ and were believed to be descendants of former slaves (ibid., 91). The Shiʿis of Medina combined the features of ‘us’ and ‘them’: they were the diarist’s co-religionists, yet they also possessed qualities of the Other, because of their appearance and low social status.

5 ‘In Fact, I Am Not a Human Being’: Women and Men

The narratives demonstrate that the Imāmī Shiʿi women, who in theory were able to perform the pilgrimage on their own (Sayeed 2016, 68), usually were, in fact, dependent on the consent of their spouse, father, or another close male relative in the cases of unmarried or fatherless women. It is significant that Vaqār al-Dowle expresses gratitude to her husband for ‘not objecting’ to her performing the hajj without him:

May God grant long life and good health to Moʿtasem al-Molk—may his good fortune endure forever—for not having objected to my journey but for having allowed instead, in shāʾAllāh, my hajj to be accepted by the Almighty and for having released me from this obligation [of performing the hajj, pb].

Jaʿfariyān and Kiyāni Haft Lang 2010, 114

In turn, in an introductory part of her travelogue, the woman from Tabas describes how she finally convinced her more-than-thirty-years-older husband to let her perform the hajj on her own. Although she expresses respect for him and emphasizes that he was guided by concern and fear for her health and life, and not by a desire to control her, at some point she shares the following remark:

(…) because of this sudden travel of mine they are [he is, pb] very affected and pensive, and for the sake of us they seemingly never oppose, but in fact, I am not a human being.

Nāẓemi 2018, 28–29

This statement, that is not elaborated upon, not only indicates the subordination of the Qajar women to men, but above all: their awareness of this subordination, which at least some of them perceived as dehumanizing, as the ‘in fact, I am not a human being’ indicates. Whereas the words of the woman from Tabas are particularly suggestive, similar comments testifying to the subordination of women to men can be found in the other diaries as well. It is interesting to note that both ʿĀliye Khānom and Vaqār al-Dowle use their travel journals as a space where they can complain about their freedoms (ekhtiyār) being limited by men (Bachtin 2020, 21–22). For instance, when the latter wants to go to Damascus in order to visit the mausoleum of Zaynab,7 her brother decides to proceed through Beirut. Vaqār al-Dowle then bitterly concludes: ‘Whoever a woman would be, men will [always, pb] get it all their own way’ (Jaʿfariyān and Kiyāni Haft Lang 2010, 83).

Importantly, apart from complaining, the female writers use irony and derision as ways of communicating their critical views about men. Sarcastic comments directed toward men are recurrent in the account of ʿĀliye Khānom and also present in Vaqār al-Dowle’s travel journal (Bachtin 2020). For example, in the Tehrani part of ʿĀliye Khānom’s diary, written after the hajj, she mocks a male tailor who was supposed to teach her and some courtly women how to use a sewing machine by calling him ‘a jealous lazy-bones’ who would not be able to teach them anything worthwhile (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 177). Such remarks show that women—themselves othered by men in the patriarchal Qajar society—would treat men as objects of othering, too.

The one diarist who actively fought to regain her ekhtiyār or freedom was ʿĀliye Khānom. On the way back to Iran she left her male custodian, Vali Khān, and took one of her female fellow travellers, a young woman called Fāṭeme under her wing (ibid., 89). Judging by the journal entry recorded after the split with Vali Khān, the decision to continue her journey without a male custodian must have entailed a veritable feeling of liberation in her:

Since the day that I left the service of Khān, thanks God, I have seen all kinds of places and eaten all kinds of food. Al-ḥamdu li-Allāh, finally I am at ease!

ibid., 93

The first reference to Fāṭeme appears in the opening part of the travelogue (ibid., 40). The fact that ʿĀliye Khānom refers to her by name may mean that she was significantly younger. While not explicitly stated, it must be assumed that Fāṭeme was a temporary wife (ṣighe) of Vali Khān, who got rid of her in Najaf and left her to her fate as soon as it turned out that she had become pregnant by him. Subsequently, ʿĀliye Khānom abandoned Vali Khān and then, together with Fāṭeme, both women joined a spouse of a certain Ḥājji Kalāntar (ibid., 89).

Was ʿĀliye Khānom’s choice to separate from Vali Khān partially driven by his cruel treatment of the pregnant woman? It seems likely, although she did not share any details explaining her decision. Albeit in different ways and to varying degrees, both ʿĀliye Khānom and Fāṭeme were subject to Vali Khān’s oppression, and we have reasons to interpret ʿĀliye Khānom’s move as an act of solidarity in the face of open injustice and violence that Khān directed at women of his entourage. But her act of solidarity was, as she disclosed, a religious act of merit, too. Her decision to take care of the pregnant and ill woman seems to be, at least in part, dictated by her desire to achieve a spiritual reward in this life or in the hereafter. Yet her bitter remarks reveal that she apparently came to regret her decision: complaining about Fāṭeme’s ‘uselessness’ (bi-maṣrafi), she demonstrates how the sacred intertwined with the profane:

So now, when I have decided to perform thawāb [a religious act of merit, pb], there’s no one to say: ‘Woman! What’s your business here? Vali Khān kicked her out, is it your business to take her along?’ Again, I do everything out of love for God, but she doesn’t do anything. It’s winter, it’s cold, there is a journey of two months ahead and I don’t spend anything, [there is, pb] no one to borrow money from and I don’t have [enough, pb] money. I’m woebegone and don’t know what to do. If I were alone with a servant girl, it would be easier.

ibid., 97

Sylvia Chiffoleau observes that the return journeys from Mecca were usually very difficult, which was caused by, among other things, fatigue and dwindling supplies (Chiffoleau 2015, 42). In the case of ʿĀliye Khānom, both tiredness and expenses increased because of Fāṭeme’s presence, and this was constantly troubling her mind on the road back to Iran. In her journal, she complained not only about the lack of money, but also about feeling overwhelmed by embarrassment (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 97). At some point, she became embittered by Fāṭeme’s ‘uselessness’ and ungratefulness to such an extent that she became carried away by anger and renounced performing any meritorious acts in the future:

Even if I would have to eat shit a thousand times, I won’t do thawāb. I have to take care of myself. And then I’m supposed to take care of Fāṭeme too. Anytime, with no desire. I vowed not to do thawāb in this world anymore.

ibid., 101, emphasis added, pb

ʿĀliye Khānom’s diary informs us that she helped at least one more young woman in a difficult situation. After the hajj, during her long sojourn in the capital, she was regularly engaged as a stylist of brides (Bachtin 2015, 998–999) and became a sought-after matchmaker. Precisely on account of being ḥājji khānom, her intervention was believed to give blessing (baraka) and provide happiness and prosperity in marriage (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 127). She matched, among others, ʿAbdolvāheb Mirzā, one of the servants of her host, Ḥeshmat al-Salṭane, with an orphan girl whose name is not mentioned in the journal (it was a temporary marriage, but the writer did not specify the contract details). As was often the case, the bride and groom did not meet before the wedding. The day after the ceremony, ʿAbdolvāheb Mirzā demanded a divorce on account of the unattractive looks of his newlywed wife. Then, ʿĀliye Khānom asked Ḥeshmat al-Salṭane to intervene, arguing that the ugliness of the girl was not a sufficient reason to divorce her, and that her fate was, at least, uncertain:

Poor orphan with no father! I went to His Lordship [Ḥeshmat al-Salṭane, pb] and told him: ‘There is nothing we can do now. It is impossible to divorce her for this reason!’

ibid., 146

Eventually, thanks to her intervention, ʿAbdolvāheb Mirzā changed his mind about divorcing the girl (ibid.).

The participation in the hajj is an important factor elevating one’s social position and those who have made a pilgrimage to Mecca enjoy a special respect in their communities. According to the traditional view, however, such a change of social status applies mostly to men, since women, rather than being associated with the social and the cultural, are perceived to be closer to nature.8 Yet the case of ʿĀliye Khānom shows that in Qajar Iran the participation in the hajj could have social implications for women, too. To become a bride stylist and to be thought of as a carrier of baraka was an important distinction on both religious and social levels. Even if embedded in a patriarchal framework, ʿĀliye Khānom’s actions served to provide the girl with no maḥram relative with financial stability, at least temporarily. Her journal demonstrates that she was able to use her high social status as well as the esteem she enjoyed as ḥājji khānom to advocate for less privileged, younger women.

6 Conclusions

The female selves emerging from the pilgrimage accounts by ʿEṣmat al-Salṭane, the woman from Tabas, ʿĀliye Khānom, and Vaqār al-Dowle appear to function in a paradoxical, contradictory dynamic of othering the Other (a Sunni, an Arab, a ‘black’) and being othered by others (men). Importantly, however, what the narratives of the woman from Tabas, Vaqār al-Dowle, and ʿĀliye Khānom demonstrate is that the women writers approached Iranian men as objects of othering, too. The fact that they often wrote unfavourably about men from their own environment indicates that their travel journals were intended, chiefly or exclusively, for a female readership. Vaqār al-Dowle explicitly states that she wrote her account for the female readers of her class and was asked to do it by a high-born woman connected to the royal court (Bachtin 2020, 12–14, 19, 24). As it was observed by Safaneh Mohaghegh Neyshabouri, one must bear in mind that the gender of the authors and their envisioned, mostly female readerships shaped both the language and the contents of their journals:

They did not write in the veiled language that the women who wrote for the press used, nor did they write employing quite the same unveiled language that they used in their private female circles. They did, however, use a language that was unembellished, and if their subject of description was not related to the royals, fairly unveiled. In most cases it seems that the author is expecting a relatively narrow readership, of mostly like-minded women, although there are obvious cases of writing that seems to anticipate that male companions and either the Shah himself or people close to him (such as his wives) will read the travelogue.

Mohaghegh Neyshabouri 2020, 134

The narrative of ʿĀliye Khānom proves that some women would attempt to abandon the circle of oppressive socio-cultural norms. It must be emphasized that, paradoxically, ʿĀliye Khānom’s comparatively lower status of a non-royal provincial aristocrat made her less entangled in the network of dependencies that hampered the other female authors. One could also wonder whether her act of defiance against the patriarchal order (embodied by Vali Khān) was somehow triggered by the liminal, and thus possibly transformative, nature of the pilgrimage. Whereas it is impossible to answer this question, what can be ascertained is that the hajj journey, apart from being an object of description, provided ʿĀliye Khānom and other women writers with an opportunity to write about themselves and problematize their relationships with men.

The female-authored travelogues from the Qajar era clearly show that their relationships with the representatives of the opposite gender were of salient importance for them. Symptomatically, in the contemporaneous male-authored texts, co-travelling women, with rare exceptions, are glossed over in silence. Even if accompanied by their wives, male travellers usually did not mention female travelling companions in their diaries. Mentioning women would be considered either irrelevant or, perhaps even more importantly, breaking the taboo, since wives belonged to the private sphere. Traditionally, they might have been overtly identified with ʿawra, ‘the most private part of the body (…)’ (Sprachman 1995, IX).

When it comes to the image of the hajj, the narratives discussed here are not coloured by a romantic vision of the pilgrimage, supposed to obliterate differences of any kind among believers who peacefully gather in the House of God. These travelogues rather show that, despite the egalitarian idea of unity among all Muslims, differences prevailed. They reveal that their writers’ subjectivity was chiefly defined by religious difference (Muslims versus non-Muslims, and even more importantly: Shiʿis versus Sunnis), ethnic difference (Iranians versus non-Iranians, mostly Arabs), ‘racial’ difference (‘white’ Iranians versus ‘blacks’), and finally linguistic difference (Persian speakers versus those not speaking Persian). Apparently, for the female pilgrims the journey outside of the home country rarely was a stimulus to redefine their subjectivity. On the contrary, the Qajar women’s attachment to their religious affiliation and place of origin seems to have undergone reinforcement through contact with the Other.

1

Throughout this chapter, I use the terms ‘diary’, ‘journal’, and ‘travelogue’ interchangeably.

2

Which is not to imply that the hajj accounts written by men did not possess such qualities.

3

For more information about these accounts, except the one by the woman from Tabas, see Bachtin 2020. On Sakine Solṭān Vaqār al-Dowle Eṣfahāni Kuchak and her pilgrimage diary, see Dusend 2013.

4

This excerpt from ʿĀliyeh Khānom’s account is one out of many in which she or other diarists complain about conditions preventing them not only from ensuring hygiene, but also the ritual purity attained through ġusl, wużūʿ, or iḥrām while travelling by ship. For example, while travelling by ship from Bandar-e Abbas to Mumbai, ʿĀliyeh Khānom laments about the dirt impeding her ability to properly perform quotidian religious rituals. Following the custom, she asks God to allow all her friends to make the hajj, but ‘(…) by land, not by ship, [where, pb] there is nothing left for a human being, no prayer (namāz), no worship (ʿebādat), no clean food. It’s all dirt within dirt (najes andar najes)’ (Jaʿfariyān 2007, 49). Also, Vaqār al-Dowle, who made her iḥrām on a ship before arriving in Jedda, laments about the dirt, hoping that God would accept the ritual performed in such conditions (Jaʿfariyān and Kiyāni Haft Lang 2010, 87, 89).

5

It almost looks like complaining about camel drivers became some sort of tradition among the Iranian pilgrims: other safarnāmes from that time also show that camel drivers did not enjoy a good reputation. For instance, Farāhāni, describing the ‘Flying Caravan’, which circulated between Mecca and Medina (probably the same with which the Qajar ladies travelled), wrote: ‘There is no method in the departure of this caravan. It sets out from Mecca going to Medina group by group from the twentieth of the month of Ẕi Ḥejjeh (dhū al-ḥijja) to the end of the month. There is no order or regularity in anything about this caravan. There is so much thievery both from within and without [the caravan, pb]. Most of the camel drivers are thieves and robbers. Along the way, if someone is lost, it is the responsibility of the camel driver. Because of this, few belongings of people are lost along the way. After an individual arrives at the lodgings, if he is a little careless, they steal his belongings at once. If 100,000 tomans [worth, pb] of the pilgrims’ belongings are carried off one night, or fifty pilgrims are killed, or if [some, pb] of the thieves are killed, there is no redress or calling to account. Usually the pilgrims stay awake from nightfall to morning, with weapons in hand, saying “Keep away, keep away!” ’ (Farāhāni 1990, 248, emphasis added, pb).

6

For more information about the Nakhāwila community, see Ende 1997.

7

Sayyida Zaynab is the daughter of ʿAlī and Fātimah and granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

8

For example, Carol Delaney, who juxtaposed the contemporary hajj experiences of Turkish immigrants in Belgium with those of Turks living in Anatolia, argued that ‘[f]or a woman hajji there are no outward signs of changed status; whatever the rewards, they are invisible and internal. A woman who has made the hajj may be an object of curiosity, envy, and admiration to her friends, but her journey does not confer any new privileges. It does not indicate arrival at a new stage of life, since stages in woman’s lives are defined rather by bio-sexual events of the female body: menstruation, defloration, childbirth, and menopause. After her journey she returns to the same life and resumes all her domestic tasks’ (Delaney 1990, 520). Obviously, Delaney’s observations concerned a different place and time, but they may be considered to stem from a specific view on roles and functions of women in Muslim societies, both in the past and now.

References

  • Afshār Orumi, Mirzā ʿAbdolḥoseyn Khān. 2007. Safarnāme-ye Makke-ye moʿaẓẓame: 1299–1300q (1261–1262sh). Tehrān: Nashr-e ʿElm.

  • Babayan, Kathryn. 2008. ‘“In spirit we ate each other’s sorrow”: Female companionship in seventeenth-century Safavi Iran.’ In Islamicate sexualities: Translations across temporal geographies of desire, edited by Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, 239274. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bachtin, Piotr. 2020. ‘Women’s writing in action: On female-authored hajj narratives in Qajar Iran.’ Iranian studies 54: 12, 6793. https://doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2020.1724506.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bachtin, Piotr. 2015. ‘The royal harem of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848–1896): The literary portrayal of women’s lives by Taj al-Saltana and anonymous “Lady from Kerman”.’ Middle Eastern studies 51 (6): 9861009.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Chiffoleau, Sylvia. 2015. Le voyage à La Mecque. Un pèlerinage mondial en terre d’Islam. Paris: Éditions Belin.

  • Delaney, Carol. 1990. ‘The “hajj”: sacred and secular.’ American ethnologist 17 (3): 513530.

  • Dusend, Sarah. 2013. ‘Pilgern nach Mekka—zur Reisewirklichkeit einer qajarischen Prinzessin und den Funktionen ihres Pilgerberichtes Rūznāme-ye safar-e ʿatabāt va-Mekkeh.’ In Venturing beyond borders—Reflections on genre, function and boundaries in Middle Eastern travel writing, edited by Bekim Agai, Olcay Aky, and Caspar Hillebrand, 75118. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ende, Werner. 1997. ‘The Nakhāwila, a Shiʿite community in Medina past and present.’ Die Welt des Islams 37 (3): 263348.

  • Farāhāni, Moḥammad Ḥoseyn. 1990. A Shiʿite pilgrimage to Mecca: 1885–1886. The Safarnâmeh of Mirzâ Mohammad Ḥosayn Farāhāni. London: Saqi Books.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Farhang-e feshorde-ye Sokhan. 2011. Tehrān: Sokhan, s.v. ‘Ru-siyāh’.

  • Gozarestan. n.d. ‘Zan-e kermāni ke ketāb-e “Ruznāme-ye safar-e ḥajj” rā nevesht ke bud?’ Accessed June 8, 2020. https://www.gozarestan.ir/show.php?id=1878.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hanaway, William. 2002. ‘Persian travel narratives: Notes toward the definition of a nineteenth-century genre.’ In Society and culture in Qajar Iran: Studies in honor of Hafez Farmayan, edited by Elton Daniel, 249268. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Ḥassanābādi, Akram, ed. 2009. ‘Gozāresh-e safar-e ḥajj-e bānu-ye hendi Shāh Jahān Beygom [!] dar sāl-e 1280 qamari.’ Payām-e Bahārestān 3: 641654.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Jaʿfariyān, Raṣul, ed. 2013. Chahārdah safarnāme-ye ḥajj-e qājāri-ye digar. Tehrān: Nashr-e ʿElm.

  • Jaʿfariyān, Raṣul, ed. 2010. Panjāh safarnāme-ye ḥajj-e qājāri. Tehrān: Nashr-e ʿElm.

  • Jaʿfariyān, Raṣul, ed. 2007. Ruznāme-ye safar-e ḥajj, ʿatabāt-e ʿāliyāt, va darbār-e Nāṣeri 1309–1312 q/1271–1273 sh. Qom: Nashr-e Movarrekh.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Jaʿfariyān, Raṣul, ed. 2000. ‘Ḥajj-gozāri-ye Irāniyān dar dowre-ye Qājār (1).’ Miqāt-e Ḥajj 32: 5384.

  • Jaʿfariyān, Raṣul, ed. 1996. ‘Safarnāme-ye Makke-ye dokhtar-e Farhād Mirzā.’ Miqāt-e ḥajj 17: 57117.

  • Jaʿfariyān, Rasul, and Kiyānush Kiyāni Haft Lang, eds. 2010. Ruznāme-ye safar-e ʿatabāt va Makke 1317q/1279sh. Tehrān: Enteshārāt-e ʿElm.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Kafshgar Sichāni, Ḥājiye Hamdam, ed. 2007. Safar-e sabz. Khāṭerāt-e manẓum-e yek ḥajj. Eṣfahān: Enteshārāt-e Puyān-Mehr.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Khosravie, Jasmin. 2013. ‘Iranian women on the road—The case of Ṣadīqe Doulatābādī in Europe, 1923–1927.’ In Venturing beyond borders—Reflections on genre, function and boundaries in Middle Eastern travel writing, edited by Bekim Agai, Olcay Aky, and Caspar Hillebrand, 131156. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mahallati, Amineh. 2016. ‘Women as pilgrims: Memoirs of Iranian women travelers to Mecca.’ Iranian studies 44: 831849.

  • Milani, Farzaneh. 1992. Veils and words: The emerging voices of Iranian women writers. Syracuse and New York: Syracuse University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Mirzai, Behnaz. 2017. A history of slavery and emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  • Mohaghegh Neyshabouri, Safaneh. 2020. ‘Resistance and encroachment in everyday life: A feminist epistemological study of Qajar era Iranian women’s travel journals’. PhD diss., University of Alberta.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Nāzemī, Nāzilā, ed. 2018. Se ruz be ākhar-e daryā: safarnāme-ye shāhzāde khānom-e qājāri. Tehrān: Aṭrāf.

  • Rahimieh, Nasrin. 2001. Missing Persians: Discovering voices in Iranian cultural history. Syracuse and New York: Syracuse University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sarukkai, Sundar. 1997. ‘The “Other” in anthropology and philosophy.’ Economic and political weekly 32 (24): 14061409.

  • Sayeed, Asma. 2016. ‘Women and the hajj.’ In The hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo and Shawkat Toorawa, 6584. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sikandar Begum. 1870. A pilgrimage to Mecca by the Nawab Sikandar Begum of Bhopal, G.C.S.I. London: Wm. H. Allen & Co.

  • Sprachman, Paul. 1995. Suppressed Persian: An anthology of forbidden literature. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.

  • Taj al-Saltana. 1993. Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian princess from the harem to modernity, 1884–1914. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Torābi, Zohre, ed. 2018. Chādor kardim raftim tamāshā: safarnāme-ye ʿĀliye Khānom Shirāzi. Tehran: Aṭrāf.

  • Collapse
  • Expand

Metrics

All Time Past 365 days Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 0 0 0
Full Text Views 416 176 13
PDF Views & Downloads 348 83 11