Bring along two suitcases on your hajj journey: a small one with your clothes and daily necessities, and a big one filled with ṣabr (patience). That’s all you really need: ṣabr.1
1 Introduction: Hajj Morality and Pilgrims’ Wider Moral Universe2
In preparation for her fieldtrip to Mecca as part of their joint research within the wider hajj project on which this book is based, the second author of this chapter and her husband booked their hajj package with Celebrity Hajj, a popular travel agency among pilgrims of Moroccan-Dutch descent who grew up in the Netherlands.3 Celebrity Hajj has an attractive website that clearly targets younger pilgrims, for example by giving a discount to recently married couples. As the name suggests, Celebrity Hajj operates in the higher segment of the Dutch hajj customer market. It offers luxurious hajj packages and provides its customers with ‘cool’ promotional gifts such as Dutch design water bottles (Dopper) displaying the logo of the agency, and key chains with the agency’s logo and the text ‘I ♥ Mecca’ on it. Each page of the agency’s website features the slogan: ‘Nothing beats the carefree fulfilment of your Islamic duty. We are confident that our care will offer you satisfaction.’4
One of the services provided by Celebrity Hajj is a preparatory meeting in which pilgrims are informed about the time table of their sojourn in Saudi Arabia and the proper way to carry out the hajj rites. There, in his opening speech for the hajj of 2016 that Kadrouch-Outmany attended, after thanking his audience for having chosen Celebrity Hajj, the first thing the tour leader told his listeners was that the journey they were about to embark on was not an ordinary trip, but a journey to the sacred city of Mecca, for which Allah had invited every single one of them. Having replied to this invitation with the niyya—the intention to fulfil one’s hajj duty—the pilgrims were now expected to prepare themselves for the most important journey of their life. The tour leader explained that besides formulating the niyya, what pilgrims would need most was ṣabr. Huge amounts of ṣabr, that is: patience or endurance. The journey could only succeed if they would exercise ṣabr from the moment they departed from Schiphol airport until their return back home. The second point the presenter stressed was that the pilgrims should take to heart that they would be travelling as a group; they should realize that they constituted a community and that the tour leader would be their amīr or ‘commander’. In former days, the leader of caravans on their way to Mecca was called amīr al-ḥajj, ‘commander of the pilgrimage’ (Peters 1994, 167–168). For pilgrims with Moroccan backgrounds, the word amīr has a second connotation, referring to the title held by the Moroccan king: ‘Commander of the faithful’.
To underscore the relevance of his statement, the presenter quoted a well-known hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: ‘Whosoever obeys me, obeys Allah; and he who disobeys me, disobeys Allah; and whosoever obeys the Amir, in fact, obeys me; and he who disobeys the Amir, in fact, disobeys me.’ In variation to the slogan on the Celebrity Hajj website, the tour leader then concluded his welcoming speech by saying: ‘You just take care of your ʿibāda (religious obligation) and we will take care of all organizational aspects (…). We are your servants.’
The emphasis on the hajj as a test of one’s ṣabr is a recurring topic in preparatory classes for prospective pilgrims. It also features in numerous booklets and websites on the hajj that pilgrims can consult before departure. On the website page where he discusses the ‘Basics of the hajj’, the Dutch spiritual care giver Mohamed Ben Ayad, for example, mentions ṣabr as one of the dimensions of hajj morality: ‘During the hajj pilgrims train themselves in patience, forgiveness, charity and supporting the weak.’5 The advice given by an imam in the epigraph—to bring a big suitcase full of ṣabr when embarking on the pilgrimage—has become a trope in hajj storytelling; variations of the story frequently occur in narratives in which our interlocutors look back on their pilgrimage experiences.
Although ṣabr is a highly valued Islamic virtue, it is also surrounded by ambivalence: views vary as to whether exercising patience is a stance of passive endurance, as those with secular orientations often claim in their critique, or if it concerns a virtuous disposition that must be actively cultivated. Also, should exerting ṣabr be one’s default mode of behaviour, or do only certain circumstances demand it? Moreover, cultural conceptions on the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr are closely related to power structures and may vary for different categories of people. A connected issue is whether one has the right to request others to exert ṣabr, or if it should be an entirely voluntary practice.
In this chapter, we will address the ambivalence surrounding the invocation of ṣabr during the hajj in pilgrims’ practical moral reasoning. The welcoming speech of the Celebrity Hajj tour leader summarized above sketches the contours of the kind of ambivalences surrounding the concept of ṣabr that pilgrims are confronted with during their sojourn in Mecca and Medina. It should come as no surprise that he foregrounded the religious character of the package tour that his customers had booked in the speech. Note, however, that through the claim concerning the necessity of exercising ṣabr from the moment of departure until the return home, the mutual responsibilities between the Celebrity Hajj tour leader and his customers are also couched in religious terms. The suggestion by conduit of a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that obeying the travel agent’s tour leaders would amount to obeying God, firmly consolidates this religious framing. In his final words, however, the presenter switches back to the discourse of another moral register he referred to in the first sentence of his opening speech; that of the responsible entrepreneur whose moral obligation it is to serve his customers. Here, he addresses his audience not as pilgrims, but as consumers of his services.
The simultaneous appeal on two different moral registers confronts pilgrims with a recurrent ethical dilemma: are hardship and setbacks part of the overall hajj experience, and should they, as devout pilgrims, therefore respond to them by exerting ṣabr? Or are they, as customers, entitled to complain if their expectations were not met and demand that the services they had paid for be delivered? Although on the surface this might seem a simple matter of appraising religious and non-religious considerations, in practice the religious and non-religious are not always easy to disentangle.
In what follows, we examine how pilgrims assess and negotiate the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr during the hajj. To this end, we analyse the dialogues between various personal and collective moral voices in pilgrims’ situational moral reasoning. Our focus is on pilgrims in their thirties to fifties of Moroccan or Turkish descent who grew up in the Netherlands. We focus on this category for two, interrelated reasons. First, the hajj has only become popular among Dutch Muslims in this age-group over the past decade. Second, because the overall integration of Muslims of this generation in Dutch social domains is more thorough than that of their migrant parents, they also find themselves in situations where their Muslimness is interrogated more often, stimulating reflection on their religious heritage (cf. Göle 2017; Jouili 2015). To a considerable extent, exploring the meanings of the hajj in their own life therefore accounts for the increasing popularity of the pilgrimage to Mecca among Dutch Muslims of Moroccan and Turkish descent. Since we are particularly interested in the relationship between experience, meaning making, and narration, a discussion of data produced through Kadrouch-Outmany’s participant observation during the hajj of 2016 will be supplemented by analytical description of data generated through interviews with pilgrims who reflected on their pilgrimage several months or years after the experience. Comparison between the two data sets allows us to explore how stories about ethical dilemmas pilgrims are confronted with as the hajj journey unfolds develop over time once pilgrims have returned home.
Furthermore, the sacred journey to Mecca offers a particularly interesting case study for investigating ṣabr as a moral practice: visiting Islam’s holiest city and stepping in the footsteps of the Prophet Muhammad attune pilgrims to the highest of religious values. As the journey approaches, many prospective pilgrims prepare themselves mentally by paying more attention to being patient and forgiving, thus striving to develop the right mind-set to perform their hajj correctly (cf. Caidi 2020, 49). During the hajj journey itself, pilgrims tend to monitor their comportment vigilantly lest their performance of the ritual should be invalidated. This self-reflexive stance is stimulated by the behavioural regulations concerning the state of iḥrām or consecration during the hajj, such as the prohibition to have sex, use perfumed toiletries, cut one’s nails and hair, or kill living creatures. Furthermore, the hajj not only puts one’s ṣabr to the test, but many pilgrims also conceive of it as a disciplinary practice through which to fortify their disposition to exert ṣabr. In this respect, the hajj can operate as a ‘pressure cooker for personal development’ as one our interlocutors put it; it is a journey full of moral lessons to benefit from upon return to everyday life.
But just as the merits of the moral lessons of the hajj are supposed to spill over in everyday life, vice versa, everyday life concerns also permeate the hajj experience. They do so in at least two respects. First of all, although ideally pilgrims spend as much time as possible on devotional acts during the hajj journey, more mundane daily necessities must also be attended to. Friends and relatives expect to receive souvenirs, so shopping is also on the to-do list of many pilgrims, as is sightseeing. Secondly, as illustrated by shopping and sightseeing activities, the dispositions of pilgrims are not only shaped by the Islamic tradition; other cultural traditions inform their daily lifeworlds as well. Ideals of Muslim personhood and the umma, the global Muslim community, thus exist side by side with other ‘grand schemes’: powerful yet never fully attainable ideals that operate as models for a good life (Schielke 2015, 13). Therefore, in addition to motivations that are based on a particular conception of the moral order of Islam, on the basis of their personal locations in various social networks and power structures, the various pursuits of pilgrims are also inspired by other grand schemes in their daily lives. They may be motivated, for example, by specific ideals about self-realization, romantic love, making money, or consumption. Each of these ideals comes with its own normative discourse or, borrowing Samuli Schielke’s terms, a ‘moral register’ to frame or assess a situation. Each moral register houses a specific style of argumentation and a specific emotional tone. Schielke uses the term normative or moral ‘registers’ rather than ‘discourses’ or ‘traditions’ to highlight the performative, situational, and dialogic character of norms (Schielke 2015, 54). We follow his approach here.
Various moral registers thus simultaneously shape the ‘sensibilities’ of pilgrims, that is, the moral and aesthetic dimensions of their experiences and emotional lives. These sensibilities tend to vary for different categories of pilgrims. For instance, for most Muslims who came to the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s from Turkey or Morocco as economic migrants, pilgrimage to Mecca is the only alternative journey besides visiting their country of origin. The horizon of their offspring, however, is much wider. Besides being accustomed to the travel practices of their parents, their personal longings have also been shaped by growing up in a country where making a holiday trip to ‘chill’ or explore hitherto unknown territory is almost considered a basic human need. As a result, their consumer wishes concerning desirable travel destinations have expanded, as have their expectations concerning the efficiency and quality of transportation, accommodation, and time-management whilst traveling. Also, whereas their parents generally come from rural backgrounds and enjoyed little or no formal education, having predominantly grown up in Dutch cities, the participants in our research are mostly modern-educated middle-class urbanites. As a result, incorporated norms about hygiene and punctuality as well as liberal values like individualism, gender equality, and self-enhancement inform their expectations concerning the conditions of the hajj (cf. Kadrouch-Outmany and Buitelaar 2021; Buitelaar 2020).
Although different ‘grand schemes’ and moral registers may be related to different domains in life, by zooming in on instances during the hajj of 2016 that gave rise to ethical dilemmas concerning the appropriateness of the moral practice of ṣabr, in what follows we will demonstrate that while practical moral reasoning is mostly situational, it is not necessarily compartmentalized. Rather, as the conversations among pilgrims concerning the appropriateness of invoking ṣabr we discuss here indicate, moral registers may be mixed and merged. Besides discussing the negotiation of the appropriateness of invoking ṣabr as a first objective in this chapter, our second objective is to shed light on the ongoing narrative construction of morality. We do so by comparing what we propose to call ‘emergent’ and ‘maturing’ stories. Emergent stories pertain to the performative, situational and dialogic character of on-site moral reasoning of pilgrims as they try to make sense of their experiences as the events of the hajj unfold. We understand maturing stories to be the telling and retelling of narratives in which individual pilgrims retrospectively reflect on the moral lessons of the hajj several months or years after they have returned home. More specifically, we study these ‘maturing’ stories in the versions that are produced in interviews with pilgrims who were willing to participate in our research project.
The chapter is organized as follows. In the coming section, we will reflect on the research methods used within this study—such as participant observation during the hajj along with interviews with pilgrims reflecting on their hajj experiences—and the implications of these different methods with regard to the nature of the different data sets thus produced. In the subsequent section, we will discuss the moral practice of ṣabr and the anthropological study of moral registers on a conceptual level. In the remainder of the chapter, we will discuss negotiations and deliberations over the appropriateness of invoking ṣabr during the hajj in emergent and maturing stories about hajj morality.
2 Studying Emergent and Maturing Hajj Stories
Stories about the hajj and the actual experience of the pilgrimage are mutually constitutive. Narratives do not merely give words to experiences, but experiences themselves are shaped by words, more specifically by the meanings these words have acquired in the vocabularies of the discursive traditions available to narrators as they interpret their experiences (cf. Buitelaar 2020; Coleman and Elsner 2003). On the basis of both personal and collectively shared stories about the hajj, prospective pilgrims learn what kind of experiences and accompanying feelings to expect whilst in Mecca. The frequent occurrence in the interviews of variations to the story about bringing a suitcase full of ṣabr, for example, taught us that this trope prepares prospective pilgrims for hardship and their patience to be tested during the hajj. Since the habitus of pilgrims is informed by several ‘grand schemes’ however, the moral register of Islam is not the only discourse that shapes their experiences and provides them with words to give meaning to these experiences. Comparing pilgrims’ ‘emergent’ stories as the events of the hajj unfold with their ‘maturing’ stories that have had time to develop in the telling and retelling over time after the return home sheds light on the impact of being informed by different ‘grand schemes’ simultaneously on the specific interplay between experience, storytelling, and meaning making. To this end, we draw on two different sets of empirical data. For the discussion of ‘emergent’ stories, we analyse the data produced through participant observation conducted by Kadrouch-Outmany, who joined a group of pilgrims from the Netherlands on their journey to Mecca for the hajj of 2016.6 For the more ‘mature’ stories, we draw on data produced through interviews conducted with Dutch pilgrims of Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds.7
Obviously not all experiences during the pilgrimage to Mecca find their ways into hajj stories; in their recollections most pilgrims focus predominantly on the highlights of their journey (cf. Delaney 1999, 520). As pilgrims are overwhelmed by a plethora of intense emotional impressions, they may not remember the more mundane dimensions equally vividly or deem them too insignificant to recollect. Also, in order to cherish the memories of the pilgrimage as a rewarding journey, pilgrims may decide that negative experiences are best forgotten or reframed in terms of important moral lessons both for themselves and their audiences (cf. Kaell 2014, 168). It therefore takes significant narrative work to process hajj experiences into stories. Chit-chatting with fellow pilgrims on the airplane back to the Netherlands, Kadrouch-Outmany noted, for example, that the homeward bound pilgrims already started to actively engage in such narrative work by exchanging experiences of highly valued moments of the journey and downplaying the moments of friction. The general conventions of hajj storytelling that they are familiar with help pilgrims to process their various experiences into more or less coherent narratives. Thus, they align their stories, at least to some extent, to one or more already existing, ‘grand narratives’ about the hajj that they are familiar with (Buitelaar 2020). In line with Martyn Smith’s argument concerning the collective stories about sacred places, such ‘grand narratives’ tend to have a highly idealising character (cf. Smith 2008, 26).
Joining a group of pilgrims during the hajj journey and enduring challenges and hardship with them offered Kadrouch-Outmany a unique opportunity study the ‘embodied talk’ (Bamberg 2011, 17) in conversations about the fragmented, complex, and sometimes contradictory emotions and experiences that pilgrims go through as the events of the hajj unfold.8 In other words, participant observation allowed her to observe how pilgrims draw on the various moral registers available to them to assess and negotiate the appropriateness of exercising ṣabr when confronted with difficulties and setbacks. In this respect, the nature of the data produced by Kadrouch-Outmany through participant observant as events unfolded differs significantly from the data produced in interviews with pilgrims who looked back on their hajj experiences, the bulk of which were conducted by Buitelaar.
However, the two data sets also overlap. Regardless whether pilgrims discuss their experiences as events unfold or reflect on them afterwards, an important factor that informs how these experiences are narrated concerns the more public or private character of the setting in which the narration occurs. As we will argue later in the chapter, in the overall ambiance of heightened religiosity during the hajj, arguments framed in terms of an Islamic moral register are more likely to gain group support and are more difficult to refute than arguments pertaining to other moral registers, such as the desire for comfort or privacy. Religious arguments are more in line with the normative character of the ‘grand narrative’ of the hajj that pilgrims are familiar with, and they are therefore more easily expressed in public. Social control may induce pilgrims to be hesitant to forward non-religious arguments in the presence of a wider audience and more inclined to share those in more private conversations. In other words, group dynamics play an important role in how pilgrims express their appreciation of disappointments and challenges. In this sense, Kadrouch-Outmany’s conversations with individual pilgrims when not being overheard by others and the recollections interviewees shared with Buitelaar in the private setting of an interview have more in common than performative instances of moral reasoning in public places.
Overall, however, the different temporalities and spatialities involved in the narrations of pilgrims whilst still on hajj and those narrated several months or even years afterwards have a significant impact on the stories produced, as we will demonstrate later in this chapter. In the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and in the tent camp in Minā, the pilgrims are in the company of Muslims only.9 The post-pilgrimage interviews were all conducted in the Netherlands, where the majority of the population is non-Muslim. This is also true for Buitelaar, who by implication belongs to a category of Dutch citizens whom her interlocutors consider likely to have one-sided preconceptions about Islam. In most cases Buitelaar’s long-term research in Morocco and knowledge of Islam proved to be helpful in developing rapport. However, the interview being set in an everyday context where Muslims are routinely questioned about their religious stance by non-Muslim fellow citizens must have informed how her presence mediated an imagined non-Muslim audience to her interlocutors.10
It is therefore likely that some of the feelings and views that pilgrims shared with Kadrouch-Outmany during the hajj journey would not have been equally shared with Buitelaar, lest certain stories might feed negative conceptions about Islam among non-Muslims. The opposite, however, also holds true: several interviewees indicated that one reason for agreeing to the interview with Buitelaar was that it appealed to them to anonymously share with an outsider feelings and views that they were (as yet) hesitant to express within their Muslim networks, fearing disapproval. Besides being able to ‘unburden one’s heart’ as one woman put it, a felt need to start exploring how to add new story lines to the kind of one-sided, positive hajj stories that pilgrims of their parents’ generation tend to share was another motivation explicitly expressed by some interlocutors (also see Buitelaar 2020). Being able to do so anonymously to someone who does not belong to one’s social network made it easier to begin such storytelling. Voicing (presumed) dissonant views concerning the moral practice of ṣabr in specific situations was a case in point.
Considering that ethnographic data on the pilgrimage to Mecca are rare,11 and, moreover, since we are particularly interested in the dialogues between voices representing different moral registers simultaneously as pilgrims negotiate the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr or the legitimacy of critique and protest, in what follows the focus will predominantly be on Kadrouch-Outmany’s fieldnotes, which will be compared to the hajj stories produced in the interviews. Before we turn to our research data, we first zoom in on views on the concept of ṣabr in the Islamic tradition and anthropological insights concerning the moral discourse and practice of ṣabr among contemporary Muslims.
3 The Moral Practice of ṣabr
In colloquial Arabic, ṣabr is often used to simply mean ‘patience’. In dārija, the Moroccan dialect, for example, ṣabar wahed dqiqa means ‘hang on for a minute’. Beyond the prosaic, ṣabr is a highly valued Islamic virtue. It is beyond this study to investigate to what extent our interlocutors are familiar with the ethical debates about ṣabr in authoritative texts in the Islamic tradition. We briefly mention them here to indicate that the conception of ṣabr as a highly valued Islamic virtue resonates with a long discursive tradition. Al-Șabūr is one of the 99 attributes or divine names of God, for instance (Schimmel 1975, 177) and another name for the fasting month of Ramadan is shahr al-ṣabr, the month of patience (Buitelaar 1993, 129). Derivations from the root ṣ-b-r occur frequently in the Qurʾan and hadith. The Prophet Muhammad is told to be patient like the prophets before him, in Qurʾan 38:16 and 46:34, for example, and a reward is promised to those who are patient in Qurʾan 33:113, 28:54; and 25:75 (Wensinck 2012). Another example is a well-known story from the hadith that concerns an epileptic woman who asked the Prophet Muhammad to pray to God to heal her. In response, he stated that if she refrained from her request and exercised ṣabr, paradise would be her part (ibid.). Muslim scholars have often emphasised the connection between ṣabr and shukr, gratitude. In his Iḥyā ʿulūm al-dīn, the Muslim scholar Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 CE), for example, stated that ‘belief consists of two halves: the one ṣabr and the other shukr’ (ibid.). In classical Sufi thought, shukr and ṣabr similarly occur in combination; ṣabr in its more basic sense relating to patience and on the highest level to renunciation. Some stern, quietist mystics even went so far as to consider perfect resignation and silent patience in times of affliction to be more suitable than prayer; however, this view is not generally shared (Schimmel 1975, 124–126).
In the anthropological study of Islam, the discussion of Islamic virtues like ṣabr has come to receive considerable attention recently. This is related to the ‘ethical turn’ that characterizes much research since the early twenty-first century. Saba Mahmood’s seminal study Politics of Piety has been very influential in this respect. Following Talal Asad’s argument that in the Islamic discourse the notions suffering and endurance should not be mistaken as synonymous with passivity but instead as creating space for moral action (Asad 2003, 89–91), Mahmood argues that for the women in the Egyptian revivalist movement she studied, ṣabr is a moral practice and a virtue that must be actively cultivated. Rather than aiming to fortify one’s ability to confront suffering, Mahmood’s interlocutors emphasized that the primary purpose of ṣabr should be to bear and live hardship appropriately (Mahmood 2005, 172). The pursuit of ṣabr as a moral practice to cultivate a mode of being as a ṣābir or ṣābira (one who practises ṣabr) is likewise discussed in research on ethical self-fashioning among Belgian, French, and German Muslim women with Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds who attend religious classes and workshops organized by Islamic revival circles (Groeninck 2017, 177–182; Jouili 2015, 185–186).
In all these studies, the research participants closely connect ṣabr to tawakkul, reliance on God’s will. As Sherine Hamdy shows, many terminally-ill dialysis patients in Egypt prefer to accept God’s will than pursue kidney transplantation. Hamdy argues that such a stance should not be seen as merely a ‘comfort mechanism’ nor does this disposition of submission to God’s will negate human agency.12 The patients she talked with actively consider the options for different treatments and take responsibility for their own choices, trusting that whatever the outcome, it will be God’s will. Like the authors mentioned above, Hamdy argues that exerting ṣabr is a mode that must be actively cultivated through work on the self. She points out that in their pursuit of the ethical disposition of ṣabr, the patients she studied drew on Islamic notions of faith in the face of suffering as redemptive of past sins (Hamdy 2009, 189).
Several studies point to gendered conceptions of the moral practice of ṣabr. For instance, the Moroccan women among whom Buitelaar conducted research with in the late 1980s held that women are better at fasting during Ramadan, as they have more patience than men (Buitelaar 1993, 129–131). To explain women’s greater capacity to exert ṣabr, Buitelaar’s interlocutors referred to the practice of gender segregation. As a result of the specific gendered division of space, women’s freedom of movement was more restricted than that of men. ‘When men have worries, they just go out and seek distraction from it. But as women we stay at home and have to come to terms with the situation,’ one woman stated. Davis (1983, V) and Dwyer (1978, 153–154) similarly found that in the 1970s and 1980s Moroccan women lauded ṣabr as a specifically female quality.
Illustrating that an unequal division of space is not the sole cause but part of a wider power structure in which women are expected to have ṣabr, the virtue of ṣabr continues to have connotations with a virtuous female stance of modesty even though today women’s freedom of movement has increased in the Middle East and mixed gender public spaces have become more common. Schielke, for example, notes that Egyptian women feel less at ease to openly express dissatisfaction, whereas men are encouraged to vent discontent (Schielke 2015, 33).13 In a similar vein, in her study among middle-aged migrant Pakistani women in the UK, Kaveri Qureshi found that ṣabr is closely related to female subjectivity while ‘ṣabar’14 is a nickname used to denote an effeminate man who is walked over by others (Qureshi 2013). Besides a disposition that must be actively cultivated, the people Qureshi studied also consider ṣabr as a capacity granted by God (Qureshi 2013, 127). She demonstrates that as a specific feminine quality, ṣabr allows women to inhabit a high moral ground, as they associate exerting ṣabr both with the capacity to do so as a sign of being blessed by God and earning religious merit. Moreover, she argues that cultivating ṣabr cannot be reduced to a discourse of submission to God, as Mahmood suggests, and is better understood as women’s creative appropriation of ṣabr for their own intentions.15
Particularly relevant for our argument here is that besides discussing ṣabr in an Islamic ethical framework of cultivating pious dispositions, Qureshi also looks at the dynamics of ṣabr in social relations. The women she studied do not only hope for recognition from God for displaying ṣabr, but also seek acknowledgement from others. By closely scrutinizing the situations in which her interlocutors invoke ṣabr in their family circles, Qureshi demonstrates that middle-aged women often enact a patient endurance of their heavy domestic burden in ways that make family members feel that their mother’s self-sacrifice requires some kind of reciprocation from them (Qureshi 2013, 130). Qureshi concludes that there is too much emphasis in the ethnography of Muslim societies on how everyday interactions are placed within an Islamic moral frame and not enough on how this moral frame derives its significance through the ‘flow of sociality’ in which individuals participate (Qureshi 2013, 133).
In line with the approach Qureshi proposes, in the next section we will discuss how pilgrims negotiate the appropriateness of exercising ṣabr by focusing predominantly on the flow of sociality during the hajj. Contrary to the everyday situations studied by Qureshi, the interactions between pilgrims in our study take place in an extraordinary time and space constellation that characterizes the pilgrimage to Mecca. In this context, the virtue of ṣabr gains particular significance. Despite the atmosphere of heightened religiosity, however, pilgrims clearly cannot always live up to the ideal of ṣabr and sometimes lose their temper or are driven by non-religious desires. By zooming in on instances of ‘failure’ to live up to Islamic ideals, we follow Kloos and Beekers who propose to focus on people’s ‘experiences of moral instability, fragmentation or ambivalence on the one hand and their attempts to achieve a level of moral coherence grounded in religion on the other’ (Kloos and Beekers 2018, 12). We do so by first exploring how stories emerge as pilgrims draw on an Islamic frame of reference as well as other moral registers in their deliberations about the appropriateness of invoking ṣabr in specific settings. In the subsequent section, we examine more matured narratives in which pilgrims retrospectively volunteered reflections on instances where their ṣabr was challenged during the hajj in interviews several months and sometimes years after their return home.
4 Emergent Stories: Contested Invocations of ṣabr during the Hajj Performance
In what follows, we will first zoom in on instances where the issue of ṣabr came up in relation to issues that any traveler expects their travel agency to organize adequately regardless the purpose of their travel: transport, food, and accommodation. Subsequently, we will briefly turn to two topics that were discussed much less explicitly on a group level, but came up recurrently in more private conversations during the hajj journey and in interviews with a wider group of pilgrims who looked back on their experiences: gender equality and the longing for privacy.
4.1 Transport
While similar instances would follow suit, the first transport incident that tested the patience of the group of pilgrims Kadrouch-Outmany travelled with occurred just one day after the group had arrived in Mecca. It concerned the bus transport between the hotel in Aziziya, a suburb of Mecca, to the city centre where the pilgrims would perform the ʿumra, the first rites of the hajj that are carried out within the confines of the Grand Mosque of Mecca.16 If, on the way to the Grand Mosque someone noted that the buses were old and shabby, elated with the prospect of performing their first hajj rites, nobody remarked on it. Things were different on the way back. Performing the ʿumra is a very intense experience both spiritually and physically. Immersing oneself in the flow of thousands of pilgrims circling the Kaʿba is described by most pilgrims as overwhelming. It is also very demanding, particularly for pilgrims who are not accustomed to Mecca’s hot climate. While tour leaders try to keep their own flock of pilgrims together, one can easily fall behind, and one runs the risk of stumbling as bolder pilgrims push to try to get closer to the Kaʿba.
Therefore, most pilgrims were exhausted after having done the ʿumra and longed to go back to the hotel for a shower. The buses, however, were late and the sun’s heat added to the day’s discomforts. After a while, people started sighing and complaining about the heat. Eventually, one man addressed the tour leader: ‘It’s annoying how you keep us waiting. I knew things wouldn’t all go smoothly, but this is absurd.’ The tour leader explained that in Mecca transport was organized by Saudi companies and that Celebrity Hajj had no say in what buses would be sent and when exactly they would arrive. Once one pilgrim had stood up to voice his discontent, other people also felt free to share their annoyance among themselves: ‘What is all this waiting about? We were promised our bus would be ready to collect us!’; ‘I expect to be picked up and dropped off on time, that’s all I ask’; ‘It’s steaming hot, why are we standing in the burning sun?’. The arrival of the bus did not stifle the complaints: ‘What a rickety vehicle’; ‘I have to fold my legs, is this what they call a celebrity hajj?’. All this time, elderly pilgrims mostly kept silent or reminded their fellow pilgrims of the virtue of ṣabr.
4.2 Food
In the evening following the bus incident, another dispute occurred in the hotel dining hall. The previous night, having arrived late after a long journey from the Netherlands, the hungry and exhausted pilgrims had arrived to a dinner buffet consisting only of left over plain spaghetti. The next evening, the group went down to the restaurant early to make sure to have had dinner before the ʿishāʾ prayer, only to find that more than one hundred people were already standing in queue and that food was not yet being served. After waiting for more than half an hour, a pilgrim in his mid-forties lost his temper and began to complain loudly. Some fellow pilgrims tried to calm him by saying ‘yā al-Ḥājj, show some patience (taṣbar)’. Others reminded him about his state of iḥrām by starting to chant the talbiya, the devotional prayer recited by pilgrims upon entering a state of consecration.17
The man could not be placated, however, and furiously called for a ‘strike’: ‘We should not accept this behaviour from the organization and we should go out to find our own food.’ To those who had found seats, he shouted: ‘It is almost ʿishāʾ now. What are you all doing still sitting here?’ About twenty people joined him on his way out. Of those who remained, several complained that it was, indeed, a shame that they would be late for the ʿishāʾ prayer, while mostly elderly women just kept silent, sighed, or said to no one in particular: ‘Eywah (well), what can we do? We must exert ṣabr.’ The next day, with the entire group as his audience, the still annoyed man addressed the tour leader. He pointed out that being an entrepreneur himself he knew unprofessional behaviour when he saw it:
We won’t have ṣabr for this! Seeing to it that there is enough food and that it is served on time is your responsibility as a travel organization and has nothing to do with me being on hajj.
4.3 Accommodation
After concluding the hajj rites that are carried out in Mecca itself, pilgrims move to the tent camp in Minā, some five kilometres outside Mecca. From there, they perform several other rites, the most important of which the wuqūf, the ‘standing’ at ʿArafa. Once this rite is carried out, properly speaking, one’s hajj is completed, even though several other rites follow, one of which the ramy, the ‘stoning of the Devil’.
Figure 13.1
A tent for female pilgrims in Minā
photograph by Kadrouch-OutmanyDuring the preparatory meeting organized by Celebrity Hajj, prospective pilgrims had been informed that the facilities in Minā would be very basic. Regardless of whether one books a premium package offering a private double room in the hotel in Mecca, as most couples in the age-group between thirty and fifty do, or a cheaper arrangement where one shares a hotel room with four to six fellow pilgrims of the same gender, in the tent camp in Minā all pilgrims sleep in gender-segregated tents accommodating up to 100 fellow pilgrims. Most older pilgrims with migration backgrounds had been used to sleeping on thin mattresses on the ground in close proximity to others in Morocco or Turkey, and appeared to handle the discomfort without much difficulty. Pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands, however, tend to conceive of the days in the tent camp as the biggest trial of the hajj, only surpassed by the ordeal of the compulsory night spent in the open air in Muzdalifa to collect pebbles for the ramy. Arguing that standing in queue for more than an hour just to use the toilet hampered performing prayers on time and carrying out other devotional practices such as reading the Qurʾan or saying duʿās, supplication prayers, a small group of younger women in Kadrouch-Outmany’s group protested against the poor sanitary facilities by confiscating three toilets from the men’s block, which had twice as many toilets as the women’s block.18 Otherwise, although in face-to-face conversations women might complain about the lack of comfort and privacy, overall they accepted the hardship as inevitable and as a test of one’s ṣabr.
Besides the rewards that all pilgrims hope will await them in the hereafter for having exerted ṣabr, customers of Celebrity Hajj can also expect an earthly reward; after completing the stoning rite, for the last five days in the Mecca area before travelling on to Medina, the programme promised accommodation in a five star hotel in the Makkah Clock Tower adjacent to the Grand Mosque in Mecca. However, on the planned return date to Mecca just before the group assembled to leave for performance of the ramy, the organization announced that, unfortunately, the hotel in the clock tower was not ready to receive them yet, so that for the coming night the pilgrims would be taken back to the much simpler hotel in Aziziya. And furthermore, all those who wished to attend the Friday sermon in the Grand Mosque the next day would have to organize their own transport.
Figure 13.2
Pilgrim praying from her hotel room in the Clock Tower
photograph by anonymized research participant project BuitelaarNot surprisingly, the by now exhausted pilgrims were utterly disappointed. Some protested that it was very difficult to find a taxi from Aziziya to the Grand Mosque in time for the Friday service. One man angrily shouted at the tour leader: ‘This is outrageous! You promised us the clock tower as of Thursday, was that all a lie?!’ Another male pilgrim tried to calm him: ‘We should have ṣabr, this too is part of hajj. The organization is doing the best they can!’ A third man remarked bitterly: ‘It’s all about money: the less days we spent in the clock tower, the more profit they [the travel agency, mb] make.’ This time, also a female pilgrim spoke up: ‘You keep talking about ṣabr, but this is just unfair! The organization has to come up with a workable solution.’ She then turned to the women around her. Referring to her own professional experience as the owner of a taxi company that caters for weddings and other luxurious events, she sneered: ‘To be fobbed off with ṣabr all the time, as if I don’t know how these things work.’ Another woman added: ‘Rather than talk about ṣabr, as a company they should abide by the Islamic principles of honesty and transparency.’
Eventually, on their way back from the ramy to collect their baggage, the pilgrims received a message on the group WhatsApp that the hotel in the Clock Tower would be ready to receive them that night after all. Through the same medium, the man who had earlier defended the organization suggested that his fellow pilgrims ought to express gratitude and offer apologies for the accusations that had circulated in the group. He received a few supportive messages, but the one that voiced the overall feeling was clearly opposed: ‘I’m relieved, yes. But thankful? No need!’
4.4 Gender Equality and Privacy
As the above case studies illustrate, the appropriateness of exercising ṣabr concerning issues that were directly related to the logistics of the journey were frequently discussed among pilgrims as a group. At least among female pilgrims—in whose circles Kadrouch-Outmany spent most of her time—in more private conversations, two additional topics were shared concerning mixed feelings about discontent on the one hand and willingness to exert ṣabr and be grateful on the other: gender discrimination and lack of privacy. Women’s indignation about the unequal distribution of toilet blocks in the tent camp in Minā was already mentioned. Other instances of gender discrimination in which women questioned the need to exert ṣabr concerned the way female pilgrims are relegated to the rear of the courtyard of the Grand Mosque in Mecca during prayer time, where they cannot see much of the Kaʿba, and the specific restrictions for women at the rawḍa, the location in the Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina that is close to the Prophet’s tomb and considered to be a part of the gardens of Paradise.19 Adding insult to injury, in one of his lectures during an excursion after the hajj was completed, the imam whom the travel agency had hired reprimanded some female pilgrims whose husbands had remained in the hotel to care for their children for their ‘un-Islamic’ selfish behaviour. When the women concerned—including Kadrouch-Outmany—told their husbands about the incident, the latter confronted the tour leaders in a private conversation.
Another issue that, for obvious reasons, pilgrims only shared in private conversations with those whom they felt close to, concerned the difficulty to muster enough ṣabr to cope with the lack of privacy during the hajj journey. This tended to be communicated mostly in indirect terms, as in the relieved ‘me-time again at last!’ that a befriended female pilgrim whispered to Kadrouch-Outmany when the announcement was made that the group would go to the hotel in the clock tower after all.
4.5 Comparing Instances of Practical Moral Reasoning
Several points stand out when comparing the instances where the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr was discussed. First of all, the issues discussed at a group level mostly concerned negotiations over hajj morality on the one hand and ethical entrepreneurship on the other. We take the fact that the negotiations took place in the presence of the entire group to suggest that the actors involved considered both lines of moral reasoning valid to frame the problem and gain support from their fellow pilgrims. Indeed, in most situations, some members in the audience tried to placate angered pilgrims or expressed their agreement to those around them. This was different in the dispute that arose when the group was informed that their stay in the Clock Tower hotel would be delayed. The pilgrim who accused the travel agent of cheating its customers and save money was corrected by others. The woman who supported him did so by integrating the moral register about ethical entrepreneurship into an Islamic one by emphasizing that honesty and transparency are key Islamic principles. Another pilgrim who had defended the tour leader when the accusation was made went further: when it turned out that the hotel would welcome the group after all, he asked the accuser on the group’s WhatsApp to apologize to the travel agent. Drawing on different registers of moral reasoning, then, was accepted as long as this did not contravene Islamic moral principles by falsely accusing someone.
Moreover, the disputes over the appropriateness of ṣabr illustrate that drawing on different moral registers does not necessarily imply that pilgrims are always torn between different desires or that they experience fragmentation. While we set out to analyse the assessment of the appropriateness of ṣabr as an entry to study how pilgrims distinguish between mundane and religious dimensions of their hajj experience, our findings indicate that in fact these dimensions are closely interrelated for them: problems with mundane issues concerning food and accommodation arrangements hampered pilgrims’ engagement in devotional practices. Voicing discontent about poor services rather than glossing them over as an exercise in the moral practice of ṣabr was therefore also religiously motivated. This fits in with a current, hegemonic religious discourse among Muslims, according to which piety should inform all dimensions of one’s life and devotional acts should be part of one’s daily routine.
This is not to suggest that pilgrims are motivated by religious considerations only. The discontent about transport, food, and accommodation also points to modern, middle-class sensibilities concerning punctuality and a certain level of luxury. Our findings indicate, however, that in the atmosphere of heightened religiosity during the hajj, pilgrims are more hesitant to publicly voice feelings of discomfort about issues that do not hinder their devotional practices, lest fellow pilgrims should question their piety. Instead, such feelings are shared mostly in more private conversations. The hesitance to express one’s desire for more personal autonomy or indignation about gender discrimination turns out to be even stronger. Perhaps this is because gender equality and individualism are highly contested values among Muslims of different religious inclinations and walks of life. Besides being the effect of peer pressure, not addressing such loaded subjects at a group level is probably motivated by the wish to preserve the harmony of the group and respect the overall atmosphere of celebrating Muslim unity.20 As we will see in the next section, these topics came to the fore during the subsequent interviews.
A last point that stands out in the negotiations about the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr at a group level concerns differences in gender and age. In line with the picture that emerges from the ethnographic literature on ṣabr regarding the genderedness of the moral practice of ṣabr, men were more vocal in expressing discontent at a group level than women. Similarly, pilgrims under sixty tended to be more assertive than those of the older generation. Both observations were confirmed in an interview with an experienced hajj tour leader.21 Asked whether he perceives differences between different categories of pilgrims, he took a moment to think and then very carefully chose his words: ‘Men …, how can I explain? Well, you know, the problem with men is that they want to show that they are the boss.’ Resonating the observations of Samuli Schielke and Farha Ghannam among Egyptian men, the tour leader’s formulation in terms of the performative dimension of men’s complaining suggests that speaking up rather than exerting ṣabr is, amongst other things, related to the enactment of masculinity (Schielke 2015, 33; Ghannam 2013, 165).22 The assertiveness of pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands was likewise confirmed in the interview with the travel agent:
Younger pilgrims tend to be very, very critical. They expect the buses to arrive exactly on time. (…) They complain about the quality of a three-star hotel … It is really a problem.
Similarly, Farooq Haq and John Jackson (2009) report that the consumer expectations of younger Pakistani-Australian pilgrims are much higher than those of older generations and pilgrims from Pakistan. The former also tend to be considerably more assertive and critical than the latter, most of whom adopt a stance of humble acceptance of all setbacks they find on their path.
Having discussed the situational, performative, and dialogic dimensions of practical moral reasoning in instances during the hajj which gave rise to ethical dilemmas concerning the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr so far, in the next section we will turn to how the interplay of voices representing different moral registers comes to the fore in stories about the moral practice of ṣabr once pilgrims have returned home and reflect on their hajj experiences several months or years later.
5 Maturing Stories about Hajj Morality
Processing the countless fragments of positive and sometimes negative experiences of the hajj into stories involves much narrative work for pilgrims. Carol Delaney, for instance, notes in her article about the hajj as an interpretive framework for Turkish villagers and migrants, that the accounts that Turkish pilgrims who had just returned from Mecca told their relatives and friends consisted mostly of impressionistic fragments. In time, these fragments were put together to form a coherent story that conformed more closely to widely shared expectations (Delaney 1990, 520).
A comparison between the sometimes heated in situ discussions about the moral practice of ṣabr with retrospective stories about occasions where one’s ṣabr was tested in the interviews, likewise illustrate the observation by Simon Coleman and John Elsner that: ‘Retelling is thus an important part in the return, allowing one to reinterpret the experiences and simultaneously “create oneself as pilgrim” ’ (Coleman and Elsner 2003, 5).23 First of all, while many narratives contained references to indignation about Saudi hajj management and the treatment of pilgrims, critical recollections about fellow pilgrims feature much less often in the hajj stories produced in the interviews. The stories that do occur pertain to more mundane situations, such as losing one’s temper with someone who takes too much time in the shower or instances in which one’s ṣabr was tested during the hajj rites, such as getting pushed by pilgrims who set their mind on touching the Kaʿba no matter how much elbowing it takes. Our interlocutors tended to tell such stories in a general way, rather than describing a particular scene involving particular persons. Furthermore, narrators usually present themselves as a witness to the scene. Mostly, these stories bespeak ambivalence about the fact that ‘people will be people’ as several interviewees put it: a realistic avowal that no one can live up to their ideals all of the time, mixed with a disapproval of comportment that blatantly contravenes the morality of the hajj. In other words, this kind of narration first and foremost serves the purpose of conveying a moral lesson that the narrator learned during the hajj. That such stories are told in general terms rather than providing particulars can probably be explained by the fact that being forgiving and not talking badly about other people are part of the same lessons about sound moral behaviour that the narrator wishes to convey.
Similarly, in stories about challenges that the narrators themselves grappled with, the focus is predominantly—but not exclusively—on how the sacred atmosphere of the hajj helped to fortify their capacity to exert ṣabr, thus contributing to their spiritual development. Not surprisingly, the tent camp in Minā and the night in the open air in Muzdalifa feature most often in stories about one’s ṣabr being tested. A woman in her mid-forties, for example, explained that she had experienced the nights in Minā and Muzdalifa as the biggest trial of the hajj, but that things had become easier once she realized how it all boiled down to a lesson in humility:
First you are in a hotel bed [in Mecca, mb]. Next you only have a thin and small matrass [in Minā, mb], and then you find yourself on the bare ground [in Muzdalifa, mb]. Before you know, you will be under the ground. So, it is a process you go through, a lesson about humility and life’s transient nature.
This excerpt shows that one of the lessons heavily emphasized in interviews about a person’s ṣabr being tested during the hajj concerns an increase of gratitude to God for the blessings in one’s life.24 Illustrating that various identifications intersect in pilgrims’ sensibilities, it was often in relation to a perceived lack of comfort that pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands positioned themselves specifically as Dutch Muslims. They did so, for instance, by pointing out their privileged position in comparison to pilgrims from poorer countries. Talking about the lack of comfort in the Minā tent camp, a man in his early thirties, for example, stated: ‘It’s not that bad. It’s just that we’re terribly spoiled, used as we are to a life in luxury.’ In a similar vein, a considerable number of narrators compared themselves to pilgrims of their parents’ generation, whose backgrounds lie mostly in poor, rural areas in Morocco and Turkey. Several female pilgrims, for example, explained that they had found it more difficult to deal with the lack of comfort and privacy in the tent in Minā than female pilgrims of their mother’s age-group. Resonating Qureshi’s descriptions of middle-aged Pakistani women in the United Kingdom who reminded their family members of the ṣabr they had exerted and the sacrifices they had made for them, a woman in her mid-forties quoted her mother, who had told her: ‘Your generation is so spoiled. If only you knew how tough things were on us at your age.’ After a pause, the interviewee added: ‘She has a point, actually. We do have less patience than our parents.’
In line with conventional hajj storytelling, an Islamic moral register is obviously dominant in the hajj stories produced during the interviews. However, as was often the case in the negotiations over the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr in the group that Kadrouch-Outmany accompanied, the hajj stories shared in the interviews also contain voices that point to other moral registers that inform the desires and sensibilities of our interlocutors. Stories about needing all the ṣabr one can muster to spend several nights in a gender-segregated tent with a hundred other pilgrims, for instance, illustrate the impact of grand schemes like individualism and romantic love in the lives of female pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands. While pilgrims of the generation of their mothers are accustomed to spending much time in the company of other women, younger women are not only used to more ‘me-time’ as the earlier quoted pilgrim called it, but they are also more strongly oriented towards sharing time and experiences with their husbands.25 As Jihan Safar and Leila Seurat argue elsewhere in this volume, a recent trend for Muslim couples is to perform the hajj as a honeymoon or shortly after their wedding as a way of bonding and thanking God and asking him to bless the marriage.26 Travel agencies like Celebrity Hajj play into this trend by offering newly married couples a discount.
Also, as coming to the fore in the story of Asmae discussed by Buitelaar elsewhere in this volume, several younger pilgrims mentioned the burden of having to operate in a group, albeit rarely formulated as explicitly as by Asmae. Rather, interviewees would state that next time, they would try to distance themselves more from the group and make sure to chart their own path. Although coincidence cannot be excluded, pressure to take care of fellow pilgrims was only mentioned by female pilgrims, thus pointing to the genderedness of felt or expected responsibilities.27 Concluding several stories about gender discrimination, a female pilgrim stated that it was not fair how female pilgrims were treated in the group by critiquing the emphasis on ṣabr:
Of course, we must all be accommodating and exert ṣabr, but some people are expected to have more ṣabr than others, and it just isn’t fair. As the Moroccan proverb goes: as-ṣabr keydabbar. Meaning as much as: patience can turn against you and suffocate you.
Several female pilgrims mentioned that an additional factor contributing to the feeling of having one’s patience tested to the limit in the Minā tent camp was the intense socializing among (mostly) older women. Apparently, this seriously hampered the younger women’s personal wishes to dedicate their time to devotional activities like reading the Qurʾan and performing supplication prayers. The frustration that comes to the fore in such stories illustrates that the desire of younger pilgrims for more time and space for themselves is not simply the result of modern sensibilities concerning autonomy, gender equality, or the desire to operate as a couple. Equally important is that these younger women have developed a religious style that differs from the religiosity of pilgrims of the older generation. For older pilgrims, gratefulness for having been ‘called by God’ to perform the hajj dominates; they tend to be strongly motivated to humbly accept all discomfort as a way to expiate for sin and earn more ajr, religious merit (cf. Buitelaar 2020). While the forgiveness of sins is also important to younger pilgrims, they tend to conceive the hajj predominantly as a project of self-reflection and spiritual growth. Although in the stories that pilgrims told us we recognize the argument that Mahmood (2005) makes concerning the exercise ṣabr as part of the cultivation of a pious self, the examples discussed here demonstrate that in certain situations pilgrims experience patiently accepting circumstances rather than trying to change them as a hindrance.
6 Conclusion: Piety and Middle-Class Consumerism
In this chapter, we have mapped how the advice given to prospective pilgrims to take along lots of ṣabr on their journey to Mecca translates into the assessment of pilgrims and negotiations between pilgrims over the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr as events during the hajj unfold, and, secondly, how references to ṣabr feature in the stories of pilgrims who reflect on their hajj several months to years after their return home. To explore how the desires and sensibilities of pilgrims relate to various models of a good life, we focused on invocations of the Islamic virtue of ṣabr to study the interplay between different ‘grand schemes’ in the practical moral reasoning of Dutch pilgrims with Moroccan and Turkish backgrounds as they try to make sense of their hajj experiences.
Comparison of ‘emergent’ stories as the events of the hajj unfold to more ‘matured’ stories that pilgrims narrate about their hajj experiences once they have returned home, indicates that an Islamic moral register gains more prominence as stories mature, while voices speaking from other moral registers, such as that of ethical entrepreneurship and the related grand scheme of consumerism, become less vocal. Illustrating the dialogical and situational nature of practical moral reasoning, in the more matured stories that were shared within a Dutch interview setting, voices representing the moral registers of gender equality and individualism that had remained more or less silent in public negotiations over appropriate moral assessment of the pilgrims experiences as they were in Mecca had become more vocal.
In the context of the heightened religious hajj atmosphere, it is not surprising that an Islamic moral register predominates in the dialogues and stories we presented. This does not mean, however, that the moral practice of ṣabr took precedence in all situations where pilgrims were confronted with ethical dilemmas due to tensions between religious desires and needs based on other grand schemes like consumerism, gender equality, and self-realization in terms of personal autonomy.
Moreover, while Schielke tends to focus on fragmentation and contradictions that people experience on the basis of being informed by various grand schemes, our findings indicate that moral registers pertaining to different ideals do not necessarily operate separately, but can also be mixed and merged in the practical moral reasoning of individuals. Our initial expectation that analysing situations where pilgrims considered it appropriate or not to exert ṣabr would point to distinctions they make between mundane and religious dimensions of the hajj journey was therefore based on a wrong assumption. Pilgrims voiced their discontent about seemingly mundane problems concerning food, transport, and accommodation first and foremost in terms of how these issues hampered their devotional practices. Similarly, younger female pilgrims who claimed gender equality and time and space for themselves equally explained their annoyance in terms of how gender discrimination contravenes the overall spirit of Islam and a desire for pious self-cultivation.
Within the exceptional, sacred time-space constellation of the hajj, religious arguments obviously carry more legitimacy to express discontent about the logistics of the hajj than, for instance, stating that one wants more comfort or ‘me-time’. In that sense, looking at what arguments (predominantly male) pilgrims voiced on a group level and which considerations (predominantly younger female) pilgrims shared in a more private setting is informative of the limitations of creatively mixing and merging of moral registers in the context where hajj morality reigns. The pattern that we discerned in arguments valuing ethical entrepreneurship and the virtue of exerting ṣabr were presented at a group level, while complaints about gender discrimination, lack of comfort, and lack of privacy mostly were expressed in private conservations points to the performative, situational, and dialogical nature of practical moral reasoning.
This should not be interpreted as indicating that religious arguments are foregrounded for mere strategic reasons of receiving recognition. Giving precedence to religious motivations is very much in line with pilgrims’ overall motivation to perform the hajj. In addition to fulfilling their religious duty and asking forgiveness for past sins, the Dutch pilgrims in the age-group focused on here felt that hajj performance is a deliberate, embodied exercise to develop virtuous dispositions (cf. Buitelaar 2020). We would argue that framing one’s feelings as much as possible in terms of a religious moral register is therefore best explained as a self-disciplining act.
Exactly because Mecca symbolizes perfection and pilgrimage counts as the ultimate devotional act, the hajj is posited above and outside the imperfections of everyday life where its sacredness can be evoked to seek guidance and strength. This comes to the fore specifically in the hajj stories of pilgrims who have resumed the routines of everyday life after their return from Mecca. In those more matured stories, fragmented experiences and ambivalent feelings have been processed into more coherent narratives in which the moral lessons of the hajj are foregrounded. Failures to live up to one’s own high ideals, for example by acknowledging feelings of extreme discomfort or even despair in the tent camp in Minā or the night in the open air in Muzdalifa, tend to be turned into important moral lessons on ‘working on oneself’.
At the same time, in addition to the ideal of the umma, grand schemes like gender equality and individualism have regained prominence in the quotidian lifeworlds of pilgrims. Also, the audiences they address in the stories produced in the interviews are more diverse than their audience in Mecca. As a result, reflections on the appropriateness of exerting ṣabr in the face of gender discrimination or pressure to adapt to the group rather than seek one’s own path likewise prove to be more prominent in the hajj stories, thus illustrating once more that moral reasoning is a dialogical and situational practice.
This was the advice of the imam of a Dutch mosque to one of our interlocutors who was preparing to go on hajj.
We would like to thank Léon Buskens and Kim Knibbe for their ṣabr to read a previous draft of this chapter and provide us with the most valuable feedback.
In line with Saudi hajj regulations that female pilgrims under the age of 45 must be accompanied by a maḥram, a male companion, Kadrouch-Outmany’s husband joined her on the hajj journey. The couple also brought their two-year-old son, who helped his mum to quickly build rapport with other pilgrims by being quite adorable.
In Dutch: ‘Er gaat niets boven het zorgeloos vervullen van uw islamitische plicht. Wij zijn er van overtuigd dat onze aanwezigheid u tevreden zal stellen.’
Translated by the authors. cf.
The group that Kadrouch-Outmany travelled with consisted of 220 pilgrims, 80 % of whom were younger than 45 years old. The number of male and female pilgrims were more or less equal. There were many young couples in the group, quite a few of whom in the company of parents, in-laws and/or siblings. In this sense, as is often the case for pilgrims from the Netherlands, the hajj was very much a ‘family affair’. In this particular group, the large majority of pilgrims consisted of Moroccan-Dutch citizens. In addition, there were some Dutch converts and Dutch speaking pilgrims with Surinamese, Pakistani, Palestinian, Iranian, Iraqi, Afghani, Turkish backgrounds.
The participants were recruited through ‘snowballing’, initial contacts in existing personal networks, mosques, and community centres serving as starting points to approach subsequent interviewees. A total of 77 interviews were conducted for the hajj research as a whole, 52 of whom were pilgrims of Moroccan backgrounds, 25 of Turkish descent. The majority of research participants were in their mid-thirties to late-fifties, all of whom grew up in the Netherlands. Ten Moroccan participants belong to the older generation of economic migrants that came to the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s. The bulk of the interviews with pilgrims who grew up in the Netherlands was conducted in Dutch by Buitelaar, while a research assistant conducted interviews with 10 older pilgrims of Moroccan backgrounds in Tamazight or dārija (Moroccan-Arabic). In addition, two students in religious studies each conducted 10 interviews with Dutch based pilgrims for their MA research traineeship and MA thesis, about half of whom from Turkish or Moroccan parentage (cf. Wijers 2019; de Lang 2017). All interviews were audio-taped and fully transcribed.
Kadrouch-Outmany has reflected on participating in the hajj as an insider’s outsider in Kadrouch-Outmany 2018.
The pilgrims in the group that Kadrouch-Outmany joined knew that she performed the hajj both for research purposes and to fulfil her own religious duty.
For the effect of a dominant Islamophobic discourse in the Netherlands on self-presentations of Dutch Muslims, also see Al-Ajarma and Buitelaar (2021).
To our knowledge, Saghi (2010) is the only ethnography, while the auto-ethnographic account of Hammoudi (2006) also offers very valuable information. Also see Al-Ajarma (2020) for ethnographic analysis of the ʿumra, the voluntary pilgrimage to Mecca.
Also see Sardar (2011, 275), who interprets the contemporary relevance of the Qurʾanic discussion of ṣabr as follows: ‘The function of patience is to persevere, against all odds, as one seeks to change what is, into what ought to be.’
Also see Ghannam (2013, 140), who writes that ‘the display of certain emotions such as rage and anger are expected and accepted of Egyptian men, but other emotions, especially sadness and sorrow are expected to be kept under control.’ This also holds true for the Moroccan settings that the authors of this chapter are more familiar with. Also, while individuals are ideally also expected to keep their emotions under control under all circumstances, it is more acceptable for Moroccan women to express sorrow than for men, but less so to show anger and discontent.
ṣabbār in Modern Standard Arabic.
Also see Menin (2020), who similarly points to the intentionality in the ways a revivalist Islam inspired Moroccan woman shapes her relationship with God by taking a stance of having one’s own responsibility to work towards God’s will.
The ʿumra consists of performing the ṭawāf, the sevenfold circumambulation of the Kaʿba, drinking Zamzam water and performance of the saʿy, the ‘running’ between the hillocks of al-Ṣafā and al-Marwa. While the ʿumra is part of the hajj ritual, on its own it can also be performed throughout the year as a voluntary pilgrimage.
Compare Kaell (2014, 92) who describes a similar response among Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land when confronted with a situation they felt uncomfortable with. Kaell argues that song is a particular strong tool that may be used by pilgrims to ‘counteract’ the unsatisfying character of a place.
cf. Kadrouch-Outmany and Buitelaar (2021), in which we describe this incident in more detail.
We discuss women’s claims to more female space at several hajj sites in more detail in Kadrouch-Outmany and Buitelaar (2021). Note that visiting the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina is not part of the hajj ritual itself. Since it is recommended to pay one’s respect to the Prophet when undertaking the pilgrimage, most travel agencies include a visit to Medina in their packages.
Also see Kaell (2014, 58) and Dahlberg (1991, 39) who point to a similar tacit understanding among pilgrims to Jerusalem and Lourdes respectively, to avoid quarreling and downplay internal differences between pilgrims of one’s own group.
Not affiliated with Celebrity Hajj.
Also see Saghi (2010, 211), who describes another example of enacted masculinity during the hajj in the form of (tacit) male competition concerning the number of ʿumra sequences one can perform in one day’s time.
Also see Robinson (2016, 44), who describes how tourists tend to re-invent their experiences in post-trip narratives: ‘In retrospect we almost joyously describe our fear or disgust directed to a situation. We struggle for descriptive precision, we conflate different feelings, elongate the moments in which we felt angry and sad, and exaggerate the intensity of affect.’
Obviously, variations occur. For a particularly strong account about being bewildered by the circumstances in Muzdalifa, see Buitelaar (2020, 11).
Also see Buitelaar’s discussion of Asmae’s hajj account elsewhere in this volume.
Also see Kadrouch-Outmany and Buitelaar (2021).
This is not to deny that sons who act as maḥram for their widowed mothers and not seldom a considerable group of other female relatives take on huge responsibilities to take care of their female relatives. On the other hand, some older women told us how, after the stay in the Minā tent camp, relieved they were to be back in a hotel where they could put their family members’ laundry in the washing machine rather than washing clothes by hand.
References
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