Epilogue Narrating Mecca: Between Sense and Presence

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

Abstract

The epilogue reflects on how the focus in this book on narrativization of the hajj creates dialogue between historical, textual and ethnographic approaches in the study of pilgrimage. It traces how the chapters of the volume uncover links between representation and presence, between pilgrimage (re-)described and pilgrimage (re-)embodied through the affordances entailed in reading, hearing, sharing, inscribing, and creating narrative.

The hajj provides perhaps the iconic example of a major pilgrimage that appears—at first glance—to be strictly circumscribed in time and space. Non-Muslims are prohibited from participating in its annual rituals, and they are not the only ones kept at a distance. If in the past Muslims were often unable to reach Mecca owing to the perils of the journey, many nowadays possess the resources to travel but face barriers of national quotas and labyrinthine bureaucracies, even when global pandemics are not raging. In light of such restrictions, one of the virtues of this volume is its use of narrative to illuminate how the hajj as spiritual and social imaginary circulates across vast social and cultural fields: it diffuses through ontological, literary, and ritual worlds in ways that cannot be confined. As the hajj is invoked by pilgrims—past, present and prospective—its sacred spaces and ritual actions are anticipated, remembered, and remediated beyond the temporal and spatial limitations of any single ritual experience.1

While a focus on narrative extends our horizons on the hajj, it also encourages the rich interdisciplinarity that we see in this volume, creating dialogue between historical, textual, and ethnographic approaches. Contemporary pilgrims are prone to reflect on the past as they seek to orient themselves in relation to the lives and actions of others who have journeyed before them, whether family members or revered saints. Written or spoken, inscribed on parchment or tapped out on a computer, narratives relating to the hajj have their own literary integrity but must not be studied in isolation. They are deeply implicated within other practices that shift across scales of imagination, degrees of formality, and levels of publicity—perhaps educating a child in the pillars of the faith, sharing personally meaningful experiences with a friend, or articulating resistance against a religious regime.

If such narration must be analysed as an inherently socially entangled activity, many of the chapters of this volume uncover productive links between representation and presence, between pilgrimage (re-)described and pilgrimage (re-)embodied through the affordances entailed in reading, hearing, sharing, inscribing, and creating narrative. An obvious example is Marjo Buitelaar and Kholoud Al-Ajarma’s chapter on contemporary ways of ‘mediating Mecca’. These authors observe that when interlocutors from Morocco and the Netherlands talk about experiences of Mecca they often reach for their smartphone to illustrate their accounts. The photos displayed are likely to have an evidentiary as well as a visual dimension, indexing and invoking past proximity to the Holy Places. Indeed, the phone itself may mediate between ‘there’ and ‘here,’ ‘then’ and ‘now,’ given its use as a human prosthetic, one of the few physical objects liable to be transported and kept close to the body in both sacred space and everyday life. Buitelaar and Al-Ajarma state that—for younger people at least—‘using the smartphone to mediate Mecca, either through photographs, WhatsApp messages or posts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram has become part of the repertoire of performing hajj itself.’ In this sense taking a picture is pilgrimage: a default form of engagement for those generations used to approaching the world with fingers pressed to a screen.

Notice the complex mixture of temporalities and spatialities evident in Buitelaar and Al-Ajarma’s case study. Taking a photo indicates faith in the future, imagining a time when that photo will be viewed again and found to be significant. By definition, it enables the pilgrim to re-narrate the memory of Mecca. But it may also permeate the experience of the present, not merely through action involved in taking photos but also as use of social media enables those beyond Mecca to be invited—in so-called ‘real time’—to share vicariously in the individual pilgrim’s experience of sacred space.2 This combination of tenses, narrations, and mediations supports Nadia Caidi’s argument in this volume that we must examine information behaviours beyond the confines of short-term interactions. The hajj as it is manifested both at and beyond Mecca—anticipated, enacted, recalled, diffused—prompts the accumulation and dissemination of different genres of knowledge across the lifetime of the pilgrim. Apparently very different types of narrative may form chains of storied association and intertextuality: logistical information about how to act appropriately at Mecca perhaps blends with a grandparent’s fond recollections of having been there, and both will frame the hajj experience on the journey before leaving further traces in the pilgrim’s recounted memories to others. And so the cycle goes on—not repeating itself, but combining and blurring numerous narratives over generations, and adapting all the time to new technologies of both travel and communication.

I am obviously using narrative in a broad sense here. A dictionary definition I find useful refers to an ‘account of connected events’, which highlights the idea of occurrences being marked out as significant while also suggesting the agency of the narrator in establishing the connections between such occurrences.3 This is one meaning of ‘making sense’: the encapsulation and arrangement of actions in order to orientate attention. Another productive definition refers to ‘a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values.’4 In this latter characterization the political and strategic dimensions of narration come even more to the fore, so that stories are not only interesting but also interested—expressive of a point of view in contrast to other potential understandings.

While narrations may shift between the informative and the normative, both forms direct and delimit understandings in significant ways. Thus the nineteenth- and twentieth-century travelogues described in this volume by Thomas Ecker and Ammeke Kateman move readily from description to prescription in suggesting how and what to experience on the journey. As Kateman notes, just as centuries of travelogues and other textual and visual forms of hajj representation had prepared authors for what to feel, so these travelogues reiterated and re-shaped the journey for future travelers. Again, one of the advantages of this volume’s approach of bringing together historical and ethnographic accounts is that we can discern tropes that recur over the long as well as the short durée, even if their specific connotations may shift. Such tropes often revolve around forms of affect that apply particularly well to the task of journeying across Muslim landscapes of ritual effort and aspirational belonging. For instance both Yahya Nurgat, writing of tales based in the seventeenth century, and Kateman, referring to the twentieth, point to yearning as a common feature of narratives, and one that may increase as pilgrims come closer to holy places that they have heard about for so long. It is also notable that references to ṣabr, or patience, stretch across genres and generations, suggesting how the effortful qualities of pilgrimage may be lent meaning as well as disciplinary power through a Muslim lexicon of affect. In this vein, Al-Ajarma’s chapter on ineffable experience emphasizes ṣabr’s highlighting of a pious refusal to be distracted by the discomforts of the journey. For Buitelaar and Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, such patience is a highly valued Islamic virtue yet it is also one that rouses ambivalence, given that debate exists as to whether it refers to ‘a stance of passive endurance’ or ‘a virtuous disposition that must be actively cultivated.’ Their chapter goes on to show how, in practice, pilgrims may shift attitudes in the course of the same pilgrimage, or as they return from the pilgrimage and recall their experiences several months later. Ethical and affective registers, like narratives, contain recurring features but should not be assumed to have a false coherence. They combine and recombine across social frames and temporal trajectories.

Admittedly, physically performing the pilgrimage in and around Mecca entails following certain established and shared plot lines, stories, sequences, as pilgrims collectively retrace the life of the Prophet and the origins of Islam. Such narratives may be concentrated in and around Mecca, but they spill out into wider, adjacent behaviours. In this volume, Jihan Safar and Leila Seurat refer to the ways package tours take visitors to the mount of Uḥud outside Medina to teach them of a battle between followers of the Prophet Muhammad and the ruling Quraysh: topography and history working together. However, many of the narratives discussed in this volume are not supplied to pilgrims for their official edification. Part of the fascination of the contributions lies in the fact that they focus on the creation of numerous tales—memoirs, diaries, commentaries on social media, even responses to anthropologists’ questions—that raise highly nuanced questions concerning the voice, subjectivity, and perceived self-determination of narrators in relation both to the hajj and to broader questions of authority. This point is brought out strikingly in Piotr Bachtin’s analysis of four Iranian accounts of the pilgrimage that were written in the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century by female members of the Qajar aristocracy. Bachtin calls the chapter ‘Othering and being Othered,’ and the women’s accounts express forms of agency that are constantly faced by countervailing forces and influences. The women are aristocrats and literate but restrained by the expectations of their class and gender. Both the journey and their diaries provide them with unusual opportunities for frankness and freedom of expression (at least to other women); but, even as they are given opportunities to experiment with and redefine their subjectivity, their observations calibrate distinctions that focus on preserving status along already established lines—religious adherence, ethnicity, language, and so on.

The attitudes of the women described by Bachtin demonstrate the constant interplay between the idiosyncratic and the conventional that we see in many accounts of the hajj as authors wrestle with landscapes, stories, expectations, that are widely known or at least frequently narrated. Perhaps all human discourse might be said to be about accountability, but the hajj and other journeys to Mecca provide events where much is at stake—prompting the constant need for editing, highlighting, sequencing, and so on. Status is asserted or inscribed, disquieting incidences concealed or ignored, parallels with exemplarity asserted, connections made, and so on, depending on how public such stories are intended to be. In his contribution on an early twentieth-century narrative by a Moroccan shaykh, Richard van Leeuwen provides a fascinating observation on the standardization or otherwise of pilgrimage experience. He argues that positive representations tend to fall into conventional tropes: ‘After all, acknowledging that one does not feel elated by the first view of the Kaʾba would really spoil the account and even throw doubt on the sincerity of the pilgrim’s faith.’ On the other hand, the expression of complaints does not have readily available templates, and thus may come closer to the personal voice of the pilgrim. We might be reminded here of Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ There is a kind of conservativism in contentment.

Narratives are used to ‘make sense’ and ‘provoke presence’ both at and away from Mecca; they draw on common tropes but shift over time; and, in so doing, they reveal struggles between conventional and idiosyncratic perspectives and expressions. A number of chapters reveal what I think of as disarticulations expressed through narrative—significant gaps, discrepancies or incommensurabilities between modes of representation.5 A fascinating example is presented by Miguel Ángel Vázquez in his analysis of a sixteenth-century poem whose ‘traditional’ Spanish poetic form is used to express a Muslim message. This counter-hegemonic work, written in Spanish of the sixteenth century but rendered with the Arabic alphabet, resonates with the writer’s experience of living under religious persecution in Habsburg Spain.

If the poet described by Vázquez must engage in a degree of concealment of his religious sentiments, the active cultivation of a contrast between pilgrimage as visible/present on the one hand, and hidden/absent on the other, is discussed by Neda Saghaee and Van Leeuwen in their reflections on the hajj in Sufi literature. Pilgrimage in such accounts becomes a complex metaphor for varieties of movement, not all of them physical, and may even challenge the assumed virtue of gaining material proximity to holy places. In one perspective Saghee and Van Leeuwen discuss, ‘whoever passes the stages of pilgrimage and is physically in Mecca but does not see God, is similar to a person who stays confined to his home without any spiritual improvement’. The moral of the story is that material presence itself is not enough: true perception depends making oneself spiritually receptive to the divine.

Although it appears to be describing an utterly different set of circumstances, Vladimir Bobrovnikov’s chapter on the Soviet writer Fazliddin Muhammadiev’s account of the hajj also reveals multiple tensions between different framings of the journey. However, in this case the push is toward a teleology of the secular rather than of the sacred. Suspended between the ethical demands of Mecca and Moscow, Muhammadiev’s novel combines distance and proximity, satire with serious and detailed account, even as the narrative—whose ontological status is already complicated by purporting to be fictional, yet informative—provides a politically loaded commentary on disjunctions between global Islam, Soviet ideology, and Western capitalism.

The most ethnographically detailed example of disarticulations between narrative frameworks is provided by Zahir Janmohamed’s gripping account of the use of mobile phone and tablet technologies used by Shiʿi pilgrims to bypass Saudi censorship rules. Buitelaar, Caidi, and other contributors show how media technology helps to bridge distances between pilgrims and far-flung publics; in the case described by Janmohamed, however, such technology actively creates distance between the ritual surveillance put in place by the Saudis and the experiences of those who wish to frame the hajj in different ways. In Janmohamed’s words:

When I entered the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, for example, I could listen to Shiʾa supplications like Jawshan kabīr that I had grown up reciting and that moved me on a deep, emotional level. Suddenly—thanks to technology—the hajj felt a little bit like my own.

We see how mediation itself need not interpose between pilgrim and sacred space: it can actually create a stronger sense of being present. Moreover, such narrative reframing links the pilgrim to childhood dispositions and memories. The hajj may not have physically moved, but it has shifted semiotically: it comes to feel ‘entirely different’.

Janmohamed shows that such reframings are not only about theological differences. He records the comments of Leila, who joins other young women in finding a Wi-Fi spot where they can download the lectures of a Canadian female scholar. Leila thus shuts off male voices and, in her words, is enabled to ‘do my own thing.’ Her actions point to a significant double shift that we see across the chapters of this volume as whole: in crude terms, the obligations of authorship and the subjectivity associated with being a pilgrim are becoming looser, more individualized, more relativized by being framed in relation to wider religious, cultural, and social lexicons. No doubt pilgrims have always ‘done their own thing,’ but in many parts of the contemporary world they have access to many more ways to imagine, narrate, and compare their pathways. This is not a tendency that is complete or inevitable, and it should not be taken as signifying a denial of sociality in making the hajj. Buitelaar’s chapter on ‘coming of age in Mecca’ focuses on the pilgrimage accounts of two young Muslims living in the Netherlands, and beautifully encapsulates the frequent dilemmas and constant decision-making of pilgrims who see going to Mecca not as a conclusion to a life trajectory, but rather as one way of preparing them for their adult lives, and indeed an experience that may be repeated. The hajj fits in complex ways into wider narratives of emergent lives that appear full of choice and thus retain much uncertainty—about how to relate to parents, whether to acknowledge or seek distance from familial homelands, what to make of a pilgrimage that appears to contain ‘mandatory’ elements.6 Buitelaar also includes a quotation from Enes, a young Muslim man, that is both an illustration and a salutary lesson about assuming the importance of narrative for pilgrims. Enes talks of how in preparation to go to Mecca he watches a DVD, but otherwise takes his grandfather’s advice ‘not to seek too much information on the meanings of the hajj, but to just “let it happen.” ’ He goes on:

My grandfather is the only person in our family who has been on hajj. I was still a child at the time. Besides the ring he gave me upon his return, what I remember is what he’d say when someone asked him about the hajj: ‘You cannot describe it, you can only feel it.’ (…) When I told him that I was going on ʿumra, he said: ‘Just go. You will see what I mean when I told you that it cannot described. Just feel it.’ And so I decided to let myself be surprised.

This is a story that denies the importance of narrative in capturing what it is like to go to Mecca. Yet at the same time it is a framing device, a powerful use of words both despite and because of its rhetorical and paradoxical dismissal of the power of the verbal. To be sure, it suggests the need to be physically present at the holy sites; but it also illustrates the unconfinable capacity of the hajj to become a consequential story that can be shared between Muslims, wherever they happen to be located.

1

For an excellent ethnography of Mecca mediated beyond the Hijaz see Al-Ajarma (2020). Compare also Flaskerud’s (2018) account of how the hajj is invoked within a Norwegian mosque through sharing of stories and references in speeches.

2

For work on the taking of ‘selfies’ at Mecca see Caidi, Beazley and Marquez (2018).

3

https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+narrative&rlz=1C1GCEB_enCA857CA857&oq=definition+of+narrative&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l9.3479j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8, accessed 2 September 2021.

4

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/narrative, accessed 2 September 2021.

5

For a more detailed discussion of the concept of articulation applied to pilgrimage see Coleman (2021).

6

These uncertainties relate closely to what Buitelaar in her introduction calls the tensions between ‘limit-form’ representations of space and time, constituted by bounded entities that are left behind as the person travels between places or phrases of life, and more ‘flow-form’ conceptions of movement, in which temporal and spatial boundaries are perceived to be fluid and porous.

References

  • Al-Ajarma, Kholoud. 2020. ‘Mecca in Morocco. Articulations of the Muslim pilgrimage (Hajj) in Moroccan everyday life.’ Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Groningen.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Caidi, Nadia, Susan Beazley, and Laia Marquez Colomer. 2018. ‘Holy selfies: Performing pilgrimage in the age of social media.’ The International journal of information, diversity & inclusion2 (1/2): 831.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Coleman, Simon. 2021. Powers of pilgrimage: Religion in a world of motion. New York: New York University Press.

  • Flaskerud, Ingvild. 2018. ‘Mediating pilgrimage. Pilgrimage remembered and desired in a Norwegian home community.’ In Muslim pilgrimage in Europe, edited by Ingvild Flaskerud and Richard Natvig, 4357. London and New York: Routledge.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Collapse
  • Expand

Metrics

All Time Past 365 days Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 0 0 0
Full Text Views 204 64 2
PDF Views & Downloads 163 32 0