Notes on Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma is a lecturer of the Globalised Muslim World at the University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. She holds a PhD. in the fields of Anthropology and Religious Studies from the University of Groningen with primary focus on Islamic pilgrimage (Hajj) and its meaning in everyday life in Morocco. She also holds an MA in Peace and Conflict Studies (from Coventry University, England) and an MPhil in Anthropology and Development Studies (from the University of Bergen, Norway). Al-Ajarma has worked in the fields of Islam, gender, refugee rights, youth leadership, visual culture, water, and migration in several countries of the Mediterranean region.
Piotr Bachtin is Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the University of Heidelberg.
Vladimir Bobrovnikov is historian of (ex-)colonial borderlands in tsarist and Soviet Russia. His field of expertise is Islam in Russia, the Caucasus, and the history of Oriental Studies. He chairs Central Asian, Caucasus, and Volga-Ural studies in the Moscow Institute of Oriental studies, and teaches at the Higher School of Economics. He is the author of Custom, Law and Violence among the North Caucasus Muslims (2002, in Russian), Voyage au pays des Avars (2011), Posters of the Soviet Orient, 1918–1940 (2013, in Russian), a chapter on Islam in the Cambridge History of Russia (Vol. II, 2009) and other research papers.
Marjo Buitelaar is Professor of Contemporary Islam from an anthropological perspective at the Faculty of Theology & Religious Studies, University of Groningen. Her research interests concern Islam in everyday life and narrative identity construction in a post-migration context. She has conducted fieldwork in Morocco and the Netherlands. Her most recent co-edited books are Hajj, Global Interactions through Pilgrimage (2015, with Luitgard Mols); Muslim Women’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond. Reconfiguring gender, religion and mobility (2020, with Manja Stephan-Emmrich & Viola Thimm); Religion as Relation. Studying Religion in Context (2021, with Peter Berger & Kim Knibbe).
Nadia Caidi is a Professor at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on human information behaviour and information policy. Current research examines the emergent practices of young people’s expressions of spiritual and religious identities online, specifically the contemporary manifestations of the pilgrimage tradition of Hajj, and how information in its multiple forms mediates and shapes the pilgrim’s spiritual, physical, and informational journey. Her work has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space; Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing, and The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion. Her most recent co-edited book is Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design (2021).
Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor and an anthropologist based at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He has published on both Pentecostalism and pilgrimage, and carried out fieldwork in Sweden, Nigeria and the United Kingdom. Recent books include Pilgrimage and Political Economy: Translating the Sacred (2018, co-edited with John Eade, Berghahn) and Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Motion (2021, NYU Press).
Thomas Ecker is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Iranian Studies in Bamberg, Germany. Since 2021 he has been working in the DFG funded research project: “Between Narration of Reality and Ego-document: Persian Pilgrimage Reports of the Qajar period” where he focuses on the hajj travelogues of Farhād Mirzā and his half-brother Ḥosām al-Salṭane, which are the subject of his PhD.
Zahir Janmohamed is a visiting assistant professor of English at Bowdoin college. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, and many other publications. Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International and in the US Congress.
Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany holds a PhD in the field of Anthropology from Leiden University with a primary focus on funeral rituals of Muslim migrant communities in the Netherlands and Belgium. She holds an MA in Law and a BA in Religious Studies. Kadrouch-Outmany was a Postdoc researcher in the research project ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’. She currently works as a qualitative researcher at The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP).
Ammeke Kateman worked as a postdoctoral researcher on Arabic Mecca travelogues in an age of Islamic reformism (1850–1945) within the research programme ‘Modern Articulations of Pilgrimage to Mecca’. She holds a PhD in Humanities (Religious Studies) from the University of Amsterdam, and pursued her studies in Arabic and History at the same university. Her monograph Muhammad Abduh and his Interlocutors: Conceptualizing Religion in a Globalizing World appeared in 2019. She also published in Die Welt des Islams, Qiraʾat (KFCRIS), Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History—vol. 18, The Ottoman Empire (1800–1914), and Philological Encounters.
Richard van Leeuwen (PhD 1992, University of Amsterdam) was senior lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Amsterdam until his retirement in 2021. His main research fields are Middle Eastern history, Arabic literature, the history of orientalism, the hajj. His publications include Notables and clergy in Mount Lebanon, 1736–1840 (Leiden 1994); Waqfs and urban structures: the case of Ottoman Damascus (Leiden: 1999); The Arabian Nights encyclopedia, 2 vols. (with U. Marzolph; Santa Barbara 2004); Narratives of kingship in Eurasian empires 1300–1800 (Leiden etc. 2017); The Thousand and one Nights in 20th century fiction (Leiden etc. 2018; awarded with the Shaykh Zayed Book Award 2020). He also works as a translator of Arabic literature and was awarded the Sheikh Hamad Award for Literay Translation in 2021.
Yahya Nurgat received his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge in 2022. His main interest lies in the religious and devotional landscape of the early modern Ottoman empire, as well as the history of Muslim devotion in general. Using guidebooks, pilgrimage narratives, and hajj-related objects and images, his dissertation (‘Space, Ritual, and Religious Experience and the Ottoman hajj, c. 994/1586–1194/1780’) tracks the impact of the hajj on the confessional, devotional, and spatial registers of Ottoman Islam. The dissertation also examines how the construction, interpretation, and experience of sacred space in Mecca and Medina evolved across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Jihan Safar (PhD 2015 at Sciences Po) pursued her postdoctoral studies on marriage and fertility issues in three Gulf countries (Oman, Kuwait and Qatar). Since 2016, Safar is based at the IISMM-EHESS where, together with Leila Seurat, she has been working on the hajj and umra markets in France, producing two reports funded by the Bureau Central des Cultes (ministry of Interior).
Neda Saghaee studied in the ‘Comparative Studies of Religions and Mysticism’ program and her master thesis concentrated on the studies of Islamic mysticism. Her PhD. thesis in Islamic studies at the University of Erfurt was entitled ‘Muḥammad Nāṣir ʿAndalīb’s Sufi Path based on his Lament of the Nightingale: Revisiting Mystical Islam in Eighteenth Century India.’ As far as her research interests are concerned, she is passionate about employing multidisciplinary methods to recognize the influence of mystical and theological discourses on all aspects of society, ranging from personal life to politics.
Leila Seurat (PhD 2014 in political science at SciencesPo) has been working on Hamas’ foreign policy. Her book, Le Hamas et le monde has recently been published in a revised version in English under the name The Foreign Policy of Hamas. Ideology, decision Making and the Political Supremacy (IB Tauris, Bloomsbury). Her postdoctoral research is dedicated to policing in Lebanon and policy transfer in the field of security. Since 2016, together with Jihan Safar Seurat has conducted with extensive research on the hajj and ʿumra markets in France, producing two reports funded by the Bureau Central des Cultes (ministry of Interior).
Miguel Ángel Vázquez received his PhD in Spanish Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington in 2001. He is currently an Associate Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at Florida Atlantic University. He specializes in the clandestine literature of the last Muslims in Spain who, during the sixteenth century, produced a corpus of manuscripts written in Spanish but rendered with the Arabic alphabet. He is currently doing research on the Moriscos’ mortuary rituals, specifically their ‘Letters of the dead’.