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Abstract
When Moroccan pilgrims narrate their hajj experiences, they speak of the importance of the pilgrimage as a sacred journey that freed them from sins and, importantly, gave them the opportunity to ask for God’s forgiveness and mercy. They often describe this journey by referring to the five senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing, which are discussed in this chapter as part of the pilgrimage as a ‘sensational form’. Taking the narratives of Moroccan pilgrims as point of departure, the pilgrimage experience is discussed through its capacity to address the physical senses of pilgrims through which their emotions are evoked. It is demonstrated that although pilgrims often assert that their experience was one ‘beyond words’, by using their senses as a medium of expression, pilgrims try to demonstrate the religious and spiritual connectedness to the holy sites they visited during their pilgrimage, their piety in performing the ritual, and the authenticity of their experience. It is argued that at a personal level, the use of senses in descriptions of the pilgrimage allows individual pilgrims to memorialize the sacred time and space upon return through narrating their embodied experiences of hajj. At a group level, sharing hajj experiences stimulates feelings and emotions for both those who have previously been on hajj and those who have not (yet) visited Mecca.
Abstract
In this chapter, it is explored how pilgrims from Morocco and the Netherlands deploy the affordances of the smartphone to mediate the sacred atmosphere in Mecca and establish co-presence between themselves and their friends and relatives who stayed home. Taking the smartphone’s ‘affordances-in-practice’ as a starting point, the chapter sketches how the research participants of the authors engage with smartphones to connect sacred time and space in Mecca with their everyday lives in Morocco and the Netherlands as they imagine, recollect, and narrate the pilgrimage to Mecca. Such instances are discussed by asking how pilgrims’ smartphone-related activities are to be understood against the background of the wider social configurations, cultural contexts, and processes in which they are embedded and, vice versa, what implications their use of a smartphone might have for their various forms of sociality and daily lifeworlds.
Abstract
In this article, we compare representations of the pilgrimage to Mecca posted on Facebook and Youtube by ‘ordinary’ pilgrims from Morocco and (semi)professional bloggers of Moroccan parentage in the Netherlands. We discuss how such posts challenge representations that circulate in the mainstream media in both countries about Islam in general and the hajj in particular. For Morocco we demonstrate that this kind of digital mediation of pilgrimage contests the ways in which the state-organized hajj is framed in Morocco’s national media. For the Netherlands, we argue that bloggers deconstruct dominant images of the Muslim ‘other’ in their self-presentations as specifically Dutch Muslim pilgrims by connecting the meanings they attribute to the pilgrimage to Mecca to universal issues.