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Abstract
Besides presenting the research project on which this book is based, the introduction synthesizes the various contributions to the volume by theorizing on the narrativization of sensorial experiences and emotional responses in both historical and contemporary, and in textual and oral personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Author:
Abstract
This chapter explores how pilgrims’ specific positionality informs their appropriation of the Islamic heritage by focusing on the ways the meanings they attribute to their pilgrimage experiences connect to their life stories. To this end, the pilgrimage accounts of two young adult pilgrims from the Netherlands are analysed to ask how age and gender intersect. It is argued that rather than viewing pilgrimage as a fitting conclusion of one’s life trajectory, for these young pilgrims visiting Mecca serves the purpose of preparing them for adult life first and foremost. It is demonstrated how both pilgrims explicitly interpret their pilgrimage experience in terms of overcoming previous biographical hindrances and repositioning themselves as active agents in their social networks and in Dutch society more widely. In particular, it is shown how in line with the main developmental tasks that characterize emergent adulthood, their accounts illustrate a reconsideration of agency and communion and a focus on activities that aim to shift the balance between the two.
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
This chapter addresses how the ambivalence surrounding the invocation of the virtue of ṣabr (patience, endurance) in pilgrims’ practical moral reasoning during the hajj are referenced in the stories they share about their experiences after returning home. By comparing ‘emergent’ stories as the events of the hajj unfold to more ‘matured’ stories narrated several months or years later it is argued 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.
Historical and Contemporary Accounts
Narrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them emotionally. Together, the written memoirs and oral accounts discussed in the book offer unique insights in Islam’s rich and evolving tradition of hajj and ʿumra storytelling.
Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
Historical and Contemporary Accounts
Narrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them emotionally. Together, the written memoirs and oral accounts discussed in the book offer unique insights in Islam’s rich and evolving tradition of hajj and ʿumra storytelling.
Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
Contributors
Kholoud Al-Ajarma, Piotr Bachtin, Vladimir Bobrovnikov, Marjo Buitelaar, Nadia Caidi, Simon Coleman, Thomas Ecker, Zahir Janmohamed, Khadija Kadrouch-Outmany, Ammeke Kateman, Yahya Nurgat, Jihan Safar, Neda Saghaee, Leila Seurat, Richard van Leeuwen and Miguel Ángel Vázquez.
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.