The Hajj Pilgrimage in Islam

Every year hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world converge on Mecca and its precincts to perform the rituals associated with the Hajj and have been doing so since the seventh century. In this volume, scholars from a range of fields - including history, religion, anthropology, and literature - together tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. By outlining the parameters of the Hajj from its beginnings to the present day, the contributors have produced a global study that takes in the vast geographies of belief in the world of Islam. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims, touching on its rituals, its regional forms, the role of gender, its representation in art, and its organization on a global scale.

Introduction Eric Tagliacozzo and Shawkat Toorawa; 1. Pilgrimage in pre-Islamic Arabia and late Antiquity Harry Munt; 2. Why Mecca? Abraham and the Hajj in the Islamic tradition Fareeha Khan; 3. The early Hajj, seventh-eighth centuries CE Travis Zadeh; 4. Women and the Hajj Asma Sayeed; 5. Hajj by land Benjamin C. Brower; 6. Hajj by sea Eric Tagliacozzo; 7. Hajj by air Robert Bianchi; 8. Economics: agents, pilgrims, and profits on the Hajj Sylvia Chiffoleau; 9. The pilgrimage to Mecca and international health regulations Valeska Huber; 10. The Saudis as managers of the Hajj Saud al-Sarhan; 11. Performing the Hajj Shawkat Toorawa; 12. Decoding the Hajj in cyberspace Gary R. Bunt; 13. A pilgrim's complaint: recent accounts of the Hajj Michael Wolfe; 14. Visualizing the Hajj: imagining a sacred landscape past and present Juan Campo.

Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (2005), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2013). He is Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program at Cornell, Director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and editor of the journal Indonesia, and has recently served on the Southeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS).
Shawkat Toorawa is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad (2005), and the editor and coeditor of several collections, including The Western Indian Ocean: Essays on Islands and Islanders (2007) and Islam: A Short Guide to the Faith (2011). He is a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow, an Executive Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, and serves on the editorial boards of Middle Eastern Literatures and the Journal of Abbasid Studies.