Pilgrimage in Islam


Book Description

It is not only the holy cities of Mecca and Karbala to which Muslim pilgrims travel, but a wide variety of sacred sites around the world. Journeys are undertaken to visit graves of important historical and religious individuals, the tombs of saints, and natural sites such as mountaintops and springs. Exploring the richness and diversity of traditions practiced by the 1.5 billion Muslims across the world, Sophia Rose Arjana provides a rigorous theoretical discussion of pilgrimage, ritual practice and the nature of sacred space in Islam, both historically and in the present day. This all-encompassing survey covers issues such as time, space, tourism, virtual pilgrimages and the use of computers and smartphone apps. Lucidly written, informative and accessible, it is perfectly suited to students, scholars and the general reader seeking a comprehensive picture of the defining ritual of religious pilgrimage in Islam.




To the Holy Shrines


Book Description

'Great Journeys' allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries and also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. It describes great civilisations, walls of ice, violent jungles, deserts and mountains and multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. This title is a classic in 19th century exploration of Arabian culture.




A Season in Mecca


Book Description

Moroccan scholar Abdellah Hammoudi takes a pilgrimage to Mecca to observe the Hajj as an anthropologist and as an ordinary pilgrim, and to write about it for both Muslims and non-Muslims. Here is his intimate, intense, and detailed account.




The First Muslim


Book Description

The extraordinary life of the man who founded Islam, and the world he inhabited—and remade. Lesley Hazleton's new book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, is out now from Riverhead Books. Muhammad’s was a life of almost unparalleled historical importance; yet for all the iconic power of his name, the intensely dramatic story of the prophet of Islam is not well known. In The First Muslim, Lesley Hazleton brings him vibrantly to life. Drawing on early eyewitness sources and on history, politics, religion, and psychology, she renders him as a man in full, in all his complexity and vitality. Hazleton’s account follows the arc of Muhammad’s rise from powerlessness to power, from anonymity to renown, from insignificance to lasting significance. How did a child shunted to the margins end up revolutionizing his world? How did a merchant come to challenge the established order with a new vision of social justice? How did the pariah hounded out of Mecca turn exile into a new and victorious beginning? How did the outsider become the ultimate insider? Impeccably researched and thrillingly readable, Hazleton’s narrative creates vivid insight into a man navigating between idealism and pragmatism, faith and politics, nonviolence and violence, rejection and acclaim. The First Muslim illuminates not only an immensely significant figure but his lastingly relevant legacy.




Pilgrimage to Mecca


Book Description

As the first British woman convert to Islam on record as having made the pilgrimage to Makkah and the visit to the Prophet's Tomb at Madinah, Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963) cuts a unique figure in the annals of the Muslim Hajj. Lady Evelyn was in her mid-sixties when she decided to go on the Hajj. Daughter of the distinguished Scottish explorer Lord Dunmore, granddaughter of the Earl of Leicester, and great-niece of the notorious romantic Lady Jane Digby el-Mezrab, the young Evelyn Murray had spent childhood winters in North Africa. There she had been imbued with the Muslim way of life, becoming, as she puts it, 'a little Muslim at heart'. Before and after the First World War she travelled widely in Egypt, Syria and Transjordan. While strongly drawn to the Arab world, she maintained a conventional place in society at home, marrying the wealthy John Cobbold in 1891 and devoting herself to her Suffolk house and Scottish estate, her gardens, and especially deer-stalking in the Highlands, of which she was a renowned exponent. When her husband, by then High Sheriff of Suffolk, died in 1929, Lady Evelyn decided to perform the pilgrimage. Arriving at Jiddah by steamer from Suez in February 1933, she stayed with the Philbys and entered into the life of Jiddah's foreign community while waiting to obtain permission to perform the Haj. In doing so, she had to overcome the considerable suspicion surrounding foreign 'converts' who, Muslims felt, made the pilgrimage and then wrote about it as a dangerous and sensational adventure. While in Jiddah she received visits from various officials of the royal court, notably the King's son the Amir Faysal (later King Faysal). PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA is as much an account of an interior journey of faith as a conventional travelogue. It takes the form of a day-by-day journal, interspersed with digressions on the history and merits of Islam. While awaiting permission to go to Makkah, she was allowed to travel to Madinah, of which she gives an enchanting account. She is the first English writer to give a first-hand description of the life of the women's quarters of the households in which she stayed in Madinah, Makkah and Muna -- an account remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. Her book was published in 1934 to favourable reviews but has never until now been reprinted. This new edition, with a biographical introduction by William Facey and Lady Evelyn's great-great-niece Miranda Taylor, serves to rescue this unique and intriguing Anglo-Muslim from the neglect that has since befallen her, even among scholars specialising in women travellers.