Muslim Pilgrimage: Sacred Spaces, Infrastructural Barriers, and Anti-Patriarchal Discourse
Panel, 2024 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, May 19 at
Panel Description
From the fifteenth century onwards, following concerted efforts by Mamluks, Ottomans, and Safavids to improve infrastructure and secure pilgrimage routes for safe travel, the number of hajj pilgrims fulfilling their religious obligations in Mecca began to increase rapidly. This increase intensified during the late nineteenth century following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the development of railway routes in the Caucasus as well as between Alexandria and Port Said Egypt, thus expanding opportunities for pilgrims from Iran, Central Asia and Europe, to perform their religious pilgrimage to Mecca and the holy Shi’a shrine cities of Iraq, notably Najaf and Karbala. The availability of the pilgrimage ritual to celebrants accelerated and intensified yet was also a source of socio-political and economic challenges and changes. This panel will delve into the importance of examining the geographical, geopolitical, and gender dynamics of pilgrims through the perspective of religious mobility and rituals. It aims to illuminate the management of prevalent challenges, and depictions of Islamic sacred spaces, and assess the impact of intellectuals in enhancing infrastructures, all within the context of acquiring a new religious-political identity.
The papers presented here collectively explore the ritual of pilgrimage and shed light on the often-overlooked geopolitical dimensions of this Islamic practice. Topics addressed include the infrastructural challenges faced during the early modern hajj, restrictions imposed on pilgrims, the growth in interest of depictions of Islamic sacred spaces, and the pivotal role of pilgrimage in the emergence of anti-patriarchal discourse. The first paper focuses on the Ottoman scholars’ struggle in their attempt to resolve the limitations of hajj infrastructure through the assistance of guides to the ritual sites and during the journey throughout the early modern period. The second paper analyzes how Iranian women have maneuvered around religious and patriarchal structures to claim and obtain their anti-patriarchal demands from the late nineteenth century until the end of Qajar era (1925). It argues that religious rituals, far beyond their spiritual value, were used as a means of emancipation and patriarchal bargaining to enable women to seek liberation and demand freedom. The third paper will present efforts to spatially depict spaces of Muslim pilgrimage and the direction of prayer. This talk will highlight the growth in interest in depictions of Islamic sacred spaces from the sixteenth century onwards demarcating borderland barriers with an eye on anti-patriarchal discourse.
This paper analyzes how Iranian women have maneuvered around religious and patriarchal structures to claim and obtain their anti-patriarchal demands from the late nineteenth century until the end of Qajar era (1925). Centered on one of the most common religious rituals, the pilgrimage, I will apply three concepts; faith, fight, and flight to argue that religious rituals, far beyond their spiritual value, were used as a means of emancipation and patriarchal bargaining to enable women to seek liberation and demand freedom from Iran’s ‘Colony of Islamization.’ This study helps understand how the twentieth-century revolutions provided the means through which women gradually gained political maturity and eventually accommodated religious choice, as witnessed during the current revolutionary movement, Woman. Life. Freedom. Exploring women’s gradual flight from religious faith to political faith, this project argues that women’s political awareness was primarily achieved through ‘bargaining with patriarchy,’ a paradigm that Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) developed. Kandiyoti demonstrates that women’s conformity to patriarchal norms can, unintentionally and indirectly, give women a sense of self-esteem, independence, identity, and power. This project contributes to studying the women’s movement through revolutionary activism and pilgrimage, and subversion of patriarchy. Historical studies of space, mobility, and borderlands illuminate pilgrimage as moments when women developed strategies to negotiate a sense of individuality, facilitate survival, and assert their independence.
From the late twelfth century onward, maps related to the hajj pilgrimage make their appearance. These maps are to be found in certificate scrolls confirming the completion of the hajj and in travelogues containing maplike pictures of the holy sites. These can be read as an indication of the growing demand for visual images of sacred spaces. Eventually, the scope of the images in these pilgrimage scrolls expands into an illustrated hajj manuscript series and a collection of prayer books: Futūḥ al-ḥaramayn (Conquests of the Holy Sites), which first appears in the early sixteenth century, and proliferates in a multiplicity of copies thereafter; and the Dalāʾil al-khayrāt (Ways of Edification) prayer book that was extremely popular in the eighteenth century, which also includes bird’s-eye views of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The pocket-book version of these books became so popular that hundreds of copies were produced from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In tandem with these hajj manuals, a tradition begins of including a glazed Kaʿba tiles in mosques adjacent to the miḥrāb (prayer niche) showing a schematic map-like representation of the Kaʿba framed by a rectangle with a series of place-names indicating the direction of prayer (Qibla) from around the world. The inspiration for these Kaʿba tile maps comes from Qibla charts (way-finding diagrams for locating Mecca) that emerged as a result of the Islamic injunction to pray, bury the dead, and sacrifice animals, among other ritual rites, specifically in the sacred direction of Mecca and to perform nonreligious acts, especially those related to bodily functions, deliberately not in that direction. A variety of Qibla schemes developed based on a combination of folk and mathematical science. These schemes appear in a multitude of sectors ranging from the simplest of four and eight-sector schemes to ten-, eleven-, twelve-, and even seventy-two sector schemes.
This paper will present and analyse efforts to spatially depict spaces of Muslim pilgrimage and the direction of prayer in the context of a larger on-going book manuscript project. In keeping with the interests of this proposed panel, this talk will highlight the growth in interest of depictions of Islamic sacred spaces from the twelfth century onwards demarcating borderland barriers with an eye on patriarchal discourse.
