This paper examines the ways in which the Ottoman Empire extended its influence into the sacred spaces of the Harameyn through the seasonal hajj caravan and the payments carried with it. The payment of annual stipends (the sürre), carried by the Ottoman hajj caravan, provided one of the most important links between the Harameyn and the Ottoman Empire. However, this important imperial link was inextricably tied to the seasonality of the hajj itself, revealing the limitations of Ottoman imperial power the region. This paper argues that Ottoman control and authority in the Harameyn was largely dependent on the hajj and the hajj caravans from Damascus and Cairo. By examining, in detail, one year of the sürre defterleri (records of yearly stipends paid to residents in Mecca and Medina) in the late seventeenth century, this paper showcases the vast patronage network sponsored by Ottoman pious endowments and the ways in which this network was able to challenge local networks of power, represented by the Sharifs of Mecca. The data from the sürre defterleri demonstrates the different corridors of power through which the early modern Ottoman Empire sought to exert its influence beyond its core provinces and into the sacred spaces of the trans-imperial Harameyn. While the networks of imperial influence showcased through the sürre defterleri tell the story of Ottoman imperial power, they also reveal the global connections at the heart of Meccan and Median society.Therefore, this investigation into early modern Ottoman authority in the Harameyn exemplifies the myriad of ways in which early modern empires sought to extend influence in regions in which their authority was routinely challenged and questionable

The second half of the 19th century was a period of significant change for Bosnian Muslims on multiple levels (political, social, cultural) that has attracted intense scholarly attention throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. However, while numerous studies dealt with religious changes and ruptures from a sociohistorical perspective, there have been surprisingly few studies on the way Islam and Hajj were conceptualized by Bosnian Muslim intellectuals in the late Ottoman and early Austro-Hungarian period. This paper will look at the way Islam featured in the Bosnian Muslim public sphere through analysis of writings about Hajj in the period from 1850-1910. It will observe the changes related to how ritual was conceived and depicted from a critical practice to a political act. This took place in correlation with apologetic rhetoric that emerged from the mid-19th century onwards. The emergence of this new Hajj discourse was related to intellectual and religious reshaping of the public sphere at the crossroads of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Thus, the paper will look at writings of Bosnian authors in Bosnian, Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, as well as all the other elements that influenced the development of ideas of Hajj as a ritual that represents a religion. Namely, the way Hajj was conceived both in reaction to the Orientalist imagery and as a result of Muslim reformist rethinking, implies a more complicated relationship with the role Islam was to play in the wider postimperial Bosnian society.

Scholarly work on modern South Asian pilgrimage to Mecca has focused mostly on the later periods of British colonialism, from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. This paper seeks to redress this gap in the literature by drawing attention to pilgrimage near the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It foregrounds the voices of pilgrims themselves, as opposed to imperial sources, to understand what kinds of political structures and entanglements surface in their accounts. It covers in particular the pilgrimages of two scholars from North India that were conducted in the context of Mughal decline and ascendant British power: Raf?‘ al-D?n Mor?db?d? (d.1809) in 1786 and Sayyid A?mad Shah?? (d.1831) in 1822. This paper analyzes shifts that occurred in the three and a half decades between their pilgrimages, in their articulation of imperial and legal politics from Delhi to Bombay and the Ottoman Hijaz, the material and cultural mechanisms of Muslim connectivity in the Indian Ocean, and the changing conceptions of the political geography of a Muslim world. Although their pilgrimages served different functions for them, this paper argues that their journeys and travel accounts served to cohere together a growing knowledge of the complex politics that pit Muslim states against a plethora of rising threats.

The Ottoman government’s investment in the Hajj and patronage of sacred sites in the ?aramayn has been well documented. This paper goes a step further in assessing the impact of this investment and patronage on conceptions of the Hajj and engagement with the sacred space of Mecca between 1660 and 1760. Mass-produced images of the Meccan sacred landscape from this period illuminate the diverse range of sites which accrued importance alongside the Masjid al-Haram and other locations of Hajj ritual. These include a corpus of over 50 tiles illustrating Mecca, mostly placed in mosques across Turkey and in Cairo. Like local Hajj ceremonial in Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus, widely available representations of Mecca provided “non-pilgrims” with unprecedented opportunities of engagement with the Hajj, thus “scattering” its sacred space. Pilgrimage narratives of both Arab, Rumi and Maghrebi scholars bring to light their unique engagements with sites of contemporary significance, both spiritually and intellectually. In the case of 'Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, his personal Hajj experience led him to compose his own Hajj manual (man?sik), as well as a treatise reflecting on the sacred space of the Ka’ba. Hajj manuals and other literature of a more prescriptive nature provide further insight into those elements of the Hajj and its journey which had amassed importance by the early modern period. The paper thus elucidates the complex overlaps of imperial patronage and religious experience.