Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca: Historical and Contemporary Accounts - Paperback

by Marjo Buitelaar (Volume Editor), Richard Van Leeuwen (Volume Editor)

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 are: 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.

Author Biography

Marjo Buitelaar is professor of Contemporary Islam at the University of Groningen. Her most recent co-edited books are Muslim Women's Pilgrimage to Mecca and Beyond (Routledge, 2021, with Manja Stephan-Emmrich and Viola Thimm) and Religion as Relation: Studying Religion in Context (Equinox Publishing, 2021, with Peter Berger and Kim Knibbe).

Richard van Leeuwen recently retired as lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on Middle Eastern history and Arabic literature. Most recently he published The Thousand and One Nights in 20th Century Fiction (Brill, 2018).

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.