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'Travel for Religious Purposes' from Oxford Islamic StudiesOnlineAbout This Resource

This article explains travel for religious purposes as background to Stewart Gordon's When Asia Wasthe World, Venetia Porter's The Art of Hajj, and Amin Maalouf's Leo Africanus. The article by RobertR. Bianchi is reprinted from The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World in Oxford Islamic StudiesOnline.

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Muslims participate in many types of travel that combine spiritual and mundane goals. For piousMuslims, nearly every journey has a religious dimension. Historically and currently, the mostpopular forms of religiously inspired travel include the pilgrimage to Mecca (ḥajj), the off-season,lesser pilgrimage to Mecca (ʿumrah), visits to hundreds of holy places throughout Asia and Africa(ziyārahs), study at Islamic schools and universities (madrasahs), reunions of transnational mysticalorders (ṭarīqahs), missionary activity among both Muslims and non-Muslims (daʿwah), privatebusiness transactions guided by sharīʿah principles, diplomacy representing Muslim governmentsand international organizations, and journeys of exploration surveying the global Islamic community(ummah) and assessing its role in world affairs.

A typical traveler often combines several of these activities in a multipurpose journey, especiallywhen visiting several destinations over an extended period of time. For example, most pilgrims toMecca (ḥajjis) also visit Medina to pray at the Prophet's mosque and to see his tomb. Many peoplecombine a ḥajj with stopovers at other holy places along the way. Asian ḥajjis frequently adjust theiritineraries to include popular sites in Konya, Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Karbala, Shīrāz,Mashhad, Multan, Ajmer, Mazār-i Sharīf, Samarkand, Quanzhou, Demak, and Yogyakarta. ForAfrican pilgrims, the routes to and from Saudi Arabia often pass through Fez, Cairo, Kano, Touba,Capetown, Khartoum, and Harar. In all of these places, pilgrims are not merely worshipers but alsotraders, students, preachers, emissaries, demonstrators, explorers, and itinerant workers. Many alsobecome fugitives, illegal immigrants, or smugglers.

Religious travel in Islam reflects an extraordinary degree of intercontinental cooperation amongconstantly intersecting groups that perform overlapping functions. The general pattern resembles a

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web of interlacing and autonomous networks instead of a rigid hierarchy, spontaneous collaborationrather than central direction, and fluid process over fixed structure. This vast web encompassesMuslims in every part of the world, helping to create a universal Islamic identity that transcendsnationality, race, gender, and class. The ḥajj has always been the most powerful expression ofIslamic unity and egalitarianism, and today its unprecedented size and diversity make it moreimportant than ever.

Religious travel helps to sustain multitiered loyalties among Muslims, allowing them to identify withuniversal, regional, and even parochial communities at the same time. By guaranteeing thecontinuous interplay of unity and diversity, the web of religious travel fosters simultaneous pride in asingle worldwide faith, in multiple cosmopolitan cultures, and in dozens of ancient ethnicities.Students of Islamic civilization have long appreciated the inherent tensions between these identitiesand the need for every Muslim society to renegotiate them periodically. However, they have notalways understood how religious travel helps to make this coexistence and accommodation possible.

Most religious travel, including the ḥajj, is organized around linguistic and ethnic communities thatparticipate in the global ummah while preserving a distinctive personality for diverse transnationalcultures. The core groups define themselves in terms of common or closely related languages,particularly Arabic, Malay-Indonesian, Persian, Urdu, Turkish-Turkic, Hausa, Swahili, English, andFrench. Each of the major languages of the Islamic world evolved as a lingua franca facilitating theintegration of multiethnic empires, intercontinental markets, and Diaspora communities. Many arehybrid languages and even when their structures differ widely they still share a vast vocabulary,particularly in religion, politics, and philosophy, that reflects common ideals and experiences.

All of these communities have an intercontinental reach and most also predate the rise of Islam. Theyare smaller than the ummah but much larger than states and nationalities, and they have developeddifferent relationships with non-Muslim neighbors and Western colonialists. Each core communityhas made a special contribution to the evolution of Islamic civilization, the rise of modernnationalisms, and widespread intercultural borrowing between Muslims and non-Muslims. Thus,Islamic civilization is an amalgam of amalgams—a pluralistic family of overlapping transcontinentalcommunities in which a handful of dominant languages help to forge common identities amongdisparate ethnicities and subcultures. Religious travel is one of the linchpins that unites andrejuvenates Islam globally and regionally. The constant intersection of multiple networks of religioustravel is the lifeblood of the universal ummah as well as the transcultural linguistic communities thatcomprise it.

Every region of the Islamic world has a handful of cities that are particularly important crossroadsbecause they blend a host of religious activities and radiate multiple layers of symbolic meaning.Some of the most notable examples are Konya in central Turkey, Yogyakarta in south-central Java,Kano in northern Nigeria, and Kashgar in far western China. These regional hubs attract anenormous flow of travelers and ideas moving back and forth between their neighboring hinterlandsand Mecca. They are critical meeting points where the primordial and the cosmopolitan collide andtransform one another in countless ways every day.

Konya's soul lies in the emerald-domed mosque and mausoleum of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, patriarch ofthe Mevlevî mystical order known throughout the world as the “whirling dervishes.” The tomb ofMevlâna (“our guide” or “our teacher”) is the preeminent pilgrimage site in the Turkish-speakingworld, but it also attracts non-Turkish Muslims who know Rūmī's Ṣūfī poetry in Persian, as well asfollowers of many other religions who admire his ecumenical and humanistic spirit. Konya is animportant educational center for both mainstream and mystical Islam and it hosts a thriving religiouspublishing industry. The confluence of rich agriculture and private industry has made it one of theleading “Anatolian tiger” economies, and all of the conservative political parties that have ruled

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Turkey in recent decades enjoy wide support there. Beyond its spiritual, economic, and politicalimportance, Konya is a powerful force in reviving traditional Turkish culture, including handicrafts,folklore, music, and archeology. Konya's genius is its ability to display its religious vitality throughmultiple personalities—Anatolian and Turkish, pan-Islamic and trans-sectarian, pre-Ottoman andpost-modern—managing their inherent contradictions while profiting from the global reach of theircombined appeal.

Yogyakarta plays a similar role in linking rival Indonesian expressions of Islam with the internationalmainstream as well as with indigenous Javanese culture. The Sulṭān's palace is a traditional center ofṢūfī learning and a generous patron of local arts. The palace's ties with the rural population contrastwith the urban middle-class following of the Muhammadiyah, the modernist mass movement whosefounders were inspired by Egyptian and Arabian reformers and whose branches extend to tradingcommunities throughout Indonesia, including remote parts of the outer islands of Sumatra, Sulawesi,and Nusa Tenggara. Despite its relative poverty, Yogyakarta continues to compete with Jakarta bothculturally and politically. Its publishing houses and bookshops offer the richest variety of religiousand secular titles in the country. Together, the mysticism of the palace and the modernism of theMuhammadiyah have encouraged record-breaking levels of pilgrimage in many forms—to localshrines in Yogyakarta, to the northern coastal cities that are resting places of the Wali Sanga (the“Nine Saints” who pioneered Islam in Java), and especially to Mecca for the ḥajj and ʿumrah. Eachyear Indonesia sends the world's largest delegation of ḥajjis to Mecca—about 200,000annually—and many more make the ʿumrah. During the last forty years, Yogyakarta has been adriving force behind the rapid spread of Islam in Java and the rest of Indonesia. Its religious,intellectual, and political leaders have contributed greatly to Indonesia's growing influence ininternational diplomacy in the Islamic world and beyond.

Kano sits astride a wide belt of Hausa settlement and trade stretching across the African savannafrom the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. Pilgrims of the Tijānī and Qādirī mystical orders come toKano from many countries, sometimes taking a long circular route via Egypt, Morocco, and Senegalbefore proceeding to Mecca and Medina. Kano enjoys a brisk traffic of illegal ḥajjis fromneighboring countries such as Niger and Burkina Faso who use Kano as their gateway because theycan buy foreign exchange and import contraband more easily in Nigeria than in their homelands.Kano boasts the most pluralistic collection of Islamic organizations, business interests, and politicalparties in northern Nigeria. The combination of sectarian, economic, and ideological rivalrygenerates constant turmoil and creativity throughout Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabianofficials are more worried about trouble-making pilgrims from Nigeria than from any other country.The Saudi government regularly accuses Nigerian ḥajjis of carrying infectious diseases, overstayingtheir visas, and belonging to international criminal gangs. In contrast to Indonesia where thepilgrimage boom has helped to increase diplomatic clout, Nigeria's rocky relations with SaudiArabian ḥajj authorities have undermined Abuja's efforts to play a stronger pan-African andpan-Islamic role.

Kashgar is an historic Silk Road entrepôt linking China and Central Asia to the Middle East that hasbenefited greatly from post-Mao China's increasing links to the Islamic world. Kashgar retains amajority Muslim population of Uighurs, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Türkmens. Unlike ürümqi, thericher capital of Xinjiang province, which is sharply polarized between dominant Han Chineseimmigrants and a marginalized indigenous community that is mostly Uighur, Kashgar's multiethnicenvironment promotes a religious and cultural openness that is a striking contrast to ürümqi'scommunal tensions. New investment from the Middle East as well as Beijing has rebuilt the centralbusiness district around the majestic Id Gah Mosque. The media and schools are trying to promote apolyglot population and bookshops are teeming with bilingual and trilingual materials for all ages inUighur, Chinese, and English. As Beijing encourages Islam domestically in order to strengthen itsdiplomatic and commercial ties with the Islamic world, Kashgar is poised to reemerge as a pan-Asian

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hub for religious and commercial travelers.

Each of these cities—and dozens more in the Arab world, Iran, and South Asia—exposes Muslimsfrom all classes and cultures to multiple expressions of a common faith. Their constant interactionhas helped to sustain a worldwide civilization for more than a millennium. Long before Westernscholars discovered the importance of globalization and transnational networks, Muslims wereexperiencing them as concrete realities every time they left their homelands to worship and toexplore a world that they have always viewed not as a shifting jumble of man-made nations, but as aseamless creation of God.

Bibliography

Bhardwaj, Surinder M. "Non-Hajj Pilgrimage in Islam: A Neglected Dimension of ReligiousCirculation.”Journal of Cultural Geography (March 1998). An overview of the major regionalpilgrimage networks in Asia and Africa.Bianchi, Robert R. Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World. OxfordUniversity Press, 2004. A study of the pilgrimage to Mecca, highlighting its global politicalramifications, with particular attention to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia,and Nigeria.Eickelman, Dale F., and James Piscatori, eds. Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration andthe Religious Imagination. London and New York, 1990. Essays comparing various types oftra-vel in different historical periods and cultural settings.Gladston, David L. From Pilgrimage to Package Tour: Travel and Tourism in the Third World.New York and London: Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2005. A sociological study of the boomin religious tourism throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.Lapidus, Ira. “Hierarchies and Networks: A Comparison of Chinese and Islamic Societies.” InConflict and Control in Late Imperial China, edited by Frederic E. Wakeman and CarolynGrant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. An excellent discussion of how rivalsocial science models can enlighten historical and cultural comparison.Netton, Ian Richard, ed. Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Medieval andModern Islam. Richmond, Va., 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to religious travel intraditional and modern societies.

Source

Bianchi, Robert R. "Travel for Religious Purposes." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the IslamicWorld. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t236/e1270.

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"Muslim Journeys | Item #187: 'Travel for Religious Purposes' from Oxford Islamic Studies Online",September 16, 2014 http://bridgingcultures.neh.gov/muslimjourneys/items/show/187.

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