The Longest Journey Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

by Tagliacozzo, Eric

• ISBN13: 9780195308280
• ISBN10: 019530828X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one ofthe five pillars of their faith. Records for this practice show that the majority of pilgrims in Islam's earliest centuries came from surrounding polities, such as Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims makingthe journey in any one year could come from Southeast Asia. This is astonishing because of the distances traveled; sailing ships, and later huge steamers as described in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, plodded across the length of the Indian Ocean to disgorge pilgrims on Arabian docks. Yet the hugenumbers of Southeast Asian pilgrims may be even more phenomenal if one thinks of the spiritual distances traveled. The variants of Islam practiced in Southeast Asia have traditionally been seen as syncretic, making the effort, expense, and meaning of undertaking the Hajj hugely important in local life. Millions of Southeast Asians, from Southern Thailand into Malaysia and Singapore, from Indonesia up throughBrunei and the Southern Philippines, have now made this voyage. More undertake it every year. The movement of Islam in global spaces has become a topic of interest to states, scholars, and the educated reading public for many reasons. The Hajj is still the single largest transmission variant ofMuslim ideologies and fraternity in the modern world. This book attempts to write an overarching history of the Hajj from Southeast Asia, encompassing very early times all the way up until the present.

Author Biography

Eric Tagliocozzo is Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies, Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915

Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I: Charting the Hajj over the Centuries
1. Ancient Footsteps: Southeast Asia's Earliest Muslim Pilgrims
2. Mecca's Tidal Pull: The Red Sea and Its Worlds
3. Financing Devotion: The Economics of the Pre-Moden Hajj
4. Sultanate and Crescent: Religion and Politics in the Indian Ocean

Part II: The Hajj through Four Colonial Windows
5. In Conrad's Wake: Lord Jim, the "Patna," and the Hajj
6. A Medical Mountain: Health Maintenance and Disease Control on the Hajj
7. The Skeptic's Eye: Snouck Hurgronje and the Politics of Pilgrimage
8. The Jeddah Consulates: Colonial Espionage in the Hejaz

Part III Making the Hajj "Modern"
9. Regulating the Flood: The Hajj and the Independent Nation-State
10. On the Margins of Islam: Hajjis from Outside Southeast Asia's "Islamic Arc"
11. "I was the Guest of Allah": Hajj Memoirs and Writings from Southeast Asia
12. Remembering Devotion: Oral History and the Pilgrimage
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index