Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World

1. Oxford Islamic Studies Online
by Oxford University Press
Pathways of Faith, Connected Histories
'Travel for Religious Purposes' from Oxford Islamic Studies
Online
About This Resource
This article explains travel for religious purposes as background to Stewart Gordon's When Asia Was
the World, Venetia Porter's The Art of Hajj, and Amin Maalouf's Leo Africanus. The article by Robert
R. Bianchi is reprinted from The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World in Oxford Islamic Studies
Online.
Text
Muslims participate in many types of travel that combine spiritual and mundane goals. For pious
Muslims, nearly every journey has a religious dimension. Historically and currently, the most
popular 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 mystical
orders (ṭarīqahs), missionary activity among both Muslims and non-Muslims (daʿwah), private
business transactions guided by sharīʿah principles, diplomacy representing Muslim governments
and 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, especially
when visiting several destinations over an extended period of time. For example, most pilgrims to
Mecca (ḥajjis) also visit Medina to pray at the Prophet's mosque and to see his tomb. Many people
combine a ḥajj with stopovers at other holy places along the way. Asian ḥajjis frequently adjust their
itineraries to include popular sites in Konya, Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Karbala, Shīrāz,
Mashhad, Multan, Ajmer, Mazār-i Sharīf, Samarkand, Quanzhou, Demak, and Yogyakarta. For
African 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 also
traders, students, preachers, emissaries, demonstrators, explorers, and itinerant workers. Many also
become fugitives, illegal immigrants, or smugglers.
Religious travel in Islam reflects an extraordinary degree of intercontinental cooperation among
constantly intersecting groups that perform overlapping functions. The general pattern resembles a
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2. web of interlacing and autonomous networks instead of a rigid hierarchy, spontaneous collaboration
rather than central direction, and fluid process over fixed structure. This vast web encompasses
Muslims in every part of the world, helping to create a universal Islamic identity that transcends
nationality, race, gender, and class. The ḥajj has always been the most powerful expression of
Islamic unity and egalitarianism, and today its unprecedented size and diversity make it more
important than ever.
Religious travel helps to sustain multitiered loyalties among Muslims, allowing them to identify with
universal, regional, and even parochial communities at the same time. By guaranteeing the
continuous interplay of unity and diversity, the web of religious travel fosters simultaneous pride in a
single worldwide faith, in multiple cosmopolitan cultures, and in dozens of ancient ethnicities.
Students of Islamic civilization have long appreciated the inherent tensions between these identities
and the need for every Muslim society to renegotiate them periodically. However, they have not
always 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 that
participate in the global ummah while preserving a distinctive personality for diverse transnational
cultures. The core groups define themselves in terms of common or closely related languages,
particularly Arabic, Malay-Indonesian, Persian, Urdu, Turkish-Turkic, Hausa, Swahili, English, and
French. Each of the major languages of the Islamic world evolved as a lingua franca facilitating the
integration of multiethnic empires, intercontinental markets, and Diaspora communities. Many are
hybrid 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. They
are smaller than the ummah but much larger than states and nationalities, and they have developed
different relationships with non-Muslim neighbors and Western colonialists. Each core community
has made a special contribution to the evolution of Islamic civilization, the rise of modern
nationalisms, and widespread intercultural borrowing between Muslims and non-Muslims. Thus,
Islamic civilization is an amalgam of amalgams—a pluralistic family of overlapping transcontinental
communities in which a handful of dominant languages help to forge common identities among
disparate ethnicities and subcultures. Religious travel is one of the linchpins that unites and
rejuvenates Islam globally and regionally. The constant intersection of multiple networks of religious
travel is the lifeblood of the universal ummah as well as the transcultural linguistic communities that
comprise it.
Every region of the Islamic world has a handful of cities that are particularly important crossroads
because 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 an
enormous flow of travelers and ideas moving back and forth between their neighboring hinterlands
and Mecca. They are critical meeting points where the primordial and the cosmopolitan collide and
transform one another in countless ways every day.
Konya's soul lies in the emerald-domed mosque and mausoleum of Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, patriarch of
the Mevlevî mystical order known throughout the world as the “whirling dervishes.” The tomb of
Mevlâna (“our guide” or “our teacher”) is the preeminent pilgrimage site in the Turkish-speaking
world, but it also attracts non-Turkish Muslims who know Rūmī's Ṣūfī poetry in Persian, as well as
followers of many other religions who admire his ecumenical and humanistic spirit. Konya is an
important educational center for both mainstream and mystical Islam and it hosts a thriving religious
publishing industry. The confluence of rich agriculture and private industry has made it one of the
leading “Anatolian tiger” economies, and all of the conservative political parties that have ruled
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3. Turkey in recent decades enjoy wide support there. Beyond its spiritual, economic, and political
importance, 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 through
multiple personalities—Anatolian and Turkish, pan-Islamic and trans-sectarian, pre-Ottoman and
post-modern—managing their inherent contradictions while profiting from the global reach of their
combined appeal.
Yogyakarta plays a similar role in linking rival Indonesian expressions of Islam with the international
mainstream as well as with indigenous Javanese culture. The Sulṭān's palace is a traditional center of
Ṣūfī learning and a generous patron of local arts. The palace's ties with the rural population contrast
with the urban middle-class following of the Muhammadiyah, the modernist mass movement whose
founders were inspired by Egyptian and Arabian reformers and whose branches extend to trading
communities 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 both
culturally and politically. Its publishing houses and bookshops offer the richest variety of religious
and secular titles in the country. Together, the mysticism of the palace and the modernism of the
Muhammadiyah have encouraged record-breaking levels of pilgrimage in many forms—to local
shrines 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. Each
year Indonesia sends the world's largest delegation of ḥajjis to Mecca—about 200,000
annually—and many more make the ʿumrah. During the last forty years, Yogyakarta has been a
driving 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 in
international diplomacy in the Islamic world and beyond.
Kano sits astride a wide belt of Hausa settlement and trade stretching across the African savanna
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. Pilgrims of the Tijānī and Qādirī mystical orders come to
Kano from many countries, sometimes taking a long circular route via Egypt, Morocco, and Senegal
before proceeding to Mecca and Medina. Kano enjoys a brisk traffic of illegal ḥajjis from
neighboring countries such as Niger and Burkina Faso who use Kano as their gateway because they
can 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 political
parties in northern Nigeria. The combination of sectarian, economic, and ideological rivalry
generates constant turmoil and creativity throughout Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabian
officials 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, overstaying
their visas, and belonging to international criminal gangs. In contrast to Indonesia where the
pilgrimage boom has helped to increase diplomatic clout, Nigeria's rocky relations with Saudi
Arabian ḥajj authorities have undermined Abuja's efforts to play a stronger pan-African and
pan-Islamic role.
Kashgar is an historic Silk Road entrepôt linking China and Central Asia to the Middle East that has
benefited greatly from post-Mao China's increasing links to the Islamic world. Kashgar retains a
majority Muslim population of Uighurs, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Türkmens. Unlike ürümqi, the
richer capital of Xinjiang province, which is sharply polarized between dominant Han Chinese
immigrants and a marginalized indigenous community that is mostly Uighur, Kashgar's multiethnic
environment promotes a religious and cultural openness that is a striking contrast to ürümqi's
communal tensions. New investment from the Middle East as well as Beijing has rebuilt the central
business district around the majestic Id Gah Mosque. The media and schools are trying to promote a
polyglot population and bookshops are teeming with bilingual and trilingual materials for all ages in
Uighur, Chinese, and English. As Beijing encourages Islam domestically in order to strengthen its
diplomatic and commercial ties with the Islamic world, Kashgar is poised to reemerge as a pan-Asian
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4. hub for religious and commercial travelers.
Each of these cities—and dozens more in the Arab world, Iran, and South Asia—exposes Muslims
from all classes and cultures to multiple expressions of a common faith. Their constant interaction
has helped to sustain a worldwide civilization for more than a millennium. Long before Western
scholars discovered the importance of globalization and transnational networks, Muslims were
experiencing them as concrete realities every time they left their homelands to worship and to
explore a world that they have always viewed not as a shifting jumble of man-made nations, but as a
seamless creation of God.
Bibliography
Bhardwaj, Surinder M. "Non-Hajj Pilgrimage in Islam: A Neglected Dimension of Religious
Circulation.”Journal of Cultural Geography (March 1998). An overview of the major regional
pilgrimage networks in Asia and Africa.
Bianchi, Robert R. Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World. Oxford
University Press, 2004. A study of the pilgrimage to Mecca, highlighting its global political
ramifications, with particular attention to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia,
and Nigeria.
Eickelman, Dale F., and James Piscatori, eds. Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration and
the Religious Imagination. London and New York, 1990. Essays comparing various types of
tra-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 boom
in religious tourism throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Lapidus, Ira. “Hierarchies and Networks: A Comparison of Chinese and Islamic Societies.” In
Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China, edited by Frederic E. Wakeman and Carolyn
Grant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. An excellent discussion of how rival
social science models can enlighten historical and cultural comparison.
Netton, Ian Richard, ed. Golden Roads: Migration, Pilgrimage and Travel in Medieval and
Modern Islam. Richmond, Va., 1993. An interdisciplinary approach to religious travel in
traditional and modern societies.
Source
Bianchi, Robert R. "Travel for Religious Purposes." In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic
World. Oxford Islamic Studies Online, http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t236/e1270.
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September 16, 2014 http://bridgingcultures.neh.gov/muslimjourneys/items/show/187.
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