Wolfe - One thousand roads to Mecca: ten centuries of travelers writing about the Muslim pilgrimage

One
Thousand
Roads to Mecca

Books by Michael Wolfe

TRAVEL

In Morocco

The Hadj: An Americans Pilgrimage to Mecca

VERSE

How Love Gets Around

World Your Own

No, You Wore Red

Paradise: Reading Notes

Greek to Me

TRANSLATION

Cut These Words into My Stone: Ancient Greek Epitaphs

CULTURE

Taking Back Islam (Essays)

FICTION

Invisible Weapons

O ne
T housand
R oads to M ecca

Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about

the Muslim Pilgrimage

Edited and Introduced by

M ichael W olfe

Foreword by R eza A slan

UPDATED AND EXPANDED EDITION

Grove Press

New York

Copyright 1997, 2015 by Michael Wolfe

Foreword 2015 by Reza Aslan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolfe, Michael, 1945

One thousand roads to Mecca : ten centuries of travelers writing

about the Muslim pilgrimage / Michael Wolfe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8021-3599-5

eISBN 978-0-8021-9220-2

1. Muslim pilgrims and pilgrimagesSaudi ArabiaMecca.

I. Title.

BP187.3.W66 1997

297.3'52dc21 97-1329

Design by Laura Hammond Hough

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street,

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

Contents

by Reza Aslan

: The Medieval Period:
Three Classic Muslim Travelers, 10501326

Naser-e Khosraw, Persia, 1050

Ibn Jubayr, Spain, 118384

Ibn Battuta, Morocco, 1326

: Enter the Europeans:
Renegades, Impostors, Slaves, and Scholars, 15031814

Ludovico di Varthema, Bologna, 1503

A Pilgrim with No Name, Italy, ca. 1575

Joseph Pitts, England, ca. 1685

Ali Bey al-Abbasi, Spain, 1807

John Lewis Burckhardt, Switzerland, 1814

: Nineteenth-Century Changes, 18531908

Sir Richard Burton, Great Britain, 1853

Her Highness Sikandar, the Begum of Bhopal, India, 1864

John F. Keane, Anglo-India, 187778

Mohammad Hosayn Farahani, Persia, 188586

Arthur J. B. Wavell, Anglo-Africa, 1908

: The Early Twentieth Century, 19251933

Eldon Rutter, Great Britain, 1925

Winifred Stegar, Australia, 1927

Muhammad Asad, Galicia, 1927

Harry St. John Philby, Great Britain, 1931

Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Great Britain, 1933

: The Jet Age Hajj, 19472000

Hamza Bogary, Mecca, ca. 1947

Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Iran, 1964

Malcolm X, United States 1964

Saida Miller Khalifa, Great Britain, 1970

Michael Wolfe, United States, 1990

Abdellah Hammoudi, United States/Morocco, 1999

Qanta Ahmed, United States, 2001

: Names and Terms

Foreword

Reza Aslan

Mecca.

Long before anyone thought to build a sanctuary here, and centuries before that sanctuary became the focal point of a new religion, pilgrims had been traveling to this desolate stretch of desert wasteland in western Arabia called the Hijaz . No one knows exactly why. There is nothing particularly unique or special about this place, nothing to draw those ancient worshippers here but sand and rock. Despite claims to the contrary in some Islamic chronicles, pre-Islamic Mecca was not the hub of an international trade network. It was not a center of commerce. It did not yield anything. There was, in short, no apparent reason to visit this arid basin, let alone to settle here.

And yet, as far back as the third century CE , if not further, pagan Arabs viewed this wide barren expanse tucked inside the bare mountains of the Hijaz as a kind of axis mundi a navel of the universea sacred space that served as the link between the earth and the heavens. They traveled here from every corner of the Arabian Peninsula, some from as far away as Yemen, to commune with the spirit world.

It would be many years later that someone would think to build a sanctuary herethe Ka ba or cubeand many more years afterward that someone would begin housing the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia within it. As the sanctity of Mecca grew, so did the legends associated with it and the Kaba. It was said that the original sanctuary was built by Adam, the first man; that it was destroyed by the Great Flood and rediscovered by Noah, before being lost and rediscovered again by Abraham, the father of the three major monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some believed this was the very spot where Abraham nearly sacrificed his first son, Ismail, that this was where Ismail and his mother Hagar were nourished by a natural spring called Zamzam after Abraham abandoned them in favor of his younger son, Isaac, and his mother, Sarah. Some historians suggest Zamzam may have been the original source of Meccas sanctity; the Kaba was likely built at first merely to house the sanctified objects used in the rituals associated with the sacred spring. Again, no one knows for certain.

What is certain, however, is that by the middle of the sixth century, when the Prophet Muhammad was born, Mecca and its sanctuary had become the religious, political, and economic center of pre-Islamic life in the Arabian Peninsula. No wonder, then, that when the Prophet conquered Mecca in the name of Islam, he emptied the Kaba of its idols but kept the sanctuary itself, as well as most of the ancient rituals associated with it, intact. Indeed, many of the Muslim rituals associated with the Kaba and the annual Hajj pilgrimageincluding the circumambulations around the sanctuary and the running back and forth between the twin hills of Safah and Marwahhave their roots in pre-Islamic practice: a reminder that the mysterious, sacred quality of this mound of earth predates any specific religious symbol or rite.

Today, the Kaba is no longer a repository of the gods. It is the manifestation of the one and only God, Allah . The Kaba is not a temple in the traditional sense. It has no intrinsic sanctity. It is called the House of God, but it houses nothing of architectural or scriptural significance.

Yet for millions of Muslims around the world who continue to walk in the footsteps of the ancient Arab pilgrims who worshipped here, the Kaba and the rites associated with it function as a communal meditation on the oneness of God and the unity of the ummah , the worldwide community of Muslims. For nearly fifteen hundred years Muslims have traveled by foot, by camel, by boat, by train, and by plane to this no-longer-desolate but thriving metropolis to experience the transformative nature of the Hajj.

The stories of these pilgrims, enshrined in this indispensable collection, are a treasure trove of memories and experiences about a land, a people, and a faith in a state of constant evolution. Some of these accounts were written by insiders, others by trespassers. At least half of them are by travelers from the West. The variety of the anthology is a reminder that, while Mecca may be an Arabian city, the Hajj is a global phenomenon, one that has captured the imaginations of people from all over the world and in every era, from the ancient to the medieval and from the medieval to modern. That makes this book more than just a collection of pilgrimage stories. It is a glimpse into an ever-evolving religion and its place in a changing worlda religion with many faces but only one heart.