Ijtihad Network Being Wise and Faithful Muslim in the Contemporary World
The Arabian Humanities Journal plans to publish a special issue titled “The Pilgrimage to Mecca as a Social Experience” and has invited all researchers to submit their works. The aim is to analyze the extent to which every hajj narrative is part of a given socio-political horizon and participates in a new definition of self and others. In what way does the pilgrimage experience contribute to reformulating the articulation between intimate and public space, between political time, religious time and commercial time (Le Goff, 1960)?
Almost a century and a half ago, the Dutch orientalist Christiaan Snoucke Hurgronje published his PhD thesis devoted to the Meccan pilgrimage (ḥajj) at the University of Leiden (Hurgronje, 1880). A few decades later, Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, author of a now-classic work on the subject, asserted that the pilgrimage to Mecca is “an institution particularly worthy of attention” (Gaudefroy-Demombynes, 1923). Following on from these pioneering works, the phenomenon of pilgrimage has continued to arouse growing interest in the field of social sciences, from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner on liminarity (Turner, 1969) to that of Alphonse Dupront on eschatology (Dupront, 1987) or Abdellah Hammoudi (2005), while the sociology of religion has highlighted the extent to which pilgrimage can be a powerful vector of individual – “pilgrimage as self-narration” (Hervieu-Léger, 1999) – or collective identity (Vincent, 2004 ; Saghi, 2010).
From a historiographical point of view, the work of the previous and current decade has been marked more by a renewed interest in the ḥajj as an object of global history, on a regional scale (Papas, Welsford and Zarcone, 2011; Tagliacozzo 2013; Dewière 2017; Can 2020), imperial (McMillan 2011; Slight, 2015; Kane, 2015; Chantre, 2018; Tagliacozzo and Toorawa, 201 6; Choudhury, 2023), or even global (Greene, 2014; Chiffoleau, 2015). Other recent works have on the one hand invested the ḥajj as an object of history by analyzing the first milestones of its integration into Muslim piety (Bouali, 2021), on the other by mobilizing the methods of cultural history and history of sensibilities (Bursi, 2022 and 2024). These different approaches have helped to highlight the complexity of the ḥajj as a “total social fact” (M. Mauss) and the role it assumes in the globalization process, whether political, religious, economic or health-related.
Analyzed as a global phenomenon, doesn’t the study of the ḥajj run the risk of succumbing to the temptation of a macroscopic discourse that leaves aside an entire social history of the pilgrimage? What if the pilgrim and his experience of the ḥajj hadn’t been the missing face of this historiographical turn? Like all “massive phenomena” (Revel 1996), shouldn’t the ḥajj then be apprehended through a finer scale of observation emphasizing the plurality of individual trajectories and their significance? In this respect, the certificates of pilgrimage (ʿumra and ḥajj) by proxy from the Ayyubid period edited, translated and analyzed by Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine have sometimes made it possible “to penetrate to the depths of pilgrims’ personal experiences” (Zouache, 2007).
In a recent work, Marjo Buitelaar and Richard Van Leeuwwen (2023) have shown that travelogues on the ḥajj reveal an individual and personal experience of pilgrimage from both the travel and ritual points of view. As the authors suggest, analysis of this rich documentation, long confined to a few medieval narratives by Muslim travellers, is still in its early stages. But another pitfall then looms, which would be to confine the experience of the ḥajj to a series of monographs, a collection of individual testimonies without social depth. Inspired by the methods of micro-history, the historiography of recent decades has enriched the historian’s conceptual tools around scales of observation (Revel, 1996), the “normal exceptional” (Grendi, 1977) or the “evidentiary paradigm” (Ginzburg 1990). Pilgrimage narratives have been analyzed from this perspective, such as the memoirs of Gilles Caillotin published by Dominique Julia (Julia, 2006). More recently, “global micro-history” has opened up promising perspectives, highlighting how individual trajectories and experiences can act as “observatories bringing into play the very definition of the global and the local” (Calafat and Bertrand, 2018). To meet these new challenges, this thematic dossier aims to inscribe the ḥajj in its dual dimensions, local and global, based on the premise that the ḥajj is at once a religious, social and spatial experience. If Alphonse Dupront assumed that an analysis of “pilgrim society” and its gesture cannot differentiate between pilgrims because every pilgrim, however “solitary”, is engaged in “a powerful collective flow” at the heart of a “sacral locus” (Dupront, 1987), a further exploration is attempted in order to grasp the social experience of pilgrimage. The challenge here is to move away from an overhanging vision of the ḥajj and its “illusion of false continuities” (Julia, 2016) in favor of a history “at ground level” (Revel, 1989) examining the plurality of historical contexts and logics of action of pilgrims as well as of the various actors of the pilgrimage (consuls, pilgrimage guides, scholars… ) at different periods in history – whether medieval, modern or even contemporary ones – so as to better highlight the articulation of singular and collective narratives, but also how situated experience can shed new light on the global logics at play in the organization and unfolding of the ḥajj.
Three dimensions will be emphasized here:
The ḥajj as religious experience and dramaturgy of salvation:
The ḥajj is, like the pilgrimage to Rocamadour studied by Alphonse Dupront, a “place of pilgrimage of deliverance from sin committed” (Dupront, 1987). What does the pilgrim’s writing tell us about his religious experience, his dramaturgy of salvation, his relationship to normative discourses and devotional literature making explicit the eschatological function of the ḥajj? Contributors are also invited to consider the ḥajj as a religious experience in the light of issues raised by work in the anthropology and sociology of pilgrimages (Dupront, 1987; Hammoudi, 2005; Mayeur Jaouen, 2005), the history of devotions, cultural history and history of sensibilities: what place does the emotional register hold in the religious experience of the ḥajj? What role does prophetic piety play in the “lived sacredness” of pilgrims? In what way is the ḥajj also a linguistic, “sonorous” and “sensitive” religious experience?
The ḥajj as an issue of governance and a vector of collective identity:
The aim is to analyze the extent to which every hajj narrative is part of a given socio-political horizon and participates in a new definition of self and others. In what way does the pilgrimage experience contribute to reformulating the articulation between intimate and public space, between political time, religious time and commercial time (Le Goff, 1960)? While this mass event has always attracted the attention and vigilance of public authorities, how does it encourage, on an individual or collective scale, a form of “transgression or legitimization of a present or future order” (P. Boutry, 2000)? What strategies do pilgrims deploy in the face of the various forms of socio-political framing deployed during the hajj? More broadly, contributions may highlight the role played by technological innovations (from printing to digital technologies) in the pilgrimage experience and narrative.
The ḥajj as a means of experiencing space:
Finally, we will examine the different spaces of the ḥajj as part of the pilgrimage experience and, more broadly, the “geographical condition” (Lazarotti, 2006) of the pilgrim or pilgrimage actor: the route, the accommodation, the stay, ritual spaces, the practice of a broad spatial ensemble around the emblematic places of the ḥajj, and so on. Particular attention will be paid to the social, cultural, economic and political issues of urban materiality in the Holy City of Mecca (Sardar, 2014). Contributors will also be invited to analyze the extent to which the different means of transport used to and within the Holy Places were likely to affect the pilgrimage experience (Zeghidour, 1989). More broadly, we will consider how pilgrims have contributed to the evolution of the material and symbolic boundaries of the ḥajj, transgressing them or, on the contrary, reinforcing them.
Proposals may be in French, English or Arabic. They should be sent by October 31, 2025 to the editors of this special issue: Hassan Bouali (hassan-2007@hotmail.fr), Luc Chantre (luc.chantre@univ-rennes2.fr)
They Proposals should include:
- The title of the article
- A 15-20 line abstract
- Data allowing exact identification of the author: full name, institutional affiliation and function, institutional address, telephone number, e-mail.
After acceptance, the deadline for submission of articles (9000 words) is March 1, 2026. Authors are requested to comply with Arabian Humanities publication standards.
Select Bibliography
Hassan Bouali, De la révolte au califat zubayride. Histoire d’une expérience politique dans les débuts de l’islam, thèse de doctorat, Paris Nanterre, 2021.
Philippe Boutry et Dominique Julia (dir.), Pèlerins et Pèlerinages dans l’Europe Moderne, Rome, École Française de Rome, 2000.
Marjo Buitelaar, Richard Van Leeuwen, Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca : Historical and Contemporary Accounts, Leiden, Brill, 2023.
Adam Bursi et Christian Lange, Islamic Sensory History, Volume 2: 600–1500, Brill, 2024.
Adam Bursi, “Scents of Space : Early Islamic Pilgrimage, Perfume, and Paradise”, Arabica 67 (2-3), p. 200-234.
Adam Bursi, “You were not commanded to stroke it, but to pray nearby it”: debating touch within early Islamic pilgrimage, The Senses and Society (17:1),p. 8-21, 2022.
Lâle Can, Spiritual Subjects : Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman, Stanford University Press 2020.
Romain Bertrand et Guillaume Calafat (dir.), Dossier thématique : « Micro-analyse et histoire globale », Annales, vol. 73, n° 1, 2019.
Luc Chantre, Paul d’Hollander et Jérôme Grévy, Politiques du pèlerinage. Du XVIIème siècle à nos jours, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019.
Luc Chantre, Pèlerinage d’Empires. Une histoire européenne du pèlerinage à La Mecque, Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018.
Sylvia Chiffoleau et Anne Madoeuf, Les pèlerinages au Maghreb et au Moyen Orient. Espaces publics, espaces du public, Presses de l’Ifpo,
Sylvia Chiffoleau, Le voyage à La Mecque. Un pèlerinage mondial en terre d’islam, Paris, Belin, 2015.
Rishad Choudhury, Hajj across Empires. Pilgrimage and Political Culture after the Mughals, 1730-1857, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Rémi Dewière, Du lac Tchad à La Mecque. Le sultanat du Borno et son monde (xvie-xviie siècle), Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne (coll. « Bibliothèque historique des pays d’Islam », 11), 2017.
Alphonse Dupront, Du Sacré. Croisades et pèlerinages. Images et langages, Paris, Gallimard, 1987.
Carlo Ginzburg, « Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d’un paradigme de l’indice », dans Le débat (nov. 1980), p. 3-44.
Maurice Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Le pèlerinage à La Mekke. Étude d’histoire religieuse, Paris, Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1923.
Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange. Religious Economies of Global Islam. London, Hurst, 2014.
Edoardo Grendi « Micro-analisi e storia sociale » Quaderni storici, 1977/35, p. 506-520.
Abdallah Hammoudi, Une saison à La Mecque. Récit de pèlerinage, Seuil, 2005.
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Le Pèlerin et le Converti. La Religion en Mouvement, Paris, Flammarion, 1999.
Dominique Julia, Le Voyage aux saints. Les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne (xve-xviiie siècle) Paris, EHESS / Gallimard / Seuil (Hautes Études), 2016.
Dominique Julia, Gilles Caillotin, Pèlerin. Le Retour de Rome d’un Sergier Rémois, Rome, École Française de Rome, 2006.
Eileen Kane, Russian Ḥajj. Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Ithaca and Londres, Cornell University Press, 2016.
Olivier Lazarotti, Habiter. La condition géographique. Mappemonde, Paris, Belin, 2006.
Jacques Le Goff, “Au Moyen Age: Temps de l’Eglise et temps du marchand”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 1960, 15(3), p. 417–433.
Catherine Mayeur Jaouen, Pèlerinages d’Égypte. Histoire de la piété copte et musulmane XVe-XXe siècles, Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2005.
Alexandre Papas, Thomas Welsford, Thierry Zarcone, Central Asian Pilgrims. Ḥajj Routes and Pious Visits Between Central Asia and the Hijâz, Berlin, 2012.
- Park, Religion and geography. Chapter 17 in Hinnells, J. (ed) Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion. London, Routledge, 2004.
Francis Peters, The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995.
Jacques Revel, « L’histoire au ras du sol », préface de l’édition française du Pouvoir au village de Giovanni Levi, 1989
Jacques Revel (dir.), Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience, EHESS/Gallimard/Seuil, 1996
Omar Saghi, Paris-La Mecque, Paris, PUF, 2010.
Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca. The Sacred City, London-Dehli, Bloomsbury, 2014.
Petra Sijpesteijn,« An Early Umayyad Papyrus Invitation for the Ḥajj », Journal Of Near Eastern Studies, 73, 2014, p. 179-190.
John Slight, The British Empire and the Ḥajj (1865-1956),Cambridge-London, Harvard University Press, 2015.
Christiaan Snoucke-Hurgronje, Het Mekkaansche feest, Leiden, Brill, 1880.
Christiaan Snoucke Hurgronje, The Mecca Festival, translated and edited by Wolfgang H. Behn, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2012.
Dominique Sourdel et Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Certificats de pèlerinage d’époque ayyoubide : contribution à l’histoire de l’idéologie de l’islam au temps des croisades, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (Documents relatifs à l’Histoire des Croisades 19 ), 2006.
Eric Tagliacozzo et Shawkat M. Toorawa, The Ḥajj. PIlgrimage in Islam, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey. Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Oxford, Oxford University Press,2013.
Victor Turner, Le Phénomène Rituel. Structures et Contre-Structures, Paris, PUF, 1990 [1969].
Richard Van Leeuwen, Ḥajj Travelogues. Texts and Contexts from the 12th Century Until 1950, Brill, 2024.
Catherine Vincent (dir.), Identités pèlerines, Rouen, Publications de l’Université de Rouen, 2004.
Catherine Vincent, « Du nouveau sur les pèlerinages médiévaux ? », Religion et mentalités au Moyen Âge. Mélanges en l’honneur d’Hervé Martin, sous la dir. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet, Amaury Chauou, Daniel Pichot et Lionel Rousselot, Rennes, 2003, p. 379-386.
Slimane Zeghidour, La vie quotidienne à La Mecque de Mahomet à nos jours, Paris, Hachette, 1989.
Abbès Zouache, Certificats de pèlerinage d’époque ayyoubide : contribution à l’histoire de l’idéologie de l’islam au temps des croisades, publiés et présentés par Dominique Sourdel et Janine Sourdel-Thomine, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes. 2007, tome 165 (2), p. 539-541.
