Among the duties God imposes upon every Muslim capable of doing so is a pilgrimage to the holy places in and around Mecca in Arabia. Not only is it a religious ritual filled with blessings for the millions who make the journey annually, but it is also a social, political, and commercial experience that for centuries has set in motion a flood of travelers across the world's continents. Whatever its outcome--spiritual enrichment, cultural exchange, financial gain or ruin--the road to Mecca has long been an exhilarating human adventure. By collecting the firsthand accounts of these travelers and shaping their experiences into a richly detailed narrative, F. E. Peters here provides an unparalleled literary history of the central ritual of Islam from its remote pre-Islamic origins to the end of the Hashimite Kingdom of the Hijaz in 1926.

Scholars from a range of fields tell the story of the Hajj and explain its significance as one of the key events in the Muslim religious calendar. This volume pays attention to the diverse aspects of the Hajj, as lived every year by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide.

Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organized the exhibition Longing for Mecca. The Pilgrim's Journey. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the two-day symposium on the Hajj, which was held at the museum in connection to the exhibition. The central theme that runs through the book is how Hajj practices, representations of Mecca and the exchange of Hajj-related objects have changed over time. The chapters in the first part of the book discuss religious, social, and political meanings of the Hajj. Here the relationship is addressed between the significance of pilgrimage to Mecca for the religious lives of individuals and groups and the wider contexts that they are embedded in. Together, these anthropological contributions provide insights into the effects on Hajj practices and meanings for present-day Muslims caused by current dimensions of globalization processes. The second part of the book takes material expressions of the Hajj as its starting point. It explores what Hajj-related artifacts can tell us about the import of pilgrimage in the daily lives of Muslims in the past and present. The contributions in this part of the volume point out that Mecca has always been a cosmopolitan city and the nodal point of global interactions far exceeding religious activities. Together, the chapters in this book depict the Hajj ritual as a living tradition. Each with its own focus, the various contributions testify to the fact that, while the rites that make up the Hajj were formulated and recorded in normative texts in early Islam, details in the actual performance and interpretations of these rites are by no means static, but rather have evolved over time in tandem with changing socio-political circumstances.

The book provides a realistic view of Hajj as it is today, with detailed explanations of all the rites. It provides Figh related issues about Hajj, Salah and personal behaviour according to the Quran and Sunnah, to enable you to obtain the best value for your time spent in the holy cities. It also provides information and suggestions about planning for the journey, what to expect and how to survive, so you can depart with full confidence. This is a must have for all those planning to go on Hajj!

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.

An extensive manual describing the Hajj?a journey that enlightens the significance of human existence and submission?this guidebook offers advice for those undertaking the holy voyage and gives the meanings behind its rituals. With special attention to the people who make the journey?approximately three million Muslims a year?this reference illuminates the importance of one of the fundamental forms of Islamic worship as a social and cosmic transformation.

The Qu'ran admonishes Muslims that "the pilgrimage to the temple is an obligation due to God from those who are able to journey there." Today over one and a half million pilgrims annually fulfill this Fifth Pillar of Islam, the Hajj. Saudi Arabia conquered the Hijaz in part to protect Hajjis from abuses in the management of the Hajj. How does that country now administer the religious event that brings so many people, often poor and illiterate, into one small area to perform a variety of complex rituals? How does the government protect its visitors' health and safety, and ensure their proper guidance through the necessary rites? How does it move so many pilgrims in and out of what is essentially an out-of-the-way desert? David Long has set this thoughtful examination of the twentieth-century Hajj within its historical framework. He first provides a clear, concise description of the rituals either necessary or traditional to the proper performance of the Hajj; he then relates how the inhabitants of Mecca used to manage the pilgrimage and finally, relates how the new Saudi rulers gradually brought the Hajj service industry under government regulation. Today there is probably no agency of the Saudi government which is not at least tangentially concerned with the Hajj. Only in the area of health did there exist a history of public management. By the early nineteenth century it had become all too clear that the Hajj served to carry diseases endemic to the Orient to Europe, and by the end of that century health and quarantine procedures were under international control. Today the Saudi government has sole control of these matters. Oil revenue vastly exceeds Hajj revenues--once a major source of Saudi income--but the Hajj continues to play an enormous role in the religious, social, and political life of the country. And even in economics it structures the Saudi businessman's year and provides part- or full-time employment to more Saudi citizens than does the oil industry. This volume contains an extensive bibliography, appendixes containing statistical material on recent Hajjs, maps, and a glossary.