History And Role Of Muslim Pilgrimage In Europe

Global interconnectedness had an impact on the sense of belonging of many people. Former conceptions of identity and belonging have become less evident as a result of the enormous influx of new information and products and rapidly changing habits and social structures. Religion can play an important role in coping with the existential anxiety that may result from this: It supplies people with concrete temporal and spatial anchor points for personal and collective narratives that link the past, present and future. It also provides a rich repertoire of stories, symbols and practices that can be used to construct a shared identity. For Muslims around the world Haj brings them closer to their religious heritage, assists them in defining their place in the world.

Gabeba Baderoon in her research paper, ‘The sea inside us’: narrating self, gender, place and history in South African memories of the Haj, discusses how Muslims in South Africa recount their experience of pilgrimage? Her paper considers the genre of oral and written South African Haj narratives and reflects on the insights they hold about Muslim subjectivity and history in South Africa. In this article, she takes a historical approach to the topic of the Haj and examine one of the earliest published accounts of the Haj from the Cape that of Haji Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward, who performed the Haj in 1910, along with oral testimonies about pilgrimage by ship in the 1950s and recently published accounts of pilgrimage by Na’eem Jeenah and Shamima Shaikh (2000), Rayda Jacobs (2005) and Rashid Begg (2011). In her analysis she considers the binaries of the self and the voice, the relation of the spiritual to the quotidian, and the place of South Africa and South Africanness in these accounts. They relate the universality of Islamic religious observance with the particularity of South Africa’s political and social realities in an autobiographical landscape.

Baderoon writes that in the collaboratively written account of South African anti-apartheid and gender activists Na’eem Jeenah and Shamima Shaikh write of the Haj as a journey of discovery.

In The Mecca Diaries, by the South African novelist and journalist Rayda Jacobs, the writer observes that going on Haj as with Jeenah and Shaikh, for Jacobs, spatial relations of orientation, belonging and return are thus central to the experience and meaning of the Haj. Baderoon further on in her paper opines that the Haj encodes a profound relation to self and other, sacred and quotidian, and time and space. These narratives show that the Haj is both personal and historical, and individual and collective, enfolding the pilgrim in a new beginning that gains meaning from its ritual and communal nature. According to her the oceans hold a particular meaning in relation to pilgrimage in South Africa. South African Muslim communities consist largely of the descendants of enslaved and exiled people who were brought to the Cape Colony from East Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia from 1658, the descendants of traders and indentured laborers who arrived from India from 1860, Black and white Muslim converts as well as a small community of immigrant Muslims from other parts of the African continent. Because most Muslims in South Africa arrived via the Indian Ocean into lives of slavery and indenture, the reclamation of the same ocean for pilgrimage is an assertion of a new and sacralised geography away from these traumatic histories. In the nineteenth century, both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans became the path to pilgrimage. In his book, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, the historian Sugata Bose opines that pilgrimage is a powerfully unifying factor in a region seemingly separated by distance, imperial and national histories. Bose contends that hundreds of years of pilgrimage across the ocean have instead created a crucial form of continuity. Considering the difficult circumstances in which Muslims practiced their religion during the colonial period, there is a surprisingly long history of pilgrimage to Mecca by South African Muslims. Ebrahim reports that the earliest known pilgrimage by a Cape Muslim was by Carel Pilgrim (Haji Gassonnodien) in 1834–1837, immediately after the end of slavery, though Imam Frans van Bengal had attempted the Haj in 1806 and Imam Abdul gamiet is known to have completed the Haj in 1811 but did not return to the Cape.

In addition, Sheikh Yusuf, who was exiled to the Cape in 1694, had already completed the pilgrimage by the time of his banishment. The introduction of a steamship to Zanzibar enabled broader access to pilgrimage and the arrival from the 1860s of Muslim teachers from Arabia, India and Turkey helped to cement a sense of connectedness to the rest of the Muslim world.

Wolfe’s compendium of Haj narratives includes an account by the Englishman John Keane, during his pilgrimage in 1877, of meeting a Cape of Good Hope Malay, one of an English-speaking Muhamedan community, who yearly send their half-dozen pilgrims to Mecca. He had been living some years in Mecca … the Cape Malays have now outlived all prejudice, and my new friend told me that he has was very comfortable in Mecca. According to Tayob in the post-emancipation period, the ability to go on Haj also became a way to negotiate status and authority within the South African Muslim community and during leadership struggles in mosques.

Baderoon further writes that for South Africans and other Africans who live some distance from Mecca, the ability to go on pilgrimage to Mecca holds a particular power to assert religious authenticity and authority, as the mosque leadership disputes alluded to above suggest, and as Cooper observes in relation to Nigerian women’s performance of the Haj. According to Baderoon, the egalitarianism of the Haj therefore holds a crucial meaning for Muslims such as women, converts, and those of lower social and economic status, whose religious status may be subject to question due to patriarchal, class or ethnocentric assumptions. Further on in her article when she discusses Haj narratives as an indigenous oral form, she writes that storytelling is central to the meanings of pilgrimage in South Africa, where a tradition of oral narrative envelops the entire experience, from preparation to return. Going on pilgrimage is a highly ritualized, communal and narrativised act. Every stage of the process from induction into the culture of Haj stories, the statement of intention (niyyah), Haj lessons, the ritualized greeting and asking of forgiveness for transgressions, hosting of friends and family for evening prayer gatherings in the weeks before departure, the farewell prayers at which orisons are said for the safe passage and success of the pilgrimage, the accompanying of pilgrims to the point of embarkation, to the welcoming back of the returning Hajisall take place within a recognized temporal, spiritual and collective framework. On their return, the stories of pilgrimage told by Hajis recounting the difficulties of travel and the transcendence of the spiritual experience form a familiar genre for both speakers and listeners.

Most South African stories about the Haj are oral accounts; but there is also a small and influential corpus of written pilgrimage narratives in South Africa, which includes Na’eem Jeenah and Shameema Shaikh’s Journey of Discovery: A South African Haj (2000), Rayda Jacobs’s The Mecca Diaries (2005) and Shafiq Morton’s Notebooks from Makkah and Madinah (2005). There is a strong interaction between the oral and written accounts, evident in the first account of pilgrimage published in South Africa, From Drury Lane to Mecca, which was based on a set of interviews with Hedley (Mahmoud Mobarek) Churchward conducted by the historian Eric Rosenthal in 1929 and published in 1931. More recently, Mogamat Hoosain Ebrahim conducted meticulous archival research and extensive interviews for his book, The Cape Haj Tradition: Past and Present (2009), which conveys ‘a fascinating account of activities and ceremonies conducted prior to the pilgrims’ departure for the Haj and upon their return’.

Baderoon in her article while analyzing oral and written South African accounts of the Haj writes that the Haj accounts form a particular strand of the genre of autobiography, connecting the interiority of spiritual transformation with quotidian matters in other words, the relation of the sacred with the profane. However, while there is a clear autobiographical impetus, the notion of the self in Haj narratives is not necessarily the one familiar from Western traditions in autobiography. She quotes Cooper that ‘the Haj invites an intriguing autobiographical impulse, but … I do not think a credible case can be made for their origins in Western media or modernist literary forms’. As Metcalf is also of the opinion that the Haj narrative is one of the oldest literary genres in Islam and it encodes a specific conception of the voice and the self. Writing about Haj poetry in Hausaland in Nigeria, Cooper notes that ‘to present the Haj is to present a certain kind of self’. Baderoon is of the opinion that Haj stories have great elegance, power and resonance. The oral form allows the speaker to navigate the dual demands of the communal and the singular, the familiar and the unique, there and here, the immediacy of experience and its telling, and the transformative and the mundane. The written accounts suggest that the reason the oral narratives are so powerful is that the Hajis themselves retain the immediacy of the pilgrimage experience. Cooper is of the opinion that, “in its effectiveness as an oral practice, the sustained relation- ship between teller and audience, and the characteristic patterns of its narration, it is evident to me that the South African Haj account and the wider cultural practices such as the formal conventions of the niyyah and the Haj greeting in which it is embedded, constitutes such an indigenous South African oral narrative form”. Cooper theorizes that vibrant poetic traditions developed in Hausaland around the longing for the Haj, especially when social and economic factors make it difficult for some community members to perform the Haj: ‘A poetic tradition emerged in Hausaland wherein the expression of longing to go to Mecca also served to evoke a nostalgia for a more perfect Islamic community’. As Cooper notes, the power of the Haj ideal for imagining an ideal community has ‘particular salience in the context of colonial domination under a non-Muslim power’, which suggests that ‘the Haj, then, is not simply a form of spiritual capital for those who succeed in performing it. It serves also as a powerful and broadly held metaphor for both the individual spiritual quest and the collective emulation of an ideal Islamic community’. This culture can be seen in analogous South African practices around the Haj.

In South Africa, and particularly at the Cape, a similar practice through which an ideal community may be envisioned can be seen in the longstanding set of traditions has developed around the Haj The oral Haj narratives form a central part of these broader cultural practices and rituals that include the ritual use of Afrikaans and English, formal practices of greeting and visiting pilgrims, an infrastructure of Haj classes and the circulation of instructional books such as ‘Die Gajj en die Oem- roh’ (1975), which is written in Afrikaans and Arabic script. Ebrahim confirms that the older Hajis prefer to greet in Afrikaans. … their greeting has rhythm and poignancy, and can be quite emotional: Greetings. If God grants me, I intend to travel to the house of God.

Baderoon further highlights the practice of financial help of the community members to perform Haj, she writes, in addition to these ‘rhythmic’ and ‘poignant’ greetings, the South African Haj culture also includes a practice of collective financial contributions to others’ pilgrimage known as ‘slawats’, which are discreetly provided to the Hajis even by those who cannot afford to go on Haj themselves. Such contributions are often small but nonetheless practical, cooperative and collective, and show the communal investment in the benefits of the Haj. This Haj culture has come to shape the annual Muslim timetable the period of visiting the prospective pilgrims and greeting the returning Hajis is built into the religious and social timetable for the year. While these traditions around the Haj are venerable, they have also been criticized as indulgent and wasteful. In response to this, leaders such as Imam Fuad Samaai assert that the ‘culture of greeting the kramats, their relatives and friends … encourages and inspires others to perform the Haj’.