REL 427 - Pilgrimage and Travel in Islam

This seminar offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the distinct but interrelated phenomena of pilgrimage and travel in Islam in the past millenium. Muslims participate in multiple forms of “religious travel,” including the main (hajj) and off-season lesser pilgrimage (‘umra) to Mecca, visitations to holy shrines and tombs (mostly Sufi) across Muslim Asia and Africa (ziyara), missionary activities among Muslims and non-Muslims (da’wah), surveys of the Lands of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the global Islamic community (umma), as well as travels to pursue Islamic education (madrasa, ‘ilm). We will explore and critically examine a number of conceptual avenues for thinking about the meanings of pilgrimage and its transformational features, as welll as travel, circulation, space, time, knowledge, translating practices, cross-cultural exchanges, religious imagination, the creation of sacred geographies and the relationship between religious travel and community and identity construction in the context of Islam by reading excerpts from travelogues (rihla in Arabic; safarnama in Persian) and pilgrimage accounts written since the tenth century CE. These include Ibn Fadlan [10^th c.], Ibn Battuta [14^th c.], Evliya Çelebi [17^th c.], Rifa’a al-Tahtawi [19^thc.]) as well as accounts written by a number of Arab, Persian and South Asian Muslim women who either performed the hajj or traveled to Europe and the United States, mostly in the twentieth century.

Prerequisites & Notes: HUMA 302 or instructor permission.
Credits: 5
Grade Mode: Letter