Sacred Movement in Islam's Sa'ee and Sama (original) (raw)
Related papers
Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca, 2023
Neda Saghaee and Richard van Leeuwen Narrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them emotionally. Together, the written memoirs and oral accounts discussed in the book offer unique insights in Islam’s rich and evolving tradition of hajj and ʿumra storytelling.
Review of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage
The Art Bulletin, 2023
The Ka‘ba Orientations: Readings in Islam’s Ancient House, by Simon O’Meara; Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria, by Richard J. A. McGregor; and Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage, by Qaisra M. Khan
Esoteric Pilgrimage: Ismaili Muslim Hermeneutics of Hajj
The Fatimid Caliphate (909-1171) was the only Shi‘i Muslim Caliphate in Islamic history in which a hereditary Ismaili Imam descended from the ahl al-bayt of the Prophet Muhammad ruled as both spiritual and temporal sovereign. Before and during the tenure of the Fatimid rule, an Isma‘ili da‘wa operated throughout both Fatimid and non-Fatimid lands where numerous Isma‘ili da‘is summoned Muslims to recognize the spiritual authority of the Ismaili Imams. This paper examines the spiritual hermeneutics or ta’wil of the hajj as elucidated in the writings of the Fatimid Isma‘ili da‘is Ja‘far b. Mansur al-Yaman, al-Mu’ayyad al-Din fi’l-Din al-Shirazi and Nasir-i Khusraw and argues that the Isma‘ili ta’wil of the hajj invests the Ismaili Imam with a spiritual status superior to the physical Ka‘ba. This hermeneutic also establishes a distinctively Isma‘ili practice of making pilgrimage to the Fatimid Imam-Caliph in Cairo. This argument is demonstrated through three pieces of evidence: firstly, the ta’wil or esoteric interpretation of the hajj presented by various Fatimid da‘is, including al-Naysaburi, al-Mu’ayyad, and Nasir-i Khusraw, situates the Ka‘ba as the exoteric House of God and the physical qiblah while presenting the Fatimid Imam as the esoteric House of God and the spiritual qiblah. Secondly, the Fatimid poets Ibn al-Hani al-Andalusi and al-Mu’ayyad fi’l-Din al-Shirazi explicitly assert the superiority of the Imam to the physical Ka‘bah and highlight the importance of making hajj to the former over the latter. Thirdly, this spiritual hermeneutic is enacted and embodied in the actual pilgrimage in that numerous Isma‘ili da‘is including al-Mu’ayyad and Nasir-i Khusraw made to see the Fatimid Imam-Caliph in Cairo. As an example of an enduring hermeneutic, the practice of undertaking a journey for an audience (mulaqat) with the Ismaili Imam continued to have a paramount status in Isma‘ili Muslim piety long after the Fatimid period and persists in present times.
In this essay we will present two texts from the Sufi literature that may contribute to the study of Islamic practice. The only existing extensive translations of writings concerning the spiritual meaning of ritual prayer in Islam being those of a chapter of the Ihyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn of al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) by M. Holland and of the al-Futūhāt al-Makkiyya of Ibn al-‘Arabī, the purpose is to enrich the doctrinal spectrum of the subject and to show that the interpretations of Salāh are in fact developments of its original meanings as they appear in the Qur’ān and in the Hadith literature. The essay hops thus to contribute to the debate concerning the genuine Islamic origin of Muslim spirituality such as it has been initiated by such scholars as L. Massignon and P. Nwyia in the fields of terminology and hermeneutics respectively. We do certainly not pretend to treat this subject in an exhaustive way, the objective being rather to highlight that Islamic practice far from constitutes a closed system of predefined norms devoid of any interpretative potential, but, on the contrary, represents a dynamic reference which has never ceased to inspire Muslim thought in a creative way. The introductory part of this paper will be treating the fundamental ideas as to what constitutes the significance of ritual prayer in the Qur’ān and secondly in the sayings of the Prophet. Without getting too much into details, our main concern will be to develop further some key issues highlighted in the article of The Encyclopedia of Islam. The second and main part begins with an extract from a contemporary fiqh treatise, introducing the presentation of a selection of extracts from the writings of two illustrious Sufi authors which, despite of their interest, have not yet been translated. The texts of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. 279/892) and of Aḥmad Ibn ‘Ajība (d. 1224/1809) have been chosen, because of their originality and secondly because of the historical and geographic distance that separates them, which shows thus that interpreting Islamic practice has never ceased to preoccupy Muslim thinkers of any cultural background
Proceedings of the International Conference on Qur'an and Hadith Studies (ICQHS 2017), 2018
This piece discloses a clear portrait of the Sufis' understanding on Hajj. The focus of our discussion will be on how Sufis correlate the detailed performance of Hajj to the hidden indications of its spiritual significances. Employing two distinctly disseminated interpretations of Hajj by way of reconstructing the mystical understandings of Dhu al-Nun (d. 245/861) and al-Shibli (d. 946), we can see the impacts of symbolic interpretations to the relevant forms of religious performances. Dhu al-Nun represents the proponent of Hajj of Islam once in a lifetime, whereas al-Shibli's mystical insight underlines the importance of the reprised sojourn that incites an escalating number of pilgrims during Hajj nowadays. The latter will cause problems for the limited capacity of the surrounding milieu at Mecca. To solve the problem, we must enroot the spirit of Hajj, as we have to go back to the ordinance of the Sharia. Dhu al-Nun had brilliantly shows the relevance of his symbolic interpretation signifying Hajj as a divine call that resembles the journey that man has to accomplish to return to God after death. Thus, the obligation of Hajj for a Muslim suffices once for a lifetime. Had it been reprised, the pilgrims would have barely felt the sweetness of mystical experiences during the hasty nasty Hajj nowadays, where congested Muslims were flooding the pilgrimage shrines.
Sacrifice, Purification and Gender in the Hajj: Personhood, Metonymy and Ritual Transformation
in Luitgard Mols and Marjo Buitelaar (eds) Hajj: Global Interactions through Pilgrimage. Sidestone Press.
A key point I make in this chapter, usually ignored in discussions of the Hajj and of Islam more generally, is that the Hajj pilgrimage ritual, perhaps the most important communal ritual in Islam, is as much focused on a woman as on a man. This is surprising if we accept the usual stereotype that Islam is a patriarchal religion in which women have second-class status (that is, they are regarded as inferior to men). In the Hajj, men identify with a woman and her suffering, just as women identify with men.