Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage by Abdellah Hammoudi, Pascale Ghazaleh, Pascale Ghazaleh (Translator)

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An unforgettable report on one man's hajj--the sacred rite that brings millions of Muslims to Mecca every year

In 1999, the Moroccan scholar Abdellah Hammoudi, trained in Paris and teaching in America, decided to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He wanted to observe the hajj as an anthropologist but also to experience it as an ordinary pilgrim, and to write about it for both Muslims and non-Muslims. Here is his intimate, intense, and detailed account of the Hajj--a rare and important document by a subtle, learned, and sympathetic writer.

Hammoudi describes not just the adventure, the human pressures, and the social tumult--everything from the early preparations to the last climactic scenes in the holy shrines of Medina and Mecca--but also the intricate politics and amazing complexity of the entire pilgrimage experience. He pays special heed to the effects of Saudi bureaucratic control over the Hajj, to the ways that faith itself becomes a lucrative source of commerce for the Arabian kingdom, and to the Wahhabi inflections of the basic Muslim message.

Here, too, is a poignant discussion of the inner voyage that pilgrimage can mean to those who embark on it: the transformed sense of daily life, of worship, and of political engagement. Hammoudi acknowledges that he was spurred to reconsider his own ideas about faith, gesture, community, and nationality in unanticipated ways. This is a remarkable work of literature about both the outer forms and the inner meanings of Islam today.

Publishers Weekly

Hammoudi, a Paris-educated professor of anthropology at Princeton University, brings his worldly experiences to the most personal of journeys: the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca (called the hajj in Arabic). Originally written in French, this English edition is being published to coincide with the 2006 hajj. Hammoudi is eager to explore the academic angles of the hajj, all the while doubting the strength of his own faith. He is constantly tested. First, he must bribe a mid-level government official in his native Morocco several times simply to be added to the country's quota list of pilgrims. Upon arrival in Medina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad, Hammoudi is stunned by the omnipresent markets hawking everything from rugs to suitcases. Still struggling for a religious experience, Hammoudi is angered by the Wahhabi stewards of Mecca and Medina, who police Islam's holiest sites with irrational Wahhabi zeal. Beset with the flu, Hammoudi still circumambulates the Kaaba in Mecca, appreciating the rare absence of gender segregation. Ghazaleh's translation is reminiscent of both French eloquence and Moroccan storytelling. At times, Hammoudi's intellectualism becomes too abstract to follow, but even such abstraction further adds to the mystical, almost surreal, journey. (Jan. 7) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A Moroccan ethnographer travels to Islam's shrines and reports on what he finds, much of it unexpected. "I am a Muslim," writes Hammoudi (Anthropology/Princeton), "who continually questions the religion's fundamentals but fiercely maintains its ethos." Ever doubtful, he discovers that his fellow Muslims undertake the hajj, or pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, for many reasons, not least of them the assumption that wealth and reputation will follow. To examine those reasons, however, Hammoudi must first get on the roster of pilgrims, for the fundamentalist Wahhabi mullahs and Saudi Arabian bureaucrats, "guardians of the Holy Places," have imposed a strict quota on the number of foreign hajjis admitted each year, and competition is fierce. Morocco, where he resides when not teaching in New Jersey, metes out its quota down to the village level: a nicely democratic practice in theory, though at every stage open to favoritism and power-brokering. "If one wanted to look for the ideology that has the most adherents in my country, one would not be surprised to find it to be something very like corruption," Hammoudi writes. "It's a secret, but an open secret." Corruption is no rarer within the walls of the holiest shrines, we find; the author recalls encounters with hookers, crooked officials and guides, and the like. Medina, thronged by visitors who all have their own reasons for coming, becomes a shrine for "the religion of Me, Me first, Me before everyone else." The Islam Hammoudi finds there and even at the Kaaba is far from monolithic, riven by ethnic and social divisions that, in theory at least, should not exist. "Around the black cube, the circle consecrated the equal dignity of all Muslims,but it did not eliminate differences in class or status."A Muslim counterpart to Lawrence Taylor's Occasions of Faith (1995) and other recent studies of pilgrimage; highly recommended for students of contemporary Islam, especially those prohibited from entering its shrines.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0809076098
  
• ISBN-13: 9780809076093
• Format: Hardcover, 304pp
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Pub. Date: January 2006
• Edition Description: Translatio
• Sales Rank: 291,093

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Excerpted from A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi. Copyright © 2005 by Éditions du Seuil Translation copyright 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Published January 2006 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

1

DEPARTURES

my departure for islam’s holy sites was no easy matter. There were the time-consuming travel preparations, and then long weeks spent going through the procedures required for the pilgrimage—complicated further by my being a resident of both the United States and Morocco.

But this was the common lot of every pilgrim who in the same circumstances chose to undertake the trip to Mecca that spring of the year 1419 of the Hegira—that is, 1999. What took me by surprise was that a malaise engulfed me, and I couldn’t tell whether it would intensify or disappear. It turned out to be lasting, so coloring my life that it became my future.

As the date approached that the Muslim calendar fixed for the departure, I felt not that I was moving toward it but that it was advancing, coming to meet me, catching up with me. This surely was the cause of my malaise. I was floating, tossed and turned by contradictions. Who exactly was this man setting off like this, whose life and activities had for decades found their meaning elsewhere? For me, the hajj had long ceased to signal salvation or a successful life. It was of course one of the famous five pillars of Islam—along with the profession of faith, prayer, fasting, and charity—established after the initial revelation, when the Prophet called for the teachings ofIbrahim (Abraham) to be restored, when as Muslim tradition has it, eternal Islam was rediscovered after the long period of decadence of pre-Islamic times. I had professed my faith, prayed, and fasted. I regularly gave to charity, and now I was about to go on pilgrimage. But all this was going on in a time frame that was not exactly mine anymore; it belonged, rather, to my identifying traditions, “beliefs and practices” attributed to the society I came from, which were objects of anthropological discourse—mine and other people’s.

It was in this mindset that I had begun to plan this project the year before. I had wanted to approach it as I had the subject of sacrifice in my earlier work—by reporting on every last detail of what was said and done. I hoped that in this first stage I would come to understand the meanings that pilgrims gave to their actions and to the sequence in which they would accomplish them. I wanted to understand the relation between each action and those preceding and following it. And I expected this first part of my work, yielding new theoretical perspectives illuminated by what pilgrims said about their experiences, to transcend mere description. I thought I could thereby understand religion through one of its concrete forms, and understand those who practice it today. From experience, I knew it would be with my difference that I would achieve this “first description.” As in my previous work on sacrifice and on masquerade, on rites of power and ritual power, my task would be to imagine Muslim religious life in the future tense, a religion in process whose traces I would follow in the past and present. And once again I knew my research would be very different from that of anthropologists who come to the study of Muslim tradition by other paths.

Still, as I made these plans, I had not foreseen the feelings that now I could no longer elude, for the more imminent and real my departure became, the more it seemed to authorize, even free up, certain words; I began to express my unease and anxiety in inadequate formulas that left much unsaid; but despite my regularly reminding myself and those around me of my worries, the reason for my malaise and for its persistence remained hidden, unknown. My diary from 1999 echoes this:

All four of us came back [from Morocco] to Princeton: Miriam [my wife], Jazia [our daughter], Ismail [our son], and I, on 5 January. My plan was to spend a few weeks with the family, to reassure everyone before returning to Morocco. We talk and talk about my hajj with our friends. Many allusions to it, many jokes as well: “You’ll be a grand haj,” says Chahnaz, the Turkish Muslim wife of an American friend who is an eminent specialist in international relations and an activist for Third World nations’ political and cultural rights. The closer the departure, the more specific the questions.
Am I being completely straightforward with my friends [in Morocco] Lahcen and Fadma? They know I write books about my experiences and in fact don’t ask questions. They surely understand that I have no intention of subverting the hajj or lying about what I’m doing. But I am not a believer like the others. I am approaching the hajj as I would a ritual from another religion. I am not contemptuous of religions; I believe that under certain conditions they allow for the expression of major existential dilemmas and encourage reconciliation on a grand scale. As with art, it’s not so much about belief as about creating a palpable form (visual, audible, tangible) that reveals the future, creating by repetition (prayer, invocation, ritual) an image of self: first in outline, then more precisely, then coming into full bloom, as in a painting, an icon that exists only to fade away when another, more fully realized one takes its place.

I don’t know if this way of seeing things will allow me to be in communion with the masses of pilgrims, or with Lahcen and Fadma, although it surely connects me with the forms of absorption in piety that one can see on faces and bodies, hear in words…Anyway, what does communion with the faithful mean? Is there any proof that communion implies identical experiences and expectations?

I have to acknowledge that the motive for my venture isn’t salvation, and perhaps this puts me out of line with most of the pilgrims. On the other hand, my project is indeed one of initiation. I’ve taken risks to become who I am today, and this trip could change me, introduce me to an even harder life, a more difficult drama. So the malaise I feel as the hajj approaches, my own hajj, is not going to dissipate. Maybe that’s the main topic of this journey to the end of the night.

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