Pilgrimage in Islam

Traditional and Modern Practices

Sophia Rose Arjana

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786071170
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología islámica

It is not only the holy cities of Mecca and Karbala to which Muslim pilgrims travel, but a wide variety of sacred sites around the world. Journeys are undertaken to visit graves of important historical and religious individuals, the tombs of saints, and natural sites such as mountaintops and springs.Exploring the richness and diversity of traditions practiced by the 1.5 billion Muslims across the world, Sophia Rose Arjana provides a rigorous theoretical discussion of pilgrimage, ritual practice and the nature of sacred space in Islam, both historically and in the present day. This all-encompassing survey covers issues such as time, space, tourism, virtual pilgrimages and the use of computers and smartphone apps. Lucidly written, informative and accessible, it is perfectly suited to students, scholars and the general reader seeking a comprehensive picture of the defining ritual of religious pilgrimage in Islam.

1

RECONSIDERING ISLAMIC PILGRIMAGE: THEORETICAL AND SECTARIAN DEBATES

Discussions of Islam and sacred space often point to the ways in which people living in the West define space differently than Muslims do, arguing that secularism is a value held solely by those who do not hold Islam as their guiding principle. This position neglects those Muslims who live in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, while insisting on a simplified view of how religious people negotiate the modern world. In fact, religion is more complicated than this binary suggests, involving movement, production, and circulation. In the case of pilgrimage, movement is a key component, making a division between secular and religious space impossible. Engseng Ho argues that this is especially true of pilgrimage, which is “a movement of persons” that entails “a movement of texts” that travel through prayers, poems, stories, countries, and other media.1

Despite the tendency in religious studies to categorize “other” people’s religion as static and traditional, many contemporary scholars consider mobility, action, and movement as important parts of the religious experience. As Annelies Moors argues, “Things do not have either a religious or secular, non-religious, status; rather the ways in which forms become or cease to be religious may well shift in the course of their production, circulations, and consumption, and depends on the intentions of those engaging with them.”2 In recent years, scholars of pilgrimage have agreed with this analysis, often defining space as an ongoing, fluid, and active construction, a product of human agency rather than one created solely by modern secular institutions or by religious motivations. According to the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, space is constructed through the interaction of physical, mental, and social fields; as a product of this interaction, space is not fixed.3 Islamic pilgrimage helps to demonstrate this vision. For example, a pilgrim visiting the tomb of Rumi negotiates a number of elements during his or her journey, such as place of origin, social class, gender, religiosity, imagination, and embodiment. These all contribute to the experience of the individual and result in a particular construction of space. Edward Soja frames this idea with his tripartite notion of Firstspace (physical space), Secondspace (imagined space), and Thirdspace, which is where the physical, political, imaginary, and social all come together. He describes Thirdspace as a site where numerous activities and movements congregate, “the real and imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”4 Following this logic, shrines, tombs, graveyards, and other sites associated with Islamic pilgrimage are in constant movement, a consequence of the fact that human beings are “active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatialities.”5

Muslims have a vast set of traditions that suggest the dead are able to hear the living, a belief that helps to explain the active quality to which Soja points. The practice of saying talqin, “reminding (or instructing) the deceased of the basics of religion, so that he will know how to answer when the angels of destruction interrogate him,” suggests just how pervasive this belief is.6 Pilgrimage sites are not simply ritual sites – they are places involved with history, memory, and imagination. Often, a pilgrimage involves a site at which memory and the imagination come together, serving as “representations of cultural artefacts associated with sacred places and conceptual narratives that become a commemoration of history as well as an imagination of it.”7

New pilgrimage sites demonstrate the active and complex nature of the construction of sacred space. An interesting case is the tomb of Ahmad Shah Masoud, the military leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Masoud was killed shortly before September 11, 2001, by two Al Qaeda suicide attackers and buried in northern Afghanistan. He was a mythic figure. Nicknamed the Lion of Panjshir, Masoud was admired even by his enemies – first the Soviets, then various competing warlords, and the Taliban. Tales of heroism were accompanied by claims of Masoud’s deep religiosity. According to his widow, she would often wake in the middle of the night to find him praying. On one occasion, she found him weeping while kneeling on his prayer mat. Afghans believe that only the awliya (friends of God or saints, also known as Sufis) can wake themselves to pray in the middle of the night.8 Like many other saintly figures in Islam, Masoud reportedly experienced miraculous events and had premonitions.

Masoud injured his leg in a battle against Communist soldiers. He sent his troops to a small valley inside Panjshir called Shaaba. Masoud could not walk very fast, however, and both he and his bodyguard Kaka Tajuddin were in danger of being caught by the enemy. Suddenly a horse appeared in front of them, which they mounted. As they traveled through the villages, they asked about the horse but no one had ever seen it before. After a week they arrived in Dasht-e Rawat, a safe place, and spent the night. When they awoke the horse was dead. In another tale, before starting his fight against the Communists, Masoud dreamt that he saw a holy man with long white hair and a beard. This man tied a green belt around Masoud’s waist.9 The tradition of tying a belt around a man’s waist is an important one in Afghanistan, symbolizing the assignment of an important job. Many years later, shortly before his death, he had another dream. In it the same holy man untied the green belt. While Masoud’s friends thought this meant the Taliban would be defeated and peace would come to Afghanistan, Masoud knew that his job was done, that his soul would soon leave his body and return to God. Shortly thereafter, he was assassinated.10

Figure 1.0 Tomb of Ahmad Shah Masoud, Afghanistan (photo courtesy of Wakil Kohsar).

After his death, Masoud’s tomb quickly became a pilgrimage site visited by those who fought alongside him in battles against the Russians, opposition forces, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, by his countrymen who remember him from the Soviet–Afghan War and the conflagration that followed, and by young Afghans who were born in the last days of his life.

Although Masoud is a modern figure and the pilgrimage to his tomb is new, pilgrims to this site follow in the footsteps of their ancestors, for numerous graves, mosques, tombs, and other sites exist in Afghanistan and like other religious and political figures, Masoud fits into a larger cultural milieu. Most students of religion may have never heard of Masoud’s tomb, or the cloak of the Prophet that lies in a shrine in Qandahar, but Afghans have a long history of shrine visitation that extends into north India. The fact that Afghans had “ties to numerous Sufis, living and dead,” and the history of “Afghan notables as keen patrons of non-Afghan Sufis and their shrines,” is absent from most of the scholarship on Islamic pilgrimage.11 In addition, Shi‘i shrines have had a presence in Afghanistan for a millennium, and of course there are ziyarat traditions that are historical, political, and local, defined in many ways by many communities. This concept of ziyarat, then, is where we must begin.

Figure 1.1 Mazar with flags, Xinjiang, China (photo courtesy of Brian Spivey).

ZIYARAT

Islamic pilgrimages are commonly referred to as ziyarat (sing. ziyarah). The Arabic word zara is the source of many words connected to pilgrimage, including ziyara, which means “visitation” and the Persianized ziyaratgah, or “place of pilgrimage,” as well as ziyarat gah mogaddas, a phrase that refers to “places to visit.” The vocabulary used to refer to pilgrimage sites is large, due to the wide geographical distribution of Muslims around the world. In medieval pilgrimage manuals, pilgrimage sites were often referred to as mazarat, but sometimes qubbah (pl. qibab) if a domed structure, mazar (a shrine), qabr (pl. qubur) if a tomb, darih (a tomb or cenotaph), mashhad (a place of martyrdom or witnessing), masjid (pl. masajid) in the case of a mosque that might contain a body or something else of religious significance, or maqam (a place a holy person had visited, such as a footprint or small structure, or a place associated with a vision), or turbah (pl. turab; mausoleum).12 These descriptors denote the Arabic words used for pilgrimage sites, representing only a small sample of the philological communities associated with pilgrimage traditions in Islam. In addition to pilgrimages connected to architectural structures like shrines and mosques, others involve hidden places that have disappeared through the ravages of time and the environment, such as the mazars buried beneath the dunes in Xinjiang, and the temporary shrines that are also found in this part of Asia, “fragile and ephemeral” constructions that are rebuilt time and again.13

Ziyarah has multiple meanings beyond the Arabic “visitations” connected to pilgrimage. It is also the word used for visiting a Sufi shaykh, literally meaning “visitation.”14 The plural ziyarat is also referenced in these cases, signifying the offerings or gifts brought to the shaykh, which in the Nilotic Sudan might include things like “livestock, cloth, slaves, honey, flour, butter, silver, rings, money (māl).”15 In these cases, the visitation or pilgrimage is to a living person rather than a tomb, relic, or holy site, illustrating one of the many ways in which pilgrimage in Islam is an expansive category. The late scholar Shahab Ahmed defined ziyarah as “visitation of saint-tombs to benefit from the cosmic economy of the Sufi’s barakah or spiritual power.”16 However, pilgrims visit sacred sites and bodies for a variety of reasons, as we shall see, and they do not always involve Sufi saints.

The use of “saint” in this book acknowledges that a large number of words are used to describe or identify holy people in Islam. In Christianity, the word “saint,” which comes from the Latin sanctus, denotes “a charismatic individual who attains the Christian ideal of perfection in his or her lifetime and who is posthumously recognized.”17 Obviously, this book is not about Christian pilgrimage (although at times it is involved in the production of Islamic practices); however, the idea of saint is used in this project to discuss holy individuals who, while having a more fluid and broader definition, are viewed as spiritually admirable, or even perfect, in their character.

Ziyarah has a wide number of meanings that involve pilgrimage practices. In Shi‘ism, ziyarah refers to the practice of visiting shrines and holy sites but it is also the name of the prayers recited at holy places. “By recollecting the events of Karbala, the ziyara at the holy places helps the pilgrim internalize the martyrdom and sufferings of al-Husayn and revives a spirit of revolt within him.”18 In some South Asian Sufi orders, the display of relics belonging to Prophet Muhammad is part of a ceremony called ziyarat.19 Ziyaratnama is the genre of literature focused on pilgrimage.20 It includes manuals that help pilgrims negotiate cities like Jerusalem, Damascus, and Qom, providing locations of sites as well as the prayers that should be recited there. As Schubel points out, for Shi‘i ziyarat has three meanings – the visitation of sacred objects at imambargahs (where Shi‘i gather in community), the Arabic salutations made at the end of a majlis/majalis, or prayer gathering, and the ritual performed on the twelfth day of Muharram.21 In Java, ziyarah refers to the “public visitation of a saint,” in a more specific usage of the term.22 These connotations are in addition to the general usage of the word to refer to pilgrimage to, or visitation of, a holy place or person.

As these examples show, Islamic pilgrimage is a diverse phenomenon. Ibn ‘Uthman (d. 1218) has a section in his Egyptian pilgrimage guide that reflects the important role played by ritual in th...