Pilgrimage in Islam

The author of this book is an independent scholar who has a lot of experience teaching at the universities of Denver and Colorado. She is the author of the much praised monograph: Muslims in the Western imagination which was published in 2015. The author has made extended travels visiting pilgrimage sites in many Muslim countries like Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iran and Indonesia. Given her personal experience, one can expect that she possesses a profound knowledge about the religious rituals in various Islamic countries. As Omid Safi writes in his foreword, ‘all religious traditions involve some notion of pilgrimage.’ And in Islam ‘the pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj, is listed as the fifth pillar of faith.’ And further on, he comments that ‘religion is ritual, ethics, history, myth and mysticism all mingled’ (p. xi), a truth which is often forgotten in our highly technically developed world. He also writes that although Makkah is the dream-place for every Muslim, for millions of Muslims over the centuries it was either too expensive or too far − so they had to go instead to places that were nearer, more intimate and familiar.