No abstract

In 1903, the Islamic reformist Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905), the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and the English writer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) met in Spencer’s home in Brighton. This article focuses on the history of the various tellings of this encounter that brought together three intellectuals from a globalizing and colonial world. It shows that the various renditions were creative negotiations of the encounter’s meaning across times, places and languages in the twentieth century. Specifically, this article’s comparison of the content, form and role of the accounts in Rashīd Riḍā’sAl-Manār(1915 and 1922), Blunt’sMy Diaries(1920), Riḍā’s biography of ʿAbduh (theTārīkh, 1931) and ʿImārah’s collection of ʿAbduh’s works (Al-Aʿmāl al-Kāmilah, 1972), and the way these accounts relate to each other through creative borrowing and translation, demonstrate the way European dominance in the global political and intellectual realm was confronted, negotiated and reiterated in the various tellings of the encounter.

In 1911, the Egyptian travel writer Muḥammad Labīb al-Batanūnī published a highly informative account of his pilgrimage journey, al-Riḥla al-Ḥijāziyya. This article is interested in al-Batanūnī’s representation (or fashioning) of the ḥajj and its materiality, as it reflects the conventions of his time and with which the author simultaneously hopes to shape the interpretations and practices of his contemporaries. Specifically, the article focuses on the way al-Batanūnī represents the objects and matters of the ḥajj (for example, Zemzem water) in opposition to interpretations and practices of his contemporaries within, as well as beyond, Islam.

The second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century were times of remarkable change around the world, also for Muslims (Gelvin and Green 2014). Revolutionary innovations in terms of steam, print, and empire had an effect on the hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and its surroundings (Chiffoleau 2015). Steamships and trains increasingly replaced the Egyptian and Syrian caravans, transporting larger numbers of pilgrims to Mecca from more remote locations such as South and South-East Asia and Morocco in a safer, cheaper, and faster way. Colonial empires such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands monitored, regulated, and, at times, prohibited the hajj journey for their Muslim subjects. International conferences imposed a period of quarantine on all pilgrims returning from the Arabian Peninsula. The publication and distribution of narrative and visual representations of the hajj in travelogues, guides, and photos were part of a global circulation of images and ideas, facilitated by cheap print technologies. These and other global processes and discourses inevitably also had an impact on the region of the Hijaz as well as on the regimes of governance there-first that of the Sharīfs under the Ottomans and subsequently that of the new Saūdi rulers from the mid-1920s onwards.Amidst these locally impacting global processes, Arab pilgrims travelled to Mecca in order to perform the hajj, which they often recorded in travelogues, as many of their predecessors had done. This chapter draws on a small set of these travelogues that were written in Arabic by pilgrims travelling through or from Egypt in the first four decades of the twentieth century in order to analyse their experience of the hajj. More specifically, I am interested in how these pilgrims assessed some of the great changes of their time, especially the obligation of quarantine for returning hajj pilgrims and the governance of the Hijaz by ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl Saʿūd (or Ibn Saʿūd). I also try to gauge their feelings about these changes-however elusive emotions might be to an historian.