In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

Abstract

This is the story of a holy land in the Middle East-but not the one you might expect. Cities like Jerusalem and Mecca might quickly come to mind, but Damascus was the key to the creation of an Ottoman holy land between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, because Damascus was the gateway to the hajj. As a recent flurry of museum exhibits reminds us, the hajj-that is, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina-has been a well-established part of Muslim religiosity for centuries. 1 The Ottoman dynasty also celebrated the hajj's importance over the six centuries of its rule, even if no sultan personally undertook the journey. 2 Yet the hajj's aura of timeless sanctity also hinders I would like to thank Tijana Krstić and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. In addition, the participants of the University of California Mediterranean Studies Workshop in 2015 provided valuable feedback on a very early draft of this article. Mina Moraitou of the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art provided very helpful information about items in the museum's collection and kindly supplied photographs of the objects. All translations are my own unless noted otherwise. The open-access status of this article has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 648498-OTTOCONFESSION). 1 See, e.g., Venetia Porter, ed., Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam (London: British Museum, 2012). 2 On the Ottoman administration of the hajj, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1517-1683 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994). Sultan Osman II (r. 1618-22) apparently made plans to undertake the hajj in 1622. Contemporary observers, however, understood this desire as a pretext to raise a new army in Anatolia to counter his standing army, which opposed his grander ambitions of rule. His hajj was not realized as he was overthrown and killed shortly thereafter.

Nābulusī Explores the Ruins of Baalbek: Antiquarianism in the Ottoman Empire during the Seventeenth Century

“…A partial translation can be found in al-Nābulusī, 1997. For an analysis of this text, see Shafir, 2020, 33–34.…”