Scents of Space: Early Islamic Pilgrimage, Perfume, and Paradise

Abstract

Within some of the earliest textual and material evidence for the history of Islam, pilgrimage appears as an important ritual of devotion, identity, and community. Yet modern scholarship has given little attention to early Muslims’ sensory experiences of pilgrimage sites and what they physically encountered while there. This article examines the importance of smell within Islamic pilgrimage practices of the first/seventh and second/eighth centuries. Drawing upon literary and material evidence, I reconstruct several olfactory components of pilgrimage in this period, including intensive usage of perfume and incense at pilgrimage destinations such as the Kaʿba and the Dome of the Rock, as well as pilgrims’ collection and ingestion of scented materials from these locations. I then argue that the prominence of pleasing aromas at these sacred spaces is connecting to early Islamic ideas about the proximity of paradise to these pilgrimage sites.

Incense and Islam in Indonesian context: An ethnobotanical study

“…In Western countries, B. frereana is known as the Coptic Frankincense as it is the type of incense mainly used by the Egyptian Coptic churches in their religious rituals El-Badrawy 2023). About 80% of the B. frereana incense are exported from Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea to Saudi Arabia, where customarily bought and brought home by Hajj pilgrimages to their countries and traditionally labeled as 'Arabian incense' (Bursi 2020). The remaining about 20% is exported by Saudi Arabia to various Muslim countries, including Indonesia.…”

“…Incense was burned to help them contemplate and draw closer to God. Religious believers commonly use incense in their rituals (Bursi 2020;Ren et al 2022;Stern 2023;Vainstub 2023). Burning incense has been practiced by Egyptians since before Christ Huang 2022), Chinese (Ren et al 2022), Africans (Sadgrove 2020), Europeans (Burridge 2020), Greeks and Romans (Verbanck-Piérard 2017), Arabs and Muslims (Bursi 2020).…”

Housing Scent, Containing Sensorium

“…Perfume, for instance, was the predicate of Islamic pilgrimages; perfume and incense were not only used at the Kaʿba and the Dome of the Rock, but also ingested, and the good smells at these sites were associated with their proximity to Paradise. 46 So it was in Christian places of worship, whose treasuries harboured an extraordinary number of liturgical objects, such as censers and thuribles, used to disperse smell of incense throughout church spaces. Medieval Jewish culture similarly associated sweet-smelling aromas with the divine.…”