A ceremony is like a book in which a great deal is written. One ceremony often contains more than a hundred books.
-George Gurdjieff, Meetings with Remarkable Men
Hajj, as a cultural artifact, is especially important for Westerners in this period of deep misunderstanding about Islam. Islam is a majority faith in fifty-four countries around the globe... In addition, millions of Muslims now live in Western countries, Western cities, Western neighborhood. It is no secret that in these latter settings, Muslim-non-Muslim relationships suffer from misconceptions on all sides. If Westerners have more pressing reasons now to learn about Islam, perhaps the hajj can provide a way to that knowledge. After all, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca is a supreme expression of the Muslim religion. All the principle practices of the faith are contained and made more apparent in its rites. Furthermore, the records of this journey that pilgrims have been making now for thirteen centuries reveal Islamic civilization as a vital global society with many centers... The hajj has drawn people across thousands of miles, in huge numbers, through every sort of calamity. It continues to do so. It has not died away out with modernity. It has flourished...
Viewed outside its divergent history, Islam is a much a “Western” religion as Judaism or Christianity. Semitic at heart, these three related faiths touch so profoundly at so many points that they clearly form contiguous layers in a single cultural substratum, the ancient West Asian tradition of prophetic monotheism...
As Western readers are generally aware, early Islam (620-800AD) spread quickly in two directions, from Mecca northeast to Afghanistan on the one hand and west to Morocco and Spain on the other. It remains less well known that during the next six centuries, Islam did not endure a long Dark Age like Europe’s. As a religion and as a social order, it went on steadily expanding into Africa, India, and Asia, bearing with it legal system, a trading network, and a coherent way of life. By all accounts, this gradual, often chaotic elaboration resulted in Earth’s first global culture. It created a composite civilization, a vast Eurasain common ground across which pilgrims, traders, merchants and bureaucrats traveled with surprising ease.
It was a thoroughly Muslim world they moved through, a loosely cohesive network with many capitals. In Arabia, the remote, sacred city of Mecca retained its status as a pilgrim center... by the eighth century real political power had drained away to more accessible cities, like Damascus and Baghdad. About two centuries later... the classical notion of an empire ruled from a single capital was already giving way to what the American Historian Marshall Hodgson has described as a constantly expanding international society governed by numerous independent Muslim powers.
Centers like Baghdad and Cairo continued to hold sway in the Near East, but beyond them in every direction for many thousands of miles lay other regions of political and mercantile influence, including full-fledged Muslim empires in Spain, North Africa, and India... These regions boasted great capitals too – Cordoba, Tunis, Delhi; yet 90 percent of humanity lived outside them, in towns and villages along the roads. Scholars today reject the ingrained Western view that this expansion was accomplished by military force. In most regions and in most cases, the local population seem to have willingly adopted a system that taxed them less and offered new options. Generally speaking, Islam proved adaptable and attractive in both urban and pastoral settings across three continents.
The forces nourishing this far-flung network were not political, commercial, or even urban. The real unifying factors were a common social pattern, expressed in the daily traditions of Islam (Prayer, ablution, diet, and manners); a common book, the Quran; and a common set of laws, the Sharia, which stresses fair trade. Commerce between say, Tangier, Cairo, Damascus, and Delhi was further supported by a complex system of caravan and sea routes for transferring goods over many thousands of miles. Throughout the Near East, the Hajj roads were the arteries of this system....
Huge Hajj caravans from the capitals were like cities on the move. Supported and defended by regional rulers, they traveled in stages through treeless regions, over sandy wastes doted with oases and encampments. To the social historian, their logistical feats indicate high organizational sophistication. The routes themselves were achievements. The nine-hundred-mile Baghdad Road to Kufa to Madina, for example, dates back to pre-islamic times. By the mid-ninth century, however, the route was marked with mile-stones and offered fifty-four major way stations, with cisterns, reservoirs or wells, fire-signal towers, hostels, and fortresses paid from the Abassid caliphal treasury. Like other routes from Suez and Damascus, the Baghdad Road developed revictualing stations too, to which local traders rode out to sell their produce... Besides the main arterial routes from Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, other trails were well traveled too – South up the Nile through Egypt, then across the Red Sea from Aydhab, or north through mountainous Yemen, for example.
Ibn Battuta, who traveled farther than any writer before him, is rightly considered one of the great medieval voyagers. He set out from Morocco on the pilgrimage to Mecca, then continued moving east for twenty years, covering most of the known world from North Africa to China before returning home... He traveled longer and farther, and wrote more, than Marco Polo.
Ibn Battuta’s experiences abroad confirm the existence of a single, inter-communicating culture extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the South of China Sea; not a narrow corridor spanned by a handful of trade routes east and west over which privileged figures traveled on official business but a global arena, an Afro-Eurasian zone actively crisscrossed by large populations of itinerant professionals who settled where they chose, furthered a career, and felt at home. Ibn Battuta was not unique in this milieu – he was representative. The roads of this time were filled with provincial scholars, judges, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and traders from every corner of the earth who shuttled almost routinely among North Africa, Egypt, Perisa, India and Indonesia. Not only Muslims but Christians and Jews, too, took advantage of this trading network. They moved along lines that appear to have provided real support to a large class of mobile professionals. Ibn Battuta moved with them, working and traveling, recording a way of life that in certain ways prefigures the social flux of modern, free market capitalism. Bangladeshis at work in Silicon Valley, Iranian families thriving in Japan, would have not surprised Ibn Battuta. In fourteenth century Damascus, he assures us, any Moroccan running out of money would be sure to find the means to earn his way. When he himself fell sick there, then went broke, benefactors appeared out of the woodwork. Later, in India, he met lawyers from around the world working at the sultan’s court in Delhi, earning handsome salaries and socializing with the upper classes. Still later, in China, as a guest of prosperous Egyptians in the huge city of Hang-Chou, with should he cross paths in the its large Muslim quarter but a neighbor from his own street in Tangier.
