A Season in Mecca:Narrative of a Pilgrimage
By Abdellah Hammoudi
Hill & Wang, 293 pages, $35
Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy
By Fawaz A. Gerges
Harcourt, 312 pages, $32.95
Islamic Imperialism: A History
By Efraim Karsh
Yale University Press, 276 pages, $33.95
In the spring of 1999, Abdellah Hammoudi, a Moroccan-born anthropologist and Princeton professor, became a pilgrim. His journey to Mecca and Medina to complete the hajj — Islam's holy mission — was personal and professional, and A Season in Mecca tells both stories. His travels allowed him to observe others, explore the worlds within which devotion lives and interrogate his own beliefs. It would be hard to find a more thoughtful and occasionally lyrical chronicle of the deep and often troubling relationships between public religious adherence and private contemplation that mark the Muslim world today.
Everything about the hajj is formal, from costume to calendar to the precise rituals that provide external structure for a pilgrim's internal journey. Its very existence testifies to the power of the past to inform the future, a celebration of Islam in the place of its founding: "I was leaving my home to go to my mythological home, the only one I could inhabit, the one that accepted me as a being adrift in the world: a home of eternity where I have always been, there with the ancient." The experience of hajj — "this forward movement of the pilgrim masses" — encompasses the mundane (applying for licences to travel, shopping and cooking for a month in a foreign land, living among strangers) and the serene acts of prayer and study. Hammoudi's quietly vivid descriptions of life during hajj are gems of journalism.
The underlying tenets of hajj, however, give rise to Hammoudi's internal dialogue about the role and place of organized religion, and his keen eye helps to focus and refocus the exigencies and occasional ironies of modern Muslim life. Although a fundamentally personal act, hajj is organized by governments: Across the Muslim world, pilgrims apply to be included in national delegations and, upon arriving, are governed, as it were, by the laws of Saudi Arabia. The essentially Arab and Wahabi nature of the Saudi experience — "this framework of a nation-state draping itself in piety" — provides a counterpoint to Hammoudi's ruminations that is at once compelling and disturbing. "Today, authoritarian states extend their governmental sway over the very management of orthodoxy," he writes, underscoring the age-old tension between founding religious texts and subsequent practice.
This stubborn lack of conformity within the Muslim world anchors Hammoudi's narrative as a deeply felt, acutely observed, dialectical tale. The rigorous rules of hajj set by Saudi Arabia require the separation of men and women, for example, but Hammoudi notes over and again that prayer, the "fourth dimension," frees the believer from the overt and often punitive administration of religion. Hajj, Hammoudi discovers, juxtaposes noxious absolutisms with the essential freedoms to believe, pray and live a Muslim life without political dictation. This progressive concept of Muslim historical memory is profound, challenging and, for the moment, sharply contested.
While Hammoudi contemplates prospective spiritual unity within the traditions of hajj, Fawaz Gerges finds fragmentation in the spirit and practice of jihad. In Journey of the Jihadist, he examines today's battles between and among Islamist groups as they seek to triumph within an essentially contested global politics. Furthering themes he first developed in The Far Enemy, Gerges — a Lebanese-born, British-educated and U.S.-based scholar — records the intellectual and political journeys of Islam's new militants. The stories he tells, sensitively and incisively, uncover complexities that belie the simplistic assumptions Western governments so often bring to their analysis and action.
