A Season in Mecca

January 8, 2008

A Season in Mecca by Abdellah Hammoudi is easily the best modern account of the hajj. A Moroccan professor of anthropology at Princeton University travels to Mecca and takes meticulous notes as to what he sees and feels during the pilgrimage season. Yet the book is much more than a Richard Burton-like outsider account of Mecca and Medina. Hammoudi is himself a Muslim, although distanced from his faith, and the narrative of hajj events is enlivened by musing on the nature of his faith and the meaning of the rituals in which he participates.

Hammoudi gives a here-and-now narrative of events.. which is not to say that he reports everything that happens. His strong narrative control steers our attention to social and concrete details. Lacking is a rich sense of how he is following in the footsteps of previous travelers. There are no references to Ibn Jubayr.. few references to the theological discussions that give the hajj historical resonance. That layering of experience always interests me, and Hammoudi tries hard to avoid that.

The chapter "Dead Ends" is an eloquent rage against the Wahhabis and their abstract, placeless religion. Hammoudi looks around Medina and cannot locate anything like an old city:

Medina's beating heart had two chambers: the mosque and the marketplace. Some of the merchandise spoke the language of the Qur'an—books, prayer rugs, verses printed in gold letters under glass—but the goods mostly proliferated in English, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. [100]

In addition to being confronted with this cross-section of globalization, Hammoudi notes the wanton destruction of anything that resembles a historic city. In the pursuit of God's ultimate oneness all historical multiplicity can be sacrificed. Ground that could at one time be called sacred is now barren of meaning.

Frustrated with this ahistorical city Hammoudi heads to the date market and enjoys the natural sweetness of this traditional Medinan crop. The dates are the one thing that allows him to make a connection with the Medina of his imagination:

Medina, my home. Not the Athens of Pericles, not the Jerusalem of the Temple of of Constantine, not the Rome of plodding divinities and of Saint Peter, not the Paris of the Concorde's sacred square, where the sacrificed king was buried beneath an obelisk (in a grandiose ritual with revolutionary crowds gathered around the guillotine). None of these could displace Medina, my mythological home. It lived on in all of Islam's cities. it will find its way around the city that forbade me even from seeing the Prophet's tomb, that kept me from everything I wanted to see, touch, smell, everything that might have taken the prayer and the chanting of the Qur'an and connected them physically to the miracle of a tradition's birth. In the absence of streets, buildings, or sanctuaries, in the absence of old Yathrib [old name for Medina], only palm trees and dates led to this place. Palm trees and dates gave me what Islam's charismatic community had seen and eaten, which I, too, in turn could see and eat. [110]

What Hammoudi desired was to experience some physical relic that would lead him back to the historical place that gave birth to his tradition. But it was all gone.. the streets, the buildings, the sanctuaries. Only the dates remained.. and a small number of people—such as some Iranians he met—who labored to imagine Medina as the old Medina.. thereby escaping at least in their minds the ravages of the Wahhabi faith.

We also get a rare view of the counter globalization that currently is proceeding all over the world. As pilgrims arrive in Saudi Arabia they encounter a barrage of Wahhabi propaganda. They learn that their local traditions are wrong, that they have always worshipped in the wrong way, that they are too lenient when it comes to their women.

Altercations between partisans of Wahhabism and of the Malikites [followers of Morocco's main legal school] were intense. The Saudi propaganda services were winning over many Moroccans to rigorous gender segregation, to the condemnation of sacrifices and festivals at sanctuaries ("saint worship," they called these), and to the total rejection of ideas, institutions, and lifestyles current in the West. [200]

By right of their immense wealth and position as overseers of the pilgrimage the Wahhabis have spread their abstracting and bare belief system all over the world. This is a snapshot as to how the spread of these religious ideas occurs.