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Pilgrimage in Islam: Traditional and Modern Practices Sophia Rose Arjana London: Oneworld Publications, 2017. 288 pages.
Pilgrimage in Islam is a religious act wherein Muslims leave their homes and spaces and travel to another place, the nature, geography, and dispositions of which they are unfamiliar. They carry their luggage and belongings and leave their own spaces to receive the blessings of the dead, commemorate past events and places, and venerate the elect. In Pilgrimage in Islam, Sophia Rose Arjana writes that "intimacy with Allah is achievable in certain spaces, which is an important story of Islamic pilgrimage". The devotional life unfolds in a spatial idiom.
The introductory part of the book reflects on how pilgrimage in Islam is far more complex than the annual pilgrimage (hajj), which is one of the basic rites and obligations of Islam beside the formal profession of faith (kalima); prayers (salāt); fasting (sawm); and almsgiving (zākāt). More pilgrims throng to Karbala, Iraq, on the Arbaeen pilgrimage than to Mecca on the Hajj, for example, but the former has received far less academic attention. The author expands her analytic scope to consider sites like Konya, Samarkand, Fez, and Bosnia, where Muslims travel to visit countless holy sites (mazarāt), graves, tombs, complexes, mosques, shrines, mountaintops, springs, and gardens to...