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Title: A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage
ISBN: 0745637884
Author:
Publicate Date: 2006-01-16
Publish: 2006-01-16
List Price: $80.15
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $29.95
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $107.63
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1: When its good, it's very good...
The description of navigating the Moroccan kleptocracy to get one of the visas alloted to the county is an example of Hammoudi's excellent narrative capability. Other highlights are his descriptions of the intimidating preparatory classes, the shopping sprees, an animal sacrifice, the oversold busses with the blaring religious tapes, the people he meets, the failings of tour operators and the pilgrims' reactions to them and the petty bureaucracy he encountered upon trying to leave Saudi Arabia.
Not all the descriptions, though, are up to this level. For instance, I couldn't envision the run between Safi and Marwa, including the "gallery" over the path. (bleachers for watching? a place with religious art?) Are there hundreds bunched the way marathons start, or in small clusters? What of the woman who cuts the lock of his hair afterward? (Can anyone just reach out and cut anyone's hair or is it arranged?) I didn't fully understand the lodgings (esp. with his gender mixed group). He does mention an air conditioned tent, but what of the other places? Motels? Temporary trailers? How did they (the women, that is) cook in them (stoves? bunsen burners?) and what of these rest rooms (down the hall? 1 for X number people? showers?) that they lined up to use?
Hammoudi is sensitive to the very second class status of women. They have all the same religious obligations as the men and have to cook too. They pray in a padlocked area. Some of the instances beg for more. For instance, he says some the women were sick because of the pills they had taken to stop menstruating (they did not want to be unclean in holy places). This is all that is written on this.
The major shortcoming, however, is Hammoudi's tendency to over-intellectualize. Much of this relates to his feelings of being an outsider. A lot of it I just couldn't follow.
Despite these limitations (and that this Hajj is in 1999), this is an insider's look at the pilgrimage, without any idealization or fluff. Hammoudi calls it as he sees it with refreshing honesty about his beliefs and feelings.
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2: A Missed Opportunity
The Hajj is a fascinating topic and this book promised something possibly unique: a travelogue which attempts to reconcile the detachment of an ethnographer with the physical, mental and emotional demands of a committed participant. However, the end product is almost completely undone by long, turgid, almost unreadable and certainly incomprehensible passages written in academic gobbledeygook. Sokal & Bricmont did us all a favour by dissing this style of writing in their book 'Fashionable Nonsense'. All we now need is a fatwa from Al-Azhar University which does the same for authors like Hammoudi. Having said this, what remains is actually worth persisting with as the author does not hold back on either the negative aspects or virtues of the Hajj experience. In other words, it's a warts and all portrayal that is rather different from the sanitised descriptions of the pilgrimage in most Islam textbooks. In closing, then, the book is just about worth the effort: two and a half stars would be a more realistic rating if this were possible.
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3: A Muslim writer questions his religion's fundamentals
A SEASON IN MECCA: NARRATIVE OF A PILGRIMAGE comes from a Muslim writer who is always questioning his religion's fundamentals - but not its meaning. His survey of how his fellow Muslim make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and why, gets him on the road of pilgrims, to personally investigate the different worlds of Islam and the varied reasons pilgrims have for making the sacred journey. Moroccan scholar Hammoudi's own pilgrimage to Mecca describes its history, religious importance, and social effects alike, as well as the politics which influence the pilgrimage itself. A 'must' for any who would understand modern Muslim sentiments.
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4: A Unique View of the Pilgrimage
In 1853, Sir Richard Francis Burton went on the pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, and his wonderful account of his successful impersonation as a Muslim pilgrim is still an exciting book. There have been other non-Muslims and Muslims who have written about the travel, which is one of the five pillars of Islam (the others being profession of faith, prayer, fasting, and alms giving). All Muslims who are able are obligated to take the hajj once in their lives. There are few modern accounts of the pilgrimage, which has become commercialized and, for those who have the money, routine. Now there is a unique account, from Abdellah Hammoudi, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, who determined that he would undertake the hajj in 1999 for the purpose of writing a book on anthropological aspects of his trip. Any pilgrim has a journey unlike any other pilgrim, but Hammoudi's effort, chronicled in _A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage_ (Hill and Wang) is distinct. He is not a believer like his other fellow pilgrims, even the friends he goes with. "I am not contemptuous of religions; I believe that under certain conditions they allow for expression of major existential dilemmas and encourage reconciliation on a grand scale." He grew up in Morocco, and was raised as a Muslim, which he says he still is, but a secular one. And so his journey set up conflicts from the start that he analyzes scrupulously at length, and which never really become resolved: "I couldn't possibly be an observer plain and simple, whether hostile and distant or friendly and admiring of Islam." He also had constantly to analyze his own participation in the ritual; can anthropologists rightly study cultures in which they are themselves taking part? Can the hajj have any value if undertaken in a secular vein?
These questions, and those having to do with the basic personal meaning of the hajj, will perhaps be less interesting for most readers than the stories of preparation and the travelogue of the journey, told with good humor in a readable translation from the French (by Pascale Ghazaleh). For instance, Hammoudi had to submit thirty passport-style photographs and six copies of his birth certificate. He had to fill out a file on himself, and had to enlist the help of someone who knew someone. Of course, just filling in the forms would not do; he had to give a sum of money to a government employee ("which we decided to call `alms'") in order to lubricate the process. Once he was fully registered, he could not simply pack up and go. He had to be trained into what he was about to undergo, for violation of minor rules would invalidate the hajj and make it as if he had never participated at all. There were constant conflicts with commerce. One of Hammoudi's fellow pilgrims even says that the hajj is "a merchants' conspiracy." There is an obsession with purchasing suitcases, suitcases that will hold other purchases that are brought back home from the hajj, souvenirs for those left behind. The commercial aspects of the hajj were only one of the disappointments Hammoudi had to face. He was continually confronted with the segregation from women, which is stricter in Saudi Arabia than in his Moroccan home. Pilgrims were eager to criticize others; one pious man pointed out, "Our neighbors prayed behind our women. Their prayer is invalid." Hammoudi is disgusted by those who declare themselves the ones who have an absolute right to interpret the prophet's words for others. He is dismayed by the obvious differences between Shiites and Sunnis and the Wahhabi brand of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.
It sounds a troublesome way to take a vacation, indeed. Hammoudi was, however, not just moved by the sad events that gives his narrative an overall "Ship of Fools" tone. There are surges of joy he describes, such as when he visits Mohammed's tomb. He describes the circling crowd at the Kaaba and being overcome with emotion and tears, and is willing to leave behind any negative lessons he has learned. "Now I understood the meaning of certain statements I had often heard: `What happiness to be here! How good God's grace is... What joy one feels at seeing all this!" Many of the pages of _A Season in Mecca_ have to do with an intellectual's attempts to come to an objective understanding of the many strange events which compose a hajj, but the subjectivity and ineffability of faith keep breaking through.
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