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While the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca is a once-in-a-lifetime religious obligation, only a small percentage of Muslims can actually perform it. Yet, the desire to visit Mecca and perform the hajj is a strong presence in Muslims’ individual and collectives’ lives. This paper discusses the different approaches of both authors to the study of the meanings of the hajj in the daily lives of Muslims in Morocco and those of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands. The chapter reflects on the merits and limitations of several axes involved in the dialogical production of knowledge on practices and meanings of the hajj, such as participant observation versus interviews, being a Muslim researcher versus a non-Muslim researcher, and studying Muslims in a Muslim-majority country where Islam is a self-evident presence versus Muslims in a post-migration European context dominated by Islam-hostile views.

This chapter introduces the book’s major aim: a reconfiguration of our understanding of modern Muslim pilgrimage through the lens of women’s new mobilities. Taking the pilgrimage to Mecca as a distinctively Muslim contribution to globalization with far-reaching political, economic and social ramifications, it provides a theoretical reflection on the interplay between Muslim women’s physical and social mobility, and its embeddedness in the various social relations, identifications and power structures that shape women’s life-worlds. It does so by drawing on and introducing the wide variety of women’s hajj and other Muslim pilgrimage practices and experiences discussed in the anthropological and historical case studies in the volume. The chapter argues that combining gender theory with mobility studies and an everyday religion approach helps to better understand the agency of female pilgrims as mobile actors who appropriate, re-negotiate and re-create authoritative ways of performing and making sense of various pilgrimage traditions. Moreover, it introduces Muslim women’s pilgrimage worlds as a cross-cutting research theme that contributes to pilgrimage research and Muslim travel and mobility studies in general, and offers new perspectives and insights in the field of Muslim pilgrimage studies in particular.

This paper discusses the hajj memoir Standing Alone (2006) by the journalist Asra Nomani to demonstrate how before, during and after her hajj performance, the author moves back and forth between various moral discourses that inform her daily life in order to make sense of her multiple senses of belonging and to claim more space for women participation and in today’s global and local Umma (community of Muslims). Using ‘Dialogical Self theory’ (DST) (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka) to analyze ‘dialogues’ between the various temporally and spatially situated ‘voices’ that populate Nomani’s hajj memoir, it is argued that what the author experiences as literally ‘stepping in the footsteps of Hajar’, like herself a single mother whose faith in and rescue by God is played out during the Hajj, Nomani finds a strong female Muslim role model to identify with. Thus appropriating Islam as an empowering moral discourse, Nomani takes the extraordinary experience of the hajj back home to her everyday life to become an activist in order to claim Muslim women’s rights as equal citizens in the various communities that she belongs.

This contribution discusses contestations of Saudi regulations concerning gender-segregation in certain places in Mecca by a group of young female hajj pilgrims from the Netherlands. It is demonstrated how a seemingly mundane matter as sanitary arrangements during the hajj can come to stand for the much larger issue of religious underpinning of gender equality; the women object to Saudi spatial arrangements not only as hindrances to their spiritual journey but also because they contradict the women’s views on gender equality. The authors demonstrate that feelings of being denied equal access to spiritual reward compared to male pilgrims played a crucial role in women’s responses to the restrictions they faced. They point out that the significance of women’s objections to restrictions on their freedom of movement reaches beyond religious interests. Linking the meanings of the hajj to the specific quotidian life-worlds of the women, the authors show that mobility is both an integral part of religious self-formation and informs how religious experiences are interpreted in relation to changing notions and assessments of places that people currently dwell in, inhabited in the past or long to be in the future

Up to not so long ago texts were approached with rather rigid traditional literary methods in which the author, text, and reader were envisaged in a fixed and unidirectional chronological sequence. In their quest for meaning readers were constrained by the notions of originality, uniqueness, singularity and autonomy of both author and text. A good example of this approach is the historical methods applied to the study of ancient religious texts, the primary goal of which is to try to understand as closely as possible the author's original meaning and their intended audience or readership.

Contrary to presupposing a divine essence and cause, as scholars such as Van den Belt do in the theological approach, historian Steve Mason (Chapter 5) exemplifies a constructivist historical approach to religion. Mason analyses how people in the Graeco-Roman world (c.300 BCE to 300 CE) framed Jews and Christians. In line with Asad’s critique that much research in religious studies builds on conceptions that are specifically Christian rather than universal, Mason argues that the label “religion” obfuscates more than it illuminates when describing the ancient past of these two major traditions. To substantiate this claim, he begins by surveying what “shell categories” residents in the Graeco-Roman world used to communicate with each other and order their knowledge of the world. Informed by both ancient textual and material sources, Mason argues that a diverse and vibrant Judaean culture, with its own famed mother-city, law-giver and customs, temple, priesthood, sacrificial system, and a larger expatriate community was “freeze-dried” by later Christians and reduced to “Juda-ism” as a belief system. “Christianity” looked altogether different: Christians were small bands of men and women meeting secretly in members” houses to worship Christ. They refrained from animal sacrifices, and some expected imminent evacuation from the world. Mason concludes by considering how a historical understanding of these very different phenomena of a Judaean “ethnos” and what began as a kind of Christian “club” can help to explain such puzzles as the Christian polemic against and simultaneous attraction to “Judaism”, the “persecution” of Christians but not Jews, and “conversion” to Judaism or Christianity.

The relevance of studying the “edges” or “adjacencies” of religion is further demonstrated in Chapter 12 by Joram Tarusarisa, who investigates the impact of religious resonances in “Nora”, a Zimbabwean political song. His analysis demonstrates that what is said to be religious and/or sacred is not cast in stone but is the result of practices, discourses and narratives woven around what gets defined as such. He discusses how the song sets apart the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), and its former leader Robert Mugabe and turns them into representations of the religious and/or sacred. Tarusarira’s analysis casts light on how the song’s narratives and discourses created a numinous vision and version of Zimbabwe that was to be delivered by the then President Mugabe, who was said to be “anointed” to guide his followers and deliver them from the land of Egypt (coloniality) to the Promised Land (independence and sovereignty). He demonstrates that the song has an explanatory dimension by which it claims to provide answers to questions of ultimate meaning in times of political instability and conflict that characterized Zimbabwe at the time when the song was composed. In doing so, it provides a theodicy, a narrative that answers ultimate questions concerning life and people’s (Zimbabweans’) place in the universe. Tarusarira’s analysis of the song and its performances is thus a concrete example of how the study of “religion” does not involve the study of a “thing” in itself, but an enquiry into how particular actors and institutions weave particular ideas, discourses and narratives, using a particular language which reflects their subjectivities and interests, to create the religious and/or sacred. The author concludes by stating that the proffered definitions of religion tell us more about those offering them than what they claim to be telling us about religion.

The chapter attempts to reverse a long-standing trend. Academic religious studies have long been assimilators of concepts and methods established in other disciplines, so much so that the separate identity of religious studies has been questioned by leading practitioners. The present chapter proposes the contrary opinion that religious studies have much to offer other disciplines. In this vein it suggests that the historiography of philosophy, in particular, could profit by taking its cue from the terminology and research interests of religious studies. Using Stoicism as its central case study, the chapter explores inter alia the analytical usefulness of Ninian Smartʼs differentiation between seven dimensions of religion and also of the concept of ‘lived religion’. Finally, the chapter reflects on what the academic study of religion stands to gain by engaging with the history of philosophy.

This contribution discusses contestations of Saudi regulations concerning gender-segregation in certain places in Mecca by a group of young female hajj pilgrims from the Netherlands. It is demonstrated how a seemingly mundane matter as sanitary arrangements during the hajj can come to stand for the much larger issue of religious underpinning of gender equality; the women object to Saudi spatial arrangements not only as hindrances to their spiritual journey but also because they contradict the women’s views on gender equality. The authors demonstrate that feelings of being denied equal access to spiritual reward compared to male pilgrims played a crucial role in women’s responses to the restrictions they faced. They point out that the significance of women’s objections to restrictions on their freedom of movement reaches beyond religious interests. Linking the meanings of the hajj to the specific quotidian life-worlds of the women, the authors show that mobility is both an integral part of religious self-formation and informs how religious experiences are interpreted in relation to changing notions and assessments of places that people currently dwell in, inhabited in the past or long to be in the future

This paper discusses the hajj memoir Standing Alone (2006) by the journalist Asra Nomani to demonstrate how before, during and after her hajj performance, the author moves back and forth between various moral discourses that inform her daily life in order to make sense of her multiple senses of belonging and to claim more space for women participation and in today’s global and local Umma (community of Muslims). Using ‘Dialogical Self theory’ (DST) (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka) to analyze ‘dialogues’ between the various temporally and spatially situated ‘voices’ that populate Nomani’s hajj memoir, it is argued that what the author experiences as literally ‘stepping in the footsteps of Hajar’, like herself a single mother whose faith in and rescue by God is played out during the Hajj, Nomani finds a strong female Muslim role model to identify with. Thus appropriating Islam as an empowering moral discourse, Nomani takes the extraordinary experience of the hajj back home to her everyday life to become an activist in order to claim Muslim women’s rights as equal citizens in the various communities that she belongs.

This chapter introduces the book’s major aim: a reconfiguration of our understanding of modern Muslim pilgrimage through the lens of women’s new mobilities. Taking the pilgrimage to Mecca as a distinctively Muslim contribution to globalization with far-reaching political, economic and social ramifications, it provides a theoretical reflection on the interplay between Muslim women’s physical and social mobility, and its embeddedness in the various social relations, identifications and power structures that shape women’s life-worlds. It does so by drawing on and introducing the wide variety of women’s hajj and other Muslim pilgrimage practices and experiences discussed in the anthropological and historical case studies in the volume. The chapter argues that combining gender theory with mobility studies and an everyday religion approach helps to better understand the agency of female pilgrims as mobile actors who appropriate, re-negotiate and re-create authoritative ways of performing and making sense of various pilgrimage traditions. Moreover, it introduces Muslim women’s pilgrimage worlds as a cross-cutting research theme that contributes to pilgrimage research and Muslim travel and mobility studies in general, and offers new perspectives and insights in the field of Muslim pilgrimage studies in particular.

This article aims to demonstrate that the concept of the ‘dialogical self’ is an identity theory that provides useful tools for studying intersectionality. In terms of the dialogical self, the formation of identity is a process of orchestrating voices within the self that speak from different I-positions. Such voices are embedded in field-specific repertoires of practices, characters, discourses and power relations specific to the various groups to which individuals simultaneously belong. By telling one's life-story, the individual intones these voices and combines them in new ways, thus reshaping them as they use them. The article applies the theoretical concept of the dialogical self to the analysis of the life-story of a relatively well-known female Dutch politician of Moroccan background whose explanation of why she wears a headscarf allows her to combine the religious and political voices in her story with her more hesitant female voice. The words, images and self-evaluations used in her self-narratives demonstrate the ways in which her religious, ethnic and gender identifications are formed and are in dialogue.

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