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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

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