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In this article, we compare representations of the pilgrimage to Mecca posted on Facebook and Youtube by 'ordinary' pilgrims from Morocco and (semi)professional bloggers of Moroccan parentage in the Netherlands. We discuss how such posts challenge representations that circulate in the mainstream media in both countries about Islam in general and the hajj in particular. For Morocco we demonstrate that this kind of digital mediation of pilgrimage contests the ways in which the state-organized hajj is framed in Morocco's national media. For the Netherlands, we argue that bloggers deconstruct dominant images of the Muslim 'other' in their self-presentations as specifically Dutch Muslim pilgrims by connecting the meanings they attribute to the pilgrimage to Mecca to universal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the interplay between content, narrator, and lifeworld in narrative constructions concerning the meanings of pilgrimage to Mecca by studying the hajj stories of second-generation Moroccan-Dutch women. By adopting a 'dialogical approach' to self-storytelling, it is asked how the pilgrimage experiences of these women and the meanings they attribute to them are shaped by different intersecting discursive traditions that inform their daily lives. It is demonstrated that by creative re-articulation and mixing of vocabularies from different discursive traditions to make sense of their hajj experiences, the women contribute to a modern reconfiguration of the genre of hajj accounts. Since gender is the site par excellence where the public debate about the (in)compatibility of being Muslim and being European/Dutch is played out, specific attention will be paid to how the women negotiate conceptions of female Muslim personhood in their stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]