Mecca is the religious heart of Islam. Islam began here when the Prophet Muhammad received the first words of the Qur’an just outside Mecca and it is toward the Ka‘ba that every Muslim in the world is required to pray five times a day and complete at least one Hajj pilgrimage in a lifetime. In the vein of medieval travel this article will focus on three aspects in the context of Mecca: Finding the Qibla (direction of prayer towards the Ka‘ba in Mecca), pilgrimage (hajj) journeys to Mecca as recounted in a specialized travelogue genre known as ‘rihla’, and images of Mecca in hajj certificates and prayer manuals.Like Jerusalem, Mecca has been a religious nexus since time immemorial or so the story goes that the Ka‘ba, built by Adam and rebuilt by Abraham and Isma‘il [Qur’an 2:125-7], was a site of pilgrimage from ancient days. Stressing the omphalotic nature of the Ka‘ba, pre-Islamic Jahiliyya stories tell us that pagan pilgrims would rub their navels on a nail sticking out of the center of the floor of the Ka‘ba as a way of uniting with god and the cosmos.

This chapter will demonstrate the breadth of travellers and travel-writing both from ‘Arabia’ and to ‘Arabia’ across the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. It begins with a definition of ‘Arabia’ and a short, succinct overview of medieval Arabic travel and travel-writing with a view to showcase the vitality of movement including but not limited to pilgrimage. The chapter will hone in on two forms of travel-writing in particular: the earliest genre of geographic literature often titled Kitab al-masalik wa’l – mamalik (‘Book of Routes and Realms’) composed in the early Islamic period and associated with the Balkhi school of geographers and the rihla, a genre developed from the twelfth century onwards by Muslim travellers from the Islamic West (Al-Andalus and North Africa) as a record of their pilgrim travels ‘to Arabia’. From here, we turn to the rihla, focusing on the Valencian ‘father’ of the genre, Ibn Jubayr who journeyed east between 1183-85. Across these examples, we will encounter different types of and reasons for travel, but all expressed in literary form. It concludes by bringing into the fold the voices of Muslim women pilgrims.

The Persian material in this chapter is first and foremost to be considered in the light of the larger evolution of Islamic traditions of travel-writing from the 8th century onwards. The Muslim tradition of rihla – the Arabic term that designates both the travel and its account – is intimately related to the ideal of talab al-‘ilm – seeking (religious) knowledge – developing as the Islamic empire spread in the early centuries of Islam. Travel-writing gradually takes shape in this context through records of transmission of hadîths and khabars – collected sayings and actions of the Prophet and holy figures – reported and discussed by lineages of mediators sought after in the course of the scholar’s journey and inventoried by him. The early genres of the risâla – epistle – and mu‘jam – (mostly geographical) dictionary – also offer glimpses of individual experiences gathered from journeys of pilgrimage, scholarly study, or trade over the vast physical expanse of the dar al-islâm – land of faith. The genre of individual travel account in Arabic is generally considered to have reached its full autonomy by the twelfth century.

Starting in 1325, Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Taking advantage of the routes opened up by the spread of Islam from one end to the other of the eastern hemisphere, he then travelled twenty-nine years, tracing the contours of Afro Eurasia, from North Africa to the China Sea and back. Ibn Battuta swears early in his journeys to travel the world without ever repeating a single route (2: 283; 191). and he undertook journeys three times the extent of Marco Polo’s, totalling around 75,000 miles. Ibn Battuta’s adult years devoted to journeying also involved him learning many scholarly livelihoods, and taking many forms of training and service, of which the final one, travel writer, might be considered the consummation. I will argue that Ibn Battuta was able to perform himself as a professional traveller-author of such extensive outreach because he employs extraordinary tactics at particular thresholds, essentially becoming his own passport by cultivating, adopting, or pretending to a range of roles that will secure admission. This gave him unusual, but not complete access to many thresholds otherwise rarely crossed.

The chronography of Annianus, composed in 412, stands out by closely mapping the chronology of the world onto the Alexandrian 532-year Easter cycle, of which he may be the originator. He also defended that Christ was born in AM 5500, which had its roots in Christian exegesis. This generated a set of chronological anomalies, especially the fact that he situated birth and death of Christ about 10 years later than usual in Christian chronography. As a consequence, there is hardly any trace of Annianus before the second half of the sixth century, when Justinian’s attempt to impose the Christmas date of 25 December on the church of Jerusalem sparked a controversy. Annianus’ chronology, which supported the date of 25 December, was put forward by the defenders of that date (especially Heron), whilst those defending 6 January drew on Andreas. Due to this controversy, Annianus’ chronography travelled from Alexandria to Constantinople and was transmitted to Syriac and hence into Arabic.

In early Islamic Egypt, “Arab-style” Greek (and later Coptic) letters employing religiously neutral monotheistic formularies were sent in the name of Muslim officials to Christian administrators. By analyzing old and new evidence of Egyptian Christians using this epistolary template, this paper argues that in the first decades of Arab rule, probably only a few beneficiaries of the new regime employed the “Arab-style” prescript in their letters written to other Christians to demonstrate their close connection to the new government and thus their social standing. Later, however, the “Arab-style” prescript became commonplace in communication between Christians and Muslims and among Christians only in everyday life. Thus, the religiously neutral template created by the conquerors for official top–down communication became a mechanism for facilitating not only the smooth functioning of administrative structures, but also, in the long run, the social cohesion of Christians and Muslims.

Amongst the thousands of papyrus and paper documents from medieval Egypt written in Greek, Coptic and Arabic there are a large number of letters of requests and petition letters. This chapter examines how the senders of these letters used the argument of being alone and helpless to persuade the letter’s recipient to undertake some action to help the petitioners. By presenting the petitioner as someone without friends, family or anyone else to help them, a relationship is created with the petitioned who can help based on the social and moral expectations that prevailed in early Islamic Egyptian society.

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of phonology, and multilingual exposure results in enhanced phonetic/phonological learning ability in adulthood. It remains unclear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. We investigate the production and perception of Arabic in fifteen early-interrupted exposure (i.e., childhood) speakers and fifteen late-exposure (i.e., novice) speakers. We compare the production of both groups to that of a control group of fifteen early uninterrupted exposure (i.e., native monolingual) speakers. The experiment included tasks addressing language proficiency, word production, and speech perception. Early-interrupted exposure speakers outperformed late-exposure speakers on all tasks of the language proficiency diagnostic, while also displaying more native-like perception and production. Our study adds further support to the body of work on the measurable long-term benefits of early language experience for an individual’s phonetic and phonological skills, even when language experience diminishes over time.

This chapter addresses the shift from multilingualism to monolingualism associated with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It begins with a general overview of the linguistic conditions in the Ottoman lands, briefly surveying the historical dimensions of linguistic interactions reflecting the ebb and flow of Ottoman expansion and contraction, including the Westward movement of Turkic speakers into the central Islamicate lands and Anatolia from the eleventh century, the expansion of Ottoman rule into the Balkans from the fourteenth century, and the influx of Muslim refugees into the shrinking borders of the Empire as a result of military defeats and ethnic cleansing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter then focuses on three main factors affecting linguistic interactions in the Ottoman lands: (a) the inherently multilingual nature of Ottoman Turkish as an amalgam of three languages, namely, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; (b) the lived linguistic experience in the Empire, including the lack of a clear correlation between ethnicity, religion, and mother tongue, e.g., large numbers of Armenians, Turks, and Greeks, whose first language was not, respectively, Armenian, Turkish, or Greek, and; (c) the ways in which the advent of nationalism and Western influence affected the linguistic scene in such a diverse and demographically mixed Empire. The chapter ends by considering post-Ottoman language policies and the monolingual orientation of the modern nation-state. The tensions between the two are often revealed when signs of the multilingual past emerge to disturb the monolingual assumptions of the modern, read “national,” era.

Spain is known for having multiple languages that coexist in different geographical regions with varying degrees of political and social recognition. At the same time, Spanish historiography, argues historian García Sanjuán (2012), has been dominated by the nationalist discourse that systematically distorts the past to construct a “Spanish” and an “Andalusian” identity predicated on the exclusion of anything associated with the Arabic language and Islam, all the while the tourism sector commodifies the “exotic” Arabic past. One of the key settings that distorts and reinvents the past are the festivals of moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians. Claiming to be true and faithful retellings of history, these festivals invoke a popular memory of the imagined past, while interlacing and mixing events from multiple time periods, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 to the so-called Christian reconquest, presented as an essential battle between Christianity and the Muslim invaders. In this article, I analyze one of the more popular and historically significant of these festivals, celebrated in the outpost village of Carboneras. I show that the festivals of moros y cristianos help engrain the legitimacy of nationalist ideas that seek to generate a specific hegemonic identity grounded in an affirmation of the Roman-Latin-Christian vision of the past. The language utilized in the festivals is purposefully selected to elevate and justify the actions and attitudes of the Christians and to amalgamate the identity of Moriscos, whose families had lived in these lands for centuries with that of moros from across the Mediterranean. The reenactments that skillfully play with, confuse, and obscure several periods in Spain’s history are a theatrical mirror of a real process of linguistic and social exclusion that reaches from the past to the present day.