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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.
Almost entirely surrounded by the sea, the Iberian Peninsula witnessed voyages that would change the face of the known world forever. Travellers crossed the Mediterranean and Atlantic, undertook journeys to Mecca and the Holy Land, to the Near and Far East, to Europe and Africa. In 1492, the New World was discovered when Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, and in 1500 Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese by a fleet heading for India commanded by the diplomat Pedro Álvares Cabral. Travel writers from Iberia departed from a place with a fluid geographical and cultural identity in its own right. Playing host over the course of its history to people of different ethnicities, religions, and languages, Iberia has always been a place of cultural interchange and political flux. Travel writing is also a key part of medieval Iberia’s rich narrative tradition in which it presents universal and particular experiences which are contingent on the delicate relationship between fact and fiction.
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.
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