The British Empire and the Hajj

The British Empire and the Hajj PDF Author: John Slight
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674915828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book

Book Description
The British Empire governed more than half the world’s Muslims. John Slight traces the empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj—the annual pilgrimage to Mecca—from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. He gives voice to pilgrims and officials alike.

The British Empire and the Hajj

The British Empire and the Hajj PDF Author: John Slight
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674915828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Get Book

Book Description
The British Empire governed more than half the world’s Muslims. John Slight traces the empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj—the annual pilgrimage to Mecca—from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. He gives voice to pilgrims and officials alike.

Imperial Mecca

Imperial Mecca PDF Author: Michael Christopher Low
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

Get Book

Book Description
With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire

The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire PDF Author: Umar Ryad
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900432335X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book

Book Description
The present volume focuses on the political perceptions of the Hajj, its global religious appeal to Muslims, and the European struggle for influence and supremacy in the Muslim world in the age of pre-colonial and colonial empires. In the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, a pivotal change in seafaring occurred, through which western Europeans played important roles in politics, trade, and culture. Viewing this age of empires through the lens of the Hajj puts it into a different perspective, by focusing on how increasing European dominance of the globe in pre-colonial and colonial times was entangled with Muslim religious action, mobility, and agency. The study of Europe’s connections with the Hajj therefore tests the hypothesis that the concept of agency is not limited to isolated parts of the globe. By adopting the “tools of empires,” the Hajj, in itself a global activity, would become part of global and trans-cultural history. With contributions by: Aldo D’Agostini; Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste; Ulrike Freitag; Mahmood Kooria; Michael Christopher Low; Adam Mestyan; Umar Ryad; John Slight and Bogusław R. Zagórski.

Public Health in British India

Public Health in British India PDF Author: Mark Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521466882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
After years of neglect the last decade has witnessed a surge of interest in the medical history of India under colonial rule. This is the first major study of public health in British India. It covers many previously unresearched areas such as European attitudes towards India and its inhabitants, and the way in which these were reflected in medical literature and medical policy; the fate of public health at local level under Indian control; and the effects of quarantine on colonial trade and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The book places medicine within the context of debates about the government of India, and relations between rulers and ruled. In emphasising the active role of the indigenous population, and in its range of material, it differs significantly from most other work conducted in this subject area.

The Longest Journey

The Longest Journey PDF Author: Eric Tagliacozzo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019530828X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book Description
The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims making the journey in any given year could come from Southeast Asia. The Longest Journey, spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.

The Scandal of Empire

The Scandal of Empire PDF Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Get Book

Book Description
Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

Channelling Mobilities

Channelling Mobilities PDF Author: Valeska Huber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
The history of globalisation is usually told as a history of shortening distances and acceleration of the flows of people, goods and ideas. Channelling Mobilities refines this picture by looking at a wide variety of mobile people passing through the region of the Suez Canal, a global shortcut opened in 1869. As an empirical contribution to global history, the book asks how the passage between Europe and Asia and Africa was perceived, staged and controlled from the opening of the Canal to the First World War, arguing that this period was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Instead, it was characterised by the channelling of mobilities through the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of movement. Telling the stories of tourists, troops, workers, pilgrims, stowaways, caravans, dhow skippers and others, the book reveals the complicated entanglements of empires, internationalist initiatives and private companies.

The Hajj

The Hajj PDF Author: F. E. Peters
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691225141
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 451

Get Book

Book Description
Among the duties God imposes upon every Muslim capable of doing so is a pilgrimage to the holy places in and around Mecca in Arabia. Not only is it a religious ritual filled with blessings for the millions who make the journey annually, but it is also a social, political, and commercial experience that for centuries has set in motion a flood of travelers across the world's continents. Whatever its outcome--spiritual enrichment, cultural exchange, financial gain or ruin--the road to Mecca has long been an exhilarating human adventure. By collecting the firsthand accounts of these travelers and shaping their experiences into a richly detailed narrative, F. E. Peters here provides an unparalleled literary history of the central ritual of Islam from its remote pre-Islamic origins to the end of the Hashimite Kingdom of the Hijaz in 1926.

Russian Hajj

Russian Hajj PDF Author: Eileen Kane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.

Kapal Haji: Singapore And The Hajj Journey By Sea

Kapal Haji: Singapore And The Hajj Journey By Sea PDF Author: Green Anthony
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811212554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
The hajj calls Muslims to journey to Mecca from wherever they are across the world. Of the far-flung communities one of the largest is that of the Muslims of Southeast Asia, and within that region in times past, one of the principal centres for hajj transit and transport was Singapore. If modern air travel bridges continents within hours, before the 1970s, pilgrim travel from Southeast Asia was by sea, and distance and difficulties were far more strongly felt. Hajj pilgrims then might take a lifetime to save for the journey, so a great many were old and frail, yet no real records remain and very few personal accounts exist of the experience, the tests, or fears along the way, of the time spent under sail or by 'steam.' This book sets out to describe the development of hajj shipping and the historical place of Singapore in this network. And, through anecdotes and comparisons, images and maps, to paint a picture of what this hajj journey by sea entailed and, in that sense, to offer a kind of 'human face' to the journey.