14 - Visualizing the Hajj: Representations of a Changing Sacred Landscape Past and Present

Summary

Muslims have visualized the Hajj and Mecca's sacred landscape since Islam's inception. Many of these visualizations result from mediated practices of representation and re-presentation. By “mediated” I mean images produced and transmitted through pre-modern texts and manuscript illustrations, and the modern print and electronic media. The media that feature the Hajj and its changing landscapes occur in a diverse array of written, print, electronic, and digital forms: manuscripts; certificates; paintings; photographs published in books, pamphlets, periodicals, or as calendars; “framing pictures”; postcards; and signboards. They include films and videos, television broadcasts, websites, and social media. In the modern era especially, these media bring images of the Hajj and its landscapes, including the individual sacred sites and beings associated with them, to viewers on a mass scale to significant effect. In addition to being mediated, these images are also mediating through their capacity to connect viewers (1) as a community horizontally with each other and with actual landscapes over great distances, (2) vertically with higher beings and the cosmos, and (3) temporally with the past, present, and the future.

The Hajj, like other pilgrimages, involves flows of human beings, religious beliefs and practices, ideologies, institutions, political forces, capital, and material goods across spatiotemporal boundaries into physical connection with sacred spaces and places. Thomas Tweed has described such flows as kinetic organic-cultural processes of crossing and dwelling, linking human beings with each other and with supramundane ones. Images that represent and re-present the Hajj and its sacred landscapes participate in these flows through what David Morgan has called in another context “visual piety.” As I shall argue, mediated images of the Hajj and its landscapes, in both medieval and modern media, engage viewers by creating relationships that both transcend place and put in place – orienting them physically and perceptually. Such relational engagements of viewer and image, as posited by Morgan, situate the body of the viewer before the image, draw the viewer's body into the image, and can even lead the body beyond the image to a greater communal body or religious tradition.