This year's spring show at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris is dedicated to the Muslim hajj, or major pilgrimage, that takes place every year in the Muslim month of dhu al-hijjah and is one of the “pillars,” or obligatory duties, of Islam. Spread across two floors of the Institut's temporary exhibition spaces, the exhibition is an ideal opportunity for Paris residents and visitors to the French capital to learn more about the history of the hajj and its contemporary character. The exhibition, entitled Hajj, le pèlerinage à la Mecque, contains several hundred pieces illustrating the history of the hajj, among them objects used by pilgrims through the ages, historical accounts, and pieces taken from collections in Mecca itself. Organised in cooperation with the King Abdulaziz Public Library in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and including pieces taken from various European collections, among them the Louvre, the British Museum and the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, it traces the routes that have historically been taken by pilgrims performing the hajj and describes the rituals that take place in Mecca during the major pilgrimage. Hajj, le pèlerinage à la Mecque has already been shown at the British Museum in London, and readers of the Weekly may remember a review of it that appeared in the paper in May 2012. For its Paris iteration, the exhibition has been slimmed down to fit in the more modest spaces of the Institut du monde arabe and to an extent refocused on the North African and francophone experience of the hajj. New pieces have been introduced from French collections, and there are many new exhibits, among them vintage photographs and official and travel documents bearing witness to the experiences of pilgrims coming from the Maghreb, West Africa and Southeast Asia during the period of French colonial control. However, the exhibition has retained its overall purpose of placing the history and historical development of the hajj in the company of its contemporary character. Some three million pilgrims from across the world now make the major pilgrimage to Mecca each year, a million more than a decade or so ago. The vast majority of these arrive by air, and transport and other facilities in Mecca and the surrounding area have been massively increased in order to host the millions of visitors. Such numbers are an integral part of the modern experience of the hajj, and the exhibition ends by detailing the facilities that have been and are being built to accommodate them. ROUTES TO MECCA: The exhibition begins, as did the earlier London show, with an account of the various routes that have been taken by pilgrims making the hajj. Among these routes, developing when paths to Mecca lay mostly overland and before the development of significant maritime or air transport, were those coming from what is now Iraq, North and West Africa, Syria, Anatolia and the Levant, and further afield from East Africa and Southeast Asia. Most of these routes, among them the famous Darb Zubayda that once led from Baghdad to Mecca, are of considerable antiquity, and the pilgrim caravans that once used them would have required food, water and protection. As Saad bin Abdelaziz al-Rashed points out in his catalogue essay on the history of the pilgrimage routes, the Baghdad to Mecca route was initially one of the most important since it was under the direct protection of the Muslim caliph in the Abbasid capital Baghdad. Named after Zubayda, the wife of the 9th-century caliph Haroun al-Rashid familiar to western readers from the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, the route was furnished with frequent wells and stopping-off points where animals could be exchanged or watered. Its upkeep and security were the responsibility of the caliphal authorities in Baghdad. The London exhibition featured detailed catalogue essays on the history of these routes, setting out what is known about their history and development. These have disappeared from the Paris show, the new catalogue of which, edited by Omar Saghi, contains more summary accounts of them. However, in the exhibition itself many familiar pieces remain. Among these are items found during excavations of the resting points along the Darb Zubayda, for example at the Al-Rabadha archaeological site in the Hejaz, loaned for the exhibition by the archaeological museum of the King Saud University in Riyadh. According to the catalogue essay by Julien Loiseau on the history of the pilgrimage routes, the route followed by the Egyptian caravans on their way from Cairo to Mecca was “incontestably the most important one.” This was so, Loiseau says, since it was followed not only by Egyptian pilgrims, but also by those coming from North and sub-Saharan Africa who would have broken their journey in Cairo before continuing on via Al-Qulzum (Suez), across the Sinai Penisula and then down through the Hejaz on the eastern side of the Red Sea to Mecca. “The influx of pilgrims into the Egyptian capital was a boon for business, but it was more of a headache when it came to finding accommodation,” Loiseau says, “especially for the less well-off.” In the 13th century, North African and Moroccan pilgrims camped out in the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, while those from sub-Saharan African found temporary accommodation in the Qarafa cemetery. The 1,600 km route from Cairo to Mecca could be covered in 35 days, 20 if on horseback, and from at least the Mamluke period onwards the departure of the caravans was a time of widespread celebration. “In 1266, the Mamluke sultan Baybars (reigned 1260-1277) for the first time presented the amir al-hajj, the leader of the caravan, with a richly embroidered palanquin, the mahmal, which led the pilgrims on their way to Mecca.” This palanquin, a sort of animal-borne litter or sedan chair, contained the kiswa, or black embroidered cloth used to veil the Ka'ba, the square-shaped building in the centre of the grand mosque in Mecca. According to Loiseau, competition set in early among the Muslim rulers of the time regarding which of them should have the honour of sending the mahmal at the head of the caravan to Mecca and which of renewing the kiswa. “When the Fatimids became the rulers of Egypt in 969,” he writes, “they immediately started to send a white-coloured kiswa to Mecca in order to replace the traditional black one sent by their rivals in Baghdad.” Later, under Mamluke rule, the mahmal containing the kiswa sent to Mecca from Cairo each year “symbolised the protection of the Egyptian sultan over the caravans leaving from the Mamluke capitals of Cairo and Damascus, as well as over the routes themselves and the Meccan holy places.” In the 13th century, the Rasulid sultans in Yemen started to send their own mahmal, and after the defeat of the Mamlukes by the Ottomans in 1516 and the passage of the region under Ottoman control, the Ottoman sultan Selim 1 began to send an Ottoman mahmal and kiswa in a tradition that continued until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after 1918. “The Ottoman victory over the Mamlukes gave them not only control over the Middle East as a whole, but also a prestige that was without precedent in the Muslim world and one that even the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had not accorded them,” Loiseau comments. “Though the sultan in Istanbul did not adopt the title of caliph until the end of the 18th century, he inherited the role of protector of the hajj from the Mamelukes and, with it, the title of khadim al-haramayn al-sharifayn (servant of the two holy places)” of Mecca and Medina. Illustrating this history in the exhibition are examples of the embroidered cloth used for the sitara, the covering of the door to the Ka'ba, and for the mahmal, the latter in a piece dating from the late 19th century. New material, not seen in London, relates to the North African and French colonial experience of the hajj, and the curators have dug up a wealth of mostly documentary material from 19th and early 20th-century French archives describing the administration of the hajj in former French colonies in North and West Africa and to a lesser extent Southeast Asia. This period, Luc Chantre explains in a catalogue essay, coincided with far-reaching changes in the hajj. The mahmal started to leave Alexandria by ship in the early 20th century, it being more efficient to take it to the Red Sea port of Jeddah and hence to Mecca than to send it by camel through Sinai. The Hejaz Railway, built during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II and joining Damascus to Medina, also followed, and replaced, the ancient Levantine pilgrimage route. However, the greatest changes came as a result of the development of commercial steam navigation after the opening of the Suez Canal, this massively shrinking the time needed to travel to Mecca and increasing the numbers of pilgrims. “Traditionally, it had taken a North African pilgrim months, if not years, to make the pilgrimage, but no more than 12 days were needed to make the journey between Bone (Annaba) in Algeria to Jeddah, the port of Mecca, by steamship by 1905,” Chantre writes. “Moreover, steamship travel massively increased the numbers of those making the hajj thanks to the use of faster and larger ships. Whereas some 27,000 pilgrims disembarked in Jeddah for the hajj in 1868, this number had grown to 40,000 in the following decade and 100,000 by 1913.” The exhibition uses often francophone material to illustrate this period, including documents issued to pilgrims traveling from the then French colonies. There are passports issued by the French colonial authorities to Algerians making the hajj, travel documents, and intriguing items such as a letter from Abdel-Kader, leader of the Algerian resistance against French rule and later living in exile in Damascus, asking for permission to set up a hajj fund in his native country. There is also a letter from Jacques-François Menou, commander of the French forces occupying Egypt following the assassination of Kléber in June 1800, regarding arrangements for the hajj.
ARRIVING IN MECCA: The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to the rituals performed by pilgrims once they arrive in Mecca and to the contemporary experience of the hajj. Most of the exhibits in this second section are historical, relating to the ways in which the holy places have been represented over time. However, this part of the exhibition also emphasises contemporary representations of the hajj and its meaning for modern pilgrims, notably as found in works of art. While there is a wealth of historical material – 19th-century certificates attesting that the bearer has performed the hajj, early photographs of the grand mosque in Mecca along with early maps and cards – there are also contemporary installations by Saudi and other artists, among them Raja and Shadia Alem, Walid Siti and Idris Khan. These installations, sometimes rather large, fill most of the space on the upper floor of the exhibition, but the curators have also found room for smaller items. These include the souvenirs that contemporary pilgrims sometimes take back with them from the hajj – gifts for family and friends, modern equivalents of historical hajj certificates, pictures of the sanctuary in Mecca that are the equivalent of the centuries-old Ottoman tiles showing the grand mosque and displayed earlier in the exhibition. There is a final section in which modern pilgrims describe on tape their personal experience of the hajj. As was the case in the exhibition's earlier London outing, much of this second section also shows the physical transformation of Mecca itself as a result of the ever-growing numbers of pilgrims making the hajj. As far as the rituals are concerned, pilgrims are now taken to neighbouring Mina by rail, and the jamarat area, the place of ritual stoning, has been developed into a permanent five-storey structure able to handle the passage of 300,000 pilgrims an hour. The sanctuary itself has recently gone through its fourth major extension, and more are planned. According to a catalogue essay by Nabeel Koshak, the present extension work on the grand mosque, the most ambitious ever undertaken, will extend the sanctuary area to 1,300,000 m2, increasing capacity to 20,000 pilgrims an hour in the area around the Ka'ba. The exhibition includes plans and images of these extensions and of the impressive logistics that are needed to host the three million or so pilgrims now arriving in Mecca for the five-day pilgrimage each year. Hajj, le pèlerinage à la Mecque, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, until 10 August.
