The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

Eric Tagliacozzo

Mar 2013 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

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.

About the author

Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History and Asian Studies at Cornell University, where he directs the Comparative Muslim Societies Program and the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project and edits the journal Indonesia. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915, which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.