ts, as demonstrated by Alawi’s depiction of the perils of travel, political issues etc. Historically speaking, some of the great Muslim travel narratives started off as Haj pilgrimages: Ibn Battuta set out on his famous travels in the 14th century with an initial Haj, as did Ibn Jubair, author of a major travel text, in the 12th century. Alawi’s account of his journey in 1929 seldom reaches the stature of such writing, but remains an interesting text, beautifully contextualised in the introduction.
The need to recover texts like this one and excavate the history of Haj pilgrimages—as well as Buddhist and Hindu ones—arises from a bid to challenge the dominant narratives of the formation of our world, which is seen as having been enabled primarily by the bridge of European colonisation. Postcolonialism makes the ‘empire’ write back, but at the same time reinforces the bridge of European centrality. However, the world contains other bridges too: that of Budhist pilgrimage, for instance, that brought the Chinese to India at least from the fourth century, or that of the Haj. Such transactions were not contingent on the European link. To trace them is to enable a fuller narration of the connections between peoples and cultures.
Oxford University Press should be congratulated for bringing out Amir Ahmad Alawi’s Journey to the Holy Land: A Pilgrim’s Diary, and Outlook for reviewing it. The authors have done a wonderful job of situating Haj within the historical context. Haj has always captured the popular imagination and many idioms were coined around it in Hindustani, Persian and other languages. Here’s one each from Hindustani and Persian: Sau sau chuhe kha ke billi haj ko chali, which I don’t need to translate; Man tora haji bagoyam tu mara haji bago (You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, with a pun on Haj, and based on two pilgrims who had to come back with the Haj not done but called each other Haji to fool people in the neighbourhood.)
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