ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how pilgrimage is verbally and materially ‘set in motion’ as recollections and desires. The author examines how pilgrimage was mediated in a mosque in Oslo through peoples’ sharing of personal pilgrimage stories, in the reference to pilgrimage in weekly speeches, in the sharing of gifts from shrine sites, and in the gifting of pilgrimage. The study challenges the notion that pilgrimage in Islam is primarily a duty. It brings into attention how pilgrimage figures in Muslims’ lives and argues that pilgrimage is motivated by pilgrimage sites being remembered as places people nourish a desire to visit.
