ABSTRACT
The pilgrims have come to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since the early days of Islam, to walk seven times round the Kaaba in Mecca, and fulfil the other duties of the Haj. Some would follow the journey of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, and visit the tombs of the second city of Islam. But while the ritual of the pilgrimage followed the same form through the centuries, the holy cities changed with the riches that the pilgrimage brought. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Meccan society was an amalgam of many different races, customs, and bizarre superstitions – all carefully recorded by a Dutch scholar, Christian Snouck Hurgronje. He married a Meccan woman and was apparently accepted within the city at all levels of society. Although other Europeans had penetrated the city in the guise of Moslems, none of them had the depth of Hurgronje’s understanding and sympathy for Meccan life:
I must once again observe: he who sees the Mekkans outside the pilgrimage season (in it they are like business men when on ‘change’) finds them gay, affable, hospitable to extravagance, entirely devoted to social life, and he who obtains admission into good family circles meets, along with many vulgar creatures, also noble human characters and unfeigned piety.
C. S. Hurgronje, Mekka, tr., 1931, p. 10.