ABSTRACT
There are two major objectives in this chapter. The first is to explore the Hajj as an economic institution, following intra-Asian trade, shipping, capital flows and investments between Southeast Asia and the Hijaz, and the lucrative avenues opened up by the pilgrims and their financial brokers. The second objective is to analyse the different Islamic ideologies, in particular the radical strands of Islamic thought picked up by the pilgrims and feared by the state, even in Thailand, as they were transported home. Thai pilgrims were a complex, differentiated group, though exposed to the strict literalism of Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia. They also encountered popular celebrations with Sufi fraternities and made visits to famous shrines and tombs, thereby achieving endorsement or even gaining the legitimacy of practices of mysticism within the sanctioned public rituals of the Hajj. But this chapter will argue that the pilgrim experience was shaped by family lineages, business networks and corporations of the Southeast Asian Hadhrami and Indian Muslim diasporas. We will also see how the Hajj expanded the cultural, intellectual and political life of ethnically diverse pilgrims, bolstering the emergence of secular ideologies and the acceptance of mysticism in the pilgrims’ home states. This was a powerful motif in the cosmopolitanism of the returning Hajjis, particularly the educated clerics, who were important members of local elites in Thailand. I have borrowed the term “secular pilgrimage” from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Anderson and Turner described the pilgrimage as the journey between statuses and places, and as a meaning-creating experience.
