HAJJ EXHIBITION AT BRITISH MUSEUM
Objects banal and beautiful have been brought together by the British Museum in an exhibition tracing the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, including priceless manuscripts and textiles, a Victorian Thomas Cook train ticket and blue plastic razors distributed by the Saudi government to all male pilgrims.
The exhibition, which opens on Thursday, is the first in any museum in the world to focus on the pilgrimage, which was already ancient when Muhammad completed his journey in the early 7th century. From 20,000 such travellers in 1932, in one week last year just under three million people undertook the hajj.
As non-Muslims, neither the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, nor the lead curator, Venetia Porter, can ever set foot at the sites or experience the rituals the exhibition describes. “In a way that’s the point of the exhibition,” MacGregor said. “The hajj is the fifth pillar of Islam, and the only one which non-Muslims are not welcomed to observe or share. The purpose of the British Museum when it was founded was to enable its visitors to understand the world better, and this must surely meet that objective.”
MacGregor described the hajj as “the high point of the intersection between theology and logistics”.
The exhibition traces the suppliers of travellers’ provisions, the organisers of camel caravans, the queen who left a legacy of a chain of wells and rest houses, and the builders who constructed railways specially for the pilgrims.
The show also looks at the appointment of Thomas Cook in the 19th century as the official hajj travel agent: the company found it insufficiently profitable and dropped it.
Porter, an internationally recognised expert on the history and culture of Islam, could go no closer than the Red sea port of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the site where medieval pilgrims landed by dhow after journeys of up to 1,000 miles often beset by hunger, thirst, attacks by brigands and pirates, and shipwreck.
She followed the paths through the old town to Mecca Gate, where she stood looking wistfully down the road towards the city only 40 miles away.
Loans came from 13 countries, however, so Porter did get to many other places of legend, including Timbuktu to borrow ancient manuscripts covering some of the earliest travellers’ accounts.
The exhibition includes the travel diaries and photographs of several outsiders who did go on the hajj, including the explorer and writer Richard Burton, whose account of his travels in disguise in 1853 became a best seller.
Although the exhibition includes ancient textiles which once hung over and inside the Ka’bah, and a little leather pouch of dust gathered from its floor, there is no image of the interior of the shrine about which outsiders have always been curious.
Although the exhibition organisers had Islamic advisers, deciding not to display the Ka’bah interior had nothing to do with religious sensitivities.
“There were almost no photographs of the interior of the Ka’bah, and none of a high enough quality to exhibit,” Porter said. “We know it’s a bare empty space, but I’ve never seen a good image and I’ll never go there, so it is fair to say that at the heart of the exhibition there remains a mystery.”
For the full article: Guardian
