Partially supported by a NULab Seedline Grant.
This project maps the journeys of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca and Medina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or the late Ottoman Empire. While the Hajj’s religious rituals remain largely unchanged since the seventh century, the Hajj journey transformed in the age of print and steam. European and Ottoman imperialism, cholera epidemics, quarantine stations, steamships, railways, the Suez Canal, and passport checkpoints disrupted traditional caravan routes and helped shape the modern Hajj as we know it today.
Drawing on travel memoirs, geographical surveys, and Hajj guidebooks written by Muslims from Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia, this project maps individual routes to the Hijaz and the infrastructure that enabled them. These texts often detail specific stops—train stations, quarantine camps, coffeehouses—showing how pilgrims experienced changing technologies and travel itineraries. In 1912, for example, school principal Muhammad Hasan Ghali broke away from the more traditional, official Egyptian Hajj caravan route. Instead, he used newly inaugurated transportation infrastructure: Mediterranean steamship lines to Palestine, then railways within Greater Syria, and finally the Hijaz Railway from Damascus to Medina. In his guidebook, Ghali encouraged readers to follow his route because it was safer, comfortable, relatively free of camels, and allowed a visit to Palestine along the way.
This project will have two online, public components hosted on a single website. The first is a searchable database cataloging stops along pilgrimage routes, including their dates of use, transportation methods, associated primary sources, and facilities such as hospitals, quarantines, oases, coffeehouses, lodges, and train stations. This database will inform a second, more visual component: a multi-layered map designed in ArcGIS that will show how Hajj routes changed over time.
By mapping these itineraries, this project reveals how disease, infrastructure, and imperialism shaped Hajj experiences before World War I. It also allows us to visualize how pilgrims often passed through Jerusalem and other holy cities en route to the Hijaz—challenging today’s more isolated spiritual geographies shaped by current borders and politics.
To learn more, you can read Ayah Aboelela‘s post: “From Egypt to the Holy Lands: Mapping Late Ottoman Egyptian Pilgrimage Routes to Medina, Mecca, and Jerusalem.“
Project Team
- Principal Investigator: Ayah Aboelela, World History PhD Student
