Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 233
done only at certain times or places. These time- and place-tied
rituals are exemplified in the Jews’ obligation to celebrate the three
great annual festivals of Pesach, Shabuoth, and Sukkoth in Jerusalem
at the appropriate seasons and the Muslims’ once-in-a-lifetime
obligation to perform the hajj on the appointed days in and
around Mecca. Properly speaking, these may be better thought of
as liturgies. Pilgrimage is also used of voluntary journeys in the
three religious communities and is in effect a pious visit—what the
Muslims call a ziyara, in opposition to the liturgical hajj—a voyage
from here to somewhere else, as the Latin name peregrinatio
signals. That “somewhere else” is a holy place of a number of
different types. It might be a locale where salvation history has
unfolded, Sinai, for example, or the site of the crucifixion in Jerusalem,
where the pilgrim might relive and, indeed, liturgically reenact
that event. It might be the dwelling of a holy man or woman,
where one might attend and gaze on one of those friends of God
thought to embody perfect virtue. And finally, and most generally,
it might be one of the sites sanctified first by the earthly presence
and now by the sacred remains of the martyrs and other heroic
witnesses to the faith.
The line between the hajj, the obligatory and highly ritualized
annual liturgy at Mecca, and a ziyara, an informal and quite voluntary
visit to Jerusalem or the Prophet’s tomb at Medina or even
to Mecca, might be perfectly clear to the Islamic lawyer, but it was
surely not so in popular devotion, and so at least some Muslim
voices were raised protesting the somewhat novel exaltation of Jerusalem
to the status of a Muslim holy city. In the period immediately
preceding the Frankish Crusade against Jerusalem, and particularly
after it, a kind of pious competition developed among
Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem for the palm of Islamic sanctity. Or
so it seemed. Actually afoot was a deliberate campaign to raise
Muslim consciousness toward this neglected holy city. In Judaism,
Jerusalem and the temple had no real competitors, and Christians
take their holy places where they find them. But against Muslim
Jerusalem there was always Mecca and Medina, which had long
enjoyed the privilege of being al-Haramayn, “The Twin Sanctuaries,”
the blessed sites of Islam’s very origins. The campaign to