The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

by Eric Tagliacozzo

The pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, has been a yearly phenomenon of great importance in Muslim lands for well over one thousand years. Each year, millions of pilgrims from throughout the Dar al-Islam, or Islamic world, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia, make the trip to Mecca as one of the five pillars of their faith. By the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth, fully half of all pilgrims making the journey in any given year could come from Southeast Asia. The Longest Journey , spanning eleven modern nation-states and seven centuries, is the first book to offer a history of the Hajj from one of Islam's largest and most important regions.

Genres: History, Islam, Anthropology

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University, where he teaches Southeast Asian history. He is the director of Cornell's Comparative Muslim Societies Program, the director of Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and the contributing editor of journal Indonesia. Tagliacozzo received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1989 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999.

Reviews

[Nynke Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book, because I figured it would be very helpful in the process of writing my thesis on the Hajj from the Dutch East Indies. It was indeed.

Eric Tagliacozzo is a very gifted man, a fact that one already notices when reading the acknowledgments, where is written that he himself translated all texts from Malay, Indonesian, Chinese, Dutch, French and Italian. But his talents are also shown throughout the book. It is a brilliant longue durée history of the Hajj from Southeast Asia, in which he tries to cover all aspects - religion, economy, politics and the such. In chronological order, he examines the origins of the Southeast Asian Hajj, the Hajj in colonial times, and the Hajj in postcolonial times. I liked the section on the Hajj in colonial times in particular, because it is such a paradoxical history with all kinds of difficulties that can be found on the intersection of colonialism (and colonial profits that are made), imperialism, multiple religions and politics from multiple angles and geographical areas. Tim Harper described the book as 'a major contribution to the practice of world history, capturing the experience of the 'transnational' in a most vital and compelling way'. I can only agree.

The last two chapters of the book are devoted to the pilgrims themselves, giving them a voice by using memoirs and oral history tapes. While one might argue about the value of oral history for such a longue durée history, Tagliacozzo justified his choices sufficiently and acknowledges the difficulities of oral history.

I recommend this book to all global and colonial historians, but also to everyone who likes a well-structured academic work that is also very enjoyable and appeals to the imagination.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written overview of Southeast Asian states and Muslims and Hajj over a long period of time. I can definitely see myself assigning or using chapters in teaching Southeast Asian history courses.