“You were not commanded to stroke it, but to pray nearby it”: debating touch within early Islamic pilgrimage

Abstract

ABSTRACT Early Islamic texts record a series of ongoing debates about a fundamental component of ritual performance: the act of touch. During the hajj, Muslim pilgrims participated in intensively haptic devotional activity in the holy city of Mecca, where they thronged to grasp objects and places associated with Islamic history and worship. Such rituals were carried out, and approved of, by many early Muslims, who considered these as important acts in the performance of Islamic identity. Yet in narrative histories and juristic discussions about the appropriate ways of interacting with and “sensing” pilgrimage places, many Muslim voices note the perceivably idolatrous connotations of touching objects and spaces. They often associate such haptic encounters with religiously marginalized others, including pagans, women, and sectarian groups. Bringing these sources into conversation with scholarship on ritual constructions of religious identity – and on the role therein of the senses – this article highlights the disputed role of touch in demarcating correctly Islamic pilgrimage practices, and thus the contested place of touch in the emergent Islamic sensorium.