Caravan travel is probably as old as civilization. Most pilgrims experienced two segments of it, the first, the journey between home and one of the three great marshaling points at Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus. From there, the second segment was the formal, annual Hajj caravan to Makkah.
For the pilgrim, the Hajj was not merely a religious duty, but also a process of personal renewal and growth. Pilgrims carried the provisions they needed. The inbound caravans were well-supplied if the person traveling were rich, but the poor often ran short, and they often interrupted their journeys to work, save up their earnings and continue.
Until about 1930, when King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud brought the tribes of Arabia under one flag, the pilgrims’ danger was greater the nearer they came to the Holy Cities. The climate was harshest in the Hijaz, where water was at its scarcest and banditry by tribes who made a living on caravans of all sorts was at its most rampant. Together, these factors made joining one of the major caravans a virtual necessity, and protecting those caravans became a major responsibility of the ruling power of the time. Failure to assure the security of the Hajj caravan was seen as a tacit abdication of political legitimacy.
*”The amir al-hajj set the order of march and, en route, his word was absolute. No one could change position or drop out without his permission.”*
Despite the sacred nature of the journey and the increased safety and security of a large caravan, each pilgrim needed nonetheless to have his wits about him. These were still mortal affairs rife with risk.
The merchants of Damascus and particularly Cairo used the relative security of the Hajj caravans not only to sell at retail to the pilgrims, but also to transport funds and goods wholesale to Makkah. Additionally, the merchants would meet in the Red Sea ports with agents from India, China, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The caravans would bring European textiles, foodstuffs and a notable amount of coinage and return laden with spices, drugs, coffee and Indian textiles. Returning pilgrims were often weighed down with various objects of piety such as prayer beads, often in such large quantities as to suggest the intention of resale to the folks back home.
Religious, scientific and literary manuscripts similarly changed hands along the same paths. With Arabic serving as a lingua franca throughout the Muslim world, the Hajj was no less an intellectual clearing-house. The Holy Cities were for centuries centers for some of Islam’s great thinkers, who traveled there to perform the Hajj and then stayed on to study with the best and brightest. Provincial scholars, judges, lawyers, teachers, businessmen and traders from every corner of the earth shuttled almost routinely among North Africa, Egypt, Persia, India and Indonesia. The certificates of learning that Ibn Battuta earned in Makkah, for example, qualified him to land posts as a qadi, or judge, in Delhi, the Maldives and Indonesia, far from his native Tangier. Today’s Bangladeshis working in Silicon Valley or Saudi families thriving in Japan would hardly have surprised the people who took to the Hajj roads.
The Hajj was in effect a traveling university, as significant to the wider ‘ummah, or community of Islam, as any of its fixed institutions of education, culture and creativity. Some pilgrims—such as Ibn Battuta, Ibn ‘Arabi and Ahmad ibn Idris—became lifelong wanderers along the Hajj roads, returning several times to Makkah and Madinah to feed on and draw from the environment of passionate intellectual striving, then returning once again to the wider arcs of the Islamic world.