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In Moroccan Pilgrims’ Own Words: The Hajj Journeys (1321 AH [1903-4]) of Muhammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr Al-Kattānī and Muhammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī in an Age Rabi II, 1442 - December, 2020 of Steam, Imperialism and Globalization

Ammeke Kateman

In Moroccan Pilgrims’ Own Words: The Hajj Journeys (1321 AH [1903-4]) of Muhammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr Al-Kattānī and Muhammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī in an Age of Steam, Imperialism and Globalization

Ammeke Kateman No. 13 Rabi II, 1442 - December, 2020

© King Faisal Center for research and Islamic Studies, 2020 King Fahd National Library Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Kateman, Ammeke In Moroccan Pilgrims’ Own Words: The Hajj Journeys (1321 AH [1903-4]) of Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Kabīr Al-Kattānī and Muhammad bin Ja‘far Al-Kattānī in an Age of Steam, Imperialism and Globalization. / Kateman, Ammeke. - Riyadh, 2020

26 p; 16.5x23cm

ISBN: 978-603-8268-69-8 1- Pilgrims I- Title

252.2 dc 1442/2723

L.D. no. 1442/1675 ISBN: 978-603-8268-69-8

Acknowledgment This work is part of a research project on Arabic Mecca travelogues in an age of Islamic reformism (1850-1945) within the research programme “Mecca. More magical than Disneyland”: Modern articulations of pilgrimage to Mecca, project number 360-25-150, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

4 Table of Contents

Abstract 6 Introduction 7 Studying pilgrims’ own words 10 Islamic places in an imperial space 14 Connecting Muslims 21 Conclusion 28

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Abstract This article analyzes a cluster of Moroccan ḥajj accounts – all related to the popular Kattāniyya Sufi order in Fez – to explore the role of the ḥajj and the Ḥijāz in these pilgrims’ own words, at a time when the experiences of imperialism, new technologies and globalization were inevitable for any Moroccan ḥajj traveller. Studying the accounts of the journeys of shaykh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī (1873-1909) (written by his follower ʿAbd al-Salām bin Muḥammad al-Muʿṭī al-ʿAmrānī) and his cousin, the ḥadīth-scholar and biographer Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī (1858-1927), this article shows how the ḥajj and its journey inevitably gained and changed meaning in direct reference to the contexts of both imperialism and steam transportation. In a way, the new context re-emphasized and recentralized the ḥajj and the Ḥijāz. But that is not all these travelogues convey. Drawing on centuries of ḥajj travel writing, the Kattānīs and their followers narrated their journeys as an Islamic journey through an Islamic geography, aimed at meeting other Muslims and gathering Islamic knowledge along the way. Read this way, their travelogues reveal themselves as a reassertion of Islam and a reiteration of its relevance in a context in which they felt Islam was under siege, whether this was done consciously or not. It was one of the ways that the ḥajj did not lose but gained meaning in these travelogues in an age of imperialism, steam and globalization.

6 Introduction Steam technology gave Muslims in Morocco and other parts of the Islamic world the opportunity to travel to the Ḥijāz in order to perform the ḥajj in a way that was safer, faster and cheaper than ever before. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Moroccan pilgrims no longer needed to take the long and dangerous land route across the whole of North Africa by caravan: they could now travel by steamship across the Mediterranean and by steam train through Egypt. The new transportation technology brought increasing numbers of people from across the Islamic world in contact with one other, in Mecca and in other cities as part of a process of globalization, defined as the increasing mobility of people and ideas (alongside goods), assisted by the rising popularity of cheap print technology and the rise of the Arabic press.(1)

The new means of transportation also signaled the integration of the ḥajj and its journey into a world that was politically, commercially and culturally dominated by European powers, companies and people. From the nineteenth century onwards, France and other European powers had taken an aggressive interest in Morocco as a prelude to the French and Spanish establishments of protectorates in 1912. European dominance also manifested in the steamships, often of European provenance and owned by European companies, that departed from Tangier and took their passengers to several European Mediterranean port cities such as Marseille and Naples. Further along the way, pilgrims disembarked from these ships at the cosmopolitan ports of Egypt and sometimes of the Levant. On their way back, following international sanitary agreements, they were forced to remain for a set period of quarantine in Al-Tūr, a camp staffed by European personnel, amongst others. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Moroccan pilgrims’ world was thus impacted by new technological, commercial, cultural and political

(1) See James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Liat Kozma, Cyrus Schayegh, and Avner Wishnitzer, eds., A Global Middle East: Mobility, Materiality and Culture in the Modern Age, 1880-1940, 50 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015).

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structures in which Europeans and European governments and companies were dominant.(2)

Amongst these pilgrims were two cousins of the Al-Kattānī family who were connected to the popular Kattāniyya Sufi order in Fez. For the occasion of performing the ḥajj in 1321 AH (1904), shaykh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al- Kabīr al-Kattānī (1873-1909), the charismatic and mysterious leader of the order, boarded a German steamer in Tangier to travel to Egypt and onwards to the Ḥijāz. The Moroccan sultan ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 1894-1908) paid for his trip, on which Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī was accompanied by an entourage of followers. In that same year, his cousin, the ḥadīth-scholar and biographer Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī (1858-1927), took his family on a journey on British steamers to visit the holy places of Mecca and Medina, calling in at several cities in Egypt and Syria along the way and on the return journey. The two Al-Kattānī cousins and their respective followers did not travel together, although they met occasionally during their stay in the Ḥijāz.(3)

Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī documented his journey with his family in a travelogue titled Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya ilā al-Iskandariyya wa Miṣr wa-l- Ḥijāz wa-l-Bilād al-Shāmiyya. His son, Muḥammad al-Zamzamī al-Kattānī, also wrote an account of this journey to Mecca, of which large parts are quoted in footnotes to the edition of his father’s travel text.(4) Furthermore, one of Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī’s followers, a religious scholar from Marrakech called ʿAbd al-Salām bin Muḥammad al-Muʿṭī al-ʿAmrānī (1861-

(2) For an overview of the ḥajj in colonial times, see: Sylvia Chiffoleau, Le Voyage à La Mecque (Paris: Belin, 2015). (3) Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya ilā al-Iskandariyya wa Miṣr wa-l-Ḥijāz wa-l-Bilād al-Shāmiyya, ed. Muḥammad Ḥamza bin ʿAlī al-Kattānī and Muḥammad bin ʿAzzūz (Al-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ/Bayrūt: Markaz al-Turāth al-Thaqāfī al-Maghribī/Dār ibn Ḥazm, 2005), 153; ʿAbd al-Salām bin Muḥammad al-Muʿṭī Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya fī al-Riḥla al-Ḥijāziyya. Wa hiya Waqāʾiʿ Riḥlat Ḥajj al-Imām Abī al-Fayḍ Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī ʿĀm 1321h [1904], ed. Nūr al-Hudā ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Al-Kattānī (Al-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ/ Bayrūt: Markaz al-Turāth al-Thaqāfī,/ Dār ibn Ḥazm, 2010), 223.) (4) I have not been able to study this work, titled ʿAqd al-Zamr wa-l-Zabarjad fī Sīrat al-Ibn wa-l- Wālid wa-l-Jadd and written by Muḥammad al-Zamzamī al-Kattānī, as it does not seem to have been published.

8 1931), documented the journey of his shaykh in a travelogue titled Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya fī al-Riḥla al-Ḥijāziyya.

These three ḥajj travelogues were not published at the time.(5) The only existing copy of Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s travelogue was found in the private library of the Al-Kattānī family. It is smudged and has the author’s notes in the margins, which might suggest that it was not distributed as a manuscript at that time either.(6) Similarly, the travelogue of Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s son, written on a typewriter, seems to have been kept in the private collection of the Al-Kattānī family.(7) Al-ʿAmrānī’s travelogue manuscript might have had a wider distribution, as four copies were still extant according to its editor in 2010.(8)

The main protagonists of these travelogues, the Kattānī cousins, were both very critical of European cultural influence in Morocco, Europe’s colonial meddling with Moroccan affairs, and the Moroccan rulers’ docility in handling this. They are often described as Islamic revivalists because they strove for the restoration of Islam and its texts, laws and rituals. Their vision of the version of Islam that needed to be restored is peculiar in its combination of scripturalism as well as maraboutism, which challenges set notions of a clear-cut division between revivalism and Sufism in the modern age (see below). The Kattānīs envisioned saints and other charismatic figures, among whom was the veiled shaykh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al- Kabīr al-Kattānī himself, playing a leading role in restoring Islam and its law due to the saints’ and shaykhs’ special functions of mediation and intercession and as sources of baraka (blessing). Moreover, both Kattānīs’

(5) The Kattānis made use of the printing press on other occasions. Sahar Bazzaz writes that the Kattāniyya order used the printing press for educational purposes from the nineteenth century onwards: Sahar Bazzaz, Forgotten Saints: History, Power, and Politics in the Making of Modern Morocco (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 93–95. (6) See the editor’s introduction in the travelogue Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī: Al-Kattānī, Al- Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 42–43. (7) Ibidem, 42, 358. (8) See the editor’s introduction to the travelogue: Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 54–66.

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intellectual and political efforts to restore this version of Islam also aimed at resisting European aggression.(9)

This article tells the stories of the Kattānīs’ journeys to Mecca and Medina at the beginning of the twentieth century at a time when the experiences of imperialism, new technologies and globalization were inevitable for any Moroccan ḥajj traveller. It focuses specifically on the roles that these Moroccan scholars attributed to the ḥajj journey and the Ḥijāz in their writings in these changing times, seen through their own eyes or, more accurately, narrated by themselves. Their ḥajj testimonials add to the stories in colonial archives about this specific period and experience, moving beyond imperial concerns. They help to present meanings of the ḥajj that were not solely related to the relatively new and dominant presence of the European governments, companies, spaces and people. They are sources within which other, continually changing aspects of the ḥajj can be identified: aspects that continue elements of the dynamicḥajj tradition yet change against a new background.

Studying pilgrims’ own words In his article “The Ḥajj as its Own Undoing”, the historian Nile Green argues that historians of the ḥajj have paid too little attention to pilgrims’ own writings in the study of the ḥajj in the age of steam transportation.(10) The existing literature relies on imperial archives and focuses mostly on the administrative dimensions of the ḥajj, he writes.(11) Given the imperial obsession with Mecca

(9) Henry Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), chaps. 3–4; Bettina Dennerlein, “Asserting Religious Authority in Late 19th/early 20th Century Morocco: Muhammad B. Ja’far Al-Kattani (d.1927) and His Kitab Salwat Al-Anfas,” in Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, ed. Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 128–52; Sahar Bazzaz, “Reading Reform beyond the State,” The Journal of North African Studies, 2008; Bazzaz, Forgotten Saints, chap. 3. (10) Nile Green, “The Hajj as its Own Undoing: Infrastructure and Integration on the Muslim Journey to Mecca,” Past & Present 226(1) (2014): 193-194. (11) Despite their reliance on imperial archives, authors such as Eric Tagliacozzo, Eileen Kane, Sylvia Chiffoleau and John Slight also used travelogues and memoirs to write their histories of the Islamic pilgrimage in the imperial age: Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Cary, NC: OUP, 2013), chap. 11; John Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj: 1865-1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 81–84, 138–143, 190–

10 as a source of “twin infection” – a hotbed of cholera pandemics and global waves of anti-colonial pan-Islamist sentiment – it seems unsurprising that studies focusing on the ḥajj in this period, especially in relation to a specific empire and relying mainly on imperial archives, emphasize the organization, administration, policing, surveillance and quarantining of the ḥajj.(12)

Instead, Green proposes that scholars turn our attention to pilgrims’ ḥajj travelogues. In her 1990 chapter, Barbara Metcalf already suggests that modern South Asian accounts of the ḥajj make a fascinating source for those studying the ḥajj in the modern period. She writes that they “invite an analysis of individual experience against the background of the social and political world in which they were produced,” as they are a type of material that gives insights into both “changing patterns of religious sensibilities and [...] a world in technological, social, and political transition.”(13) Since then, a number of promising articles and chapters on Muslim ḥajj travelogues in this period of steam and imperialism have been published, in addition to (translated) editions of individual works and anthologies such as those of F.E. Peters.(14) Yet pilgrims’ ḥajj

191, 247–253, 260–262; Chiffoleau, Le Voyage à La Mecque see the use of Arabic and some Persian Muslims’ travelogues; Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 51–53, 78–81, 154. Slight rightly observes that colonial archives can yield more complex and diverse images than only colonial concerns if analyzed in a way that heeds the diversity of agents behind them, including Muslim agents, and the diversity of the type of material in them. John Slight, “British Colonial Knowledge and the Hajj in the Age of Empire,” in The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, ed. Umar Ryad (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 81–111.. (12) On the colonial obsession with pandemics and pan-Islamism, see: William R. Roff, “Sanitation and Security. The Imperial Powers and the Nineteenth Century Hajj,” Arabian Studies 4 (1982): 143–60; Michael Low, “Empire and the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and Pan-Islam Under British Surveillance, 1865-1908,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 2 (2008): 269– 290; Luc Chantre, “Entre pandémie et panislamisme: L’imaginaire colonial du pèlerinage à La Mecque (1866-1914),” Archives de sciences sociales des religions, no. 163 (2013): 163–190. (13) Barbara Metcalf, “The Pilgrimage Remembered: South Asian Accounts of the Hajj,” in Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori (London: Routledge, 1990), 86. (14) A selection of studies on ḥajj travelogues: Metcalf, “The Pilgrimage Remembered”; Rita Stratkötter, Von Kairo Nach Mekka: Sozial- Und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Der Pilgerfahrt Nach Den Berichten Des Ibrāhīm Rifʿat Bāšā: Mirʾāt Al-Ḥaramain, Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 145 (Berlin: Schwarz, 1991); F.E. Peters, The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Richard Van Leeuwen, “Mobility in Islamic Thought: The Syrian Journey of Rashîd Ridâ in 1908,” in Centre and Periphery within

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travelogues remain an understudied source, especially for the experiential aspect of the pilgrimage.

In his 2015 article, Nile Green gives centre stage to several published ḥajj travelogues from South- and South-East Asian Muslims at the turn of the twentieth century. Green focuses on the travelogues’ articulation of the enormous transformation of the ḥajj journey (and not so much its destination or the ḥajj ritual) when it became integrated into the new “geography of steam”. This change was geographic, demographic and semantic in nature. The steam journey brought Muslims to cosmopolitan ports such as Bombay, meeting non-Muslims there and along the way in train carriages and on steamer decks. To make sense of the new journey experience and the space through which they traveled, the pilgrims used newly-introduced loan words or translations to express distance, duration and geography. Altogether, he concludes, “the ḥajj was transformed from a ritual movement through a long-familiar Muslim memory space into a journey through a world governed by ideas, peoples and technologies of non-Muslim provenance” and therein “lay the paradox of the ḥajj as the means of its own undoing”.(15) According to Green, the ḥajj in the age of steam was not predominantly an experience of an Islamic world any longer but one of a non-Islamic world, which, to him, seems to defeat the purpose, or at least part of it.

This article heeds the call to turn to the writings of the pilgrims themselves. It analyzes a cluster of Moroccan travelogues related to the Kattānī-family at the beginning of the twentieth century to explore the role of the ḥajj and the Ḥijāz in their own words. It shows how the ḥajj and its journey inevitably gained

the Borders of Islam: Proceedings of the 23rd Congress of L’Union Européenne Des Arabisants et Islamisants, ed. Giuseppe Contu (Leuven: Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 2012), 33–46; Homayra Ziad, “The Return of Gog: Politics and Pan-Islamism in the Hajj Travelogue of ’Abd Al-Majid Daryabadi,” in Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print, ed. James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Rainer Brünner, “The Pilgrim’s Tale as a Means of Self-Promotion: Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā’s Journey to the Ḥijāz (1916),” in The Piety of Learing. Islamic Studies in Honor of Stefan Reichmuth, ed. Michael Kemper and Ralf Elger (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 270–91. (15) Green, “The Hajj as Its Own Undoing,” 193-4.

12 and changed meaning in direct reference to the contexts of both imperialism and steam transportation. But that is not all these travelogues convey: this article also explores other meanings and purposes of the ḥajj as conveyed by the travelogues, referencing continuing Islamic traditions of travel and pilgrimage. In many ways, the unpublished and hitherto unstudied texts on the Kattānīs’ ḥajj travels continue tropes of Moroccan ḥajj travel literature.(16)

This article does not further the argument that these travelogues represent “the old” or “the traditional” in a modern world. The Kattānīs and the groups they travelled with inevitably encountered the new world of steam- and print- powered connections and imperialism. Their texts thus represent one of the meanings that the ḥajj and its journey had (or gained) in that modern world and age. The travelogues of Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī and ʿAbd al- Salām bin Muḥammad al-Muʿṭī al-ʿAmrānī in the entourage of Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī are not discussed here as representative of ḥajj travelogues of the early twentieth century – or of early-twentieth-century ḥajj travelogues of Moroccan Sufi ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars) with anti-colonial and revivalist leanings. However, reading them may further sensitize us to the under-studied meanings, old and new, changed but familiar, that the pilgrims themselves attached to the ḥajj in this age.

Specifically focusing on the spaces they travelled through and the places they visited, this article analyzes how the Kattānīs and their followers negotiated around the European dominance, and the new role that the space of the Ḥijāz took on for them within this larger space. Perhaps more importantly, it shows that the Kattānīs journeyed not only through what Green calls a “steam geography” but much more prominently through and towards a “sacred Islamic geography,” to use a term coined by Annemarie

(16) Nasser S. Al-Samaany, “Travel Literature of Moroccan Pilgrims during the 11–12th/17–18th Centuries: Thematic and Artistic Study” (PhD Dissertation, University of Leeds, 2000); Richard Van Leeuwen, “Euforie en ontberingen. Het hadj-verslag door de eeuwen heen,” ZemZem. Tijdschrift over het Midden-Oosten, Noord-Afrika en islam 14, no. 1 (2018): 8–19.

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Schimmel to refer to Islamic organizations and conceptualizations of space.(17) Secondly, this article focuses on the people who are central to the travelogues. Notwithstanding the presence of the non-Muslims in the world they travelled through, this section shows that their travelogues are predominantly inhabited by Muslims. Muslims were the protagonists of their journeys and Muslims – specifically Islamic scholars – were the people they sought to meet along the way. As a quest for knowledge and connections, these encounters were a continuation of older practices set in a new wave of global mobility of people and ideas. They also reveal the limits of these transnational connections, bringing the forging of local affiliations and the discovery of transnational differences to the fore.

Islamic places in an imperial space Recounting a conversation with his skeptical father, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī writes in his introduction that Moroccan Muslims no longer needed to use the long and dangerous land route by caravan to reach Mecca but could now use the safer and easier option of sea transportation.(18) For the Kattānīs and other Muslims in this age, their opportune use of steam transportation paradoxically rendered their ḥajj travels at least partly “a journey among infidels”, as Nile Green concludes at least for South Asian pilgrims at the turn of the century.(19) According to Green, this rendered the journey “a vector of moral tensions”, as pilgrims inevitably came into contact with non-Muslim places, people and their customs on deck and in ports (as well as with Muslims of the lower classes, he adds).(20)

(17) Annemarie Schimmel, “Sacred Geography in Islam,” in Sacred Places and Profane Spaces: Essays in the Geographics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Jamie S. Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), 173. (18) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 107. In Egypt and along the Levant coast he also used the steam train on his journey. With some excitement (using an exclamation mark), he noted that the train between Alexandria and Cairo shortened the journey to three hours whereas it had previously taken six days. Traveling by steam train and ship was a new experience for Al-Kattānī and his family, as his son notes in a passage on the first steam train they ever boarded, which took them from Alexandria to Cairo via Tanta. Al-Kattānī, 130, n.4. (19) Green, “The Hajj as Its Own Undoing,” 224, 226. (20) Ibidem, 217.

14 The studied travelogues reveal that the Kattānīs journeyed carefully through this space in which non-Muslims were increasingly dominant. The mostly comfortable and luxurious steamers that they and their followers used to travel across the Mediterranean and the Red Sea were of German, French and English provenance. Following unnamed other scholars, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī writes that he considers it detestable (makrūh) to use European ships to get to the Ḥijāz, but as long it does not hinder the performance of other Islamic duties, that does not negate the obligation to go on ḥajj.(21) It is therefore no surprise that in describing how the British ships were big, fast, clean, well-facilitated (with water for (ritual) washing and drinking), he also emphasizes that he and his fellow Muslim travelers could perform their prayers without disturbance.(22) His son also mentions that they gave food to the ship’s crew to persuade them not to disturb their religious duties.(23) Al-ʿAmrānī’s account shows that he took care not to engage in imitating (tashabbuh) the Christians and their Christian customs, for example by sitting on deckchairs, much to the approval of his shaykh.(24)

The travelogues describe how they trod similarly carefully when mooring in European ports such as Marseille, Naples and Malta. Docking at the port of Marseille and Naples, Al-ʿAmrānī is quite positive about the cities’ infrastructure. Yet when visiting what was probably a sugar refining factory on a tour through the city, he also remained careful not to approve of anything that might be makrūh (detestable), such as the liquid sugars the factory produced.(25) Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī, in turn, simply refused to disembark at Malta because of the unbelief (kufr) there.(26)

(21) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 108. (22) Al-Kattānī, 118, 327. See also Al-ʿAmrānī on religious services on board: Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa Al-Fāshiyya, 150. (23) Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 119, n.1. Another example of the care with which they acted on the ships is evident when Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī relates his worries about when and where to enter the sacred state of iḥrām at sea, as the ships do not stop and one could not rely on the non- Muslim or not-so-pious captain to indicate the right spot. Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 145–147. (24) Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 147. (25) Ibidem, 152. (26) Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 121.

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Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s travelogue articulates how he shuddered at the non-Muslim presence and dominance in the cities he journeyed through. For example, he denounces the Damascenes’ adoption of Christian dress and food, which he found prevalent throughout the Mashriq.(27) Describing his stay in Cairo, Al-Kattānī heard about Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s so-called Transvaal fatwa (legal advice) a year earlier, with which ʿAbduh had allowed South African Muslims to eat food slaughtered by Christians and Jews and to wear European-style hats. The Moroccan scholar disagreed sharply with this.(28) When he stayed in Jerusalem, he was very critical of Muslims living next door to Christians and Jews in the city, with Christians and Jews outnumbering Muslims and being allowed to enter mosques.(29) He saw this as an estrangement (ghurba) from the Islamic religion and a signal of the imminence of the Hour of Resurrection (al-sāʿa).(30) A few years later, he reiterated his judgment on the absolute impermissibility of adopting Christian and European customs in his book Naṣīḥat Ahl Al-Islām.(31)

Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s sharp rejection of Muslims living under the culturally-dominant Christian Europeans reaches its peak in his evaluation of the imposition of compulsory quarantine at Al-Tūr.(32) While he had intended to circumvent this by staying in Medina for longer, he does not seem to have realized this plan.(33) Instead, his mandatory four-day stop at the

(27) Ibidem, 285. (28) Ibidem, 136–137. In a footnote, Al-Kattānī’s son’s travelogue is quoted saying that ʿAbduh ruled the way he did to please and flatter the English [the colonial authorities in Egypt at that time]. For more information on ʿAbduh’s Transvaal fatwa and the vehement public debate that it caused, see Charles Adams, “Muhammad ʿAbduh and the Transvaal Fatwa,” in The Macdonald Presentation Volume (New York, 1933), 13–29. (29) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 313–314. (30) Ibidem, 313–314. He also laments the lack of Qur’anic and religious knowledge, for example about prayer, even among ʿulamāʾ. He denounces the wearing of sandals in many of the mosques (though not Al-Aqṣā) and the smoking there, as well as in the tombs. (31) Muḥammad Ibn Jaʿfar Al-Kattāni, Naṣīhat Ahl al-Islām: Taḥlīl Islāmī-ʿIlmī li-ʿAwāmil Suqūṭ al- Dawlat al-Islāmīya wa-ʿAwāmil Nuhūḍih̄ a, ed. Idrīs Al-Kattānī (Rabāṭ: Maktabat Baḍr, 1989). (32) Their travelogues also indicate that they had to go into quarantine in Beirut (Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī and his party) and Algiers (Al-ʿAmrānī in the entourage of Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī). (33) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 108.

16 quarantine station at Al-Tūr was clearly what disturbed him most during the whole journey to and from the Ḥijāz.(34) In his travelogue, he sharply disagrees with its governance by Christians and Jews as it elevated “people of false religions” over Muslims. He also questions the effectiveness of the hygiene measures and thus its overall benefits for Muslims, pointing out the presence of numerous flies and foul smells. He sees it as a Christian plot to hinder the rite of the ḥajj and its ordinance over Muslims. But he seems most enraged that it was harmful and humiliating to Muslims who had just returned from their holy pilgrimage for God and the Prophet. They were scolded and scowled at, cursed, abused and insulted; they were made to take off their clothes and were left to wait. For Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī, all this made quarantine a heinous act that should not be allowed, and he likens it to a prison.(35) In contrast, he considered their two-day stay in quarantine in Beirut not bad at all, with kinder people and more space, light, and greenery.(36) Surprisingly, given al-Kattānī’s very negative experience and evaluation, Al-ʿAmrānī conveys no discontent whatsoever when mentioning his mandatory periods of quarantine in Al-Tūr and in Algiers in his travelogue.(37)

It is clear that their world was one of industrialized transport, imperial concerns about pandemics, and European dominance, which made their journeys different to how they had been before. It presented them with new challenges and gave the journey a new meaning as they navigated through a world of “unbelievers”. Yet this does not mean that their ḥajj was only a means of “its own undoing”, as Nile Green contends. Neither did they only attach meaning to it in relation to those concerns that were central to colonial administrations and their archives.

(34) See Chiffoleau on the international sanitary policies concerning ḥajj pilgrims in response to cholera breakouts in the Ḥijāz, mostly as a concerted effort by the colonial authorities: Chiffoleau, Le Voyage à La Mecque, chap. 4. (35) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 231–233. (36) Ibidem, 232, 236. (37) Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 281, also n.1, 283.

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Instead, the new context re-emphasized and recentralized the ḥajj and the Ḥijāz. According to Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī, the introduction of the much safer and easier option of traveling by ship lifted the barriers to the ḥajj for Moroccans with which his father had objected to his son’s plans. His father had claimed that Moroccans lacked the ability (istiṭāʿa) to go on ḥajj because of the high risk, and had refused at first to concede to his son’s plans to do so.(38) While his reluctance to agree to his son’s ḥajj plans might seem surprising, given the centrality of the ḥajj ritual in the Islamic religion, historian Jocelyn Hendrickson describes a broader current within the Māliki tradition of Islamic Law that denounced or prohibited the ḥajj for Muslims of the Maghrib (and al-Andalus) from the eleventh to the nineteenth century. One of the commonest juridical explanations for the demotion or prohibition of the ḥajj within the Māliki tradition was the prioritization of the Islamic obligation of jihād over that of the ḥajj, given the status of the Maghrib at the outer limit of the Islamic world and thus as the main site for defending the territory of Islam. Hendrickson further argues that these fatwās suited the political wishes of rulers in the Maghrib to keep their able subjects at home.(39) In contrast, the new transportation technologies not only facilitated Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s ḥajj journey but actually made it an obligation, according to him.

Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s travelogue shows that the new context in which colonial and non-Muslim concerns were so dominant added a new aspect to the ḥajj and the sacred spaces in and around Mecca and Medina. In his introduction, he writes that the idea of going on ḥajj and to Medina occurred to him as “a way to escape to modern-day conflicts in Morocco, out of fear for the unbelievers surrounding and invading it, until the whole becomes their province, under their actual reign, even if it currently is already under their reign of power (my translation).”(40) For him, the space of the Ḥijāz

(38) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 107–108. (39) Jocelyn Hendrickson, “Prohibiting the Pilgrimage: Pilgrimage and Fiction in Mālikī Fatwās,” Islamic Law and Society 23 (2016): 161–238. (40) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 107.

18 felt like a blissful escape from the colonial hostility in Morocco. Further, the dire situation in Morocco was just as bad, or worse, in other places in the Islamic world, as he observes, for example, in Jerusalem. In contrast, his travelogue seems to convey that the Ḥijāz was outside the colonial reach, as was the ritual of the ḥajj, despite quarantine and other colonial “plots” to hinder it. Going there for ḥajj seems to have been a way of defying a world wrongfully dominated by “unbelievers”. Only a couple of years later, in 1907, he travelled to the Ḥijāz again to live in Medina, returning a year later, after which he emigrated to Medina in 1910.(41) In an imperial world, he found the holy spaces of Mecca and Medina unique in that they were free of colonial intervention, which made it desirable – or perhaps even obligatory – to emigrate there (hijra).(42)

Finally, and importantly, the non-Muslim or cosmopolitan spaces through which the Kattānīs journeyed to reach the Ḥijāz for their ḥajj are in no way predominant in their travelogues. The non-Muslim cultural geographies were the spaces to carefully tread through, as we have seen, avoiding their influence as much as possible by taking care not to imitate or adopt non- Muslim customs. Yet instead of placing this new geography at the center of the journey, the travelogues most prominently convey a space in which the final destination as well as the destinations along the way were Islamic and carried ritual meaning. For the Kattānīs, the places to visit (mazārāt) were the holy places of Mecca and Medina, but also the countless tombs, shrines, mosques, and graveyards along the way in the Ḥijāz and in Egypt and the Levant. A large part of Al-ʿAmrānī’s travelogue is devoted to these Islamic places: he lists them, providing additional information, recounting experiences there and recording his emotional states when there. These seem to be the coordinates of a “sacred Islamic geography” ultimately dominated by the destinations of Mecca and Medina which is far more prominent in this travelogue than the

(41) Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco, chap. 3. (42) See also: Ibidem, 90–91.

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geographies in which steam ports and non-Islamic antiquities provide the main nodes and attractions.(43)

While Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s travelogue expresses the most intense emotions when in quarantine, recounting anger and humiliation during this stopover on his steam-powered journey back home, Al-ʿAmrānī writes about the emotions evoked by his journey’s Islamic destinations. He recounts how he experienced submission (khushūʿ), crying and humility (taḍarruʿ) beyond words when praying at the Kaʿba.(44) Similarly, he describes the blissful sensation in his heart of the presence of the invisible at the maqām of the Prophet Ibrāhīm. He describes how this was triggered by seeing Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s intense response to the recitation of a poem by the Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn Al-Fāriḍ (1181-1235), on a Sufi traveller’s uninterrupted love for God at every physical and spiritual stage (maqām).(45) For Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s son, too, the Islamic destinations evoked strong emotions. He describes in his travelogue that they went straight to the mosque on arriving in Medina to attest to “the pain of their passions” (alam al-ashwāq), which had haunted them before arriving there, and “their burning desire to meet the Prophet” (lawāʿij al-maḥabba fī-l-talāq [sic, what seems to be intended: fī-l-ṭalāqī]).(46) In this sense, the travelogues of Al- ʿAmrānī and Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s son seem to convey that these and other Islamic destinations were the places that had meaning for them and those who had gone before them, quoting others’ mystical poems to convey this special meaning.(47) Thus in many ways it is not the steam geography

(43) Schimmel writes that the “[s]acred geography in Islam (…) is determined by different coordinates” of which one is the sanctuary of Mecca. My use of the term “sacred geography” here suggests that these determining coordinates might also be considered to include the various graves and shrines across the Islamic world which were visited (ziyāra). Schimmel, “Sacred Geography in Islam,” 173. (44) Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 229. (45) Al-ʿAmrānī, 223–224. (46) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 191, n.1. (47) Schimmel, “Sacred Geography in Islam”; Al-Samaany, “Travel Literature of Moroccan Pilgrims during the 11-12th/17-18th Centuries:”

20 that is prominent in these travelogues on the Kattānīs’ journeys to Mecca in 1903-4, but the sacred Islamic geography.

Connecting Muslims Having analyzed the travelogues’ articulation of spaces in the modern world, this article now turns to how they describe the people who inhabited these spaces and what the travelogues reveal about the connections between people in this age of increased mobility and connectivity.

Throughout their steam journey the Kattānīs and their following were inevitably exposed to non-Muslims on steamer decks and in the streets of cosmopolitan port cities in France, Italy, Egypt and the Levant. These encounters happened despite their opposition to European political interference and aggression and their strong aversion to the European Christian cultural influence, of which they considered Jews the cultural brokers. Yet only very few individual Europeans or non-Muslims feature in the records of the Kattānīs’ ḥajj journey. Discussing the crew of the British steamer (calling them “enemies of God”) and their facilitating attitude toward the performance of Muslim religious services, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī mentions that the English captain and his deputy watched their prayer in amazement and told the praying Muslims that they themselves did not believe in the divine filiation of Jesus.(48) Several helpful Jews, not necessarily all Europeans, figure in the travelogues, too.(49)

In contrast, Muslims, and especially Islamic scholars, feature prominently in the Kattānīs’ travel accounts. In Al-ʿAmrānī’s ḥajj travelogue, the leading part is undeniably and self-evidently assigned to his shaykh, Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī. In his introduction Al-ʿAmrānī declares that he intends to write down everything he sees and hears of his shaykh during the journey, to fulfil his duty of emulating him.(50) Indeed, he records Muḥammad bin ʿAbd

(48) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 118–9. (49) Al-Kattānī, 146, 327, n.1; Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 146, 152. (50) Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 68.

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al-Kabīr al-Kattānī’s assessments of certain ḥadīths and the Black Stone, his Sufi recitations as well as his ritual actions, presenting him as a modelof Islamic knowledge and practice both in matters of the ḥajj and more generally. In Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s travelogue it is the author himself who fulfills this role as the authoritative Muslim protagonist. He documents his legal judgments on smoking, the iḥrām (ritual state and garment), quarantine and the use of European ships.

Besides these protagonists, the travelogues are filled with mention of the Islamic scholars they met on their journey to and from Mecca, in Medina but also in Cairo, Beirut and Damascus.(51) Meeting with Islamic scholars in search of Islamic knowledge (ṭalab al-ʿilm) has been a central aspect of the ḥajj and its journey for centuries, for Moroccans and other pilgrims travelling from other parts of the Islamic world.(52) Al-ʿAmrānī lists the scholars whom he and the group he travels with meet. He includes the ijāzas (scholarly licenses) that Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī handed out to scholars along the way, and notes the occasions when the shaykh corrected other scholars’ opinions, for example on smoking.(53) Similarly, the majority of Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s travelogue is devoted to his encounters with other prestigious Islamic scholars. His entries about these provide information about madhhab- and ṭarīqa-affiliations and the expertise of the scholars, and include

(51) While one might imagine that the greater journey speed would shorten the ḥajj journey (even despite the delay of the obligatory period of quarantine), the Kattānīs and their followings’ journeys lasted almost three quarters of a year, and they therefore had plenty of time to meet people. Al-ʿAmrānī left his home town Marrakech on 13 Rabīʿ II in 1321h and returned to Al- Jadīda on 28 Ṣafar 1322h, having traveled for more than ten months. Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al- Kattānī was away from home for eight months, leaving Fez on 17 Shaʿbān 1321h and returning on 13 Rabīʿ II 1322h. Before his departure, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī had contemplated residing in Medina for some time to extend the journey and avoid quarantine, as was often done at the time (Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 108). Whether he stayed longer in Medina to avoid quarantine I am not sure, but he certainly did not manage to circumvent it (Chiffoleau, Le Voyage à La Mecque, 196). (52) Sam Gellens, “The Search for Knowledge in Medieval Muslim Societies: A Comparative Approach,” in Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, ed. Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori (London: Routledge, 1990), 50–65; Van Leeuwen, “Euforie en ontberingen.” (53) Al-ʿAmrānī, 157–158.

22 the text-dependent ijāzas and text-independent ijāza ʿāmmas that Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī gives, but most often receives.(54)

Abdallah Laroui and Henri Munson, both relying on the biography of Muḥammad ibn Bāqir al-Kattānī, hint at the possibility that Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī was in contact with pan-Islamist circles in Cairo during this ḥajj journey.(55) Before and after the Kattānīs’ ḥajj journeys, he and his cousin Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī were outspoken in their criticism of French and also Spanish interference in Morocco’s affairs, and the Moroccan sultans’ docility in accepting Europe’s colonial meddling in Moroccan affairs.(56) Their criticism was greatest after they returned from their ḥajj journey in 1903-4. Unwilling to legitimize the French occupation of Morocco’s cities of Oujda and Casablanca in 1906, Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī supported the sultan’s brother’s coup in the Ḥāfiẓiyya revolt of 1908. In that same year, his cousin Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī published Naṣīḥat Ahl al-Islām, a recommendation to the Moroccan sultan (ʿAbd al-Ḥāfiẓ, r. 1908/9- 1912) on how to evade foreign interference and domination through Muslims uniting in their struggle against the infidel foreigners (jihād) and refraining from adopting their customs, ideas and laws, because accepting a government by non-Muslims would amount to polytheism and apostasy.(57) Furthermore, when Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī lost faith in Sultan ʿAbd al- Ḥafīdh’s ability to counter the French soon after his initial support, the shaykh

(54) For the encounters with fellow scholars, see Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 123–128, 134–141, 149–184, 188, 192–226, 234–235, 236–245, 248–278, 309–313. For my use of the labels “text-dependent” and “text-independent”, see: Sabine Schmidtke, “Forms and Functions of ‘Licences to Transmit’ (Ijāzas) in 18th-Century Iran: ʿAbd Allāh Al-Mūsawī Al-Jazāʾirī Al-Tustarī’s (1112-73/1701-59) Ijāza Kabīra,” in Speaking for Islam: Religious Authorities in Muslim Societies, ed. Gudrun Krämer and Sabine Schmidtke (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 95–127. (55) Abdallah Laroui, Les origines sociales et culturelles du nationalisme marocain, 1830-1912 (Paris: F. Maspero, 1977), 373. Laroui refers to Muḥammad al-Bāqir bin Muḥammad Al-Kattānī’s Tarjamat Al-Shaykh Muḥammad Al-Kattānī Al-Shahīd: Wa-Hiya Al-Musammāt Bi-Ashraf Al- Amānī Tarjamat Al-Shaykh Muḥammad Al-Kattānī (Tiṭwān: Maṭbaʿat al-Fajr, 1962), 88–101. (56) Munson Jr.,, Religion and Power in Morocco; Bazzaz, Forgotten Saints; Abdelilah Bouasria, Sufism and Politics in Morocco: Activism and Dissent (Routledge, 2015), 56–66. (57) Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco, 87–91; Al-Kattānī, Naṣı̄ ḥat Ahl al-Islām. No. 13 Rabi II, 1442 - December, 2020

initiated a revolt against the Sultan in 1909 and was captured and flogged to death for it.(58) A few years later Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī met the pan-Islamic political activist and publicist Shakīb Arslān in Medina, and was possibly also in contact with the influential Islamic reformist and publicist Rashīd Riḍā.(59) His Naṣīḥa (recommendation to the Sultan) was used in the anti-colonial Berber insurgences against the Spanish and French in the Rif War, and in Libya against the Italians.(60)

Yet, despite their evident anti-colonialism, there is not even a hint of contact with Cairo’s pan-Islamist circles in any of the travelogues of the Kattānīs and their followers. It might be that their authors chose not to record such matters for reasons of safety in a context of heavy policing and surveillance, even though they themselves were not subjects of a European colonial empire at that time. It might also be that the Kattānīs did not discuss anti-colonial politics with the people they met on their journeys, that they did not find the subject appropriate to a ḥajj travelogue, or that Al-ʿAmrānī was not included in these meetings. Whatever the case, political pan-Islamist encounters are absent from the travelogues.

This conspicuous absence notwithstanding, the Kattānīs’ accounts of their scholarly encounters can tell us something about the degree to which their connections reflected ideological and theological convergence between them and their contacts. The travelogues make clear that Islamic scholars from Morocco to Syria found a lot of common ground, sharing an interest in a textual corpus of the Quran, ḥadīth-literature and law treatises that are central to the Islamic tradition. This type of commonality was not new and did not exclude diversity, as Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s encounters

(58) Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco, 72–74. (59) Shakīb Arslān, Li-Mādhā Taʾakhkhara al-Muslimūn wa-li-Mādhā Taqaddama Ghayruhum?, 3rd ed. (Al-Qāhira: Maṭbaʿat ʿĪsā al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1358), 70; Amir Shakib Arsalan, Our Decline and Its Causes: A Diagnosis of the Symptoms of the Downfall of Muslims, trans. M. A. Shakoor, 2nd ed. (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1952), 66; Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco, 92. (60) Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco, 93.

24 make especially clear. He met with scholars from all madhhabs, Sufis as well as legal scholars.(61) He recorded with interest opinions and rituals that differed from his own, casually citing a ḥadīth that difference of opinion amongst religious scholars is a blessing (khilāf al-ʿulamāʾ raḥma) when discussing the timing of putting on the iḥrām.(62) Yet he also records surprise or shock at times. For example, in Mecca, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī met the Meccan shaykh ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd bin Muḥammad al-Firdawsī, muftī and qāḍī at the Isles of Riau in the Dutch Indies. When Al-Firdawsī wanted to smoke tobacco in Al-Kattānī’s presence, the two men began to fiercely discuss the legal status of smoking tobacco. Only in the end does Al-Kattānī’s attitude towards Al-Firdawsī soften, when Al-Firdawsī makes clear that the legal status of smoking is actually subject to great variety within the umma of Muḥammad and that Al-Kattānī will not be able to get the umma to agree on this. Al- Kattānī agrees that they will not reach an agreement and they part in peace.(63)

The travelogue of Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī also shows that greater connectivity could also be paired with a heightened consciousness of unsurpassable differences in ideas across the Islamic world. For example, when meeting Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s friend Muḥammad Maḥmūd al-Shanqīṭī in Cairo, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī records being unpleasantly surprised that Muḥammad al-Shanqīṭī disapproves of the Sufi concept ofkashf (spiritual and esoteric ability to understand divine truths), tomb visitations, tabarruk and tawassul (referring to the entreaty to and intercession of saints).(64) Al-Kattānī’s was also shocked when he saw that Al-Shanqīṭī kept his shoes on when praying or entering a mosque. Less shocking is that the two men

(61) In her chapter on Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī, Bettina Dennerlein briefly mentions the intense diversity of his scholarly encounters during his ḥajj journey, to reinforce her argument that Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī’s intellectual milieu was particularly inclusivist. Dennerlein, “Asserting Religious Authority in Late 19th/early 20th Century Morocco,” 140. (62) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 145. (63) Ibidem, 163–166. See also Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī on the smoking of tobacco: Al-Kattānī, 114–118, 285, 314; Al-ʿAmrānī, Al-Luʾluʾa al-Fāshiyya, 157. (64) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 134–135.

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disagreed on whether the name ʿUmar was declinable or not according to Arabic grammar.(65) Meeting the Syrian scholar ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Bīṭār, Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī denounced Al-Bīṭār’s call for ijtihād and turning anew to the ḥadīth to deduce legal rules, labelling this a great vice and a devilish scheme.(66) These strong divisions and disagreements indicate the perhaps surprising unconnectedness that also came with increased connection. It made Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī acutely aware of the differences between himself and some of his fellow Islamic scholars in Cairo, Damascus and the Ḥijāz, which genuinely surprised and shocked him on occasion.

Incidentally, the sharp differences between these scholars are noteworthy because Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī is often labeled, for instance by Henri Munson, Bettina Dennerlein and Sahar Bazzaz, as an Islamic revivalist, a reformist or a Salafi, although of a peculiar kind, both scripturalist and maraboutic.(67) Indeed, the maraboutic was a self-evident aspect of Al- Kattānī’s idea of Islam and in this respect he differed from many other Islamic reformists, as his encounter with ʿAbduh’s friend Al-Shanqīṭī illustrates.

Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī’s views also differed from Islamic revivalism or reformism in some other respects – at least at the time of this ḥajj journey at the beginning of the twentieth century. First, while condemnation of taqlīd (conformity to (legal) precedent) and a call for ijtihād (independent reasoning) are often considered central aspects of Islamic reformism in the 19th and 20th century, even though it came with different variations, Al- Kattānī sharply differs from this in his travelogue. Second, while many Islamic reformists were critical of colonial domination, they varied in the extent to which they opposed all European and Christian influence, while Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar Al-Kattānī was quite radical in his rejection, as we have seen. Furthermore, he

(65) Ibidem, 134–135. (66) Ibidem, 259–260. In contrast, Sahar Bazzaz mentions Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī’s endorsement and application of ijtihād. Bazzaz, Forgotten Saints, 91–93. (67) Munson Jr., Religion and Power in Morocco, 89–92; Dennerlein, “Asserting Religious Authority in Late 19th/early 20th Century Morocco,” 142; Bazzaz, Forgotten Saints, 89–91.

26 does not seem to have shared many of the reformists’ common sympathy for science and technology. From Al-Kattānī’s description of the quarantine station at Al-Tūr it is clear that he has no faith at all in the medical insights into public health displayed there, objecting to quarantine as futile and even harmful.(68)

Relying on this travelogue one might therefore question whether Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī can productively be grouped with these reformists under a label such as “salafi” or “revivalist”. Taken together, his views in this respect might have been closer to scholars whom he met during his journey who are often labelled conservative or traditionalist, such as Yūsuf al-Nabahānī in Beirut and Salīm al-Bishrī in Cairo, who were both critical of Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s opinions in matters of ijtihād and taqlīd as well as of modern science, for example, and who were also critical of European colonialism and Westernization in general.(69) The differences highlight the care with which these labels should be used, as the boundaries between intellectual movements were still porous and fluid, at least at this point of time.

For this article, it is less important whether we characterize him as a Salafi, a reformist or a revivalist. What is more important is that these travelogues convey a journey in which Muslims were the protagonists and the most significant people the Kattānīs sought to meet. Also, the meaning of these encounters does not lie in their anti-colonial purposes (despite colonial archives’ interest in these). Rather, in these travelogues the encounters’ significance lies in meeting Islamic scholars to gather Islamic knowledge. The quest for knowledge is not a new aspect of the Moroccan ḥajj journey: it had long been a purpose of this journey for Islamic scholars, and particularly so at this time when the pilgrims’ mobility was greatly facilitated by steam.

(68) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 232–233. (69) Al-Kattānī, Al-Riḥla al-Sāmiyya, 138, 236–238. On Al-Nabahānī, see David Dean Commins, Islamic Reform: Politics and Social Change in Late Ottoman Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 117–118; Marwa Elshakry, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 212–213. On Al-Bishrī, see Indira Falk Gesink, Islamic Reform and Conservatism: Al-Azhar and the Evolution of Modern Sunni Islam (London: Tauris Academic Publishers, 2010), 199–205.

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In addition to revealing global mobility, the travelogues’ accounts of the Kattānīs’ long-distance connections with Islamic scholars also had a very local function. In Al-ʿAmrānī’s travelogue of his journey in the entourage of his shaykh Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī, local relations within the Kattāniyya order are most prominently forged and strengthened by his records of Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī’s actions and opinions and exchange of ijāzas with other scholars. In this sense, Al-ʿAmrānī’s whole travelogue is to the greater honour and glory of Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī – and next to that, of Al-ʿAmrānī himself. For Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī, too, his encounters with Islamic scholars and the many ijāzas he collected along the way to and from Mecca and documented meticulously in his travelogue probably increased his authority at home.

Conclusion By centering on Islamic scholars and places, these travelogues celebrate the type of knowledge and practice that Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Kabīr al-Kattānī and Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī stood for. They meticulously document the Islamic places they visited and the deeds and opinions of both cousins. They relate the topics they discussed with fellow scholars, such as the corpus of ḥadīth, dhikr practices, the study of the Quran (tafsīr), the origin of shrine visitations and the legality of smoking according to Islamic law. All in all, the accounts of the Kattānīs and their followers’ journeys read as a reflection of and search for Islamic knowledge (ṭalab al-ʿilm), both in theory and in practice (ʿilm wa-ʿamal). They did not seek to focus on a world of sanitary regulations, steam technology or European dress and other customs, nor did they reflect a new conceptual vocabulary to express duration and distance. Instead, they aimed for Islamic knowledge and practice, representing part of that full repository of human actions and creations “that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced, and to which Muslims acting as Muslims have attached themselves.”(70) This is what turning to these pilgrims’ own writings yields.

(70) Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 356–357. Cited in Alireza Doostdar, “Review of Shahab Ahmed, ‘What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic,’” Shiʿi Studies Review, 2017, 273–78.

28 The travelogues are in this sense a continuation of a genre of Moroccan ḥajj travel writing in which visiting Islamic places and meeting Islamic scholars in search of Islamic knowledge has been a prominent feature. This does not mean that the Kattānīs or their travelogues should be considered a relic of the past, somehow untouched by time and history. It is evident that the new technology of steam vitally changed their journey, allowing them to travel by steamship and train, which exposed them to non-Muslim spaces and non-Muslim people and presented them with new challenges. Al-ʿAmrānī worries about imitating European Christian customs, while Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī discusses whether using European Christian steamships and the internationally-imposed stay in quarantine in Tor is allowed in Islam.

Moreover, the new context added to the meanings of the ḥajj, its journey and their narration. In the travelogues recounting the ḥajj of the Kattānīs, the age-old ritual, the sacred space of the Ḥijāz, and the standard elements of recording the journey there took on extra meaning against a new background of steam, imperialism and globalization. For Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī, the possibility of travelling to Mecca by steamship made the ḥajj an obligation for Moroccan Muslims, unlike the way his father and other Mālikī jurists saw it. His fear that Morocco was besieged by colonial aggressors made the Ḥijāz acquire the meaning of an uncolonized oasis, blissfully isolated from a world dominated by “enemies of Islam” and therefore the place to go as a Muslim in this age of imperialism, and a space to which he would eventually emigrate. This context of imperialism thus gave standard and genre-determined elements of Moroccan ḥajj travelogues new meanings when incorporated in the travelogues of the age. They might be seen as ways of critiquing and defying the European dominance.

Reading Muḥammad bin Jaʿfar al-Kattānī’s hagiographical work Salwat al-Anfās against the context of the state-led reforms in Morocco in that time, Sahar Bazzaz interprets the work as a way of defying, whether consciously or not, the state’s authority in leading the reform. According to her, the book

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about the holy men of Fez and their graves reasserted the power and authority of the sharīfs, the ʿālims and the shaykhs upon which the Kattāniyya order and their programmes of Islamic revivalist reform drew, in contrast to centralized paths of reform.(71) Similarly, read against a context of imperialism, one might interpret the travelogues of the Kattānīs’ ḥajj journey as an Islamic journey to Islamic places and people in order to gain knowledge about Islam and practice its rituals in defiance of a world in which Islam and Muslims were increasingly rendered marginal.

In sum, for the the Kattānīs’ travelogues, the ḥajj in the industrialized world was not the paradoxical means of “its own undoing”, to refer to Nile Green’s provocative article title again.(72) These travelogues do not predominantly mirror the technologies that transformed this age, or the new spaces or people that came with this new means of transport. Nor do they reflect the colonial officials’ interest in pandemics and pan-Islamism, of which colonial archives unmistakably bear the imprint. Instead, drawing on centuries of ḥajj travel writing, the Kattānīs narrated their journeys as an Islamic journey through an Islamic geography, as Muslims meeting other Muslims and gathering Islamic knowledge from fellow Islamic scholars along the way. Read this way, their travelogues reveal themselves as a reassertion of Islam and a reiteration of its relevance in a context in which they felt Islam was under siege, whether this was done consciously or not. It was one of the ways that the ḥajj did not lose but gained meaning in these travelogues in an age of imperialism, steam and globalization.

(71) Bazzaz, “Reading Reform beyond the State,” 8. (72) Green, “The Hajj as Its Own Undoing.”

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About the Author

Ammeke Kateman studied Arabic and History at the University of Amsterdam. After obtaining her PhD at the same university, she participated in a research project on Arabic Mecca travelogues in an age of Islamic reformism (1850-1945) within the research programme “Mecca. More magical than Disneyland”: Modern articulations of pilgrimage to Mecca. Her monograph Muḥammad ʿAbduh and His Interlocutors: Conceptualizing Religion in a Globalizing World was published by Brill in 2019 and other work was published in journals such as Philological Encounters (2018) and Die Welt des Islams (2020).

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