Pilgrimage

Explanation

Pilgrimage is read in the book as a complex religious, human, political, and social phenomenon, not merely a ritual observance. Its importance lies in showing how spatial and temporal elements become symbols, and how identity, legitimacy, and the sacred are reconfigured through rites.

Referred to by

• The impossibility of restoring the first Islam
• The vertical and horizontal dimensions of pilgrimage
• Inner religious experience transcends mass manifestations
• The distinction between the immanent and the transcendent order
• Pilgrimage is a rite that reshapes the sacred and the human
• Pilgrimage is a religious and human phenomenon
• Pilgrimage and the continuity of older elements
• Pilgrimage carries a semantic and ontological transformation
• Pilgrimage reveals the inadequacy of two readings
• Heritage testimonies reveal the accumulation of meanings of pilgrimage
• Al-Ghazali and al-Qummi endow pilgrimage with cosmic spiritual meanings
• Al-Ghazali links pilgrimage to death and the afterlife
• Later jurisprudence empties pilgrimage of its spiritual horizon
• Jurisprudence shifts toward formalism
• Islamic scientific thought remained governed by sanctity and tension
• The Qur’an reconstructs pilgrimage within the horizon of monotheism and the new sacred
• The Qur’an reframes pilgrimage as a sacred space of equality
• The Qur’anic reading of pilgrimage reveals historical and theological assumptions
• A contemporary reading of the Qur’an requires moving beyond traditional interpretation
• Al-Qummi expands pilgrimage through cosmic projections
• Equality and spirituality in the rites
• The implicit assumptions in the verses on pilgrimage
• The anthropological approach reveals the similarity of the sacred
• The transfer of functions to human intermediaries
• The history of interpretation reveals the broadening of pilgrimage’s meanings and then their juristic narrowing
• Renewing religious thought is a condition for preserving religion and liberating reason
• Transforming the pagan pilgrimage into an Islamic pilgrimage
• Rationalizing acts of worship in al-Ghazali
• Reading pilgrimage as a transcendent passage
• Reading the Qur’an is renewed when revelation is understood as a historical symbolic discourse that liberates meaning and religion from orthodoxy and politicization
• The future of pilgrimage is tied to renewing Islamic thought