Among the duties God imposes upon every Muslim is a pilgrimage to the holy places in and around Mecca. Not only is it a religious ritual filled with blessings for the millions who make the journey annually, but it is also a social, political and commercial experience that for centuries has set in motion a flood of travellers across the world's continents. Whatever its outcome - spiritual enrichment, cultural exchange, financial gain or ruin - the road to Mecca has long been an exhilarating human adventure. By collecting the first-hand accounts of the travellers and shaping their experiences into a detailed narrative, this volume provides a literary history of the central ritual of Islam from its remote pre-Islamic origins to the end of the Hashimite Kingdom of the Jijaz in 1926. Air travel has now converted what was once a lengthy land or sea voyage into a matter of hours, but the accounts of that earlier, more arduous experience on foot or camel, under sail or steam, are extraordinary. Although overwhelming numbers of travellers have been driven chiefly by piety and God's command, some have been European frauds, adventurers or explorers drawn by the lure, and the danger, of a forbidden experience.
F. E. Peters
Francis Edward Peters is Professor Emeritus of History, Religion and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. A native of NYC, where he attended Regis H.S. and still lives, he was trained at St. Louis University in Classical Languages (AB, MA) and in Philosophy (Ph.L.), and received his Ph.D. from Princeton in Islamic Studies. Peters, though formally trained as both a classicist and an Islamicist, is best known as a historian of religion, a field where he was a pioneer, and is now the leading scholar, in the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is a subject on which he has written more than twenty books, most notably the two volume The Monotheists (Princeton, 2003), The Children of Abraham. A New Edition (Princeton, 2004) and The Voice, The Word, The Books: The Sacred Scriptures of the Jews, Christians and Muslims (Princeton 2007). His most recent, Jesus and Muhammad: Parallel Tracks, Parallel Lives appeared from Oxford University Press in 2010, and he has contributed as well to the Oxford Bibliographies Online. .
In addition to his more than forty years teaching everything from Homer to Hasidism in the classrooms of NYU (where he chaired both the Classics and the Middle Eastern Studies departments and won a number of teaching awards), as well as accepting visiting professorships and guest lectureships at many of America's and the Middle East's top universities, Peters has been featured on CBS' TV series Sunrise Semester and on a variety of TV documentaries and served as New York's WPIX TV anchorman for the original moon landing. He has three audio courses on tape and CD in the Barnes and Noble Portable Professor series. He is presently serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City and has assisted in curating public exhibitions at Holy Cross College, The British Library and The New York Public Library.
