Hajj the Holy Journey: The Hajj Route through Postcards/Kutsal Yolculuk Hac: Kartpostallarla Hac Yolu
Elif M. Gokcigdem
Murat Kargılı; Ömer Çolakolu, Nafiz Akehirliolu
trans. 2014, Denizler Kitabevi, 978-9-94426-449-5, 150try/$67 hb.
This book offers a vivid, multidimensional window on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Makkah whose roots go back to the Prophet Abraham, through the medium of nearly 300 historic postcards dating from the 1870s to the 1950s. Kargili is an independent scholar. His work documents in English and Turkish the Hajj’s spiritual, cultural, socioeconomic and political aspects as he takes the reader on a visual journey through annotated postcards that collectively reveal the pilgrimage’s impact on the diverse range of communities from which the participants originate, highlighting the routes they took to Makkah and the holy sites they visited. Despite the ever-evolving methods of travel—by land, sea and air—affecting the duration and the difficulty of the journey, these postcards remind us of pilgrims’ will to answer the most precious invitation of their lives, portraying a very human need to preserve and share a memory.
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