specialised agent and under government regulation at home as well as in Saudi Arabia, is the norm. With all the contemporary media and political noise about Islam, the changing nature of the pilgrimage and the individual experience of undertaking it are in danger of being lost or relegated to a few lines in alocal newspaper or glimpses of family videos and photos. How do different pilgrims now live the pilgrimage, more than a century after the Jeddah? What stories does apilgrim tell of such a regulated and, for many, exhausting as well as transcendent experience? What kinds of reflection does the haj provoke after more than a hundred years of transformation? Abdellah Hammoudi’s narrative, A Season in Mecca, offers one response. It is as much a subtle, complex meditation as it is an example of the ‘art of reportage’ (for which it won a Lettre Ulysses Award in Berlin in 2005). It is a commentary on one Arab intellectual’s modern dilemmas as well as on the haj as he experienced it in 1999 and as he continues to apprehend it in his writing. Perhapsitwould be better to say, as he struggles toapprehend it, because this sense of struggle gives the writing much of its deep interest. The book records ‘the eruption’ of the event of the pilgrimage into his life, the sometimes violent ways in which that life was disturbed, and the changing shape of the anthropological project in which the pilgrimage had its seemingly conventional

beginnings: the Guggenheim Foundation Award, the conversations with friends at Princeton, the professional rites and trappings of research carried out by a distinguished anthropologist. The ‘malaise’ that surprises Hammoudi as the date for leaving Princeton and his family draws near haunts the whole book, between the lines as well as in intense episodes of self-questioning. Who was this person who was ‘going on the pilgrimage’, ‘en anthropologue’, as he initially imagined, for research? There are obvious schematic answers. A Moroccan trained academically in Morocco and France, he has lived in Princeton, ‘this magnificent, chilly campus’ where he feels himself immured, where ‘nothing speaks to me,’ since 1991. A Muslim who hadnot practised his religion since adolescence, he could in some senses fit in easily enough in France, America and on return visits to Morocco without having tomake specifically religious accommodations of body, diet, dress, ritual. The new project, however, so much more than a project, sparked its own more profound interrogations. He had already been confronted fifteen years earlier in a Moroccan village by the direct challenge: ‘And you, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your own folks on this day of sacrifice?’ (The French uses tu, which in context might be taken to accord little respect to the addressee.) At that point, the response that he simply wanted to observe different ways of carrying out the celebrations in different places seemed sufficient. He studied rituals, did

not perform them, the intellectual’s distance with its occasionally acknowledged and suspect envy of those who do. The questioner politely did not pursue the matter, did not ask ‘what sort of a person are you? With whom and to whom do you identify, belong?’ But now Hammoudi faces quite different interlocutors (as well as a changing inner dialogue with himself). How might other pilgrims interrogate him and what answers might he give that would make any sense to them? It was one thing to conceive the project in terms of reporting on the slightest details of what people said and did; attending to the sense pilgrims gave to their sequenced acts; deriving new theoretical points of view from what the pilgrims recounted about their experiences. Quite another, this time around, to be inthe pilgrimage, performing its rites. Moreover, what exactly was the role of intention here, personal, anthropological, religious? Certainly, in religious terms the nature of one’s intention (niyyain Arabic) is crucial to the acceptability of one’s pilgrimage to God. Fellow pilgrims might have their own sharp opinions, too, about someone who said he was ‘studying’, despite the Muslim injunction that God’s is the judgment. By 1999, the world had shown itself far more challenging than the Moroccan peasant. ‘Islam’ had become a matter of intense, sometimes vitriolic debate and polemic, especially in the United States. Princeton, like other universities, is not immune from wider politics, especially concerning IsraelPalestine relations. Anyone who teaches

anthropological approaches to the study of Islam in America knows that theclassroom is an increasingly fraught place. Challenging the concept of an eternally existing ‘Muslim mind’ is just the beginning. Not much comfort in the university, then, for the deracinated Moroccan intellectual. Given Hammoudi’s understandable contempt for Arab politics, there was no comfort to be had in that direction either: marginalised and exiled intellectuals scattered around the world orin jail, hypertrophied autocratic Arab states, and the accelerating ‘fragmentation of national structures and norms in the postcolonial period’ accentuate only too painfully the triumphalist and militarist strength of the US and Israel. Given his doubts about his place in America, his feeling of being ‘the ghost of myself’ (fantôme de soi) and his position as someone whose friends knew he was not pratiquant, the coming pilgrimage threw its brutally relevant ‘and you, what are you doing here?’ at Hammoudi in a highly charged personal and socio-political context. Add to that the sudden awareness that in terms of what had once been his own Moroccan cultural and social context, he would not know, as he told his wife, ‘how to behave in this piece of white cloth’ – the ihramgarments betokening the state of purity into which pilgrims enter, essentially two pieces of seamless white cloth for men – and one can see with what force the pilgrimage might erupt into a life in and around which powerful forces were already roiling. The decision to take on the project must itself have been a response to impulses beyond

6 london review of books 19 october 2006