Introduction: Muslim Pilgrimage through the lens of women's new mobilities

This chapter introduces the book’s major aim: a reconfiguration of our understanding of modern Muslim pilgrimage through the lens of women’s new mobilities. Taking the pilgrimage to Mecca as a distinctively Muslim contribution to globalization with far-reaching political, economic and social ramifications, it provides a theoretical reflection on the interplay between Muslim women’s physical and social mobility, and its embeddedness in the various social relations, identifications and power structures that shape women’s life-worlds. It does so by drawing on and introducing the wide variety of women’s hajj and other Muslim pilgrimage practices and experiences discussed in the anthropological and historical case studies in the volume. The chapter argues that combining gender theory with mobility studies and an everyday religion approach helps to better understand the agency of female pilgrims as mobile actors who appropriate, re-negotiate and re-create authoritative ways of performing and making sense of various pilgrimage traditions. Moreover, it introduces Muslim women’s pilgrimage worlds as a cross-cutting research theme that contributes to pilgrimage research and Muslim travel and mobility studies in general, and offers new perspectives and insights in the field of Muslim pilgrimage studies in particular.