Makkah's hinterworlds: Jeddah, the Indian Ocean Hajj, and Southeast Asia

Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. Michael Christopher Low. Columbia University Press, New York, USA, 2020, pp. 416. ISBN 978-0-231-19077-0 (pbk). A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Ulrike Freitag. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, USA, 2020, pp. xvi + 392. ISBN 978-1-108-47879-3 (hbk). Indonesians and Their Arab World: Guided Mobility among Labor Migrants and Mecca Pilgrims. Mirjam Lücking. Cornell University Press and Southeast Asia Programme Publications, Ithaca, NY, USA and London, UK, 2021, pp. xiv + 261. ISBN 978-1-501-75311-4 (hbk). Considerations of global or world cities and world city networks have long been analytical and empirical endeavours in urban studies (Taylor, 2004). This has been supplemented by discussions of comparative urbanism and planetary urbanization (Robinson, 2022). There are however, other tracks of urban studies. For instance, Paul Wheatley (1921–1999),1 the first editor (1953–1958) of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (then known as the Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography) in his final (posthumously published) and remarkable work, The Places Where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands, Seventh Through the Tenth Centuries,2 epitomizes the longstanding interest in the idea of the 'Islamic city' and efforts to elicit the character of the urban fabric of the Islamic world (Abu-Lughod, 1987). Yet such rich and deeply historical literatures have been marginal to much of the recent debates about comparative urbanism and planetary urbanization, and in particular, the cities of the Hijaz (the western side of Saudi Arabia), seldom feature in the analytical and empirical fields of comparative and critical urban studies, heritage studies, planetary urbanization, and world cities scholarship (for notable exceptions see Jeong, 2023; Buitelaar & van Leeuwen, 2023; Arafat, 2022; Bsheer, 2020; Lombardo, 2016). This is in stark contrast to the burgeoning scholarship on Persian Gulf cities (most often Dubai, then Doha) (see, for example, Assaf & Pagès-El Karoui, 2021; Khalaf, 2006; Mohammad & Sidaway, 2016; Panwar, 2024) which find themselves as emblematic cases of world-cityness. Nowhere is this uneven geography more evident than the case of Mecca (hereafter Makkah3). The birthplace of the Prophet of Islam was termed the 'More-Than-World City' by Sidaway (2023: 389), and is 'amongst the world's most connected cities, whilst also being a quotidian reference-point for a quarter of humanity' (Allouache & Sidaway, 2023: 69). The Hajj—the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Makkah, and the fifth pillar of Islam—is the greatest single mobility event annually in the world, and one of the largest ongoing peaceful gatherings in history (Aljazeera, 2023). It is, consequently, for the abovementioned reasons, that this review essay considers Makkah's 'hinterworlds', a concept framed in a different context by Peter Taylor (2001; 2004), in contrast to a local hinterland. In April 2022, Saudi Arabia eased COVID-19 restrictions after banning foreign visitors for two years and increased Hajj capacity. The Kingdom is looking to accommodate 30 million Hajj and Umrah4 pilgrims and more than 100 million tourists a year as part of its 'Saudi Vision 2030' (KSA, 2022a; The Economist, 2022). The 'Saudi Vision 2030' is Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman's (commonly known as MBS) programme of post-oil economic diversification. Additional projects include expansion of Al-Masjid al-Haram ('the Holy Mosque'), a high-speed railway connecting Makkah and Madinah, the launch of a digital platform (https://www.nusuk.sa/) to manage pilgrim arrivals and permits and other 'smart' technologies (Arab News, 2022b; see also Mehmood & Hasnain, 2023). We are decidedly at a key moment in the Saudi Arabian modernization project that began with the discovery of oil in 1938 and was greatly accelerated by the oil price boom of the 1970s. Jeddah and Makkah are venues for spectacular urbanism, featuring high-rises, shopping malls, and an expansion of hotels and other infrastructure to accommodate a steep rise in visitors (Barau, 2019; Mater, 2016, Zand, 2010). The long-distance flights, buses and cars, the daily electricity and water consumption, the accelerated bottling and commodification of Zamzam water, and the reliance on low-wage migrant workers, complicates the 'sustainability' claims that also feature in the 2030 plan (Arab News, 2022a; Grand & Wolff, 2020; KSA, 2022b). Jeddah, the second-largest Saudi city, is frequently discussed as the arrival port (and airport) and a stopover point for pilgrims. While parts of Jeddah's historic district were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014, the wider city is increasingly being redeveloped. The redevelopment of Jeddah pays attention to areas surrounding the old city which have 'vernacular urban patterns', and buildings and small alleys that make for 'perfect climatic performance' dating back to the 18th century (Anonymous, 2022: 356). However, since 2021, large-scale demolition and forcible evictions have been ongoing to make way for the 'Jeddah Central Project', an urban renewal and tourism project which is part of 'Saudi Vision 2030' that has attracted criticism and some local dissatisfaction (Anonymous, 2022; Hazbun, 2022). It is in these contexts that many scholars will value the deep historicizations and transregional scales mobilized in Imperial Mecca, A History of Jeddah and Indonesians and Their Arab World. The books examine the imperial legacies of Ottoman and British rule in the Hijaz, the making of the modern Hajj, urban transformations in Jeddah and Makkah, and the sometimes perilous journeys of pilgrims and migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia to the Arabian Peninsula, and back. Each of these books has already received engaged reviews (For Imperial Mecca, see Middle East Monitor, 2021; Neumann, 2021; The New Arab, 2022; Choudhury, 2023; Freitag, 2022; Husain, 2021; Quamar, 2022; Slight, 2022; for A History of Jeddah, see Bishara, 2021; Middle East Monitor, 2020; Mills, 2021; Reilly, 2023; Willis, 2022; for Indonesians and Their Arab World, see Al Qurtuby, 2022; Chaplin, 2022; Kaptein, 2022; Missbach, 2022; Oktadiana, 2023; Rinaldo, 2022; Robinson, 2022; Wildan, 2021). I, therefore, want to consider connections, uneven development across the Arabian Peninsula, South and Southeast Asia, and the accentuating inequalities, accumulation, and dispossessions visible in such urban spectacles and visions of 'sustainability'. I, then, conclude with further reflections on implications regarding the politics of knowledge production in geography and urban studies. In Imperial Mecca, Michael Christopher Low explores how 'European imperialism, the advent of steamship transport, and the increasingly interconnected nature of the Muslim world changed the traditional complexion of Ottoman pilgrimage administration' (Low, 2020: 3). The rise of European colonial rule in the Muslim world altered the Ottoman Empire's relationship with non-Ottoman Muslims. Foreign pilgrims' acquisition of imperial citizenship and subsequently postcolonial nationalities led European powers to claim a right to interfere in the affairs of the Hajj and Muslim holy places. As such, Low views the Hijaz as 'caught between two imperial worlds, an Ottoman Island adrift on a colonial ocean, lost in the gaping chasm between the area-studies regions that we now artificially divide into the Middle East and South Asia' (Low, 2020: 5). The book proceeds in three parts. The first, Extraterritorial Frontiers, focuses on Ottoman sovereignty and the empire's practices of semi-autonomous rule over the Sharifate of Makkah and the Hijaz. European imperial powers, and particularly the British Raj, leveraged unequal international treaties and foreign consular representatives regulating Muslim colonial subjects during the Hajj. It unpacks how the British were able to gain a much stronger position on the Arabian Peninsula through increasingly aggressive extraterritorial projection. The second part, Ecologies of Empire, explores the ways in which the Ottoman Empire had to grapple with the epidemiological consequences from the colonial (mis)management of British India's public health and environment. Repeated waves of cholera and plague ravaged India, and by extension, the Hajj. The Ottomans implemented public health reforms in the form of quarantine regulations, and new urban sanitation and water infrastructures. The Ottomans leveraged this deeper involvement into the affairs of the Hijaz to consolidate power over the Arab frontier. However, we come to learn of how urban Hijazis, the Bedouin, and the Sharifate of Makkah resisted and even sabotaged such infrastructural interventions, leading to local conflict. The evolution of Ottoman public health controls in the Hijaz were seen as a capitulation to international pressure while, in fact, it also suited Istanbul's programme of technoscientific modernization and efforts to extend its reach in the empire's Arab frontiers. Parallels with the COVID-19 pandemic, in terms of challenges in implementing contested quarantine regulations, strict border controls, and the disciplining and scapegoating of vulnerable and marginalized communities, are striking. In the third part, Managing Mobility, Low focuses on the dawn of steam age mobility. Low explains how the steamship pilgrimage became a vehicle for the globalization of cholera outbreaks and epidemic diseases on one hand. On the other, British Indian officials feared that lengthy stays in the Arabian Peninsula would radicalize Muslim imperial subjects, such as by encountering anticolonial dissidents or pan-Islamic activists. The growth of steamship pilgrimage compelled new forms of Ottoman and inter-imperial governance; from border controls and passports to pilgrimage transport services like steamships, railways, pilgrimage guides, and camel rentals. As a result of this evolving epidemiological and mobility landscape, European colonial empires strengthened their position and set the terms of the Hajj in ways that affected millions of pilgrims and further challenged the world's only remaining Muslim major imperial power. The pathologization of pious mobilities as part of wider British vs Ottoman inter-imperial struggles in the Hijaz in the 19th century is an important part of the story that Low narrates well. The Indian Ocean steamship Hajj was a profitable venture and pilgrims became a significant source of revenue. Moreover, Muslim pilgrims, as colonial subjects deserving of consular assistance and 'protection', required access and representation and privileges that deepened colonial surveillance of the Hajj, echoing subsequent concerns about the presumed threats of Muslim mobilities (Willis, 2017). Imperial Mecca unpacks the historical backdrop against which we can understand the contemporary surveillance of Muslim border crossings and mobilities. Low shows how histories of the Arabian Peninsula and the Hijaz require an engagement across the overlapping fields of Indian Ocean, South Asian, and imperial histories. In that sense, Imperial Mecca is a reminder of the insights that can be gained by mobilising a transregional approach which considers relations between regions, and ventures into 'areas that can be normally outside of [our] primary specialties, stretching a bit beyond [our] respective comfort zones' for deeper historicization of the present (Jadaliyya, 2021). Ulrike Freitag's A History of Jeddah, offers a biography of Jeddah, also known as the 'Bride of the Red Sea' (or the 'Gate of Makkah'). Jeddah has received relatively scant attention in human geography and urban studies despite having been a historically important and famously cosmopolitan port city for Indian Ocean trade routes and pilgrims travelling to Makkah and Medina. Freitag traces the city's history and vibrant cosmopolitanism from the late Ottoman period to more recent times. The Saudi saying, 'Jeddah is different' (Jeddah Ghair) serves as a guiding notion through the book's eight largely chronologically arranged chapters. The chapters systematically unpack how the socio-cultural and economic lives of different groups of migrants from the Ottoman empire, including influences from North Africa and the Indian Ocean world, produced the urban built environment of the city, well before the discovery of oil. The book draws from a wide range of sources, and Freitag is refreshingly straightforward about gaps and limitations (Freitag, 2020: 27–31). However, the all-encompassing style and temporal breadth of the writing works against the readers' efforts to keep track of how conceptual engagements with 'cosmopolitanism' and the focus on conviviality, evolves across the rich literatures and historical sources discussed. It would, however, seem that a notion of 'cosmopolitanism' that would not bind itself to Western modernity would require mobilizing decolonial and critical Muslim geographies and studies framing, engaging, and building on 'categories, interpretations, and terminology that are intrinsic to intellectual traditions within Islam' and their manifestations in Jeddah's urban fabric (Sidaway, 2023: 388). A History of Jeddah is a timely, comprehensive publication. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chapter 8, "The Disappearance and Return of Old Jeddah", which concludes the book but also serves as a gateway and invitation to chart Jeddah's current position in the crosshairs of the Saudi state's urban modernization and redevelopment efforts (Freitag, 2020: 328–44). Jeddah is making headlines as part of a massive $20 billion urban development project, leading to large-scale demolitions and 24-hour eviction notices, local resistance in the form of social media campaigns (e.g. using the hashtag #HadadJeddah, Jeddah Demolition) and graffiti. The destruction and eviction of communities threatens its reputation as a hospitable port city. Jeddah's circumstances parallel MBS's NEOM megacity project that resulted in the arrest of more than 50 tribespeople for resisting evictions (Business Insider, 2022; Elsheshtawy, 2022; Middle East Eye, 2023). A History of Jeddah therefore pairs well with Low's Imperial Mecca, which contextualizes Jeddah and Makkah from the fruitful macro entry point of Ottoman and British conflicts and tensions in the Hijaz. Freitag's contribution will be of interest across disciplines and to scholars of heritage studies, vernacular architecture, and urban renewal, complementing ongoing conversations on geopolitical conflicts and tensions, authoritarian durability, energy transition and oil. Although it might be less digestible for a wider audience, A History of Jeddah is undoubtedly a key reference point on the history of the city for scholars of the Arabian Peninsula. In Indonesians and Their Arab World, Mirjam Lücking compares the experiences of two groups of Indonesians—Makkah pilgrims and mostly female care and domestic workers—who travel to the Saudi Arabia, and back. Lücking systematically unpacks how Indonesian migrants make their journeys to the distant locus of the Islamic world meaningful. Specifically, the notion of 'guided mobility', a play on Indonesia's 'Guided Democracy', which refers to 'Sukarno's attempt to harmonize national, religious, and communist ideologies (…) in order to realise his idea of the Indonesian nation-state' and bring political stability, forms a central analytical framework (Lücking, 2021: 39–40). Lücking defines 'guided mobility' according to three dimensions: firstly, 'interpersonal guidance through social actors, like guides and intermediaries'; secondly, 'institutional and legal guidance through laws, regulations, and administrative procedures'; thirdly, 'normative guidance through situated representations, including embodied physical representations like dress codes and uniform and the representations of Others and selves' (Lücking, 2021: 13). The notion, therefore, conceptualizes the ways in which 'the result of their spatial mobility is socio-cultural continuity rather than change' (Lücking, 2021: 198). Interestingly, while both groups of migrants travel under different administrative procedures, passports, and regulations, pilgrims and migrant workers converge in and around the pilgrimage in Makkah. Migrant workers can also perform Umrah without the more frequent organized group experience of other pilgrims. Conversely, some pilgrims, due to long waiting lists for the Hajj, use an Umrah visa to enter Saudi Arabia and then seek to stay on and work. As Indonesian pilgrims are the largest group in the Hajj each year, there are job opportunities within the pilgrimage industry as local guides, assistants, chefs, interpreters and shopping aides (Lücking, 2021: 170–1). Readers unfamiliar with Indonesian history will also find a historical overview of Indonesia's encounters with the Arab world and the growth of Indonesia's migrant labour regime in the first two chapters. Notably, those interested in current debates on the ongoing Islamization of Indonesia, and tensions between Islamism, politics, and tradition in contemporary Indonesian politics will find an insightful engagement in Chapter 2 (Lücking, 2021: 56–106). Journalists and scholars continue to debate the complex and diverse manifestations of Indonesia's 'conservative turn' in the post-1998 democratization. Indeed, whether the 'guided mobility' and the encounters of Indonesian migrants reshapes their representation of the Arab world in ways that contribute to Islamization is an important question that will make Indonesians and Their Arab World of interest to wider audiences. Lücking does not find evidence that returnees carried newly adopted conservative ideological or ideas influenced by Wahhabism and Salafism. While many Indonesian Muslims esteem a shared mastery of Islamic teachings, Lücking's research participants—most of whom are Javanese and Madurese migrant and pilgrim returnees—also expressed disappointment of the unfair treatment of Indonesian migrants and the lack of democracy and human rights in Saudi Arabia (Lücking, 2021: 117). As such, the evolving relationship between religion, state, conflict, and democracy in Indonesia (or the so-called 'conservative turn') is perhaps the outcome of more local forces competing for political power. Lücking shows how Makkah pilgrims are celebrated on their return and can enjoy upward social mobility in their community whereas many migrant worker returnees (unfortunately) are caught up in a state of precarity conducive of serial labour migration as their savings often do not last long. Even if such migrant workers, as the book interestingly shows, have performed Hajj or Umrah, and visited Makkah and Medina, this is not recognized and celebrated in the same manner in their community back home (Lücking, 2021: 78–9). Despite fears of an 'Arabness' that could spoil the international reputation of a 'tolerant' Indonesian Islam (for example, see Chapter 3, Arab-Phobia in Indonesia, Lücking, 2021: 130), 'guided mobility', means that Indonesian migrants' perceptions of 'the Arab world' remain largely shaped by the home context, and conditioned through personal, institutional, and governmental intermediaries as part of Indonesia's migration infrastructure, which carefully orchestrate the journey. In conclusion, recent years have witnessed the emergence of an extensive body of scholarship in geography and urban studies that examines the rapid transformation of built and natural landscapes in the Arabian Peninsula (e.g. Ouis, 2002; Koch, 2014; Moser et al., 2015; Iskander, 2021). Much of this work also focuses on large-scale urban development projects and the speculative character of green initiatives and sustainability spectacles across Persian Gulf cities (e.g. Koch, 2023; Rizzo & Petruccioli, 2023; Rizzo, 2017; 2020). The striking thinness of urban scholarship on the Hijaz highlights how urban studies remains deeply uneven. Remedying the presentism and weak historicization that has characterized such work is important. Moreover, beyond writing the Hijaz, and the Western side of Saudi Arabia to diversify empirical case studies, mobilizing critical and decolonial Muslim geographies frames and studies would transform engagements with Islam and Muslims 'beyond an adjective of diversity across space' (Allouache, 2023: 386). What happens when 'an adept, committed, and visible community of Muslim scholars in geography' bring together the vast corpus of critical geography with traditions of Islamic knowledge and learning? (Sidaway, 2023: 388). It would certainly broaden critical geography and urban studies. Other geographies of urban theory may learn from the birthplace of Islam and deeper considerations of Makkah's hinterworlds. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Nuraziah Aziz for the help provided during the editorial process. I would also like to thank Carl Grundy-Warr, Shaun Lin, and James Derrick Sidaway for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this review essay. Any errors are my own.