Spiritual journeys and Orientalist echoes in the divided pilgrimage narratives of Lady Anne Blunt’s A Pilgrimage to Nejd: The Cradle of the Arab Race and Lady Evelyn Cobbold’s Pilgrimage to Mecca

Pilgrimage, as a religious devotion and a secular, identity-oriented journey, is a multifaceted manifestation that evokes spirituality in its diverse manifestations. I construe this study as an attempt to look into the contradictory spiritual and cultural implications that permeate the narrativization of pilgrimage in Lady’s Anne Blunt’s A Pilgrimage to Nejd: The Cradle of the Arab Race (1881) and Lady Evelyn Cobbold’s Pilgrimage to Mecca (1934). Drawing on postcolonial theory and feminist critical discourse, as well as post-Orientalism, re-Orientalism, and decolonial approaches, the analysis sheds light on Cobbold’s pilgrimage as a sacred transformative quest for faith. Her immersion in Islamic rituals becomes an act of self-reconstruction, albeit her text is often betrayed by the tension of Orientalist tropes that stem from her Western background. In contrast, Blunt’s account reveals a “secular” pilgrimage steeped in colonial and Orientalist discourses wherein spirituality is reduced to the documentation of a realm of exotic allure, distanced from authentic engagement. My reading attempts to highlight the complex interplay of spirituality and Orientalism within the discourse of pilgrimage, which positions Cobbold’s journey as an act of personal and spiritual transformation, and in the meantime views Blunt’s within the tensions of cultural appropriation that informs the broader understanding of women travelers in shaping cultural narratives during the colonial era.