Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia

3. "I Was the Guest of Allah": Modern Hajj Memoirs from Southeast Asia

3 “I WAS THE GUEST OF ALLAH”: MODERN HAJJ MEMOIRS FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA Eric Tagliacozzo One of the more important ways that accounts of the hajj have been transmitted is through memoirs — the conscious act of people setting down their memories to pen and paper, in order to have these memories preserved as a record of their journeys. Few experiences, in fact, have been deemed more worthy of a written account than those activities involving a spiritual quest of one sort or another, a state of affairs commented upon in some detail by scholars of this genre of writing (Hutch 1997). Yet the memoir as artefact, as nearly everyone would agree, is not a dyed-in-thewool record of actual events, preserved in complete veracity with “what happened”. It is, rather, a construct, with “truth passing toward art” in the words of one prominent critic (Barrington 1997). Distortion, whether intended or unconscious, is always a part of this morphogenesis, and is in fact part and parcel of translating one’s lived experiences into a format ready for the reading of other people (Conway 1998). As such, memoirs can and should be dissected, to see what their writing can tell us about how such stories are generated, and what their very inscription means as an act 48 Eric Tagliacozzo of intent (Hart 1970, pp. 485–511). Some scholars have noted that memoirs have their own rhythms and patterns as a genre, often following certain themes in their quest to lay out and explain lived experience (Fletcher 1966). These critical dimensions of gauging the worth of memoirs are useful and instructive in thinking through the value of such accounts, and perhaps especially so in the telling of a journey as large (and as diverse) as the hajj, which allows millions of people to undertake a voyage in many of the same ways. In the pages that follow I set out some of the ways in which hajj memoirs can be read. These memoirs nearly all come from the past fifty or so years (that is to say, the postcolonial period in Southeast Asia), when pilgrims were making hajj from independent nation-states in the region. Nearly all of these narratives have been written in Indonesian or Malay. An initial subsection of the chapter looks at hajj memoirs that were crafted earlier than this period, to provide something of a limited genealogy to these accounts throughout the centuries before our own. After these accounts have been examined, we turn to the notion of place (topos) in the pilgrimage, as Southeast Asian pilgrims narrate their experiences in a variety of important locales in the Hejaz. Jeddah (the disembarkation point in Arabia), Mecca, the plain of Arafat, Mina and Medina are all briefly studied. The second half of the piece looks at the hajj and the self, that is to say, where the haji or hajah fits into his or her conception of the hajj based on their own provenance, whether this is geographic, occupational, gender-specific, etc. I argue that these sorts of considerations play a large part in the narration of hajj memoirs as well, as can be shown from literally dozens of accounts on these topics. The chapter then ends with a look at the notion of introspection in the memoir, as well as the idea of “the return” to Southeast Asia, after a successful pilgrimage has been undertaken. Throughout the piece we will focus on the published memoirs of a wide variety of regional Muslims, whose autobiographical accounts constitute en masse an impressive and under-studied body of literature on the past age of the Southeast Asian hajj as a whole. THE FADED TEXT: HAJJ MEMOIRS FROM THE PRE-INDEPENDENCE PERIOD We know that a small number of Southeast Asians were making the hajj from a very early date, and that these numbers increased over the course Modern Hajj Memoirs 49 of the centuries, until in the nineteenth century the numbers started to reach into the thousands year after year. Yet for the pre-modern era before this time, the number of actual accounts available to be studied is even smaller than the small trickle of hajis who were actually able to ply back and forth across the Indian Ocean on these distant maritime routes. One of the first of these memoirs, if it can indeed be called such, is the Hikayat Hang Tua, or Tale of Hang Tuah...