Migration, Diaspora, and Religious Pilgrimage in Comparative Perspective: Sacred Geographies and Ethical Landscapes1

Against Ghassan Hage’s theorization of migration “guilt”—the view that migration entails a sense of rupture, animating an unfulfilled desire to recapture a lost, imaginary, subjective wholeness—this article explores the conjunctures of migration and religious pilgrimage in the creation of new, transcendent moral subjectivities away from “home.” Taking four case studies—Christian Filipino migrants working in Israel, Muslim Pakistani immigrants to the United Kingdom, Indian Jewish Bene Israel immigrants to Zion, and Hadramati Sufi itinerant migrants across the Indian Ocean—we reflect on a central theme animating the theorization of religion and diaspora: that of movement away from home as religious and moral exile, and the sense of subjective alienation and yearning it entails. By going on pilgrimage, we show, migrants deny the rupture migration has entailed, creating their own sacred geographies that recapture and renew an imaginary wholeness. They redefine their sufferings, hard labor, and difficult living conditions as a religious sacrifice or sacred journey, imbuing the act of abandoning a former home or homeland and its familiar surroundings with ethical meaning. By becoming pilgrims, migrants of diverse origins travel across international borders while extending trans-local pilgrimage cults as they migrate internationally. Migration and pilgrimage are thus, we argue, mutually reconfigured as embodied and subjectively transformative forms of movement.