There are moments in the development of any field when a landmark work constitutes a major leap forward in our understanding of a particular phenomenon. The Longest Journey is just such a book: theoretically situated on the cutting edge, positioned to contribute to multiple growing areas of scholarly analysis, and not written as a conclusion to a debate but rather serving as a door into a vast and largely unexplored area of academic inquiry.
This much-anticipated book is the first attempt to narrate Southeast Asians' involvement in the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries to the present. The scope of the project presents a daunting task: how can one track the development of such a complex social and ritualistic process from myriad points of origin across space and time in a cohesive and coherent manner? Tagliacozzo, a historian, adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from “archaeology, archival history, literary criticism, sociology, epidemiology, political science, and ethnography” (p. 7). His original ethnographic work in both the Muslim-majority countries of Malaysia and Indonesia and in overlooked areas in Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Philippines is especially impressive. He combines this with archival research on Dutch, English, French, Indonesian, Italian, and Malay-language materials from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Tagliacozzo's book is an unprecedented accomplishment in its synthesis of a wide variety of sources into a compelling story. This story is told in three sections ordered chronologically, with each section divided into four thematic chapters. The author first analyzes the development of the hajj as a primarily individual phenomenon up until the mid-nineteenth century. He then turns to how the pilgrimage was observed and regulated by non-Muslim colonials. Finally, he places the hajj in the context of modern nationalism and contemporary memory-making.
Part one gathers together available information about the hajj up to the mid-nineteenth century, building towards the argument that three periods exhibited high levels of Southeast Asian involvement: as early as the 1370s, starting in 1600 and throughout the seventeenth century, and again in the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, the author claims that by the second of these periods, political and religious concepts were being fused together to produce cultures in which Islam was ascendant in certain parts of Southeast Asia. Part two charts increasing colonial regulation and interference, first through mounting colonial interventions based upon evolving understandings of public health, and through writings by colonial officials, including the Dutchman Snouck Hurgronje. Finally, the book turns the focus to post-independence state regulation of the hajj, experiences by people from Muslim-minority nations, and the more personalized experience of the pilgrimage drawn from twentieth-century memoirs.
One of the book's strengths is its focus on the institutional, political, and economic facets of the hajj over many centuries. This institutional approach enables the author to avoid the dehistoricizing tendencies of much Orientalist scholarship on Islam. Nonetheless, we may find reason to push back a little against the metastructure (precolonial, colonial, postcolonial) of the book's narrative. No doubt the colonial powers had a profound impact on the structure of the hajj, but as the author notes himself, Aceh—a place drawn into the colonial orbit quite late—served as the vanguard for Southeast Asia in terms of its involvement in the hajj and Islamic religiosity in general. Other places that do not fit into the political-era framework were also significant, such as Patani in the early nineteenth century, possessing an unusually mobile population taking part in the hajj in relatively high numbers, as well as serving as a distribution point for hajj-related literature. Some readers may also wonder why Islam is not more central to the book's narrative. Indeed, the lived experience of the hajj only comes to the fore in the final two chapters, offering those involved in the next phase of research plenty of opportunities to expand upon Tagliacozzo's impressive accomplishment. One way to do this may be to engage more directly with the growing body of literature on Islamic knowledge networks that linked the Middle East to Southeast Asia,Footnote 21 especially in the precolonial period, which would allow Sufi tariqa and scholarly communities to emerge as the central units of analysis rather than disconnected individuals. These vital social organisms survived well into the colonial period, often challenging, ignoring, or coopting colonial apparatuses for their own purposes.
This book is written in a highly accessible manner and will appeal to scholars of the entire Indian Ocean region as well as specialists of Islam and Southeast Asia. Instructors of undergraduate and graduate classes on the religion and history of these regions would be wise to consider this for their courses, as it sheds light upon the active, moving mass of humanity that has voyaged across the Indian Ocean in search of spiritual awakening and transformation over more than the last half millennium.
