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In their 1978 book, “Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture,” the British and British American anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner imagine pilgrimage as two roads, one inbound and one outbound — one sacred, the other profane. The road in is a spiritual journey, “exteriorized mysticism,” to use the Turners’ phrase. The road out is less about faith and more about travel itself — that radical business of leaving the safety of one’s home to journey

The word “pilgrim” itself derives from the Latin peregrinus, meaning “one from abroad” — a foreigner

I was interested in this other human side of pilgrimage — the road out, as it were. I imagined it to be full of danger and fun, populated with bawdy characters such as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. I had chosen three faiths that were at odd angles to my own background — my father was Muslim, but not Shiite; my paternal grandmother was Christian, but not Catholic; my mother was Sikh, which made her part of the Indic fold, but not Buddhist

Performing the Hajj pilgrimage is compulsory for every Muslim who is physically able and can afford the trip. It consists of five days of ritual worship, practical formalities underscored by layers of meaning and symbolism. The symbolic themes of traveling toward the Beloved and of journeying between life and death are made real in the various and specific proceedings. Many of the rituals of Hajj, taught to Muslims by the Prophet Muhammad, are drawn from the life of the Prophet Abraham and his family (known to Muslims as the Prophet Ibrahim).

The Hajj pilgrimage contains symbols of Abraham’s actions, including throwing stones at the spots where the devil taunted Abraham, the sacrifice of a sheep, and worship around the Kaaba. Enduring the sometimes-difficult journey to Saudi Arabia, and then the journey between various points around Makkah during the five days of Hajj, is also reminiscent of Abraham’s wandering nature

This strong woman, a slave and a woman of color, practically a single mother, had the strength to survive. Her memory is kept alive every day because her running between the hills of Safa and Marwa is a crucial part of the Hajj rites. Pilgrims re-enact Haajar’s search for help by walking between the two hills seven times while absorbed in prayer. Enter the holy mosque at any time of the year and you will see thousands of pilgrims walking in Haajar’s footsteps, because the walk between Safa and Marwa is also an obligatory part of the other Muslim pilgrimage (known as Umrah, which can be performed at any time of the year).

Stampede kills more than 700 at Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca

The stampede occurred Thursday morning during the ritual known as "stoning the devil" in a tent city in Mina, about two miles from the holy site in Mecca, Islam's holiest city.

The incident is the deadliest disaster at Mina since 1990, when 1,426 people died.

Every year China's port cities erupt in chaos as 130 million migrant factory workers scramble to make their yearly pilgrimage home for the New Year.  This astonishing spectacle, the largest human migration in the history of the world,

Roughly 25 percent of the global workforce is Chinese. Given such enormous firepower, China inevitably sets the norm for wages and working standards in the global supply chain. Multi-national corporate interests have chipped away at those standards and wages in order to maximize profits and serve shareholders.  The chronic disregard for workers' rights in China's foreign-invested sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, so it really should be no surprise that ninety percent of Americans have since the 1970s suffered economic slippage--in wages, benefits, job security. 

As with any ruling dynasty, the requirement that the reigning sultan produce an heir was central to succession

judicial royal fratricide became an accepted method of securing the Ottoman throne until its abolition in the 17th century by Ahmed I

The eventual abolition of fratricide came about following widespread public disapproval over the accession of Mehmed III to the throne

Epidemics and pandemics have plagued German territory - and the rest of the world - for thousands of years.

One of the first significant outbreaks of disease in what is today Germany can be studied and traced is the Antonine Plague of 165 - 180 CE. While we cannot be certain, this was thought to be a severe strain of smallpox brought back to the provinces Germania Major and Inferior, via returning legions. In their cramped quarters in bases along the Rhine, the disease raged, leading to a significant loss of manpower. 

Far more well known than these pandemics is the Black Death. Originating in the Near East around 1348, three distinct strains of the Bubonic Plague, or Yersinia Pestis bacteria, killed up to a half of the population of Europe - hundreds of millions strong at the time. Central to the spread of this epidemic was the nature of the medieval world. Trade routes pilgrimage destinations and heavily trafficked Hanseatic cities were natural havens for the fleas that carried the bacteria.

Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer

Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.

The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.

ordinary people worn out by the dramas and lies of the past four years have a right to refuse to take Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters seriously. To reject further debate with people whose views are completely incoherent is not only understandable, but sensible.

I am not talking about all 74 million people who voted for Trump. Some voters may well have supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020 with a sense of hesitancy, perhaps focused on a single issue, such as abortion, or because they were making a raw and self-interested calculation about taxes.

Instead, I am talking about the people who are giving Trump their full-throated support to the very end, even as he mulls a military coup; the people who buy weird paintings of Trump crossing the Delaware, or who believe that Trump is an agent of Jesus Christ, or who think that Trump is fighting a blood-drinking ring of pedophiles. These supporters have gone far beyond political loyalty and have succumbed to a kind of mass delusion.

The year was 610 and the man's name was Muhammad. And the belief system that arose from Muhammad's ideas became the basis of one of the world's most widely practiced religions: Islam.

Muhammad began working as a merchant and soon married his employer, a rich woman named Khadijah. Over the next 20 years he became a wealthy and respected trader, traveling throughout the Middle East.

While meditating in a cave on Mount Hira, Muhammad had a revelation. He came to believe that he was called on by God to be a prophet and teacher of a new faith, Islam, which means literally "submission." This new faith incorporated aspects of Judaism and Christianity. It respected the holy books of these religions and its great leaders and prophets

Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.

7th century

Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life.

Then, after Kabul fell to the Taliban last August, Khyal Mohammad Ghayoor received a call from a stranger who identified himself only by the dual honorifics, Hajji Sahib, which roughly translates to a distinguished man who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca. The man told Mr. Ghayoor he was needed back in Afghanistan, not as a baker but as a police chief.

“I am very excited to be back in a free and liberated Afghanistan,” he said.

A similar mass exodus of Afghanistan’s professional class occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviets withdrew and the Taliban wrested control from the warlords who filled the leadership vacuum.

When more than six million African Americans left the South for better opportunities in the North and West, between 1916 and 1970, their relocation changed the demographic landscape of the United States and much of the agricultural labor force in the South. This decades-long, multi-generational movement of Black Americans, known as the Great Migration, impacted southern labor to such a degree that white landowners resorted to coercive tactics to keep African Americans from leaving.

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow segregation became the law across the South, restricting political, economic and social mobility of African Americans. According to The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, a comprehensive history of the migration by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson, in 1900, nine out of every 10 Black Americans lived in the South, and three out of every four lived on farms. Despite a concerted effort by white southern landowners to make them stay, by 1970, nearly half of all African Americans, about 47 percent, would be living outside of the South.

Post-slavery, white southerners still depended on Black people as their main labor force

Though Annalee Newitz began work on “Four Lost Cities” long before the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to read it today without periodic is-this-where-we’re-headed? musings. The book functions as a travel guide to places that no longer exist

The chapters on Pompeii, the volcano-buried city in the orbit of ancient Rome, famous for its exquisitely preserved ruins, its brothels and taverns and graffiti, and on Angkor, a metropolis of medieval Cambodia, didn’t fire my imagination so much, perhaps because I already knew something of their histories.

Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.