Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, edited by Venetia Porter with M.A.S. Abdel Haleem and other contributors, is a scholarly volume published by British Museum Press to accompany the museum's own major Hajj exhibition, bringing together specialist contributors on the history, ritual practice and material culture of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Its authority rests on the contributors' academic standing and on the British Museum's access to historical pilgrimage related objects and manuscripts for the exhibition the volume documents. Its strength is genuinely interdisciplinary coverage, history, art history and ritual practice together in one accessible scholarly volume. Its limit is the ordinary one for an exhibition catalog, essays synthesizing existing scholarship for a broad audience rather than a single sustained monograph argument, so a narrow specialist claim about one specific historical period of the Hajj benefits from a dedicated study of that period.