In present-day pluralistic and individualized societies, the question of how individuals appropriate religious traditions has become particularly relevant. In this volume, psychologists, anthropologists, and historians examine the presence of religious voices in narrative constructions of the self. The focus is on the multiple ways religious stories and practices feature in self-narratives about major life transitions. The contributions explore the ways in which such voices inform the accommodation and interpretation of these transitions.

Every year, in the last month of the Islamic calendar, millions of Muslims from around the world come together in Mecca to perform the Hajj, the pilgrimage that all capable Muslims should perform at least once in their lives. In 2013, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden organized the exhibition Longing for Mecca. The Pilgrim's Journey. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of the two-day symposium on the Hajj, which was held at the museum in connection to the exhibition.

The central theme that runs through the book is how Hajj practices, representations of Mecca and the...

Narrating the pilgrimage to Mecca discusses a wide variety of historical and contemporary personal accounts of the pilgrimage to Mecca, most of which presented in English for the first time. The book addresses how being situated in a specific cultural context and moment in history informs the meanings attributed to the pilgrimage experience. The various contributions reflect on how, in their stories, pilgrims draw on multiple cultural discourses and practices that shape their daily lifeworlds to convey the ways in which the pilgrimage to Mecca speaks to their senses and moves them...