The Pilgrimage to Mecca - Assignment Example

Reading response From the story in the text, it is clear that pilgrimage is an activity carried out only among the historical religions and happens to share similarities with certain rites of passage. These rites of passage are evident in a number of cultures worldwide but are mostly marked within tribal settings. In this process, the pilgrims are removed from their normal way of life and placed in an environment with powerful symbols and experiences. By the instance they go back to the normal world, it is notable that they have changed in a way.

This change could either be how the people around them view them or how they perceive themselves in return. Contrast is invoked between the structure and the anti-structure of life on a daily basis. He also argues that the moral unit of the pilgrimage is individual as the masses going to the shrine know, not of each other and when they finally converge at the site, the only similarity they seem to share is the pilgrimage and nothing else. The dialect that the person shares with the other people at the pilgrimage is the commonness of feeling hence the name communitas.

The approach turner used placed the study of pilgrimage on the scholarly map and gave the sacred travel a distinctive profile as well as locating it in a historical process like colonialism. A new agenda for pilgrimage studies is keen to portray that the power in a holy place is almost like a religious void with the ability to accommodate different meanings and practices bought o them by different groups. Although holy places cannot be detached from economical and political structures, they can be viewed as places with different modes of authority and could become more visible in a space that is more ritually charged.

For instance, in Jerusalem, various Christian pilgrim groups operate in line with their ritual practices and theological assumptions. This resulted in a new course of study as far as pilgrimage study is concerned. The logic used in the story from the text contains a specific sting in theory. They argue that a person cannot take for granted the meaning of a pilgrimage or its participants since a uniform phenomenon of pilgrimage cannot be taken for granted. It is clear from the story in the text that in some shrines, people went to witness certain artifacts like shoes, bones, combs, and teeth that were believed to have belonged to significant saints at one time.

On arrival, pilgrims were required to pay some amount of money to be allowed to view the holy relics, which were used, for the maintenance of the shrine. Some holy places allowed the pilgrims to touch and kiss the artifacts and they would be given tokens to show that they had visited the pilgrimage site. For Muslims, the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the most important among the five pillars of Islam. It marks an important aspect of Muslim religious life.