Technopiety as Assemblage: Religion, Materiality, Affect and Digital Technologies in Hajj

Introduction

Hajj is annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and one of the five mandatory religious duties of Islam. ¹ Physically and financially capable Muslims must perform hajj once in their lifetime. As with most Islamic practices, hajj can be traced back to the era of the Prophet Abraham and now, in 2019, it attracts more than two million believers each year from across the world. Hajj is an extraordinary practice for all Muslims – while Instagramming, not so much. Hajj is also a practice that arguably does more to produce gender as a category of difference than any other obligatory Islamic ritual. Gender is inscribed into and onto believers’ bodies ² at multiple levels during hajj through actions ranging from those inherent in the established practices of Islam ³ to those embedded in the postcolonial politics of the Saudi state apparatus. Spaces of worship are designed differently for men and women, women are prohibited from certain spaces altogether, and even visa requirements for women are more limiting. Hajj, as a place and as an embodied experience, is primarily shaped by gender identity.

The gender-mediated spaces entailed by Islamic practice have significant affective and ethical implications for the digital performance of piety, and this essay uses the frameworks of technopiety and assemblage to examine how this once-in-a-lifetime ritual is experienced and transformed by the use of everyday digital technologies, such as Instagram. Social media studies examines the ways that digital technologies reproduce practices of capitalist consumption and reproduction through cultural and religious practices, both offline and online. ⁴ While these are important questions, my focus is on how these technologies transform and reproduce techniques of cultivating piety. Attending this coproduction ⁵ of religious subjectivity and pious social media content as an assemblage ⁶ allows analysis to move beyond a commonsense understanding of this as a relationship between two discrete entities: a subject broadcasting a traditional religious practice from a fixed religious space into a neutral, secular space. This paper enriches our understanding of the relationship between religious subjects and digital technologies by adding an anthropological perspective to the work of religious, literature, and media scholars. ⁷ I analyze how religious affective modes and spaces are transformed by the entanglements of digital technologies and gendered experience of hajj. The broader question explored in this paper is how social media platforms, particularly those with an audiovisual focus, such as Instagram and Snapchat, affect the gender-space nexus of hajj? How do these practices of technopiety, the expression of faith in digital spaces, affect the ways religious subjects seek to transform both themselves and the matrix of ethical and physical relationships in which they find themselves embedded, particularly conceptions of Muslim sisterhood?

This paper is based on autoethnographic data from a trip I took three years ago. On a breezy night in 2016, I landed in Medina, in the Hijaz. ⁸ I was excited to be in the Holy Land, and I did not want to waste time in the hotel room. Luckily, the tour company was about to hold a group visit to the mosque in which the Prophet is buried. I left my cell phone in the hotel room without hesitation, intending to avoid worldly distractions. I was also attempting to abide by the official rules: many sources, including the United States State Department notice for the pilgrims, mention that photography is banned in the holy sites and violations will result in the confiscation of the device. ⁹ I had previously experienced mosque guards being unsympathetic to picture taking. However, my 2016 trip and the vast quantities of digital material posted from those sites suggests that this ban has not been strictly imposed in recent years.

As my small tour group made our way to the Prophet’s tomb, the guide started explaining the proper code of conduct for our visit. He mentioned that women and men entered from separate doors and prayed in separate areas, but simultaneously told us to “stick to one another.” Then, he added, “if you are sharing your photos on social media, please remember to use the hashtag #hajj2016 and #hajarinternationaltravel.” “Hajar International Travel” is a pseudonym, but the practice of livestreaming or posting pictures of hajj online is a common practice. Social media is perceived as a marketing platform that can attract future customers, so many Islamic travel agencies adopt the practice in order to remain competitive. Although the suggestion that picture taking was encouraged sounded a little odd to me, I did not think much about it at that moment. However, as days passed, the recurring image of people recording the prayer and the Ka’ba, a tabernacle associated with the Prophet Ibrahim, grasped my attention.

Hajj and the Space and Temporality of Worship

Hajj is one of the central pillars of Islam. The other pillars only require one condition to be practiced: the testimonial word and prayer require consciousness, fasting requires physical ability, and charity requires financial capability. Successful performance of hajj, however, necessitates that adherents satisfy all of these conditions simultaneously. In addition, the act can only be performed on certain days of the year and within certain boundaries of the Holy Land. One of the most recurrent memories of my childhood is sitting in my family’s living room in Istanbul, longingly watching “Ka’ba livestreams” broadcast by Saudi Arabian national television. It is an entirely different experience, however, to partake in the ordinary pilgrim experience while simultaneously having one’s image broadcast to other parts of the world. In a place only a lucky few can access, live video streaming complicates our understanding of the historic ritual and shifts the ways that pilgrims can share their spiritual experiences with a wider audience.

The importance of hajj to this discussion lies in its temporally and spatially bonded character. Hajj exists within a multilayered temporality: it is sufficient for worshippers to perform the pilgrimage only once in a lifetime, although people can and do perform it more than once, depending on their physical and financial strength. The spatial arrangements of hajj are also clearly defined: Muslims who are performing this ritual for the year must stay within the Haram region of Saudi Arabia during these days. Non-Muslims are not allowed to enter the site at any time due to religious segregation. Even for Saudi citizens and residents, entering the Holy Land requires a special visa; there are different visas for the hajj season and other times of the year. Even the act of pilgrimage is not simple: hajj is not a single trip to Mecca. Rather, pilgrims first perform a smaller pilgrimage, umrah, around the Ka’ba in Mecca. Simultaneously, however, hajj takes place annually, between the eighth and twelfth days of Dhul-al-Hijjah, the final month of lunar Islamic calendar. The four subsequent days are spent traveling twelve miles to the city of Arafat before returning to Mecca.

As part of our first day of the pilgrimage, the tour company offered a guided circling practice, or tawaf, ¹⁰ for our first day in Mecca. It seems like circumnavigation of the Ka’ba should be quick and simple, but the massive crowds can cause a single circle to last up to an hour. The crowds pose other practical problems, particularly for newcomers. Most of my tour group were American Muslims who had never been to the holy site before, so the travel company separated us into groups of twenty to ensure that no one would get lost. It seemed impossible to keep track of twenty people in a sea of two million constantly moving supplicants. We developed strategies: holding hands, watching each other constantly, and making plans in case we were separated. The tawaf took us seven full hours on that first day. During the third circle, our guide took out his cellphone and started livestreaming our worship on Snapchat. Some pilgrims were shy while others happily smiled at the camera. When we were back at the hotel, he told us his username and suggested that our families could watch us. In the following days, I watched many fellow travelers stream live Instagram videos from the gender-segregated corners of mosques, women-sections of restaurants, and the tents we shared in the mountains.

After the tawaf, pilgrims travel five miles to spend the night in Mina, in separate tents for women and men. On the second day, they head to Arafat, twelve miles east of Mecca. The Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) said, “The hajj is Arafat,” ¹¹ so the day in Arafat, spent in prayer and reflection, is considered the most important part of the ritual. As was the case in Mina, tents in Arafat are assigned on the basis of gender. People can interact outside the tents, but only a few choose to do so because of the extreme heat. Thus, many women pray, rest, eat, and casually chat only with their fellow women. When the sun sets, believers head to Muzdalifah, five-and-a-half miles west of Arafat. Some people take buses, others choose to walk; the use of private cars in this area is strictly regulated during the days of hajj. Muslims spend the night in Muzdalifah under the starry skies; there is no formal separation of men and women, but de facto gender segregation forms, regardless. Pilgrims then return to Mecca to perform a final circling around the Ka’ba. Then, after throwing stones at the symbolic Satan in Mina for three days in a row, the hajj is completed.

Gendered Spaces

There are countless books, pamphlets, YouTube videos, blog posts, websites, and oral histories that explain different aspects of the five days of hajj. The technical descriptions and Islamic juridical mandates in these accounts represent the hajjas almost gender neutral; the ways that gender will shape these experiences are absent or elided from these guiding texts.

I had expected that my pilgrimage would be a private, inward reflective experience, but the reality was that I shared the experience with dozens of other people, and that it was marked by a sense of sisterhood within the gendered geographies of hajj. The personal politics of hajj are complex: multiple sets of social, political, sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, national, and disability identities are mapped onto each other to create unique modes of being. My positionality is informed by my embodied experiences as someone who grown up in Turkey, lived in parts of Middle East and North America for over ten years, has Turkish-American citizenship, and identifies as Middle Eastern. I was travelling with an American travel company that serves upper-middle class population. Unlike most Turkish women, who prefer colorful clothes made by the Turkish textile industry, I garb with black abayas and the occasional niqab, because I picked up the habit during my language training in Arab countries. I am a speaker of Turkish, English, and Arabic in a space wherein language acts as a significant marker of difference. All of these identities and performances determined my own subjective and affective modalities, but also shaped how I was perceived by others.

On a more emotional level, I was in a particularly vulnerable situation: last minute family health problems had drastically changed my travel plans, and I had no female friends or family accompanying me. The women I shared this unique experience with helped me with my struggles and enriched my experience of the hajj itself in every way; they cracked jokes and offered their shoulders to cry on in moments of overwhelming emotion. We enjoyed our time together as we prayed next to each other, recited the Quran silently, and checked our phones frequently. Undoubtedly, sisterhood is also a site of multiple tensions including peer pressure and displaying social hierarchies. Yet in the absence of the familial ties and civic organizations that usually guide relationships of sisterhood, the temporary assemblage of physical and digital spaces of hajj offered an experience in which gender enabled me to connect with my fellow sisters, transcending other differences.

When I interviewed Sharmin, twenty-eight, she also described her hajj in terms of similar intense feelings she experienced during both the ritual itself and as part of sharing the ritual with friends and strangers. She has imagined her prospective hajj journey since her childhood, she explains. ¹² She planned the prayers she would make upon her first sight of Ka’ba and every moment she would spend in the holy mosques. When she arrived, though, the stories her grandfather and uncles had told her were completely different from seeing these places with her own eyes.

Even before arrival in the Hijaz, gender quickly becomes the normative category that defines every space. When one starts the visa application to perform hajj, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia website informs pilgrims that women under the age of forty-five cannot perform hajj without a male guardian. ¹³ However, travel agencies help women circumvent this requirement by providing a random male guardian to women traveling on their own; it is commonplace to find one man assigned fifty women as “relatives.” Women over forty-five are required to submit a notarized “no objection” letter from a father, husband, son, or brother, in order to travel with a group. Women who cannot provide this documentation are not granted a visa, and violators face deportation.

Once women who satisfy these conditions arrive in the Holy Land, they may encounter different forms of segregation in certain spaces. Some of these realities depend on their personal travel arrangements: company choice, citizenship and, of course, budget. Others are embedded in the space: holy places have separate entrances for women and men. Inside, prayer spaces are separated by screens. These women-only sites within the mosques are for silent prayer or reflection, but they also offer comfort zones in which women share prayer rugs and food (mostly fresh dates), rest and sleep between worship times, and help each other find sitting areas where they can feed children. It is not just “public spaces,” such as mosques, that are divided in this way; private spaces are also organized on the basis of gender. In most hajj packages, families who want to lower accommodation costs can choose to forego private rooms for each couple or individual in favor of sleeping in rooms with multiple other men or other women. This is also the case for the tents in Mina and open-air nights in Muzdalifah. Restaurants in the Haram region have separate spaces for women and men, as well as a third section for families, which is inherently mixed because there is no way to confirm that people are actually related. Similarly, fast food places have different lines for women; in some cases, women can only order for pick-up. The continuous performance of ritual with these public, private, and religious boundaries encourages participants to screen everything through an increasingly gendered filter, which eventually becomes an instinct. After a short while, I found myself got accustomed to looking for women-only spaces without a second thought.

Sharmin’s experiences of these holy spaces is very emotional, and she finds herself at a loss for words when she tries to define these feelings in our conversation. livestreaming her hajj enabled her to share her experience without necessarily having the words; thus, sharing live accounts of her visit made her more aware of the spaces she occupied as well as providing a visual perspective of women-quarters for those who cannot visit. She explains this using the concept of ihram, ¹⁴ which is another important requirement of hajj. In addition to “being” in the sacred places at the ritual time, ihram literally means “prohibiting,” and refers to things that are normally allowed. Ihram has multiple practical meanings: it is the dress you wear but also the state you enter in, both physically and spiritually.

Sharmin, who livestreamed most of her hajj on her popular Instagram page, commented that she extended her understanding of ihram to her social media conduct. She does not think of her Instagramming as an un-Islamic activity or a practice to be refrained from in order to focus on religious practice. Instead, she found that the spirituality of hajj was so religiously intense that sharing it brought her great joy and relief. While covered in ihram, she avoids polemics and will not respond to negative comments from her followers. She did her best to be mindful of other women in every video and picture. This is literally represented in the digital space when she shared and she tagged the “sisters” she befriended in physical and online spaces, even though they were not present on her hajj. Thus, this piety is not performed or cultivated in neutral, empty digital spaces; it is co-produced on social media platforms inhabited by other women and their networks of familial and faith relationships. This experience of co-produced piety and emotional connection that transcends geographic and national boundaries produces a shared feeling of joy and solidarity among women. The expressions of piety facilitated by social media become a space for creating new ties among pious Muslim women.

It is significant that the digital technologies used to broadcast hajj transcend the physical boundaries of the spaces of sisterhood established by religious texts and authoritarian state structures. However, religious ethics and bonds of sisterhood also mediate these new online spaces, just as they do the physical ones. Although the gendered assemblages formed during the time and practice of hajj are temporary, they are not arbitrary. Rather, they are contextualized in the religious ethics that guide these practices and subjectivities of their practitioners. In Sharmin’s account, livestreaming hajj emerges as a transformative practice for the pilgrim’s self and collective sisterhood. In other words, the hajj is experienced by women as practice, and livestreams of this ritual are not simply footage of something that happened elsewhere: when women upload live videos of the hajj as it happens, women in other spaces are able to contemporaneously participate in pilgrim women’s experiences of the hajj. When women in those other places download and save these livestreams onto their phones, that too is a shared ritual they perform alongside their sisters currently on hajj in Saudi Arabia. This perspective shifts the point of view away from a state-sponsored or public television broadcasts, with their masculine gaze, and toward a women-centered glimpse of hajj that has previously been invisible in the public sphere. As women make this perspective public on social media, their own experience is enriched by the ways it is shared and embraced by sisters all around the world who yearn to be physically present on the hajj.

In Sharmin’s account, ihram emerges as a space in which one does not negotiate flexibility between religious choices. This is opposed to Deeb and Harb’s ¹⁵ study of leisure spaces, in which friendship, fun, and leisure activity are represented in opposition to religious observance. As Sharmin strives to complete her hajj to the best of her ability, she does not consider Instagram a distraction from religious practice or a space in which the restrictions of hajj become more flexible. Ihram represents active work that Sharmin conducted on herself as a mechanism for cultivating piety through constant awareness of acts and thoughts, combined with embodied rituals marked by multiple registers such as dress code, body hair, refraining from harming non-human beings, and livestreaming every step of her journey. Ihram was, thus, a form of serious religious practice – but it was also a source of significant fun. Sharmin’s understanding of video broadcasting hajj offers an illustration of how space is co-produced through interrelations with “her Muslim sisters around the world.” She does not think ihram requires her to refrain from her daily social media activity, but she does believe that it necessitates a different form of ethical awareness of conduct and that this awareness does not shift in between religious and flexible norms.

For Massey, “space is a product of interrelations,” “a process,” an entity through which “the negotiation of relations with multiplicities, the social is constructed.” ¹⁶ According to her, “We cannot ‘become’ without others, and it is space that provides the necessary condition for that possibility.” ¹⁷ I approach the co-production of religious subjectivity and digital media content from this perspective of space. Thus, as I will detail further below, I imagine technopiety as a space that consists of multiple spaces that includes pilgrims’ bodies, the Holy Land, social media platforms, and the affective planes of piety and fun, among others.

Technopiety

In this section, I suggest a new understanding of digital technologies as transformative spaces that allow a hybrid of materiality, affect, ethics, and fun that alter the religious experiences of those who create and access them. This space, which I call technopiety, is a constant process of subjectivation, co-produced by an assemblage that primarily consists of modern secular technology and historically embedded practices of religion. Through an interaction of these realms, new possibilities emerge that transcend the boundaries of spatially and temporally bounded religious practice and materialize new affective modes. Sharing images and videos of hajj creates possibilities for transnational bonds between the Islamic community. Online platforms are not the exclusive domain of Muslims or women, of course. However, these affective bonds, which transcend the temporal and spatial limits of the traditional ritual, are particularly significant for Muslim women because their access to hajj is highly regulated on the basis of their gender identity. Similarly, the experience of hajj is far from homogenous; it differs vastly based on gender, class, ethnicity or fast-changing travel contexts. ¹⁸ Yet, the way my interlocutors stream, record, post, and comment on those clips of hajj are articulated in terms of an affective bond of sisterhood underlined by their Islamic and gendered subjectivities.

Examining the use of video-sharing networks in religious practice allows me to analyze the emergence of “technopiety.” My position differs from previous studies of Islamic subjectivity and (use of) technology, including Hirschkind’s ¹⁹ discussion of cassette sermons or Moll’s ²⁰ work on TV preaching. My use of the technopiety framework negates the need to represent the connection between technological platforms and subjects as a binary relationship in which the person or experience is mediated through a neutral, secular technology. The temporal and spatial specificities of livestreaming hajj make the production of technopious assemblages a co-temporal experience of hajj among sisters. Framing technology as an assemblage expands its gendered spatial boundaries, which acknowledges the ways this experience moves people closer to “becoming with” technology. ²¹ Becoming-with is not limited to the material individual body but expands to the religious collective of Muslim sisterhood.

This analysis differs from new, materialist feminist approaches as well affect theory because the possibilities that emerged from this becoming-with-technology are not represented as indeterminacies, ²² contingencies, ²³ or intensifications of arbitrary affect. ²⁴ Instead, I understand technopiety to be produced by and productive of gendered subjectivities that are situated in religious, political, and historical contexts. It is important that one cannot become a hajjah (female pilgrim) by watching Snapchat Live or Instagram stories. Also, it is not particularly novel for pilgrims to share their experiences; over the years many have published their memories of hajj, and it is customary for pilgrims to narrate their experience to family and friends upon their return. ²⁵ However, the ways hajj is mediated by digital platforms create new possibilities for social bonding between Muslim women that transcend the physical boundaries of hajj or of their hometowns. In other words, the ways that hajj was already a physical and spiritual journey are transformed by new forms of technopiety that allow women to blur and reinforce gender distinctions of hajj. Narrating the experience is no longer a recollection of a journey after it is completed. Synchronous technologies allow women to share and experience the imagery of hajj during the actual holy days of hajj. This enhances the collective mood of celebration, while the shared images of hajj incite multiple affective modes among believers.

Perhaps the most interesting way that digital technology has transformed religious affective modes and spaces in the context of hajj is that, in certain ways, very little has changed. Even though images and videos of women-only spaces are and could be seen by men once they are made public on social media, many practicing Muslim women choose to organize their social media pages along the lines of gender difference by setting up filters and choosing who to accept and who to block. Thus, this transformation is not a linear one that opens up previously closed (religious) spaces through the use of technology. Some women reinforce these boundaries only adding women as friends or by using privacy settings to keep their posts closed to the public, and thus only available to women; some only interact with women in comment sections. Thus, while digital technology has blurred gender lines by allowing outsiders to access previously restricted spaces, women have taken steps to ensure that their livestreaming of hajj on social media platforms also reflects those old boundaries. Simultaneously, however, digital platforms have increased access to those spaces for those who do belong: social media provides new – although still limited – access to women-only spaces for other women who are not physically present on hajj.

The fact that women’s actions in digital spaces continue to enact gendered boundaries reflects the fact that gender remains a meaningful category in women’s accounts and experiences of hajj. That significance is articulated through the language of “Islamic sisterhood.” Sisterhood has been conceptualized in terms of biological and social affinity, ²⁶ feminist collectivity, ²⁷ and as a religious institution of Christianity. ²⁸ In the context of Muslim subjectivities, specifically in studies of Islamic revival, kinship appears as a powerful conceptual tool, although sisterhood was not used as a separate analytic. In her study of pious Shi’i youth, Deeb ²⁹ suggests that kinship-like emotional ties, such as those between a brother and sister, regulate rules of conduct between sexes and shape social welfare networks by providing a foundation for the common faith between volunteers in NGOs and aid recipients. In this paradigm, the relational self in the community is situated against the traditional relational self in biological kinship structures. Similarly, Ellen McLarney ³⁰ criticizes the revivalist works of Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind by arguing that their focus was primarily on the affective plane of the self and the sensory realm of the body. She theorizes gendered kinship structures, such as (political) motherhood, as a realm in which the distinction between the public and private spheres are blurred. In her work, the politics of family are understood as both politics of the private sphere and as a private piety cultivated in the public eye.

Following McLarney, my ethnographic evidence stemmed from personal experience as well as in-depth interviews, both of which illuminated the collective ethics of technopiety. Initially, as I mentioned previously, I had planned to go on hajj with my extended family. Due to an unexpected health problem in the family, I found myself accompanied only by my spouse. Once on hajj, however, gender-based segregation ensured that I hardly saw him during the day. Overwhelmed by sadness and loneliness, the women I shared physical and online spaces came to my aid. They consoled me – but, more than that, I realize in retrospect that I had fun during the hajj. Young and old women in myriad spaces taught me many ways of care, and my hajj became about them instead of a reflective, inward journey. Spirituality and fun intersected as we prayed together about every aspect of life, circled the Ka’ba hand in hand, did invocations side-by-side in the mosques. My hajj companions were not limited to the people with whom I had geographical and physical connectivity. I was in touch with many friends online who became a significant part of my hajj experience. A convert friend whose non-Muslim father refused to sign her hajj papers for many years joked that this was also her hajj, conducted vicariously through me. In such instances, female pilgrims shift the boundaries of gender-segregated spaces in the Holy Land, and in doing so they create new bonds that are defined by religiosity and gender.

Imagining new forms of kinship in physical and online spaces of hajj produces its own Islamic ethics, such as respecting other women’s privacy in women-only spaces while uploading videos, not responding to harsh comments to videos (usually made by men), praying with and about women who watch the videos elsewhere in the world. Furthermore, Snapchatting hajj shifts the male-centered gaze of hajj, although the new affective bonds it creates are still defined by the nexus of gender and religion. Thus, the transnational broadcasting of religious practice transforms the gendered space-time limitations of the hajj and in doing so it consolidates and challenges the guiding religious and gendered principles of the ritual. Sharing hajj images is not necessarily intended to take down the patriarchal barriers set by religion in the accounts of pilgrim women I interviewed. Nor do these women “share” simply to inspire others or to exhibit their religiosity. Instead, technologizing their pious practice is a work that women conduct on themselves: it transforms the self and, by extension, the community and the space.

Pious Fun

A Pakistani-American woman named Sunera, told me in an interview that she and her husband saved money for hajj for ten years, so now that she was finally doing hajj, she felt it would be selfish to keep this experience to herself. ³¹ For her, sharing it was equivalent to saving it: inscribing it in her memory and that of her sisters all around the world. The transformative value of hajj for her is enriched by the supportive and funny messages and comments sent to her by women who were, in her words, “stranger sisters.” She articulated her experience with an emphasis on the shared feelings of Islamic sisterhood. In her use of the digital networks, her spiritual experience was mediated on the platforms of social media and in her interactions with fellow Muslim women. Thus, she did not see shared images from her hajj practice as a process of externalizing the religious experience or her social media image. ³² Rather, she understood and used social media as a space of religious experience and fun. “Fun,” for Sunera, and many of my other informants, is not an alternative social space in which religious norms are secondary or negotiable. Instead, fun stems from the circulation and reflection of religious experience within a (digital) community of women. Thus, the moments that Sunera livestreamed and the pictures she posted were not distractions from the pious feelings of worship. They were an assemblage of piety and fun that is enhanced by the intensity of religious experience.

The forms of piety in social media spaces have recently attracted a growing body of anthropologists and media scholars. Dayana Lengauer examines how online networks of Muslim women in Indonesia use social media to spread messages and organize physical prayer groups in mosques. ³³ Here, social media emerges as a medium adopted by a preexisting community. Conversely, Rinker et al. find that the use of religious smartphone apps among university students challenge traditional religious authority by shifting its realm from public to the private. They also find that using religious apps can be a more isolating experience for religious subjects, who integrate religion into their daily lives but now identify less with their community. ³⁴ Interestingly, having fun is often similarly conceptualized as a tool for the subversion of moral-political authority. Thus, religious and political institutions often see fun as a threat. Asef Bayat argues that fun is “an array of ad hoc, non-routine, and joyful conducts – ranging from playing games, joking, dancing, and social drinking, to involvement in playful art, music, sex, and sport, to particular ways of speaking, laughing, appearing, or carrying oneself – where individuals break free temporarily from the disciplined constraints of daily life, normative obligations, and organized power.” ³⁵ He argues that Islamist politics situate joy in terms of spiritual, inner pursuits whereas the lighthearted, spontaneous concept of fun is seen as less acceptable or appropriate. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the carnival as a festive ritual of the poor that temporarily subverts class hierarchies, Bayat extends the subversive power of fun beyond class politics yet holds it as a categorical threat to Islamist political power. Samuli Schielke challenges Bayat’s view in his study of saint festivals in Egypt. He represents mulid, ³⁶ or saints’ festivals, not as a simple case of fun in opposition to power, but rather as a festive utopia ³⁷ that contests a particular modernist vision of order, progress, and subjectivity. ³⁸ Indeed, mulid strongly resembles hajj in terms of its exceptional temporality and spatiality that depends on specific times and locations for travel in order to attend a festival. However, in examining experiences of mulid, Schielke reserves joy for the Sufi subjects who see mulid as a religious pilgrimage based on individual spiritual transformation and fun for people who see mulid as an opportunity for relaxation and entertainment. Although he does not define fun and joy as mutually exclusive, his description of fun is associated with moments of excitement, shopping, picnicking or strolling. Thus, his analysis represents joy and fun as de facto exclusive categories that may be experienced by the same people, but only in discrete circumstances – and joy is understood as a necessarily inward practice.

The ways that religious youth navigate possibilities for fun in relation to geography is a key element of Deeb and Harb’s study of spaces of leisure in conservative neighborhoods of Beirut. ³⁹ They see the newly minted cafés in Hezbollah-dominated areas as promoting flexibility in moral norms that include but are not restricted to religious notions. For the new generation, youth who take religion for granted, daily life is marked by negotiating choices based on a series of social, political-sectarian, and moral rubrics. However, in their ethnography, choices are usually defined by moments of transgressing the rules of Islamic practice through controversial actions, such as listening to music, going to cafés serving alcohol, or flirtation.

My observations of women on the hajj reveal an alternative approach to geographies of piety and joy. Focusing on joy that arises from religious practice as it is experienced and co-produced in the physical and social media spaces of hajj shows that joy and leisure are not limited to points of ambivalence or contingency regarding religious practice. In sites where negotiating moral norms or ethical frameworks is not deemed a priority for religious practice, attending hajj through social media channels suggests that performing hajj and creating social media content are not regarded as unrelated practices. In other words, women who livestream the hajj do not think of their ritual activities as pertaining to piety and their time spent on social media as pertaining to leisure, nor do they see religious norms as guiding the former practice and relaxed in the latter. The fun of the pious practice that stems from sharing spirituality with Muslim sisters on social media is not limited to activities for which religious restrictions are bent. In the videos and livestreams of hajj, collective fun is not only present in moments when piety is not the priority – instead, these women show that the ethical precepts of hajj are inhabited in multiple ways that encompass fun rather than excluding it.

Conclusion

This paper sketched some spaces of the hajj including the material, social, technological, and affective. In these spaces, ordinary women’s hajj experience is produced in and through social media networks, and this transforms the limits of gendered physical spaces that are imposed by the state, Islamic traditions, cultural values, and neoliberal consumption habits. However, in the new spaces in which the spatial and temporal lines blur, Islamic sisterhood bonds produce another bounded and limited space that is defined by an entanglement of piety and fun for women pilgrims.

The production of gendered technopiety is fashioned with smartphone technologies and these interactions transcend previously imagined boundaries of embodied religious ritual. Female pilgrims’ livestreaming, recording, and sharing the physical spaces of ritual life on hajj opened up the closed-quarters of women-segregated sites on social media networks. In this process of opening up, the shift from the masculine gaze to a women-centered view of lived space is articulated not as a blurring of gender lines, but as a way of creating new categories of sisterhood that go beyond shared physical space. The women I traveled with were a heterogeneous group that consisted of immigrants, converts, and second-generation Americans. Although hotel arrangements vary by budget, most people I travelled with fell into upper-middle class categories. These women and I slept, ate, and performed rituals which gave new meanings to their use of the social media apps, far beyond the neoliberal advertisement strategy adopted by our (male) tour company representatives who posted travel moments on their official tour accounts in order to attract future customers.

The women I traveled with saw in these moments of technopiety the potential to transform themselves by sharing the life-changing experience of hajj with other women. They also saw these practices as transforming digital platforms such as Instagram or Snapchat by doing something with them that really matters to them and their fellow Muslim sisters. My traveling companions all knew women who could not afford hajj, who would be denied a visa due to the non-cooperation of a male relative, or who yearn for a hajj they already performed. Digital practices that incorporate these absent women, known to them in physical and virtual spaces, into their hajj experience was framed in terms of Islamic sisterhood. This was not done in a didactic or charitable way; rather, women who shared their hajj experience with “their sisters” told me that only by sharing did they realize the change the experience wrought in themselves. This change, impacted their pious selves but did not exclude the joy and fun of understanding hajj as a collective experience. The religious ethics that guide women’s transformative pilgrimage experiences were not distinct from their social media, nor did they simply permeate their use of social media. Sharing the hajj on social media platforms allowed women to introduce new understandings of Islamic ethics in which physical practice is co-produced with the digital content and both are realized in the context of a gendered community. While unmaking the physical walls that segregate physical spaces, they were forging new connections of Islamic sisterhood, which they saw as an inherent part of their personal transformation during the experience of hajj.

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1. Quran 22:27–29.[↑]
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).[↑]
3. Here, I use “established practices” in reference to Talal Asad’s well-known paradigm of Islam whereby “a practice is considered Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive tradition of Islam, and is so taught to Muslims.” Talal Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986).[↑]
4. Christian Fuchs, Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2019).[↑]
5. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).[↑]
6. Jasbir K. Puar. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).[↑]
7. Gary Bunt, iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam (London: Hurst & Company, 2009); Robert Bianchi, Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Babak Rahimi & Peyman Eshaghi, Muslim pilgrimage in the modern world (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Robert T. Rozehnal, Cyber Sufis: Virtual expressions of the American Muslim experience (London: Oneworld Academic, 2019).[↑]
8. The Hijaz, the Holy Land of Islam, is a geographical region that comprises most of the western part of modern-day Saudi Arabia. It is centered on the two holiest Muslim cities: Mecca and Medina. Mecca is where Prophet Muhammad was born and raised and is the location of the Ka’ba, which is also associated with Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham). Medina is the location of the first Muslim state and the burial site of Muhammad. God’s revelations to Prophet Muhammad, the origins of Islam as a faith, and many of the institutions and customs associated with Islam, such as the pilgrimage to Mecca, are all associated historically with the Hijaz and its two holy cities. As a result, the Hijaz has been highly influential throughout the Muslim world, particularly in the seventh century and again following the development of Saudi Arabia’s vast oil resources in the twentieth century.[↑]
9. US Department of State – Bureau of Consular Affairs website, “Pilgrimage Travelers (Hajj and Umrah),” https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/go/Hajj.html.[↑]
10. Tawaf means “circumambulation.” In this, the first ritual of the hajj, pilgrims walk anticlockwise around the Ka’ba seven times. This tradition goes back to the time of Ibrahim (Abraham) and Isma’il (Ishmael), who walked around the Ka’ba seven times after they had rebuilt the structure. Pilgrims undertaking tawaf are following in the footsteps of the prophets Ibrahim, Isma’il, and Muhammad.[↑]
11. Hadith literature is considered the second most important oral and written tradition in Islam, after the Quran. Most chapters in the Quran deal with theoretical issues, while the Hadith is a compilation of the Prophet’s (PBUH) verbal statements and daily applications of verses and Islamic knowledge to his behavior, which mostly deals with vernacular practices. This pronouncement about Arafat is taken from one of the most authoritative sources of hadith: Tirmidhi, Vol. 5, Book 44, Hadith 2975.[↑]
12. Sharmin, personal interview, February 2019.[↑]
13. Saudi Arabia Visa website, https://www.saudiarabiavisa.com/hajj-umrah-visa-saudi-arabia/.[↑]
14. On the first day of hajj, one makes the intention of ihram and utters a special invocation called the talbiyah. Its sartorial requirements for women and men are gendered: men must change clothes into a seamless two-piece cloth, while women can wear regular clothes that cover their body but leave hands and face exposed. Once one “enters into the state of ihram,” hunting animals, cutting trees, or engaging in sexual acts is forbidden. Leaving ihram is marked by symbolic haircut of about two inches.[↑]
15. Lara Deeb and Mona Harb, Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shiite South Beirut (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).[↑]
16. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2015), 1, 3, 13.[↑]
17. Massey, For Space, 56.[↑]
18. The politics of hajj are closely related to Saudi Arabian foreign policy. In 2016, Iranian citizens were denied visas on the basis of the deteriorating relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Following the Gulf crisis in 2017, Qatari authorities accused Saudi Arabia of blocking hajj for its citizens.[↑]
19. Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).[↑]
20. Yasmin Moll, “Television Is Not Radio: Theologies of Mediation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 33.2 (2018): 233–265.[↑]
21. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 244.[↑]
22. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women and Society 3 (2003): 801-832.[↑]
23. Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).[↑]
24. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).[↑]
25. Lâle Can, Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2020).[↑]
26. Joseph Suad, “Gender and Relationality among Arab Families in Lebanon,” Feminist Studies 19.3 (1993): 465–86; Joan Bamberger, Louise Lamphere, and Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Woman, Culture, and Society (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1974).[↑]
27. bell hooks. “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women,” Feminist Review 23 (1986): 125–38; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984); Aihwa Ong, “Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity? Questions of Communitarianism and Citizenship in Asia,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4.1, Article 7 (1996); Kelli Zaytoun, and Judith Ezekiel, “Sisterhood in Movement: Feminist Solidarity in France and the United States,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 37, no. 1 (2016): 195–214. [↑]
28. Margaret Cain McCarthy and Mary Ann Zollmann, Power of Sisterhood: Women Religious Tell the Story of the Apostolic Visitation (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2014); Heather L. Claussen, Unconventional Sisterhood: Feminist Catholic Nuns in the Philippines (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Nancy Marie Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).[↑]
29. Deeb, Lara, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).[↑]
30. Ellen Anne McLarney, Soft Force Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).[↑]
31. Sunera, personal interview, September 2016.[↑]
32. Michael Sacasas, “Always On,” Real Life Mag, March 14,2019, https://reallifemag.com/always-on/?fbclid=IwAR1RCo4jOiVsA2TS3U6WzIMK7KruR8iYc_m50tht6oju-p0GQF7XmEmIIT4.[↑]
33. Dayana Lengauer, “Sharing semangat taqwa: social media and digital Islamic socialities in Bandung,” Indonesia and the Malay World 46.134 (2018): 5–23.[↑]
34. Cortney Hughes Rinker, Jesse Roof, Emily Harvey, Elyse Bailey, and Hannah Embler, “Religious Apps for Smartphones and Tablets: Transforming Religious Authority and the Nature of Religion,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 12.4 (2016): 1–14.[↑]
35. Asef Bayat, “Islamism and the Politics of Fun,” Public Culture 19.3 (2007): 434 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2007-004.[↑]
36. “Mulid” is the Arabic word for Muslim and Christian saint’s festivals.[↑]
37. See also Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968).[↑]
38. Samuli Schielke, The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 68.[↑]
39. Deeb and Harb, Leisurely Islam, 2013.[↑]