Belief in daily life

This lesson asks you to show understanding of religious beliefs found in one culture and how they relate to its other aspects, to analyse how a culture’s relationship to its environment shows in its beliefs, and to analyse how aspects of culture come together in its expressions. The museum offers Islamic examples only: a pilgrimage, the rules for lawful food, and one author’s reading of what Islam asks about the natural world; other beliefs and cultures are for your class to add. ¹

Choose one belief and follow it into one habit: what is eaten, where people travel, how they treat their surroundings. Say whose reading you are using.

Read one journey closely. The record of Hajj reports from the Encyclopaedia of Islam that until the eighteenth century pilgrims travelled either by sailing ship as far as Jeddah or in caravans organised by the authorities of the great Muslim countries ². The dangers were losing the way, sandstorms, floods, attacks by Bedouin and epidemics; forts with small garrisons served as water and food stations, a military escort accompanied each convoy, and tribes whose land was crossed were won over with money and robes of honour ². Each caravan had a leader, the amir al-hajj ². A large caravan gathered at Damascus and took about thirty days to reach Medina, and the journey from Cairo to Mecca took about thirty-five days ². The last official Egyptian overland caravan left in 1300/1883 ². The article gives only rough figures for the numbers who went ².

The record reports from the Kuwaiti Encyclopaedia of Fiqh that hajj is an individual duty, once in a lifetime, on every legally responsible person who is able ³. The jurists then differ on whether it falls due at once when its conditions are met: Abu Hanifa (in the sounder of two reports from him), Abu Yusuf, Malik (in the preferred report from him) and Ahmad held that it does; al-Shafi'i and Muhammad ibn al-Hasan held that it may be deferred ⁴. The Shafi'is argue that the Prophet ﷺ took Mecca in year 8 of the Hijra and did not perform the hajj until year 10 ⁵. The museum gives each school's position as the jurists hold it, and states no ruling of its own.

The three records stand on different ground. The hajj record draws on the jurists' encyclopaedia for rules, and on the Encyclopaedia of Islam, whose author judges the effects of the pilgrimage on society, culture and the economy to be immense but notes that they have not been adequately studied ^{6 7}. The same article says it is hard to know what spiritual influence the pilgrimage exerts ⁶. The record on slaughter gives the jurists' terms and says that on some points the schools differ, for instance that the ignorant person's case is disputed ^{8 9 10}. The record on the environment is one author's reading, and it says that further sources are needed for detail.

The Kuwaiti Encyclopaedia names, among the purposes of the pilgrimage, a gathering where differences of wealth and poverty, race, colour and language fall away ^{11 12}, while the Encyclopaedia of Islam adds that preachers present an ideal and pilgrims are of every kind ⁶. What evidence would you need to judge how far the gathering matches the ideal, and why does the article's own caution that the influence is hard to know matter to your answer?

• Hajj: the rites, the roads and the jurists' differences, with the Encyclopaedia of Islam's warnings about what is known.
• Slaughter (dhaba'ih): the jurists' terms for lawful slaughter, and the points on which the schools differ.
• Environmental protection in Islam: one author's reading, labelled as his, of what Islam asks about the natural world.

Read Hajj and Slaughter. Make a two-column chart: the belief, and the daily practice the record links it to.