Public History and The Hajj Trail

How can our research on the early modern world reach and relate to a broader audience? This question is one that many of us think about and my own imperfect answer to that has been to create an interactive free-to-play historical simulation built from my own research and designed for use in the classroom. Over the past year and a half my colleague, Russ Gasdia, and I have been coding an educational simulation of the Early Modern Hajj. The project, entitled The Hajj Trail, aims to bring the experiences found in early modern pilgrimage narratives to students through an interactive digital platform. Essentially, the format of The Hajj Trail simulation builds off the style of the 1970s educational simulation The Oregon Trail that generations of American public-school students played during their elementary education. The Hajj Trail expands on the concepts of that older educational tool and repurposes it for an educational introduction to the cultural history of the early modern Islamic World – and in particular the Ottoman Empire. 

Simulating History: How it Works

The simulation takes students along the Ottoman caravan route from Istanbul to Mecca where they encounter the beauty and difficulty of traveling in the early modern world as sourced from early modern travel and pilgrimage narratives themselves. The most prominent examples being the travelogues of Evliya Çelebi, Yusuf Nabi, Abu Salim al-Ayyashi,Qutb al-Din al-Nahrawali, Ambrosio Bembo, and Richard Pococke among others. Through the world constructed in The Hajj Trail students have a chance to imagine the complexities of the early modern hajj journey and the multi-faceted experiences that defined it. Students can go through the simulation focusing on the trade and mercantile complexity of the Ottoman world or uncover and map out the larger sacred geography that dotted the landscape along the road to Mecca, or even focus on non-traditional routes to the holy cities and combine their travels with side goals to visit family and friends as real pilgrims chose to do during the seventeenth century. The ultimate educational goal of this project is not only to centre the hajj in our understanding of the cultural world of early modernity but also to showcase the ways in which the pilgrimage was embedded into a multitude of experiences that made up the everyday lives of pilgrims and early modern Muslims. 

The Hajj Trail: Where it Started

The idea that became The Hajj Trail started off as a conversation between me and my colleague Russ Gasdia who has a self-taught background on coding. I was telling him about the stories and adventures I was reading about in my own dissertation research on the early modern hajj, and he mentioned that it sounded a lot like that old educational simulation The Oregon Trail. Russ had mentioned that he thought it wouldn’t be too difficult to code together our own hajj version by using the open-source tool Twine which is often used for online digital storytelling. As this idea slowly came together, we realized it was going to be a lot more work than we initially expected as we added more and more complexity to the project. However, during the quarantine in 2020, Russ and I – two historians with no formal backgrounds in coding – busied ourselves by building out this idea and learning how to code in different mechanisms for The Hajj Trail. As the project grew, we kept adding different events, locations, and items which we hoped would deepen the immersion for students and help to encapsulate the educational mission for The Hajj Trail – to centre the hajj in our understanding of early modernity and showcase how enmeshed the hajj was with the experiences of everyday life in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire.

Changed Perspectives and the Making of The Hajj Trail

One important insight I learned while working on this project was that I needed to appreciate how the hajj impacted not just the holy cities or major centres of power like Istanbul or Damascus but also transformed and defined those smaller forgotten places on the map. When building out the content for The Hajj Trail, I needed to scour early modern pilgrimage and travel accounts to find any sort of information on now ruined caravanserais or small villages which dotted the landscape on the roads between Istanbul and Mecca. It was this process, learning the route place by place, stop by stop, that I began to get a better sense of the difficulty of the journey to Mecca and how these caravans of pilgrims left a mark on the landscape of the Ottoman Empire. Without the pilgrimage many of these small stops along the road would not have this burst of activity once or twice a year and that the sacred geography of the Islamic World was not only built through shrines, tombs, and mosques but also imbued in wells, caravanserais, and campsites which gave moments of respite and refuge to thousands of pilgrims on their travels to Mecca over the centuries. 

When I first started on The Hajj Trail, I hoped that it would be able to spark student interest in the important cities and sacred sites of the early Modern Muslim World – places like Istanbul, Aleppo, Konya, Medina, and Mecca. However, after finishing this first section of the project, those pages about the smaller stops along the road in pilgrimage narratives that I would often skip through – that gave me so little information as an historian with two or three lines of text – changed for me. Suddenly I saw those small and out of the way places in a different light. I hope that The Hajj Trail can help give students a different perspective of the early modern Muslim world, one that is not based on stereotypes of war, violence, and rigidity but is instead centred around a better understanding of the stories, landscapes, and encounters told by pilgrims and travellers of that seventeenth-century world. And maybe, some students will also come away with a renewed appreciation for those places so defined by the hajj pilgrimage yet are not easily found on a modern map – places like Çakit Han, Mada’in Salih, Belen, and Ulukışla – stops along the route that gave comfort amidst trying landscapes to those early modern pilgrims in what for many amounted to the most difficult journey of their lives. 

Future Additions and Contributions

You can find The Hajj Trail at www.hajjtrail.com and it currently allows users to traverse the landscapes of Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Arabia. We are currently adding the Ottoman Balkans as well which we hope will be finished by Spring 2022. If you wish to help in this project as a contributor, it is all-volunteer and we have never received funding for it but we would be happy for the help, you can ask to join our Hajj Trail Methodology and Collaboration group on Facebook, email me at [email protected], or stop in during my new weekly Twitch stream on Wednesdays where I work on the project live at www.twitch.tv/tkottomans.

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Tyler Kynn is an Instructor of Global History at the University of Memphis. He received his PhD from Yale University’s History Department in 2020 and is currently working on a book project preliminary entitled “A Season for Empire: The Hajj in the Early Modern World.”