Illustrating the journey

Set among the surat al-Hajj a beautifully expressive drawing of a pilgrim’s ship brings to life the journey itself. This image is made up of a carefully composed series of defined brushstrokes and fluid washes. Both inscriptions in Chinese and Arabic read as a rough translation “Doing it in the name of Gold and Emperor.” To our left a less stylised ship is included, whereas in the center, the reader’s ship, is crafted entirely out of fluidly abstracted nastaliq (a common style of Islamic calligraphy used to write in Persian, Urdu, Kashmiri and Punjabi).

This ship is a visual tool for us having read Ma Dexin’s (马德新) (who lived from: 1794 to 1874) “Hajj Journey Notes” 朝觐途記. This bok was a well-known early travelog published by this influential Sino (Chinese)-Muslim scholar and pilgrim. Ma Dexin had undertaken a 7-year long Hajj himself. Through this expressive drawing the tales of hardship, beauty, and devotion are refined into a complex and thought-provoking package of narrative illustration. Imagine for a moment you are hundreds of miles from land and pushing forward through a turbulent ocean. The quality of line is used here by the artist(s) to draw our attention to the nature of this experience.