This book allows both Muslims and those unfamiliar with the Islamic faith complete access to the holiest sites of one of the world's major religions, practiced by a quarter of the world's population but often misunderstood in the West.
Closely following the publication of F. E. Peters's The Hajj (Princeton, 1994), which describes the perilous pilgrimage itself from the travelers' perspectives, this collection of writings and commentary completes the historical travelogue.
This is the first book-length study of the emergence of Medina, in modern Saudi Arabia, as a widely venerated sacred space and holy city over the course of the first three Islamic centuries (the seventh to ninth centuries CE).
Burton begins the first volume of his work with a famed line of verse on cavalierism by the Arab poet al-Mutanabbi (915-65 AD): "I am well known to the night, the steeds, and the desert / the sword and [the guest], the paper and the pen.