Out of Obscurity: John F. T. Keane’s Late Nineteenth Century Ḥajj
Open AccessIn late 1877, John Fryer Thomas Keane set out on a journey few Christian Europeans had attempted—completing the ḥajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca. While some Europeans had undertaken this pilgrimage as Muslims, Keane donned the guise of an Indian Muslim instead of converting to Islam outright. From the ḥajj of Italian Ludovico di Varthema in the early sixteenth century to the nineteenth century travels of Englishmen Sir Richard F. Burton and John Lewis Burkhardt, a select few Westerners embarked upon ḥajj disguised as Muslims in order to reveal the nature of this restricted Islamic ritual practice. After completion of his ḥajj, Keane detailed his journey in a two-volume set. Given his youth and general lack of experience, Keane stands out as a unique, and understudied, traveler among England’s nineteenth century disguised ḥajjis. He represented a new form of non-Muslim ḥajji, that of the tourist, who performed the pilgrimage, not out of any academic or imperial needs or wants, but for their own personal enlightenment, adventure, or gain. His ḥajj also demonstrates the growing global interconnectedness of the late nineteenth century. In this thesis, I outline how studying Keane affects our understanding of late nineteenth century Western exploration in Arabia.
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