The pilgrimage to Mecca took place on a sustained basis by land for many centuries after the time of Muhammad. This was especially so from the predominantly Arabic-speaking polities ringing the Arabian Peninsula, and stretching from Egypt and the Levant to Iraq. Yet hajjis also came in large numbers by sea, and as the centuries wore on a larger and larger percentage of religious travelers made their way to the Hijaz in this way. As we will see, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fully half of all pilgrims en route to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in any particular year might be coming from very distant places, and almost certainly by sea in these cases. Maritime travel was cheaper and more routinized; vast numbers of hajjis could be fit into the holds and onto the decks of vessels, especially after the steam revolution that culminated in the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Although the business of the pilgrimage to Mecca has been analyzed to some extent in historiographical literature about the Hajj, an analysis of the purely maritime dimensions of this historical transit has not yet been attempted. We can only make a beginning toward that goal here, but it is safe to say that over time the pilgrimage to Mecca gradually became more and more of an oceanic venture, and remained thus into the middle decades of the twentieth century. It was only after this point that the Hajj began to metamorphose into new directions, whereby pilgrims began to voyage more by air than by sea, as Chapter 7 in this volume describes in some detail.

The present chapter outlines the process of traveling by sea on the Hajj in three inter-connected parts. The first part looks at the long, outstretched coast of the Maghrib to Egypt, and travels furthest back in time, nearly one thousand years to the early second millennium CE, to show the organized beginnings of maritime Hajj transit. This section of the chapter also looks at East African and Ottoman maritime transport in the times leading up to and including the Early Modern era.