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[lsanderson]

The vast caravan assembled for “Journey to Mecca.”
By DONALD G. MCNEIL Jr.
Published: February 13, 2009

IN the parlance of the war in Iraq, firing on the enemy is “lighting up a hajji.”

Unlike dehumanizing insults adopted by Americans in other wars, “hajji” is actually an honorific. It is added to the name of one who has made the hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.

Erasing that kind of prejudice is the reason Taran Davies — a half-English, half-American graduate of Eton and Harvard who was raised in the Church of England — has devoted himself to making films about Islam.

His travels around the Muslim world have led to five documentaries, each shot with a larger and larger camera. His first, “Around the Sacred Sea” in 1994, chronicled his five-month horseback trek around Lake Baikal in Siberia with a few Harvard classmates after their graduation in 1993. The others have taken him to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (“The Land Beyond the River”), Afghanistan (“Afghan Stories”) and Chechnya (“Mountain Men and Holy Wars”). Everywhere he went, he said, “all the roads I was on led to Mecca — and if we are to understand anything about the Islamic world, we need to understand the hajj.” More

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't claim to really understand it -- but one of my co-workers (and his family, in fact) made the hajj this year, and I know a little more about it than I did before. American Muslims of recent Indian descent, in this case.