Scholars of the Middle East are moving quickly to chronicle and interpret China’s rise in world affairs, particularly in light of the grand aspirations of the New Silk Road, officially known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As the so-called China Dream unfolds across Eurasia and Africa, area specialists are pondering the profound implications for transforming the Middle East as they know it, for enriching transregional exchanges and for scrambling power relations between continents and hemispheres. The growing literature in this field has made many strides in a short period. In addition to highlighting the magnitude and ramifications of what is being called the New Silk Road, it has compiled a rich base of data and commentary on specific projects and countries. Many writers have traced the twists and turns of official relations, and some are investigating the conflicting social and popular responses across the region. At a broader level, there is more focused speculation about new possibilities for diplomatic and geopolitical maneuvering in a post-American world where China and other non-Western countries will exert greater influence. The recent books of Guy Burton and Mordechai Chaziza exemplify these achievements — and their limits. Burton explores China’s shifting attitudes over several decades toward conflicts involving Egypt, Algeria, the Palestinians, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf Wars, the Islamic State organization, and Sudan. He explicitly addresses China’s influence on the systemic aspects of international politics, pointing to signs of change in norms and expectations about great power rivalries and spheres of influence. With clarity and balance, he weighs the multiple roles Beijing has played over time: disrupter, bystander, patron, mediator, and, most consistently, patient opportunist. Chaziza lays out a series of country snapshots that recapitulates much of the reporting on China’s bilateral relations in the Middle East. He tries to cover Turkey, Israel, Iran, and 11 Arab nations, one after another, in just over 230 pages. He expresses an open-minded curiosity about China’s longterm impact on economic competition in the Middle East and beyond, suggesting that New Silk Road investments give Beijing’s diplomacy an advantage that competitors are unlikely to match. Together, these volumes reflect the mixed efforts of Middle East specialists to integrate empirical and theoretical concerns while tackling rapidly changing relations between state and society as well as between regional and global actors. Building upon the advances in this field, it might be helpful to consider some of the more challenging questions that researchers can address in the future, realizing that agendas will vary depending on scholarly tastes and political predispositions. The current conversations are highly skewed toward security studies and speculation about China’s long-term intentions, both official and unspoken. The result is a stream of repetitive policy papers and opinion pieces from specialists in think tanks and consultancies, reflecting anxieties over the meltdown of American dominance and a looming cold war with China. Unfortunately, the Great Game approach to Middle East studies neither enlists nor promotes the kind of interdisciplinary imagination that is inspiring scholarship across the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Ironically, many studies of Sino–Middle Eastern relations still stress the Middle East’s presumed uniqueness and exceptionalism — even though all of the conventional geographic zones are enmeshed in global networks that struggle to meet common dangers none can manage alone. China’s ascendance casts the Middle East in a new light as part of a wider world

Western and Islamic societies suffer from a common ailment—their citizens are losing trust in the basic integrity of their political institutions. There is a growing sense that systematic injustices are the core reasons behind economic, political and social crises. The result is a global decline of political authority. Embattled liberals in the West and the Islamic world want to bolster struggling democracies, new and old. Both groups see religion as indispensable in coping with chronic crises of legitimacy. Western liberalism’s sense of vulnerability is paving the way for a rediscovery of Islamic Modernism. Western liberals hope that open-minded Muslims can help them combat fundamentalisms of all stripes, including extremist tendencies surging in America and Europe. Today’s Islamic Modernists comprise an influential network of writers, interest groups and activists that can be valuable allies in transnational struggles for democracy and religious tolerance.

The author tries to provide a comprehensive report of the Hajj in China in terms of human participation, management, and implications of hajj to the politics of this country. He refers to the regional and ethnic variations in Hajj activity and explains the “China’s Hajj Belts." By referring to the issues such as female pilgrims, urban-rural gaps, ethnicity, gender, and the problem of hajj as a collective action, he provides a thorough report of hajj done in China currently.

:Islamic Globalization is a combination of religious, economic, political, and diplomatic advances that are transforming the Muslim world. Its building blocks are the hajj and religious travel, capitalism and Islamic finance, democracy and Islamic Modernism, as well as new international regimes tailored to the varied needs and tastes of Muslims in diverse cultures. Islamic Globalization allows modern Muslims to join the mainstream of international life and to reform it at the same time. These are also China's goals, particularly as Chinese leaders express greater interest in soft power; eager to identify with visions of civilizational exchange and global governance.

:The Islamic world has its own dreams of resurgence and global influence. They know that most of the mega-networks that China envisions will retrace the ancient routes of Muslim traders, seafarers, and pilgrims–routes that form the sinews of a thriving world civilization that can become the equal of China and the West. Citizens of Muslim nations are well-aware that their governments are paying Beijing for these projects with their national patrimony, and they are demanding that the benefits accrue to ordinary people and their descendants.

As the United States perceives the westward expansion of China’s influence as threatening both regional and worldwide balances of power, it has responded with an understandable but ill-conceived counter-action—the ‘Obama pivot’ from the Middle East to the Western Pacific. The new American thinking aims to divide the intercontinental and transoceanic regions that China and other nations want to integrate, while encouraging an ‘encircle China’ coalition among smaller maritime powers from India and Singapore to Australia and Vietnam and on to the Philippines, Japan and South Korea. The blind spot in the American plan is that all of these countries need China more than they need the United States. None of them wants a military alliance with Washington that will antagonise Beijing because their economic futures pull them inexorably towards greater integration with the mainland’s vast and growing markets. Obama’s eastward focus attempts to stem the powerful current of Islamic countries that have strengthened ties with China while quarrelling with the United States. A growing number of former American allies, including some that were virtual American dependencies, are now hedging their bets with more independent foreign policies that actively court Chinese investment, trade, military cooperation and diplomatic support.

Abstract Modernist Islamic thinkers see the hajj as a treasure house of fluid symbols carrying infinite meanings everyone is free to interpret and reinterpret as they choose. In their view, “reading” the hajj’s inner meanings is similar to reading any sacred text, including the Qur’an–every mortal mind can grasp a fraction of God’s message, but no human authority, no matter how learned and esteemed, can monopolize the discussion or claim the final word. Three writers have produced widely influential reinterpretations portraying the hajj as a powerful agent of social and political reform–Muhammad Iqbal of India, ‘Ali Shari‘ati of Iran, and Mohammed Arkoun of Algeria. Iqbal’s revivalism, Shari‘ati’s rebelliousness, and Arkoun’s humanism have merged into a modernist stream of hajj interpretation that enjoys mass audiences in dozens of languages and nations. Their views are constantly discussed and debated by a cosmopolitan hajj community that is increasingly youthful, female, educated, urban, and non-Middle Eastern.

Abstract The hajj is a grueling and perilous march. Even the most self-reliant pilgrims realize that being closer to God also brings them closer to death, and the ones most likely to survive are those who help one another. The hajj works because of the good sense and mutual support of the pilgrims, not because of the staggering resources their governments marshal to assist and control them. The decisive factor is the pilgrims’ self-control and mutual cooperation. When they pull together they usually muddle through the thousands of breakdowns in order and services confronting them each day, but when they fall apart, nothing else really matters and no one can save them from disaster.

AbstractThe international relations of the hajj are a fascinating interplay of power, law, and religion. Debates over hajj policy frame the struggle for power in Islamic international organizations, promoting greater bargaining and cooperation between blocks of Arab, Asian, and African states. The hajj is an evolving international regime based on customary international law but, more important, it is the clearest embodiment of a worldwide religion subordinating the interests of nation-states to the universal duty to comply with God’s commands. Advocates of Islamic modernism rely on the ideals of the hajj to support calls for greater world community and morality that are strikingly similar to the arguments of Western writers who are leading the current theoretical revolutions in international relations and international law.

AbstractGeographically and culturally, today’s hajj is nearly universal. The highest rates of hajj activity are still in countries closest to Mecca, but air travel allows Muslims throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas to participate with equal frequency. The strongest predictor of hajj activity is per capita income rather than distance from Mecca or the proportion of Muslims in the national population. Female participation is a special dimension of pilgrimage, demonstrating the enduring power of culture. Hajj growth has been accompanied by a steady rise in the proportion of women pilgrims to about 45% of the total, yet in many countries regional disparities in female pilgrimage reflect virtually separate societies with incompatible views of the value and freedom that women deserve.

Abstract Debates over the politics of pilgrimage revolve around three key questions. Do pilgrimages tend to fall under the control of entrenched authorities–secular and religious–or do they remain independent social movements inherently hostile to hierarchy and hegemony? Do pilgrimages encourage universal and egalitarian identities or do they harden parochial loyalties already dividing nations, sects, and social groups? And are modernization and globalization destroying pilgrimages or making them more vigorous than ever–reducing them to quasi-secular tourism or turning them into truly worldwide expressions of spiritual revivals? Although there is truth in both explanations, Western narrators tend to view the hajj as a bulwark of the status quo whereas Muslims overwhelmingly see it as embodying irrepressible demands for equality and universal community–a vision that inevitably contradicts parochial identities, including nationalism.

AbstractEach year, more than two million pilgrims from over 100 countries converge on the holy city of Mecca to reenact the ritual dramas that Muslims have been performing for centuries. While it is first and foremost a religious festival, the hajj is also a major political event. The Muslim world's leading multinational organization, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has established the first international regime explicitly devoted to pilgrimage. Every large Muslim nation has developed a comprehensive hajj policy and a powerful bureaucracy to enforce it. Yet no authority–secular or religious, national or international–can really control the hajj. Pilgrims believe that they are entitled to travel freely to Mecca as "Guests of God"–not as guests of any nation or organization that might wish to restrict or profit from their efforts to fulfill a fundamental religious obligation. Blending social science with the humanities and international law,Guests of God tells the stories of hajjis and hajj managers from Nigeria, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia exploring one of the greatest human experiences of our time.

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