Guests of God: Pilgrimage and Politics in the Islamic World

Robert R. Bianchi is a political scientist, and this Oxford University Press book is his scholarly study of the Hajj pilgrimage's political dimensions across the modern Islamic world, examining how governments and institutions organize and contest the pilgrimage. Its strength is that Bianchi brings a political science lens to a subject usually treated devotionally, documenting the modern administrative and diplomatic realities of the pilgrimage in detail. Its limit is exactly that focus, it is a study of the Hajj's politics and organization, not a devotional or ritual-procedure guide to performing the Hajj or Umrah, so a claim about the required rites themselves needs a source addressing that religious content directly.