The museum's target of 80,000 visitors was quickly exceeded. By the end of the run, 119,948 adult tickets had been sold (children had free entry and were not counted). Forty-seven percent of visitors were Muslims. Some non-Muslim visitors reported that overhearing Muslim families' conversations or striking up conversations with them, helped them appreciate the spiritual importance of the hajj.
Brian Sewell in the
Evening Standard described the exhibition as "of profound cultural importance", praising it as an example of "what multiculturalism should beinformation, instruction and understanding, academically rigorous, leaving both cultures (the enquiring and the enquired) intact". For
The Diplomat, Amy Foulds described the first part of the exhibition as very interesting but felt that the section about Mecca was anti-climactic, though somewhat redeemed by the contemporary art pieces. The scholar of religion
Karen Armstrong recommended the exhibition as an antidote to Western stereotypes of Islam that focus on violence and extremism. She described it as an insight into how the vast majority of Muslims view and practise their religion. For the
Sunday Times art critic
Waldemar Januszczak, an exhibition on a topic for which there is relatively little visual material was "heroic" and showed a determination to help visitors understand the world. He drew a parallel with exhibitions of
conceptual art; since texts rather than visual art played a crucial role, "so much of the extraordinary story line laid out for us [...] takes place in the mind". Among the visual art, he singled out the textiles as providing "a visceral artistic buzz to the display".
Nick Cohen, in an
Observer piece accusing British cultural institutions of "selling their souls" to dictatorships, criticised the exhibition for ignoring aspects of the hajj documented by historians of Islam. He speculated that topics had been excluded so as not to offend the
Saudi royal family, including deaths at the hajj (by violence or by incompetent crowd control) and the destruction of buildings in Mecca where Mohammad and his family had lived. The museum responded that the Saudi royal family had not funded the exhibition and had no curatorial control. File:Khalili Collection Hajj and Arts of Pilgrimage Mss 1025 fol 15a CROP.jpg|alt=refer to caption|Illustration of a North African pilgrim caravan from the , 17th century File:Khalili Collection Hajj and Arts of Pilgrimage txt-0442-front.jpg|alt=refer to caption| cover in red silk, late 19th century File:Khalili Collection Hajj and Arts of Pilgrimage txt 0241 full.jpg|alt=refer to caption|Section from the curtain of the prophet's tomb, 18th century
Publications Two books resulted directly from the exhibition, both edited by Venetia Porter.
Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam is an exhibition catalogue that also includes interdisciplinary essays explaining the history, culture, and religious significance of the hajj. The authors include Karen Armstrong,
Muhammad Abdel-Haleem,
Hugh N. Kennedy,
Robert Irwin, and
Ziauddin Sardar. The
Art of Hajj is a shorter book describing Mecca, Medina, and the rituals of the hajj with visual examples. Qamar Adamjee, a curator at the
Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, described both books as accessible to a broad audience while covering many different aspects of the subject. Its proceedings, including thirty papers on different aspects of the hajj, were published by the British Museum in 2013 as
The Hajj: Collected Essays, edited by Venetia Porter and Liana Saif. The Khalili Collection of Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage subsequently expanded into a five-thousand-object collection documenting the Islamic holy sites of Mecca and
Medina. In 2022 it was published in a single illustrated volume by Qaisra Khan, who had co-curated the London exhibition and had become the curator of Hajj and the Arts and Pilgrimage at the Khalili Collections. An eleven-volume catalogue is scheduled for publication in 2023.
Related exhibitions The success of
Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam prompted museums and art institutions in other countries to inquire about hosting hajj-themed exhibitions. It was not possible for the London exhibition to go on tour; it had involved special loans from 40 different sources, arranged by years of negotiation. Instead, these institutions created exhibitions on the theme of the hajj using items loaned by the Khalili Collection, among other collections. These included the
Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the
Arab World Institute in Paris. The Doha exhibition was titled
Hajj: The Journey Through Art and drew most of its content from
Qatari art collections. Since France has many North African immigrants, the Paris exhibition focused on hajj routes from North Africa. ==See also==