The Muslim pilgrimage was the earliest major driver of long-distance personal travel

Evidence

I start with pilgrims, not because they are the earliest chronologically (they are not); but because the pilgrimage—more specifically the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina—is the first really major factor of personal travel over vast distances in human history, and for long it remained the most important single factor. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 724

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the Eurocentric assumption that long-distance personal travel begins with Christian pilgrimage or medieval European exploration; connects to Said-adjacent arguments about the priority of Islamic networks in global mobility.