Pilgrimage studies to holy sites in early modern Palestine and Egypt have ignored Christian Arabic writings. This paper examines three accounts written by Orthodox and Catholic pilgrims to St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai and to Jerusalem and other parts of Palestine in the years 1637, 1753, and 1755. It shows the popularity of pilgrimages among Christian Arabs and the interactions they had with the various religious communities in the Ottoman world. The pilgrimage accounts show a thriving Christian Arab culture in the middle of a Muslim empire, and they present the views and experiences of pilgrims in their own words – challenging, on numerous occasions, the descriptions of Christian Arabs that appear in contemporaneous European sources.
