Forging a Russian Hajj Route 99quay, before boarding a steamship bound for the Red Sea.^33 It was also not lost
on Russia’s Muslims that the Orthodox pilgrims who traveled alongside them
were not subject to the same intrusive rituals of screening and examination in
Russia’s ports. Several Muslims, in their written accounts of the hajj, noted bit-
terly the division of Muslim from Orthodox pilgrims on the quay in Odessa,
and saw anti-Muslim and discriminatory overtones in medical screening.^34
Firsthand descriptions from the early twentieth century capture the disorien-
tation and misery that many Muslims experienced as part of new medical in-
spection and disinfection procedures in Russia’s Black Sea ports. One account,
by a Russian journalist on the ground in Sevastopol during hajj season that year,
described how police forced a large crowd of angry pilgrims from Central Asia
to line up on the quay for examination before they boarded the ship. None of
these pilgrims spoke Russian, the ship’s horn was blaring in the background,
and the scene was chaotic. There were only three doctors for nearly 2,000 pil-
grims; the doctors were overwhelmed and rough with the pilgrims, rushing to
examine them all in just an hour and a half. The medical examination consisted
of the doctors asking pilgrims, one by one, in Russian, “Do you feel well?” Any
sign of fatigue or illness, pilgrims knew, could get them yanked from the line
and barred from entry onto the waiting ship. And so the sick tried to conceal
their illnesses, and others refused to answer the questions and just kept moving,
with overwhelmed doctors letting them slip past.^35 While thousands of Muslims
were taking Russia’s railroads to get to Mecca by the 1880s and 1890s, many
continued to avoid them. And Russian officials suspected, no doubt correctly,
that rumors of chaotic scenes like this reached Muslims by word of mouth,
frightened them, and kept them traveling the old land routes.
Unsurprisingly, given these problems along the railroads, ROPiT’s hajj tick-
ets sold poorly. It sold only a couple thousand tickets a year from 1899 to 1901.
In the end, it was stuck with piles of unsold ticket books for hajj pilgrims.^36
ROPiT’s chairman would later say that this was a result of the perceived high
cost of ROPiT’s combination tickets. Overall the round-trip tickets were
cheaper than what pilgrims paid, all told, to make the multileg round-trip jour-
ney. But the lump sum seemed large to them, he argued, and deterred many
from buying the tickets. Price may indeed have been a factor, but it seems likely
that the cultural issues and logistical problems discussed above also played a
key role. Another issue that ROPiT had not anticipated surely also contributed
to poor sales. The combination tickets, which offered fast, nonstop, direct ser-
vice between the Black and Red seas, did not fit typical multistop itineraries
between Russia and Mecca.