168 Chapter Five
At the same time, a Sovtorgflot official approached two Turkish citizens in
Constantinople, Muhammad Murat Remzi and Hasan Fahmi, to invite them to
work for the fleet. They were hajj brokers and guides who worked in Sinkiang,
organizing hajj pilgrims and escorting them to Mecca and back every year. That
fall they were on their way back from Mecca, passing through the Turkish city;
the Sovtorgflot official must have circled the crowd of arriving hajj pilgrims,
and picked them out as pilgrim-guides and thus potential recruits. He offered
them a fee to “agitate” among Muslims when they returned to Sinkiang to take
Soviet routes and Sovtorgflot ships instead of routes through India and by Brit-
ish steamers. The two accepted the offer, with certain conditions. Upon their
return to Sinkiang, they contacted the Soviet consul to ask him to improve con-
ditions along the Soviet routes.^39
In their negotiations with the Soviet consul, Remzi and Fahmi revealed a
number of obstacles that deterred many Muslims from making the hajj through
the USSR. These, in turn, revealed how dramatically conditions along the old
routes had changed under Soviet rule. The first issue was related to currency. In
1926 the Soviet government had passed laws to limit the export of currency and
valuables from the country as part of its efforts to build the state and economy.^40
Figure 5.1. A postcard from 1930 shows hajj pilgrims from Central Asia strolling in
Eminönü, Istanbul. They probably arrived in the city on Sovtorgflot ships. (Hac, Kutsal Yol-
culuk [Istanbul: Denizler Kitabevi, 2014])