Russia as a Crossroads of the Global Hajj 9Following the historian William Roff ’s influential “twin threat” thesis, schol-
ars working across colonial contexts have argued that the European powers
sponsored the hajj essentially for defensive reasons: to contain the spread of
cholera and Pan-Islamic ideas. In Russia, Daniel Brower has argued, tsarist offi-
cials were essentially forced into permitting and even supporting the hajj by the
late nineteenth century, because of Russia’s policy of religious toleration, and
out of concern for the negative political and sanitary effects on the empire of
the unregulated hajj.^16
But historians have been too quick to assume similarities across empires.
A close look at the Russian case reveals a more complex set of motivations for
involvement in the hajj than standard histories allow, and unique aspects
related to the peculiarities of imperial Russia’s geography. A land-based empire
with large Muslim populations living within its borders, rather than in remote
overseas colonies, and hajj routes that cut through its central Slavic-speaking
lands and busy Black Sea ports, Russia had both internal and external interests
in the hajj. For Russia, the hajj was not a matter limited to far-away regions and
populations—invisible at home and separate from domestic issues—but instead
a highly visible, annual event that took place largely within Russia’s borders and
was deeply entangled with domestic issues.
Russia’s goals in sponsoring the hajj were different from those of other Euro-
pean powers, and they were more ambitious. What is striking overall about
Russia’s decision to sponsor the hajj is not that it was undertaken to guard
against perceived sanitary and political threats, but that it was ultimately an
attempt to instrumentalize the pilgrimage to advance secular state and impe-
rial agendas. At a time when Russia was simultaneously trying to cultivate a
broader, collective sense of imperial belonging and “Russianness” among the
empire’s diverse peoples, and to develop the empire’s economy to fund
empire-wide reforms, the tsarist government embraced hajj patronage both to
integrate newly conquered Muslim populations and to channel lucrative profits
into state coffers. To this end, Russia organized seasonal service for hajj pil-
grims on state-owned railroads and steamships, hoping to streamline the traf-
fic onto Russian transport and capture millions of rubles for the state. In this
sense, the Russian case more closely resembled that of the Ottoman state, in
which the sultan undertook elaborate and expensive patronage of the hajj not
only because it was expected of him as ruler of the Muslim holy places, and
caliph of all Muslims, but also for non-religious and strategic reasons—namely,
to integrate Arabic-speaking Muslims into the empire, and to justify posting
Ottoman troops in the empire’s far-flung Arab provinces.^17