22 Chapter One
rebellions across the North Caucasus in the early 1820s, he worried that the hajj
was feeding this resistance, and that disguised pilgrims were in fact arms smug-
glers and Ottoman agents. Writing to Russian foreign minister Karl Nesselrode
in January 1822, Ermolov noted that many Muslims in the Caucasus made the
hajj every year along routes through Ottoman lands, and he warned that the
experience was surely strengthening their loyalties to the sultan and their
resolve to resist Russian rule.^13
Tsar Alexander I was reluctant about the hajj ban. He worried that Muslims
would resent it, given Russia’s promise of religious toleration, but he agreed to it
as a temporary security measure. Ermolov’s officials announced the ban
throughout the Caucasus in early 1822, and threatened violators with state con-
fiscation of their property, and deportation into Russia’s central regions.^14 The
tsar’s hesitation illustrates how Russia’s official policy of religious toleration,
introduced in the late eighteenth century by Tsarina Catherine the Great to
foster social control and imperial stability, was sometimes difficult for officials
to reconcile with broader security concerns about the empire, particularly
when it came to pilgrimage to holy sites abroad.
Russia’s hajj ban in the Caucasus was short lived because it did not work.
Muslims continued to leave the Caucasus for Mecca in spite of it, some with the
help of Russian officials, who were often easy to bribe. In 1823, Ermolov com-
plained to his commander in Dagestan, in the North Caucasus, that “many
Muslims” from his province were showing up in the South Caucasus carrying
travel documents from their local Russian authorities that permitted them to
make the hajj, in violation of the ban.^15 The ban also created problems for for-
eign Muslims. Soon after it was announced, the Foreign Ministry received
numerous complaints from Persians and Bukharans who suddenly found their
routes through the Caucasus blocked. More than once Nesselrode wrote to
Ermolov, reminding him “under no circumstances” to apply the ban to foreign
Muslims, who “passed through Russian lands to make their journey easier.”^16
The hajj ban also interfered with tsarist officials’ efforts to cultivate Muslim
allegiances, and co-opt elites into the emerging Russian administration in the
Caucasus. When Muslim elites complained about the ban, Russian officials tried
to defend it as a benevolent measure, intended to protect Russia’s Muslim sub-
jects from violent attacks along Ottoman hajj routes, and as a “warning about
the dangers of traveling through Ottoman lands during wartime.”^17 But Russian
officials quickly discovered that Muslims recognized, and resented, the ban for
what it was: an attempt by their colonial conquerors to restrict their religious
practice, and, thus, a violation of Russia’s stated policy of toleration of Islam.