44 Chapter One
the trip to Mashhad. Many pilgrims spent “their last kopecks” on the journey,
which left their families who stayed behind destitute and created problems for
the tsarist administration. With steamships now providing easy, fast transport
from Baku and Lenkoran across the Caspian Sea, “huge crowds” of Shiʿis had
started making the pilgrimage to Mashhad, where, Vorontsov’s officials
reported, they “fill up on hatred for Christians.” As more Muslims were making
these pilgrimages, Vorontsov worried, the government was being deprived of
taxes in their absence.^83
Voronstov rejected Titov’s proposal out of concern for stability in the Cauca-
sus. “I recognize that the majority of Russian subjects making the hajj are from
the South Caucasus,” he told L. G. Seniavin, head of the Asiatic Department at
the Foreign Ministry, “and I have often thought of the idea of posting a Russian
agent in Mecca.” And yet he did not see any reason to offer special protection to
a religious practice that had “inconvenient” political consequences, and
instilled in Muslims “hatred for Christians.” Like European colonial officials
elsewhere, Vorontsov’s fears about the hajj had much to do with Mecca’s status
as a city closed to non-Muslims, and the anxieties this generated about the hajj
as a cover for clandestine political organization and the radicalization of Mus-
lims. It does not seem that Vorontsov had any evidence of connections between
the hajj and Muslim anticolonial resistance in the Caucasus. In fact, in other
correspondence around this time, he conceded that he had “not seen any bad
behavior from returning pilgrims.”^84
While acknowledging Voronstov’s local concerns, Titov defended his plan
for a Russian agent in Mecca by making a broader strategic argument. In a let-
ter to Nesselrode in June 1851, Titov argued that extending Russian hajj patron-
age into Mecca would help Russia better integrate its Muslims into the empire,
and could even reduce their “fanaticism.” Central to his argument was the pun-
ishing physical experience of the journey, and Ottoman failures to secure
routes for pilgrims, something he knew much about from the reports of his
consular officials in Syria. He described the hajj under current conditions in the
Ottoman Empire as one of the most “inconvenient” and “ruinous” religious
practices for “the majority of Muslims who performed it.” Allowing Russia’s
Muslims to make the hajj through Ottoman lands under these conditions, he
argued, would help “neutralize” the great desire of Muslims to make it, and
deter “fanaticism” and “the spirit of contradiction,” especially when Muslims
saw the “facilities” offered to them as hajj pilgrims in Ottoman lands by a
“Christian government.” He pointed to Damascus as a model: Muslim pilgrims
from the Caucasus had a more positive impression of Russia after receiving