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Mapping the Hajj,
Integrating Muslims
During the second half of the nineteenth century the hajj became a mass phe-
nomenon in Russia, due to Russian imperial expansion and the tsarist state’s
creation of modern transport networks. Russia’s conquest of Turkestan increased
the empire’s Muslim population dramatically, adding some seven million new
subjects. Muslims now were fifteen percent of the empire’s total population, and
Russia’s second largest confessional group after Orthodox Christians.^1 Mean-
while, Russia’s rapid construction of an empire-wide railroad network, and its
new steamship service from the Black Sea, had the accidental effect of widening
access to Mecca for Muslims across Russia and Eurasia. Russia may have built
its modern transport system with economic and strategic goals in mind—to
industrialize, foster commercial activity, integrate the empire’s regions, and
secure Russia’s borderlands—but this did not prevent Muslims from putting the
system to their own uses. In Russia as elsewhere Muslims embraced modern
modes of transport as a new and improved way of getting to Mecca.^2
By the 1880s tens of thousands of Muslims were making the pilgrimage to
Mecca through Russian lands and Black Sea ports every year, having aban-
doned their old caravan routes through Ottoman, Persian, and Indian lands.
Lured by promises of superior safety, comfort, and speed, these Muslims now
took Russian railroads and steamships to get to Arabia and back. They hailed
not only from Russian lands, but also from Bukhara and Khiva, Persia, Afghan-
istan, and China. In Odessa, Russia’s chief port on the Black Sea, the sudden
surge of Eurasian hajj traffic through the city was significant enough to attract
the attention of the sharif of Mecca, in faraway Arabia. As the Ottoman official