48 C h a p t e r Tw o
responsible for the Muslim holy cities and the annual pilgrimage, the sharif
every year sent a fleet of professional pilgrim-guides out to cities worldwide
that were transit points for hajj pilgrims—these included Najaf and Karbala,
Baghdad and Bombay, Rasht and Constantinople, and, by the 1880s, Odessa.^3
One of Russia’s major modern migrations, and its largest pilgrimage, the hajj
was inscrutable to most tsarist officials. They had a limited understanding of its
religious meaning. Many confused Mecca with Medina, referring to it as the
site where the prophet Muhammad was buried, and where pilgrims prayed at
his tomb. They had little sense of Muslims’ routes to Mecca, their itineraries, or
their actions along the way. The hajj journey between Russia and Arabia largely
involved foreign travel, much of it through lands where Russia had no historical
interests or formal presence. The same was of course true of Russian Orthodox
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which involved travel along multiple, shifting routes
through Ottoman lands, putting pilgrims beyond the reach of tsarist authori-
ties. But the Jerusalem Orthodox pilgrimage was a familiar tradition to Russian
officials, and they generally regarded it more positively.^4
The rise of Russia’s mass hajj traffic occurred at a time of growing European
and Russian anxieties about Pan-Islamism as a threat to empire, when Russia
was struggling to integrate millions of newly acquired Muslim subjects in
Turkestan. In classic Orientalist fashion, and like colonial officials elsewhere,
many Russian officials viewed the hajj as a clandestine, conspiratorial activity,
and a symbol of Muslims’ “fanaticism.” Many also feared it, more so than any
other migratory phenomenon, as a source of infectious disease, above all chol-
era. And so, as the hajj became a mass phenomenon, tsarist officials grew
increasingly intent on bringing it under government supervision and control.
They began by trying to understand hajj pilgrims’ routes and itineraries. In a
tradition dating back to the eighteenth century, the tsarist state sought to capture,
and co-opt, human movement within Russia’s vast imperial expanses by envi-
sioning it in terms of an itinerary, a set of stations and stops.^5 Russia approached
the hajj similarly. To gather information on how Muslims were getting from Rus-
sia to Mecca and their stops along the way, Russia opened a network of new con-
sulates abroad starting in the 1880s. It opened these at known transit points of
Russia’s hajj traffic, as gleaned from interviews with returning pilgrims—in Bagh-
dad and Jeddah, Karbala and Mashhad, Constantinople and Bombay.^6 As this
pattern of new consulates suggests, with one at Karbala and one at Mashhad
(both important Shiʿi holy sites), the hajj was not the sole Muslim pilgrimage
central to tsarist interest and planning. But as the largest of all Muslim pilgrim-
ages, it was the main focus of Russian state attention and intervention.^7