54 C h a p t e r Tw o
Arabia. Previously, getting to Mecca from Russian lands typically took many
months and, in some cases, years. By the late nineteenth century, Muslims from
Russia routinely made the round-trip pilgrimage in a few months. In hajj mem-
oirs from this period, Muslims marveled at the speed of railroads and steam-
ships, noting that they could now get from Ufa to Constantinople (a distance of
more than 3,000 miles) in a week, and from Jaffa to Odessa in just ten days.^20
The experience in 1880 of Shihabetdin Marjani, the well-known Tatar theolo-
gian and historian, was common. Traveling exclusively by railroad and steam-
ship, he made the round-trip pilgrimage in just over four months. He left Kazan
in early August and was home by late December, having stopped off several
times along the way to sightsee, visit mosques and holy sites, and meet with
religious scholars.^21
Second, modern and more affordable methods of transportation made the
hajj widely accessible for the first time in history. Across colonial contexts, rail-
roads reached into rural areas and connected them with bustling port cities. By
the late nineteenth century the hajj had been transformed from a small-scale
phenomenon performed largely by elites of means and connections into a mass
event dominated by the poor.^22 Finally, railroads and steamships reorganized
the hajj along new routes, commingling people with little or no previous his-
tory of contact, and generating new itineraries. Over the second half of the
nineteenth century, Muslims worldwide began to turn away from ancient land
routes to Mecca, shifting to railroad and steamship routes. The opening of the
Suez Canal in 1869 made it possible for Muslims coming from “northern”
lands—North Africa, the Balkans, Russia, and Central Asia—to get from the
Black and Mediterranean seas to the Red Sea directly by sea route. By the 1870s
Russia’s Black Sea ports of Sevastopol, Batumi, and Odessa had become centers
of bustling hajj traffic, where pilgrims gathered to catch steamships to Constan-
tinople and beyond to Arabia.
The rise of mass hajj traffic through Russia brought a profound conceptual
shift in how tsarist officials thought about the Meccan pilgrimage. If previously
they had seen it as a mysterious, ill-defined Muslim cultural phenomenon, they
now began to see it as a concrete religious process and a highly visible annual
event that raised new questions about how to manage Russia’s Muslim popula-
tions, as well as the geography of Russian imperialism.
In recent years historians have created a robust scholarship on how Euro-
pean empires used ethnography and technologies of mapping and census-taking
as “cultural technologies of rule.” Scholars argue that these technologies were
as important as “more obvious and brutal modes of conquests” in Europeans’