Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 57to cover any debts they might have left behind. This measure was intended to
discourage poor Muslims from applying for passports, and thus limit the num-
ber going on the hajj overall. It was also intended to solve the serious and grow-
ing problem of poor Muslims who made the hajj from Russia without sufficient
means, creating a serious economic drain on the empire’s institutions, as well
as on its foreign consulates.
Russia’s efforts to restrict the hajj over the 1860s did not work. The hajj traffic
kept growing in spite of these measures. As railroads expanded deeper into the
empire’s Muslim lands, the numbers of pilgrims increased. And, as had always
been the case, many hajj pilgrims simply left Russia without ever applying for a
passport, slipping across the border undetected. The business of selling false
passports was booming in Russia in this period, and so others bought fakes, or
simply bribed officials to get a Russian passport, in spite of the prohibition.^31
Criminal rings in Black Sea ports peddled fake Chinese and Bukharan pass-
ports at high prices.^32 In this sense, reform of passport laws had little practical
meaning or effect on the flow of Russia’s hajj traffic.
Much of what the Russian government knew about the empire’s hajj traffic
came from its foreign consulates in Ottoman lands. By the late 1860s the tsarist
government knew that large numbers of its hajj pilgrims were showing up at
Russian consulates abroad and begging for money to cover their travel expenses.
The Foreign Ministry received numerous reports about this problem from its
embassy in Constantinople.
There was nothing new in the late nineteenth century about Muslims from
Russian-ruled lands making the hajj by way of Constantinople. Hajj memoirs
and Ottoman documents reveal instances from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries of hajj pilgrims from Russia and Central Asia passing through the
Ottoman capital, even when it made for a more circuitous route.^33 There, they
visited the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, a close companion of the Prophet
Muhammad, marveled at the city’s majestic stone mosques, and often stayed for
extended periods to study with religious scholars. Some came also to witness the
sultan’s hajj investiture ceremonies and the surre procession that left Dolma-
bahçe Palace for Kabataş harbor, and crossed the Bosporus by ship to Üsküdar
(from which the imperial hajj caravan departed on its route across Anatolia to
Mecca via Damascus). Many from Russia and Central Asia stayed in Constanti-
n o p l e’s tekkes, lodging houses for pilgrims scattered around the city. Naqshbandi
Sufis had established these lodging houses across Ottoman lands starting in the
sixteenth century, to provide a support network for Central Asia’s hajj pilgrims.
Other pilgrims stayed in hotels run by Crimean Tatar émigrés.^34