58 C h a p t e r Tw o
What changed in the late nineteenth century was scale. Suddenly hajj traffic
surged through Constantinople from Russian-ruled lands every year, as steam-
ships became the preferred mode of travel. Many hajj pilgrims from Russia
were educated Muslims, with the means and connections abroad to ease their
journey. The hajj memoirs they wrote give us some sense of how these elites
experienced the Meccan pilgrimage in these years, as well as their experience of
Constantinople. What is perhaps most striking when glancing through the
pages of these memoirs is the absence of problems: there are few mentions of
shady brokers and crooks lurking in the shadows of Constantinople’s streets,
ready to pounce on hapless hajj pilgrims. Such mentions fill pages of reports on
the hajj from the Russian embassy in these years. Perhaps this is due to a retro-
spective whitewashing of the journey. But it also surely reflects the unique
experience of the city by Russia’s Muslim elites, who were often educated and
well traveled, sophisticated and multilingual, and, no less importantly, plugged
into an extensive network of scholars and émigrés and their institutions in
Ottoman lands. Many arrived in Constantinople with a list of names in their
Figure 2.3. Hajj pilgrims from Central Asia at the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari (a close
companion of the prophet Muhammad) in Constantinople. The landscape of the Ottoman
capital was dotted with majestic stone mosques, and Islamic tombs and shrines, which many
pilgrims from Russia and Central Asia included in their multi-holy-site hajj itineraries.
Early 1900s. (Hac, Kutsal Yolculuk [Istanbul: Denizler Kitabevi, 2014])