60 C h a p t e r Tw o
In 1897, on the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne,
British Indian Muslims in Jeddah set up the Jubilee Indian Pilgrims Relief
Fund, a charity fund to help poor pilgrims, overseen by the British vice-consul.^37
Also in the 1890s, a disagreement developed between the French Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and the colonial government in Algeria over who should cover
the mounting costs of repatriating indigent pilgrims to Algeria.^38 The Otto-
mans’ inability to control the Hejaz and secure routes for pilgrims opened up
opportunities for Europeans to intervene. When in trouble, Muslims often
asked for consular intervention. In the 1880s a group of twenty-eight Muslims
from Singapore in Mecca wrote to the British consul, asked him to secure their
route from Mecca to Jeddah, and said they were being extorted in Mecca.^39
This was not what the European powers had had in mind in offering consular
services to their Muslim subjects headed to Mecca. They had hoped to gain
more supervision and control over the hajj traffic by getting pilgrims to register
their passports with consulates. Instead, they were finding that pilgrims often
showed up only to demand money. This drained the limited resources of foreign
consulates, and created conflict within European governments about how to
solve this growing problem.^40 As always, the European powers showed great
caution when it came to intervening in the religious life of their Muslim sub-
jects. Recent scholarship has highlighted the extent to which European colonial
rule of Muslim populations was based on accommodating Islam and supporting
Muslim institutions. This was perhaps especially true when it came to the hajj,
which the European powers generally saw as a nonnegotiable form of Muslim
mobility and religious practice, and which they increasingly supported as the
nineteenth century went on.^41 They were loath to introduce new restrictions on
the hajj, for fear of a Muslim backlash. But they were also losing a lot of money.
In 1859 the Dutch had started to require that Muslims departing for Mecca
show proof of adequate means, and other imperial powers followed suit.^42 Rus-
sia, which frequently looked to other European powers for ideas on how to
manage the hajj, most likely modeled its 1869 measure on the Dutch precedent.
The hajj traffic continued to grow not only because of better transportation
and informal networks and pathways for travel, but also because many Russian
officials inside the empire resisted measures to restrict it. In the Caucasus, the
1860s orders prompted new discussions and debates about hajj pilgrims and
access to passports. Just a few years before, in 1864, Russia had finally put down
the decades-long Muslim anticolonial rebellions in the North Caucasus. The
leading Russian official in charge of Dagestan in the late 1860s, M. T. Loris-
Melikov, wanted to maintain this newfound regional stability. He did not deny