Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 63Ottoman lands. Many of these requests came from Russian officials in the Cau-
casus, on behalf of Muslims under their rule; they asked Ignatʹev to investigate
the whereabouts of their relatives who had made the hajj and never returned,
and the fate of their estates. Estate cases for hajj pilgrims who died in Ottoman
lands had in previous centuries been handled by Ottoman officials, and had
historically been a source of lucrative revenues for corrupt officials. But Mus-
lims who were Russian subjects, many of them recently minted subjects from
the Caucasus and Central Asia, were increasingly turning to Russian diplomatic
officials to resolve these cases, no doubt seeing them as more likely to succeed.
This offered Russia opportunities to increase its involvement in the hajj, and to
encourage Muslims to rely on Russian support and institutions in making the
pilgrimage, but it also required enormous efforts and resources from the Con-
stantinople embassy. One of Ignatʹev’s main difficulties in resolving estate cases
like Borenov’s, he told the Foreign Ministry in 1871, was that he had no consul
on the ground in Jeddah, where many of Russia’s hajj pilgrims died.^49
Ignatʹev also received requests for financial aid from Muslim pilgrims in
other parts of the Ottoman Empire. One such petition came in 1871 from Suez,
from a group of six Muslims from the Caucasus who found themselves penni-
less and stranded. Clearly revealing their interpretation of Russian diplomatic
protection as in part an economic entitlement, they appealed in their petition
to Ignatʹev’s “well-known goodness” that extended without difference “to all
Russians,” and asked that he as “protector of Russians in Ottoman lands” pay
their way from Suez home to Russia. This, too, was not an isolated incident, but
rather part of a broader and increasingly burdensome pattern. Ignatʹev told the
Foreign Ministry that hajj pilgrims were becoming a “drain on our consuls in
the East,” who were being forced to offer them financial help despite not having
the necessary resources.^50
In early 1871 Ignatʹev received a complaint from the Ottoman grand vizier
about a group of 2,000 Muslim pilgrims from the Caucasus who had shown up
in Constantinople on their way to Mecca. Ottoman officials had stopped them
and found they were armed to the teeth with weapons—daggers, knives, pistols,
and guns—that they planned to sell to cover their travel costs. Officials discov-
ered that one pilgrim had three hundred guns. The grand vizier complained
that this posed a security risk to the Ottoman Empire, and demanded that
Ignatʹev pressure the Russian government to tighten its border control. If noth-
ing else, this episode revealed to Ignatʹev the ease with which Russia’s Muslims
were moving across the empire’s porous borders. It doubtless heightened his
sense that the hajj traffic was unsupervised, unobstructed, and out of control.^51