64 C h a p t e r Tw o
While grappling with these various problems, Ignatʹev also faced the acute
crisis in 1871 of a massive cholera outbreak in Jeddah. Because of the outbreak,
steamship companies canceled their service to Arabia, leaving thousands of
pilgrims stranded in Constantinople, among them thousands of Russian sub-
jects. Stuck indefinitely in a foreign city with no infrastructure in place to sup-
port them, they became easy targets for con men and quickly ran out of money.
They also began to contact Ignatʹev and his consul-general for help; both pan-
icked as they realized that the pilgrims’ needs were too great for them to man-
age. Moreover, Ignatʹev soon discovered, almost none of the pilgrims contacting
the embassy and general consulate carried Russian passports. He warned the
Foreign Ministry that, left to their own devices, these pilgrims faced “serious
dangers,” and their plight deserved “the special attention of the imperial gov-
ernment.”^52 There is every reason to believe that Ignatʹev’s apparent humanitar-
ian concern and pity for these Muslim pilgrims was genuine. Uprooted from
home, poor, vulnerable, disoriented in a strange city, and trying to perform a
major ritual of their faith under awful circumstances, the hajj pilgrims he met
in Constantinople must have appeared grievously sad. Yet it is also clear that
he saw the hajj as a growing threat to Russia’s imperial stability, and that the
Foreign Ministry took seriously his pleas to restrict it.
On the Foreign Ministry’s urging, in 1872 the Interior Ministry once again
ordered Russian officials in Muslim regions to stop issuing passports to Mecca.
The official reason given was the cholera outbreak in Jeddah, and the ministry
urged Russian officials in Muslim regions to frame the measure in humanitar-
ian terms. They were to discourage Muslims from getting passports to Mecca
by informing them of the outbreak and warning them about the serious dan-
gers and discomforts they would face if they went on the hajj.^53
The 1872 measure, like those before it, met widespread resistance from Rus-
sian officials in the empire’s Muslim regions. K. P. von Kaufman, Russia’s
governor-general of Turkestan, where the Russian conquest was ongoing,
refused to implement it. One of Kaufman’s first decrees as governor-general, in
1870, had stipulated that “no restrictions” be placed on Muslims applying for
passports to Mecca. Like colonial officials in Muslim regions elsewhere in the
world, Kaufman supported open access to the Mecca pilgrimage as a matter of
pragmatism, to win local Muslims’ loyalties, and neutralize “fanaticism.” Rea-
soning that the hajj was a ritual central to the Muslim faith, and open access to
it symbolic of Russia’s policy of religious toleration, Kaufman intended to avoid
the appearance of any kind of government intervention or prohibition.^54 In the
Caucasus, too, officials resisted the measure. Here, also, they generally opposed