70 C h a p t e r Tw o
As a Muslim, Ibragimov was able to serve Russia not only in Jeddah, where
European merchants and diplomats were allowed to live within the city walls,
but also in Mecca, which was closed to non-Muslims. This was not lost on local
Ottoman officials in the Hejaz region, who noted with alarm that Ibragimov
had rented a house in Mecca, and expressed concern to the Ottoman govern-
ment in Constantinople that European powers were starting to use their Mus-
lim colonial subjects as a way to penetrate the Muslim holy cities.^72
Ibragimov’s time as Russia’s Jeddah consul would be brief. Within less than
a year he was dead and buried in the cemetery outside the city walls, a victim of
the 1892 cholera outbreak in Arabia, his grave marked with inscriptions in Rus-
sian and Arabic.^73 As it turned out, he would be the first and last Muslim sub-
ject to serve as Russian consul. After his death, the Russian Foreign Ministry
appointed as his successor A. D. Levitskii, the first in a line of non-Muslims to
serve as Russian consuls in Jeddah.^74
The Jeddah consulate was supposed to help the tsarist government map Rus-
sia’s hajj traffic through Ottoman lands. The Foreign Ministry hoped that by
getting pilgrims to register their passports with the consulate, they could gain a
better sense of the scale of the traffic, the logistics, the specific needs of pil-
grims, and the networks they relied on for support. It hoped that by identifying
these networks the Jeddah consulate could then displace them, redirect Russia’s
Muslims, and isolate them from the influence of foreign institutions, officials,
and ideas in Arabia. It was one thing for Russia to open a Jeddah consulate for
its Muslim subjects, however, and another to get them to use it. And getting
Muslims to show up at the consulate and use its services was crucial to Russia’s
efforts to gather information on the hajj.
To understand how the tsarist government gathered data on the hajj, we must
piece together scattered evidence. The archives of Russia’s Jeddah consulate are
missing. They may have been destroyed during World War I, during the fight-
ing in Arabia. Fortunately, however, the history of this institution lives on,
albeit in fragments, in other collections.
Soon after the Jeddah consulate opened, Turkistan wilayatining gazeti began
to advertise its services through a series of articles. Most Muslims in Turkestan
were illiterate. The readership of this weekly newspaper was surely small, per-
haps several thousand, out of an overall regional population of some seven mil-
lion Muslims. But since 1870, the year it established the newspaper, the Russian
administration had been using it to convey important information to the local
population. The historian Adeeb Khalid has explored some of the ways Russian
officials used the paper as a colonizing tool, to communicate decrees of the new