74 C h a p t e r Tw o
mass movement of hajj pilgrims between Turkestan and Arabia—a collabora-
tion with the goal of colonizing Turkestan and integrating Muslims into the
empire.
On the ground in Jeddah, Russian consul Levitskii attempted to bring the hajj
traffic under his control and authority, among other means, by laying claim to
the city’s network of Central Asian tekkes. As noted earlier, Sufis from Central
Asia had established these lodging houses across Ottoman lands in earlier cen-
turies to support hajj pilgrims from Turkestan.^81 Levitskii’s investigations turned
up five such tekkes in Jeddah, and he visited them all within a year of his arrival.
In an 1893 report to Russian ambassador I.A. Ivanov in Constantinople, he
described them as “exclusively for Russian and Bukharan subjects,” funded by
Russian subjects, and generally in appalling shape. One of them, the “Bukharan
tekke,” was “extremely dilapidated,” and the Ottoman subjects running the tek-
kes were overall of “extremely limited intelligence.” “Given that these lodging
houses were obtained by and for Russian subjects,” he wrote in his report to the
ambassador, “it goes without saying that with the opening in Jeddah of a Rus-
sian consulate, their supervision should become the domain of the consul.”^82
Levitskii’s main argument for taking over the tekkes in Jeddah was sanitary.
He insisted that he, as Russian consul, should oversee “the cleanliness of the
tekkes and their hygienic condition,” and that he or his secretary needed to
make regular visits to these places in order to “preserve hajj pilgrims’ health.”^83
There is no reason to question Levitskii’s sincerity on this point. There had been
eight major cholera epidemics in Jeddah since 1865, and Levitskii wrote his
proposal in 1893, in the midst of one of the worst ever. The 1893 epidemic killed
more than 30,000 pilgrims in Arabia. That same year a cholera epidemic rav-
aged Russia. It began in Astrakhan, and was blamed on returning hajj pilgrims.
The most deadly epidemic Russia experienced in the nineteenth century, it
killed 250,000 Russian subjects empire-wide. In Russia, as elsewhere, the dis-
ease disproportionately afflicted the lower classes. Myths and legends swirled
among them to explain the appearance of the “dreaded guest,” including the
idea that the government had created it to kill off poor people.^84 Levitskii would
most likely have been aware of anxieties within the Russian government at this
time about cholera as a threat to domestic order, and the role of the hajj in
spreading it.
In Jeddah in 1893, Levitskii would have seen firsthand the horrors described
by another eyewitness, a doctor employed by the Ottoman government named
Oslchanictzki. He described Jeddah that year as a “vast cemetery,” with dead
bodies filling the caravanserais, mosques, cafés, houses, and public areas, and