Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 75the city’s workers and porters refusing to bury the dead. “Everywhere,” Osl-
chanictzki wrote, “were the dead and suffering, the cries of men, women, and
children, mixed with the roaring of the camels, in short, a terrifying scene
which will never be blotted out of my memory.” The epidemic lasted a full
month, and the majority of the afflicted were colonial subjects. This epidemic
transformed cholera in the Hejaz into a major international issue, and prompted
the European powers to insist on their right to intervene directly in sanitary
conditions in Jeddah, given the failures of the Ottomans to enforce interna-
tional regulations in their own lands.^85
In response to the devastating cholera epidemic in Arabia, as well as a plague
scare in India, the European powers convened the first Sanitary Conference on
the Mecca Pilgrimage. There they drafted the 1894 Paris Sanitary Convention,
which focused largely on cholera, and marked stricter and more invasive con-
trols over hajj traffic—these included, among other things, stringent medical
inspections in pilgrims’ ports of departure, and the establishment of a new
quarantine station on Kamaran Island in the Red Sea, staffed by European and
Ottoman, Muslim and non-Muslim medical officials.^86 The 1893 epidemic, in
other words, led to a deepening of European involvement in the hajj in and
around Arabia as well as in colonial locales. The Ottomans, seeking to regain
control and authority over the mass hajj traffic, and to curb European influence
over the pilgrimage, introduced their own series of measures after the 1893 epi-
demic. Among other things, Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II ordered the con-
struction of a lodging house for poor pilgrims in Mecca, with a capacity for
1 ,400.^87
But Levitskii’s interest in taking control of the Jeddah tekkes was also about
his authority over Russia’s hajj traffic, and gaining control over the tekkes’
financial and legal dealings. He sought both to eliminate barriers that blocked
his access to pilgrims and to remove them from other sources of influence and
authority. He told Ambassador Ivanov that he needed open access to the tekkes
in order to resolve “judicial-estate issues” when pilgrims died. As things stood,
Ottoman officials were trying to block him from the tekkes, for fear of losing
their own authority over estate cases, which were for them a lucrative source of
income. Levitskii asked Ivanov to get the Ottoman government to issue a decree
to local officials, asking them not to “condemn” him for visiting the tekkes, or
to obstruct his access.^88
Ivanov hesitated to do this for fear of upsetting the Ottoman government.
Scribbled in pencil in the margins of Levitskii’s proposal is his response, in
which he noted that the Ottoman government was already opposing Russian