88 Chapter Three
the Orthodox Church, which enjoyed preeminent status in the empire, and was
a crucial source of institutional support for the regime. At the same time, they
worried that Muslims might resent government involvement in the hajj as an
attempt to restrict the practice of their faith.
These concerns and complexities around the hajj illuminate a much larger
problem for Russia: How could it reconcile its identity as an Orthodox state,
and the historically privileged position of the Orthodox Church within the em-
pire, with the diverse confessional makeup of its internal populations, and the
need to integrate and effectively govern these diverse populations? How could it
harness the economic and other benefits of the hajj, without appearing to con-
trol or interfere with it?
Ultimately, the government never created or endorsed the equivalent of the
IOPS for the Muslim pilgrimage, nor did it build an elaborate complex for its
hajj pilgrims in or around Mecca. Most strikingly, as this chapter describes,
Russia never officially announced its support for the hajj or its plan to organize
it. The plan was never centralized in a single ministry or institution, but was
instead carried out in a decentralized manner, in semisecrecy.
The idea to forge a state-sanctioned hajj route was first proposed in 1896, in the
Ministry of Internal Affairs’ comprehensive “Report on the Hajj, Its Meaning,
and Measures for Organizing It.” In addition to providing data on Muslims’
patterns of travel in making the hajj—and identifying the three main routes
that Russia’s Muslims took in getting to Mecca—this report stressed the urgent
need for the government to organize the hajj, for sanitary, political, and eco-
nomic reasons. It offered specific proposals on how best to do this, based on
data compiled by Russian consuls abroad, above all in Jeddah.
The report proposed that Russia redirect its hajj traffic along the Black Sea
route. This was not, in fact, a single route but rather a set of Russian railroad
routes that converged in the sea’s main Russian ports of Sevastopol, Batumi, and
Odessa. From these ports hajj pilgrims continued on by steamship to the Ara-
bian ports of Jeddah and Yanbu. According to estimates by Russian consular of-
ficials, the Black Sea route was growing in popularity among Russia’s Muslims by
the 1890s, but still attracted the fewest numbers of pilgrims overall—about 2,000
to 3,000 a year, while twice as many took land routes through Afghanistan and
India, and almost 15,000 took land routes through the Caucasus.^8 The modern
railroad-to-steamship routes through the Black Sea were ideal for organizing the
hajj, tsarist officials widely agreed, for two reasons. First, they ran through