Russian Hajj. Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca - Eileen Kane

Preface xi

who often could not communicate with Muslim pilgrims—and to whom, as
non-Muslims, the holy site of Mecca was closed—these reports tend to be
detailed yet unforthcoming about their sources. They all start to sound the
same by the early twentieth century, suggesting that some Russian consular
officials simply read and repeated data from other reports, rather than doing
local, ground-level investigations into hajj patterns. By comparing and combin-
ing data from these two sources, I  have tried to reconstruct as accurately as
possible the geography of Russian hajj itineraries and routes in the tsarist and
early Soviet eras.