126 Chapter Four
In its comprehensive scope and design, and its stress on comfort, efficiency,
and affordability, Saidazimbaev’s plan owed much to the “package tour”
invented in the late nineteenth century by Thomas Cook, the legendary English-
man and founder of the eponymous travel agency.^24 This was not a coincidence.
Cook’s organizational model was simple and easily replicated, and had spurred
the growth of a modern travel and tourism industry worldwide, including Rus-
sia.^25 As an entrepreneur who traveled extensively around the empire, Saidaz-
imbaev would surely have been exposed to Russia’s burgeoning travel industry
through advertisements, and seen firsthand the various services offered to trav-
elers in cities and railroad stations across the empire. Saidazimbaev may even
have modeled his plan in part on Cook’s late nineteenth-century effort in India
to centralize the hajj under a single agency (it failed).^26
But Saidazimbaev’s plan also differed from conventional package tours in
significant ways. It aimed not only to organize and capture the profits involved
in mass movement of people—pilgrims, in this case—but also to ensure that
they underwent proper sanitary procedures before leaving Russia. Hence, the
facility he proposed for Odessa would not only provide pilgrims with lodging
and provisions, but would also have a specially outfitted “steam chamber”
where they would undergo mandatory “disinfection,” in line with international
sanitary rules for the hajj.^27 There was also a charity dimension to his plan,
insofar as it offered free lodging, and reserved a number of free steamship tick-
ets for the poor. In this sense it resembled the Ottoman system of hajj organiza-
tion, which was in part intended to demonstrate the sultan’s generosity and
largesse toward his most needy Muslim subjects.^28
Saidazimbaev used his money and connections to gain support for his plan,
and secure himself the job of hajj director. He began at home in Tashkent.
Mobilizing contacts within the Russian administration there, he met with the
Tashkent railroad authority in April 1907 to request a plot of land next to the
city’s main railroad station. He proposed leasing the land to build a facility—a
“Muslim station” (musulʹmanskii vokzal)—to house and feed the growing num-
ber of hajj pilgrims who used the city as a transit point, coming to Tashkent
from across the Turkestan region as well as from Afghanistan and China.^29
The railroad authority approved Saidazimbaev’s request. It gave him a
twelve-year lease on a plot of land, and he drafted a plan for a two-story, multi-
purpose building to serve the needs of pilgrim-travelers. The building was to
contain sex-segregated waiting rooms; a teahouse; a shop selling provisions and
goods; a barbershop, cafeteria, and dining room (for elites); a ticket office sell-
ing steamship tickets; space for performing ablutions; and a mosque in an