The Hajj and Religious Politics after 1905 143The most damning critiques of Saidazimbaev and his hajj complex appeared
in the empire’s Turkic-language newspapers, and were written by Muslims.
Saidazimbaev would later dismiss these articles as the work of jealous “enemies”
determined to undermine his plan for their own economic motives, but this
seems unlikely.^92 The same complaints appeared in a variety of newspapers, and
overall they suggest the extent to which Russia’s Muslims had internalized ideas
about religious reform, come to see in the hajj issues relating to their civil rights
as Russian subjects, and become emboldened to demand change. They show that
many Muslims had embraced the new medium of newspapers, which had spread
throughout the empire after the 1905 revolution, as a way to express their dissat-
isfaction, and reject new measures regarding the hajj.
This point is worth emphasizing. Muslim representation in the State Duma
had declined since the First Duma in 1906, as the government scaled back plans
and promises for reform and pushed Muslims and others out of the Duma.
There had been thirty-six Muslim representatives in the Second Duma of 1907,
but by the end of the year, with the creation of the Third Duma, there were only
ten. Standard narratives of post-1905 Muslim political activity often focus on a
narrow group of Muslim elites and their emigration from Russia, above all to
Turkey, where they worked to promote Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism (both
projects failed).^93 But the vast majority of Russia’s Muslims did not emigrate
from the empire, and as discussions about the hajj in Muslim newspapers
reveal, Muslims continued their struggle to advance their civil rights inside the
empire after 1905, through the Duma and the popular press. By speaking out
against what they deemed invasive and prejudicial policies and practices under
Saidazimbaev’s hajj regime, Muslims who wrote to these newspapers revealed
their willingness to rely on institutions of the imperial state—above all, the
Duma—to protect their rights as “citizens” in the Russian Empire, in which
civil rights were being actively debated and were in flux. At the very least, this
example suggests that some Muslims in the post-1905 era put stock in the
October Manifesto’s promise of religious equality in the empire, and begin to
imagine themselves as “ ‘citizens’ in an empire with a highly contested rights
regime.”^94
Many Muslims who wrote to the empire’s newspapers likened the hajj com-
plex to a “prison” and complained about being detained in it against their will.
Writing to Va g i t from within the hajj complex in October, Omar Ishkakov, a
Tatar pilgrim from Astrakhan, described how police officers and gendarmes
stationed at the gates of the complex scared away outsiders by yelling