1Introduction
Russia as a Crossroads
of the Global Hajj
In the late nineteenth century Russia took on a new role in the world: patron of
the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Citing its policy of religious tolera-
tion, the tsarist government subsidized transportation for Muslim pilgrims on
Russia’s railroads and specially outfitted “Hejaz steamships,” and built a
cross-border network of facilities along their routes between Russia and Arabia.
It created special passports for hajj pilgrims and passed new laws to protect
them during their long-distance travel. By the early 1900s the tsarist govern-
ment had built a sprawling, transimperial hajj infrastructure that spanned Rus-
sian, Ottoman, Persian, and Indian lands. One of the architects of this
infrastructure, foreign ministry official N. V. Charykov, described it as a system
of “cut-rate steamship service through Constantinople,” organized with the
“active participation” of Russian consuls abroad to ensure safety, comfort, and
low costs for Muslim pilgrims.^1
An Orthodox Christian state, Russia would at first glance seem an unlikely
supporter of the hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, and a sacred Muslim ritual.
In imperial Russia the ruling Romanov dynasty embraced Eastern Orthodoxy
as its official faith. Orthodox tsars claimed divine right to rule, and the Russian
Orthodox Church enjoyed prestige and legal privileges as the empire’s “preem-
inent” church. From the late eighteenth century, Russian tsars claimed to be the
“protectors” of global Orthodoxy—the mid-nineteenth-century Crimean War
was fought largely on these grounds—as part of Russia’s self-fashioning as heir
to the Byzantine imperial tradition, and its competition with Britain and