Russia as a Crossroads of the Global Hajj 3made the hajj through Russian-ruled lands before the nineteenth century; most
would have gone undetected by tsarist authorities, whose presence was light in
Russia’s vast expanses. But surely the hajj happened on a small scale. Long dis-
tances, high costs, and the dangers and uncertainties of travel limited Muslims’
access to Mecca before the modern era.^3
This situation changed with Russia’s construction of a modern transport net-
work inside its empire. Russia built this network very quickly over the second half
of the nineteenth century, following its humiliating defeat in the Crimean War
(1853–1856), and as part of a rapid “modernization” campaign that aimed, among
other things, to develop Russia’s domestic economy and foreign trade. It com-
prised a dense web of railroads that linked disparate regions of the empire (and
drastically shrank distances between them), and connected to brand-new steam-
ship lines that operated out of Black Sea ports. In Russia, as elsewhere, the intro-
duction of railroads and steamships reorganized and accelerated existing patterns
of human movement.^4 Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of the
hajj. If previously the Meccan pilgrimage had occurred on a small scale within
Russia, it was suddenly a mass phenomenon in the late nineteenth century. Tens
of thousands of Muslims made the hajj through Russian lands every year—tsarist
subjects as well as those from Persia, Afghanistan, and China—most by way of
the Black Sea. Russia’s conquests of Muslim lands and peoples, and its mobility
revolution, had, in effect, transformed the empire into a crossroads of the global
hajj. To manage the mass hajj traffic moving through its empire and across its
borders, Russia began to systematically support the pilgrimage to Mecca.
This book tells the story of how Russia assumed the role of hajj patron in the
late nineteenth century, as part of its broader efforts to manage Islam and inte-
grate Muslims into the empire. It explores Russian involvement in the Meccan
pilgrimage in cross-border perspective, and reveals how, in the era of mass
mobility, the imperial project of governing and integrating Muslims took on
global dimensions. Challenging stereotypes about entrenched Islamophobia in
the tsarist regime, and Russian officials’ attempts to block Muslim movement
abroad for fear of Pan-Islamism, it demonstrates that Russia, in fact, facilitated
and even increased Muslim mobility abroad in the late imperial period by
sponsoring the hajj. I argue that it did this not only, or even primarily, to con-
trol its Muslims or keep them under surveillance while abroad, but ultimately
in an attempt to co-opt the mass migratory phenomenon of the hajj, and exploit
it as a mechanism of imperial integration and expansion.
The focus of my story is the hajj infrastructure that Russia built between the
1840s and the 1910s, and that the Soviets revived in the late 1920s. By using the