The Hajj and Socialist Revolution 171had allotted for it.^45 At the same time, Kamalov faced resistance from the Per-
sian government to his efforts to organize the hajj across Soviet borders. In the
spring of 1927 Kamalov had arranged a meeting at the border point of
Gaudan—a Soviet town along the USSR-Persia border—of Soviet and foreign
officials involved in the hajj campaign in Persia, Afghanistan, and the USSR.
Mamedov never showed up, and Kamalov soon discovered why: the Persian
government was refusing requests for travel to Soviet lands, in the hopes of
defeating the Soviet hajj campaign.^46
In April 1927 the OGPU wrote to Sovtorgflot to report that the recruitment
of pilgrims was going poorly in Persia. The OGPU blamed Mamedov, the fleet’s
local agent there, for this. To encourage pilgrims to take only Soviet routes and
transport, Sovtorgflot was selling exclusively round-trip tickets to pilgrims.
Many pilgrims resented the set itinerary, and many liked to take alternate
routes home, to visit different sites and countries. To show flexibility, Sovtorg-
flot offered pilgrims a thirty-percent reimbursement on their return fare, if
they chose not to use the second half of the ticket. But Mamedov had erred and
promised pilgrims a fifty-percent discount. The British seized upon this mis-
take, and stoked Persians’ suspicions of Soviet motives to discourage them from
taking Soviet routes.
But there was a larger issue: Mamedov had reported that the Persian govern-
ment was refusing to issue any passports to Mecca in 1927. Scholars have argued
that the Persian government blocked Muslims from making the hajj in 1927 for
political and religious reasons—for fear of the Saudis’ antipathy to heterodox
Shiʿism, and to protect its predominantly Shiʿi citizens from persecution.^47 But
documents from the Soviet archives reveal other important factors. Busy with
state-building projects of its own in the late 1920s, the Persian government saw
the hajj as a drain on the domestic economy, and worried that Muslims were
taking large sums of money out of the country. It could not formally prohibit
the hajj, because of its obligatory nature for Muslims, so instead the Persian
government spread lies about the Saudi government’s destruction of sites in
Mecca and Medina, and cholera and plague outbreaks. Whatever the motiva-
tions of the Persian government, Mamedov predicted few Persian pilgrims
would take advantage of Soviet hajj transport in 1927.^48
In Afghanistan, too, Sovtorgflot’s agent Kamalov had been unsuccessful in
recruiting large numbers of pilgrims. The OGPU blamed Sovtorgflot. It had not
given Kamalov the resources he needed to build a planned khadzhikhane in
Kushka, to support needy pilgrims and draw them to the Soviet routes. There
had apparently been a misunderstanding between Kamalov and the Sovtorgflot