186 Conclusion
Europe’s colonial past and made urgent for the European powers during the
first wave of globalization in the late nineteenth century.
By revealing Russia’s long overlooked, ambivalent, and multivalent role in
the history of the colonial-era hajj, and adding new complexity to that story by
including the specific Russian case, this book contributes more broadly to our
understanding of the history of Islam and Europe. It reminds us that present-day
discussions of Islam in Europe have a much deeper history, and that our per-
ceptions today are in many ways colored by stereotypes and prejudices refined
in the late nineteenth century. For example, Russia and other European powers
in the late 1800s and early 1900s feared that Mecca was a center of clandestine,
conspiratorial, anticolonial plotting. But no great anticolonial revolt was ever
plotted in Mecca. And firsthand accounts by several Pan-Islamic thinkers
reveal how disappointed they were by hajj pilgrims’ indifference to politics
while in Mecca. Abdürreşid Ibrahim, for one, a leading Pan-Islamic intellectual
from Russia, complained about the simple, pious Muslims he met in Mecca,
and his inability to engage them in political discussion.^4
It remains to be seen how Russia and Europe will adapt to their new role as
centers of the global hajj. This book has reconstructed a story previously hid-
den, which reveals much greater ambivalence in Russian officials’ attitudes
about Islam. It restores to history the optimism shared among many tsarist offi-
cials, that Russia’s Islamic inheritance of the hajj offered opportunities, not just
dangers, and could be remade, not just suppressed, into a Russian tradition.