6 Introduction
hierarchy that the Russian state built—whether it functioned, as Russian rulers
hoped it would, as a means of state control over Islam, and the extent to which
Muslims actively participated in it.^12 But there is little debate about the goals
behind it, of domesticating Islam in Russia, and isolating Russia’s Muslims
from global Islamic networks.
A central goal of this book is to challenge this stark view. I argue that along-
side efforts to cultivate domestic sources of Islamic authority and encourage
Russian Muslims to adhere to state-created Islamic institutions, Russia also
sponsored, indeed reinvigorated, the Islamic institution of the hajj. Far from
constantly trying to cut Muslims’ ties to the wider world, in this example Rus-
sia worked to facilitate and even expand them. These efforts were reflected in
the hajj infrastructure that the Russian state built over the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, at great expense and effort. Russia built this infrastruc-
ture in an effort to harness and exploit perceived benefits of the hajj for the state
and the empire. This would prove to be difficult: like other pilgrimages, the hajj
was a largely spontaneous phenomenon that was in many ways difficult to pre-
dict, let alone control and co-opt. Russian officials were often disappointed by
Muslim pilgrims’ unwillingness to follow state-sanctioned routes, or avail
themselves of services offered by state officials along their routes. Nevertheless,
Russia’s construction of this infrastructure is testimony to tsarist officials’ com-
plex understanding of the hajj and its implications for Russia. If some saw it as
a liability, many others saw it as an asset. Islam’s global dimensions were not
merely a problem that the tsarist state (and later the Soviet state) struggled to
manage, let alone dismantle, but were instead a phenomenon that also created
new, positive opportunities for Russia, and that Russia tried to exploit for eco-
nomic and strategic purposes.
The story of how Russia inherited and grappled with a hajj tradition is part of
the broader history of global European imperialism. By the end of the nine-
teenth century Europeans had brought most of the world’s Muslims under
colonial rule (of the world’s Muslim states, only Persia, Afghanistan, and the
Ottoman Empire escaped colonization). Each of the leading imperial powers of
the day—the British, Dutch, French, and Russians—ruled more Muslims than
did any single independent Muslim state.^13 And most hajj pilgrims who showed
up in Mecca by the late nineteenth century were colonial subjects. They arrived
in unprecedented numbers, as many as 300,000 a year by the early 1900s, the
result of the global mobility revolution that went hand-in-hand with European