17171
Imperialism through
Islamic Net works
In 1848 a Russian subject named Kasym Mamad died in Arabia while per-
forming the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Mamad was a native
of the South Caucasus, a region Russia had recently conquered through wars
with the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Like most Muslims traveling overland to
Mecca at this time, Mamad made the long trip as part of a caravan, a procession
of people and animals. He took a route that Muslims from the Caucasus, Sun-
nis and Shiʿis, had followed for centuries. It wound through eastern Anatolia
and northern Syria down to Damascus, the departure point for one of the enor-
mous imperial caravans to Mecca that the Ottoman sultan sponsored every
year.^1 Unlike his ancestors, however, Mamad made the hajj through Ottoman
lands not as a Persian subject, governed by Ottoman taxes and laws, but as a
newly minted Russian subject, entitled to extraterritorial privileges and the
protection of Russian diplomatic officials in Ottoman lands.^2
When Mamad died, his heirs in the Caucasus appealed to Russian officials to
investigate the whereabouts of 300 rubles, a large sum, which Mamad had
entrusted to a camel driver in Damascus for safekeeping. Mamad’s heirs wanted
it back. In earlier times, they would have appealed to Ottoman judicial authori-
ties in Damascus, who for centuries had been in charge of auctioning off estates
of the many pilgrims who died on the hajj and disbursing the proceeds to the
proper heirs.^3 The local Russian governor referred the case to the viceroy in
Tiflis (Tbilisi), who forwarded it to the Russian ambassador in Constantinople.
Over the next two years, Russia’s consul general in Syria investigated Mamad’s
estate. With the help of local Ottoman officials, the consul general managed to