20 Chapter One
Notwithstanding these challenges and complexities, Russia over the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries would build a transimperial hajj infra-
structure that spanned thousands of miles and supported the tens of thousands
of Muslims pilgrims who moved between the empire and Arabia every year.
Many of Russia’s Muslims were critical of the tsarist government’s involvement
in the hajj, but most relied on this infrastructure, to some extent, in making the
pilgrimage to Mecca. Built upon Russia’s expanded consular networks in Otto-
man and Persian lands—the result of extraterritorial privileges Russia had
gained through peace treaties starting in the late eighteenth century—this hajj
infrastructure was testimony to the dramatic changes in Russia’s internal
demographics and relations with neighboring Muslim states, as well as its
changing position in the world after its conquests of Muslim-majority lands.
The story of how Russia became patron of the hajj begins in the Caucasus. The
Caucasus, a Muslim-majority region, was annexed by Russia over the first half
of the nineteenth century through a drawn-out process of piecemeal conquest
and war. There, against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing war against Muslim
anticolonial resistance in the north and its efforts to consolidate imperial rule
in the region, tsarist officials in the 1840s first began to organize coordinated,
cross-border support for Russian subjects taking the popular Syrian route to
Mecca, via Ottoman Damascus. Collaborating with Russian consular officials
newly posted in Syria, tsarist officials in the Caucasus organized logistical,
financial, and judicial support to assist small numbers of pilgrims, perhaps a
few hundred a year, in making the hajj through Ottoman lands. Kasym Mamad
was a typical beneficiary of this early patronage, as a Muslim elite with close
ties to the nascent tsarist administration in the Caucasus.
This first instance of Russian organization of cross-border hajj patronage
reveals how much tsarist officials saw strategic opportunities in the hajj. Russia
wanted to establish stable rule in the Caucasus and expand its diplomatic pres-
ence and political influence in Ottoman Syria, a site of European imperial
rivalries in the first half of the nineteenth century. Russian officials in both the
Caucasus and Syria embraced hajj patronage to consolidate Russian power in
their region, and in the process forged a new policy of Russian imperialism
through Islamic networks.
Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus was a turning point in the empire’s history.
Much has been written about the wide-ranging transformative effects of this
conquest on the empire—how it gave Russia an “Orient” to civilize, allowed it to