Imperialism through Islamic Networks 21see itself as a colonial empire like its European rivals, and created a new impe-
rial borderland, far removed from the center, to which the Russian state exiled
undesirables.^11 This conquest also integrated Russia into the world in new ways,
through the web of human mobility networks that connected the lands and
populations of the Caucasus to other parts of the world. The nineteenth-century
Caucasus was a bridge between Russian lands in the north and Persian and
Ottoman lands to the south, and a hub of ancient caravan routes along which
people had been moving for centuries as merchants, travelers, and pilgrims.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the Caucasus remained a
center of Eurasian hajj traffic. We see this by piecing together documents from
Russia’s foreign policy archives. These archives contain numerous petitions from
Muslim rulers from Central Asia and Persia, asking the tsarist government to
allow their subjects passage to Mecca along their traditional routes, across the
Russian steppe and through the Caucasus. These cases reveal the extent to which
Russia’s southward expansion had made the hajj a diplomatic issue with neigh-
boring Muslim states, whose rulers sought to keep the old routes to Mecca open
for their subjects as a matter of their own prestige and political legitimacy.
In the early 1800s, Russia allowed foreign Muslims open access to these
routes through a series of treaties with the Persians and Ottomans. In some
cases the Foreign Ministry even arranged and subsidized travel for elite Mus-
lims from Central Asia. This was a small-scale but nevertheless significant
practice. It shows that rather than try to close these routes and prohibit hajj
traffic through the empire, Russia instead embraced an informal role as “pro-
tector” of hajj pilgrims and routes in its diplomatic relations with its Muslim
neighbors. In so doing, Russian tsars were acting in an ad hoc fashion much as
Muslim emperors had since eighth century: they laid claim to the tradition and
networks of the hajj for imperialist aims. At a time when Russia sought to
develop commercial relations with Persia and Central Asia, its practice of sup-
porting foreign hajj pilgrims was surely motivated by economic and strategic
interests.^12
Domestic Muslims, newly minted subjects of the tsar living in the Caucasus,
were another matter. Russian policy toward these internal Muslim populations
went through three stages. As the new ruler of the Caucasus, Russia first tried
to prohibit the hajj. In 1822 Tsar Alexander I officially banned the hajj for Mus-
lims in the Caucasus, at the urging of his trusted commander in chief of the
region, A. P. Ermolov. This was above all a security measure. Like colonial offi-
cials operating in Muslim regions elsewhere, Ermolov was suspicious of the hajj
as a “clandestine” activity that fed Muslim “fanaticism.” Faced with Muslim