Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 49As this chapter will show, Russia’s creation of an external consular network
for its hajj pilgrims illustrates how Russia’s imperial project of managing, gov-
erning, and integrating diverse populations extended beyond the empire’s for-
mal borders by the late nineteenth century. Recently, historians have begun to
explore important and long overlooked questions about the spatial dimensions
of Russian history, focusing on, among other things, the processes (cultural,
political, ideological, etc.) that produced the geographical space of the Russian
Empire as we know it today. Scholars working along these lines tend to treat
Russian empire-building as a process that took place within the bounded terri-
tory of the empire, reifying Russia’s borders and the idea of empire as a kind of
closed container.^8 But this is not quite right. Russia’s imperial borders were
porous and often less fixed in the minds of nineteenth-century contemporaries
than they seem today. And as Russia’s imperial populations moved across these
borders with increasing ease and frequency during the late nineteenth century,
they pushed the tsarist government to devise new policies and strategies of
imperial governance. Migrations, in other words, shaped the geography of Rus-
sian imperial rule and tsarist administrative networks.
Studies of the hajj often focus on the ultimate destination of Mecca, treating it
as a simple journey from one point to another and overlooking crucial ques-
tions about the process of getting there and back.^9 This approach perhaps makes
more sense today in the twenty-first century, when the hajj is a highly stream-
lined affair under strict Saudi government control, and most of the world’s
Muslims (as many as three million a year) make the pilgrimage by plane, from
their home cities directly to the Jeddah airport and then by air-conditioned bus
to Mecca.^10 But before the era of air travel and mass transit, the pilgrimage to
Mecca was more circuitous, and the voyage itself had more meaning. For many
Muslims it was the journey of a lifetime, the only time they would ever travel
far away from home. Much of the experience was about the physical journey, as
well as the places and people they visited and encountered along the way.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most Muslims from Russian
lands took their time getting to Mecca. Their routes and itineraries changed
according to political events, weather, and contingencies along the way. They
typically involved stops at many other important holy sites along the way, in
Constantinople, Damascus, and Jerusalem above all, with time for sightseeing
thrown in, and, in some cases, several months of study with religious scholars
in major centers of Islamic learning, such as Cairo and Medina.