Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 51nineteenth-century Russia, it suggests the proximity of these places in the minds
of Russia’s Muslims, when modern transport had made them suddenly widely
accessible. It also appears to be a map, something that one might have studied or
even taken on the pilgrimage as a guide to the major sites in these four cities.
Similarly, hajj memoirs that Muslims began to produce in the modern era
read like guidebooks for future hajj pilgrims, with exhaustive details on the
logistics of getting to and from Mecca, people to avoid and places to see, and
lists of the many holy sites and shrines to visit in Constantinople, Damascus,
Jerusalem, and, finally, Mecca and Medina.^11 Unlike other kinds of modern
travel writing, they were not written to entertain, but instead to offer practical
and useful information on how to make the pilgrimage. As such they offer pre-
cious detail on Muslim itineraries to Mecca as well as changing experiences of
the hajj in the modern colonial era.
The historian Barbara Metcalf has argued that written accounts of the hajj are
a distinctly modern phenomenon. There are several famous examples of
Arabic-language hajj travelogues from earlier centuries—including Ibn Battu-
ta’s fourteenth-century account that begins in Morocco—but, she notes, there is
no continuous genre of hajj memoir-writing until the eighteenth century, when
European imperial expansion into Asia increased possibilities for long-distance
travel, and inspired more travel writing in general.^12 By the late nineteenth cen-
tury, dozens of hajj accounts were being written in Russia. Most were unpub-
lished and remain in manuscript form today. Scattered among private collections
and libraries in former Russian imperial lands, these accounts are rich and
largely untapped sources on Muslim experiences under tsarist rule.^13
The earliest known hajj memoir by a Russian subject is the mid-eighteenth-cen-
tury account by the Tatar merchant Ismail Bekmukhamedov.^14 He set out for
Mecca in 1751 from Orenburg, Russia’s chief military and commercial outpost
on the Ural River and the empire’s frontier with the Kazakh steppe. From
Orenburg, Ismail and four companions took a trade route headed toward “the
Kazakh region.” After twenty-two days they reached the Silk Road city of
Urgench (in today’s Turkmenistan), where they joined a caravan that arrived in
Bukhara twelve days later. From Bukhara, Ismail and his companions followed
a circuitous route over land and sea, through Afghan, Persian, Arab, and Indian
lands, before finally heading to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Next, he
traveled north with a group of Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman capital of Con-
stantinople, site of the some of the most majestic mosques in the Islamic world.
He then spent twenty-five years in Constantinople, working in a shop to earn
enough money to pay his way home.