Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 67house for Russia’s hajj pilgrims in Constantinople. This would be modeled on
the city’s centuries-old tekkes, the Sufi-run lodging houses where many of Rus-
sia’s pilgrims stayed, but on a much larger scale and with a different purpose.
Ignatʹev envisioned the caravanserai as a facility where all of Russia’s Muslims
could find comfortable, affordable, and safe lodging under one roof during
their extended stays in the city. He proposed the plan as a way to isolate Russia’s
Muslims from harmful influences abroad, and protect the empire from destabi-
lizing influences. With suitable lodging in Constantinople, he reasoned, they
would have no reason to venture into the city streets and “rub elbows” with
“local mullahs or hodja” who had been filling their heads with “harmful
ideas.”^60 The proposal also reveals Ignatʹev’s anxieties about the hajj as a politi-
cal event, and his desire to redirect Russian pilgrims away from alternate insti-
tutions and support systems—and foreign influences—while in Ottoman lands.
Russia never built the caravanserai. Officials in the Ministry of Internal
Affairs widely rejected the idea as infeasible. There was no guarantee that Mus-
lims would actually use it, they argued, as they could not be forced to stay there.
They might even see it as an attempt to interfere in their religious rituals, and
avoid it altogether. Other officials worried that it would send a wrong signal to
Muslims that Russia was trying to encourage the hajj, when in fact the opposite
was true.^61
But clearly Russia had to do something to address its external hajj traffic. In
the mid-1880s, the new Russian ambassador to Constantinople, A. I. Nelidov,
noted to the Foreign Ministry a “sharp increase” in Russia’s hajj traffic through
the city, and said he and his consul-general were “barely able to manage” pil-
grims’ needs and demands.^62 In reports to the Foreign Ministry Nelidov, like
Ignatʹev, emphasized the serious sanitary problems of the hajj, and their poten-
tial threat to Russia. With no central lodging house to receive them in Constan-
tinople, he reported, the many thousands of pilgrims who came from Russia
stayed in “filthy” lodging houses, about fifty small places scattered around the
city, which failed to satisfy their “most basic hygienic needs.” Many pilgrims
died of disease in these places, often without the knowledge of the Russian
authorities. Of those who returned to Russia, many carried disease.
But Nelidov warned of yet another danger, also with potentially serious
domestic implications for Russia. The “sad situation” of hajj pilgrims abroad, he
argued, was damaging to the tsarist government’s reputation among its Muslim
populations, and might even be working against Russia’s efforts to integrate
Muslims into the empire. As things stood, it looked like Russia was failing to
provide its Muslims with the diplomatic protection they were entitled to as