72 C h a p t e r Tw o
governor-general early on, and later to encourage intellectual debate and reading
knowledge of Russian as part of a policy of “cautious enlightenment.”^75 Articles
from the early 1890s reveal that officials also used the newspaper to influence
patterns of the hajj from Central Asia, by directing Muslims toward Russian
institutions abroad.
The newspaper published a series of articles that encouraged Turkestan’s
Muslims to register with and use the services of the Jeddah consulate and other
Russian consulates abroad while making the hajj.^76 The first articles appeared in
March 1892, a few months before the scheduled annual hajj rituals in Arabia, at
a time when Muslims in Turkestan would have been preparing to leave on the
pilgrimage. That month the paper published “A Guide to Russian Consulates in
Turkey for Russian Subjects Making the Pilgrimage to Mecca.” This article
emphasized the importance of Muslims using Russian consulates abroad to
ensure that their rights were protected through Ottoman lands. It described
procedures for filling out the proper documents required to make the hajj
“legally” as Russian subjects, and in order to receive Russian consular support.
It announced the recent opening of the Jeddah consulate and its importance for
pilgrims as the closest Russian consulate to Mecca.
At the time, officials in Turkestan were increasingly eager to know the routes
the region’s Muslims were taking to Mecca, especially the purported “secret”
routes through Afghanistan and India, where Russia had no consular outposts.
The newspaper published several articles that were clearly attempts to encour-
age hajj pilgrims to make the pilgrimage through legal channels, by way of Rus-
sian railroads and steamships, and through its consulates, in order to facilitate
supervision and to track the traffic. An article from 1895 is an example of this:
it offered additional practical information to readers on how to make the hajj
from Turkestan through official Russian channels. It covered how to properly
fill out “hajj documents,” Muslims’ rights to consular protection abroad as Rus-
sian subjects, etiquette for riding trains and steamships, and the need to follow
sanitary rules and pass through quarantine stations.^77
Over the next few years, Turkistan wilayatining gazeti published several
other articles showcasing the services the Jeddah consulate offered Russia’s
Muslim subjects. At first glance, these read like simple reports on new services.
But more likely they were calculated attempts to lure pilgrims to the Jeddah
consulate, and away from competing institutions organized around the hajj
traffic. This was not, of course, simple benevolence on the part of the regime
toward its Muslim subjects, as it was often presented in such articles, but part of
the regime’s agenda of surveillance, control, and rerouting of Russia’s hajj