78 C h a p t e r Tw o
Muslim agents who staffed the consulate for help in doing this. These Muslim
agents were often Russian subjects who had demonstrated their loyalty and
usefulness to the Russian government as native informants and officials in
Muslim regions of the empire.^98 As Muslims, they understood the rituals of the
hajj and, no less importantly, were able to travel to Mecca and Medina. Their
linguistic skills also allowed them to communicate with Russia’s hajj pilgrims
moving through the region. Officially appointed to the Jeddah consulate, as
well as other consulates along hajj routes, as clerks, guards, and interpreters,
these Muslim agents in fact took on much broader roles, spying and compiling
detailed reports for the government on the hajj traffic.^99
One such person was Shakirdzhan Ishaev. A Muslim Tatar who had served
the Russian administration in Turkestan for many years, he arrived in Jeddah
in 1895 to work at the consulate.^100 His appointment offers further evidence of a
growing collaboration between officials in Jeddah and Tashkent to monitor and
organize the Turkestani hajj traffic. The Russian ambassador noted that he was
appointed to the Jeddah consulate because of his “intimate knowledge of life”
in Turkestan, suggesting that he would primarily focus on pilgrims from that
region of Russia.^101 Ishaev would work closely with Levitskii to encourage pil-
grims to come to the consulate. He greeted pilgrims arriving in the city from
Russia, speaking to them in their native tongue, and describing the Jeddah con-
sulate’s services. His efforts to get them to deposit their money and valuables
with the consulate for safekeeping earned him the enmity of Ottoman “guides”
(vekils) in Jeddah, who offered these same services for a fee, and jealously
guarded their hereditary role in the local hajj industry.^102
During his time at the Jeddah consulate, Ishaev researched and wrote a series
of reports on the hajj, Arabia, and the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina for the
Russian Foreign Ministry. Other colonial governments had commissioned
such reports—most famously Snouck Hurgronje’s reports from the 1880s for
the Dutch government in Indonesia—but Ishaev’s were the first written by a
Russian subject, based on firsthand travel and observations, for the tsarist
government.^103
At a time when the tsarist government sought to gather basic information on
the hajj traffic from Russia—routes, logistics, and existing Muslim support
networks—Ishaev’s reports offered rich details as well as recommendations on
how to reorganize the hajj under Russian authority, based on extensive inter-
views with hajj pilgrims from Russia passing through Jeddah, as well as his own
pilgrimage to Mecca in 1895. That year he set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca
from Jeddah with his wife and four-year-old son. He described the unenjoyable