82 C h a p t e r Tw o
In 1897 and 1898 it sent two doctors, D. Zabolotnyi and D. M. Sokolov, to report
on sanitary conditions along pilgrims’ routes and in Arabia. Zabolotnyi took a
route through India (popular among Turkestanis), while Sokolov took the Black
Sea route. Both reports cited awful conditions that Russia’s hajj pilgrims suf-
fered on board steamships. Zabolotnyi described the garbage-strewn deck of
his ship, where pilgrims fought with one another for space, and cooked and
slept amid the ill. Both doctors noted a general lack of medical facilities for
pilgrims in Arabia, to tend to the many sick and dying from disease.^115
Also in 1898 Russia’s minister of war, A. N. Kuropatkin sent a high-ranking
Muslim officer, Staff-Captain Abdul Aziz Davletshin, to Arabia on a secret
intelligence-gathering mission. A Tatar and trusted intermediary for the gov-
ernment, Davletshin had served an intelligence role under Kuropatkin in
Turkestan in the 1880s, and wrote an extensive report on local legal customs.^116
The result of his 1898 mission was a 145-page report on the Hejaz region and
the hajj, submitted to the Ministry of War, the first of its kind by a Russian sub-
ject for the Russian government. Divided into seven sections, Davletshin’s
report covered a wide variety of topics, including the flora and fauna of the
Hejaz, pilgrims’ routes in the Hejaz, climate, and the currency system.
One long section of Davletshin’s report focused on “the hajj by Russian Mus-
lims and the sanitary conditions of the pilgrimage.” Much like Ishaev’s reports,
Davletshin’s provided rich, ground-level detail on the logistics of the hajj for
Russia’s Muslims, the main institutions and individuals that organized and
served the crowds of pilgrims from Russia, and data on those making the hajj,
including numbers, their origins in the empire, sex, and age. A Turkic-speaker
and a Muslim, Davletshin had access to pilgrims through a shared language,
and to Mecca and Medina. He gathered information from interviews with pil-
grims, whom he accompanied from Jeddah to Mecca and Medina. His account
also included, tucked in the back, a series of detailed maps—one of the Haram-ı
Sharif or Great Mosque in Mecca, one of the Great Mosque in Medina, and
finally a map of the topography of Arabia and the main land routes pilgrims
used to reach Mecca and Medina.^117
The work and reports from Jeddah yielded a geographic conception of Russia’s
hajj traffic, a “map” of sorts, that would guide the government’s efforts to orga-
nize and co-opt the hajj over the next decade. Much like the maps produced by
British colonial officials of “British India,” these reports created an image of Rus-
sia’s hajj traffic that purported to be accurate, but in fact missed a great deal,