Global Hajj and the Russian State

In the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca underwent a dramatic transformation and became characterized by rapid mass mobility and growing European involvement. Scholars explain this change by pointing to global technological advances in transportation and intensified European imperial expansion into the Muslim world. Tsarist Russia was no exception to these developments. How did Russian authorities deal with the increased traffic of Muslim pilgrims between the Russian Empire and Arabia? For specialists, this question is not entirely new. Historians have written archivally based studies of Russian policies toward the hajj and paid attention to a variety of views and motivations that tsarist officials had concerning this issue.¹ Eileen Kane’s work is the first book-length study of the Russian hajj written in English and presents a valuable addition to this scholarship as well as the growing literature on Islam in Russia and Russian-Ottoman connections.

Kane’s argument is bold and straightforward: in the late 19th century the Russian state looked at the hajj not only as a liability but also as an opportunity and took on a new role in the world as patron of the hajj (1, 2, 6). Kane develops this argument by demonstrating how Russia “facilitated the hajj not primarily to control, but to coopt and exploit it as a mechanism of integration and expansion” (3). The book is based on a wide range of sources, including materials from the archives in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Tbilisi, and Istanbul as well as newspapers and hajj memoirs. To better assess Kane’s archival research, it would have been helpful if in her bibliography she specified which archival collections (fondy) she consulted. Kane should be credited for making useful maps to illustrate hajj routes and for including photographs that enliven her narrative.

According to Kane, the state’s patronage of the hajj was not publicly endorsed and centrally organized, but it was systematic (19, 88). She finds the evidence of this patronage in the views of some officials and the state-sponsored hajj infrastructure, which included “a network of people and institutions posted along hajj routes” (15). Kane provides examples of how Russia sponsored the hajj during the period prior to the Crimean War and up until the 1920s. She begins her study by elucidating how in the 1840–50s some imperial officials supported the hajj of the Muslim elite as a way to maintain stable rule in the Caucasus and extend the imperial agenda into Ottoman Syria. The newly opened Russian consulate in Beirut headed by K. M. Bazili (1839–53), and vice-consulates in Aleppo and Damascus offered diplomatic protection to hajjis from the Caucasus while providing the Caucasian administration with information on Muslim subjects under its rule.

As the hajj became a mass phenomenon in the second half of the 19th century, the Russian authorities came to realize that it could not be stopped and should be brought under government control. Kane chronicles Russia’s efforts to gather information on hajj routes, logistics, and itineraries. New Russian consulates that opened along the hajj routes in Baghdad and Jeddah were especially instrumental in this endeavor. The government also organized the hajj by drafting policy proposals, attempting to attract pilgrims to Russian steamships, and establishing new regulations. In Kane’s view, the turning point in Russian hajj policy came in 1908, when Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin appointed Muslim entrepreneur Said Gani Saidazimbaev as the “hajj director” (rukovoditel´ palomnichestva). Therefore, she pays special attention to Saidazimbaev’s ambitious plan to organize the hajj. Kane argues that the Muslim pilgrims’ response to state and private initiatives to organize the hajj was mixed and included both praise and complaint, but “for the most part Muslim pilgrims relied on Russians.” This fact, as Kane suggests, did not mean a transformation of attitudes toward the tsar and empire but served as evidence of Muslims’ resourcefulness (14).

The outbreak...