The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956 by John Slight (review)

John Slight's The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956 is a timely and groundbreaking book for both the study of the British Empire and the history of Muslim societies. Slight confronts a significant topic of postcolonial amnesia, namely the fact that, from 1857 to 1947, British monarchs ruled over more Muslim subjects than any other empire in world history. As decolonization led to reframing of modern history narratives, neither the British nor postcolonial Muslim societies are interested in this century-long period when the British Empire's legitimacy in the eyes of its Muslim subjects became closely linked to its management of pilgrimage to Mecca from various imperial domains. British colonial claims to be the biggest Muslim empire in the world, often expressed by diverse figures from Winston Churchill to George Nathaniel Curzon, carried arrogant assumptions about white Christian supremacy and racial condescension toward Muslim subjects. This vision of the British Empire was contradicted by narratives that made Britain a leader in Anglo-Saxon racial unity of white dominions, and in the post-World War II period, a member of the Pan-European civilization. But, as Slight's impressively well-researched and well-written book shows, in the inner imperial zones of the British Empire—from the Indian Ocean to Egypt, Sudan, and Nigeria—management of pilgrimage to Mecca gave both the colonial officers and Muslim subjects an opportunity and a necessity to work out the content of the claims of "the greatest Mohamedan power in the world" (3).

In six fascinating chapters, Slight demonstrates the crucial ways in which the British Empire's engagement with Muslim pilgrimage shaped the modern Muslim religious and political experience as well as geopolitical conflicts related to World War I, such as redrawing the borders of the modern Middle East and the decolonization of Asia and Africa. Slight's book includes fascinating stories about the British consulate in Jeddah, which had to respond to requests by destitute poor pilgrims for repatriation, and the role played by Muslim colonial officers in articulating more intrusive, aggressive, and comprehensive British interference in Hajj in order to deal with issues of sanitation and transportation.

In the second chapter of the book, Slight focuses on the pilgrimage in the mid-Victorian period. Expanding on previous scholars who argued that Queen Victoria's Empire was instrumental in providing the transportation and communication grid that strengthened inter-Muslim connectivity from the Indian Ocean to East and West Africa, Slight goes into detail about the ways in which this pilgrimage infrastructure worked and what legal challenges it produced in Ottoman-British relations. It was due to the late-Victorian era's cheaper and safer steamship travel that Muslim populations across Asia and Africa became more mobile and interlinked, forming a new discourse of global unity of Muslims. The first three chapters of the book, which cover the period from 1865 to 1914, give the impression that the pre-World War I period—including the British protection of Indian Ocean networks, as well as Britain's good relations with the Ottoman Empire—was the golden age of modern pilgrimage and Pan-Islamic imperial connectivity. There were issues of health, legal status, and infrastructure, but British as well as Ottoman officers were often busy responding to these challenges, and Muslim populations across Asia and Africa benefited greatly from the opportunities of inter-imperial peace during that period. This symbiotic relationship between the British-led Eurocentric imperial order and Muslim connectivity may partly explain various levels of Muslim loyalty to the British monarchy, as well as British credibility in the eyes of its Muslim subjects.

The second half of the book deals with the period from the British-Ottoman military confrontation in World War I until the Suez Crisis in 1956. In chapter 4, Slight includes several unique insights into the transformation of the Middle East during the decade from 1914 to 1924. Since the world today is still struggling with the long-term...