Russian Hajj

Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

Eileen Kane

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801454233
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701306
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia centrale

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

1

Imperialism through Islamic Networks

In 1848 a Russian subject named Kasym Mamad died in Arabia while performing the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Mamad was a native of the South Caucasus, a region Russia had recently conquered through wars with the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Like most Muslims traveling overland to Mecca at this time, Mamad made the long trip as part of a caravan, a procession of people and animals. He took a route that Muslims from the Caucasus, Sunnis and Shiʿis, had followed for centuries. It wound through eastern Anatolia and northern Syria down to Damascus, the departure point for one of the enormous imperial caravans to Mecca that the Ottoman sultan sponsored every year.1 Unlike his ancestors, however, Mamad made the hajj through Ottoman lands not as a Persian subject, governed by Ottoman taxes and laws, but as a newly minted Russian subject, entitled to extraterritorial privileges and the protection of Russian diplomatic officials in Ottoman lands.2

When Mamad died, his heirs in the Caucasus appealed to Russian officials to investigate the whereabouts of 300 rubles, a large sum, which Mamad had entrusted to a camel driver in Damascus for safekeeping. Mamad’s heirs wanted it back. In earlier times, they would have appealed to Ottoman judicial authorities in Damascus, who for centuries had been in charge of auctioning off estates of the many pilgrims who died on the hajj and disbursing the proceeds to the proper heirs.3 The local Russian governor referred the case to the viceroy in Tiflis (Tbilisi), who forwarded it to the Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Over the next two years, Russia’s consul general in Syria investigated Mamad’s estate. With the help of local Ottoman officials, the consul general managed to track down the camel driver in question—a rich Damascene and Ottoman subject named Hajji al-Esmer—and had him brought to the local Islamic court in Damascus. There, under oath before an Ottoman judge, al-Esmer acknowledged Mamad’s deposit and testified that he had returned it to his travel companions, two men described in court documents as Russian subjects and Muslim military officers from the Caucasus. At this point, the consul general transferred the case back to Tiflis for the Russian viceroy to investigate further.4

Mamad’s story and his heirs’ quest to recover his estate illustrate a much broader historical change, whose effects would prove wide ranging: by the mid-nineteenth century, as a consequence of global imperialism, the hajj was increasingly coming under European influence and control. This was unprecedented. Since its eighth-century beginnings after the birth of Islam, the Meccan pilgrimage had been performed under the patronage of Muslim rulers, through Muslim-ruled lands, and with the help of Muslim officials along the way. Hajj pilgrims’ ultimate destination—the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina—were (and still are) closed to non-Muslims. This situation slowly began to change in the sixteenth century, as Europeans explored the Indian Ocean and other parts of Asia, conquering Muslim-majority lands and bringing long stretches of traditional hajj routes under their influence and direct control.5 As European colonization grew, so did Europeans’ interest in and influence over the hajj.

Russia was unique among European empires in ruling Muslims as far back as the fifteenth century, and had one of the longest histories of involvement in the hajj. In the sixteenth century Muscovite Russia conquered the former Mongol khanate (principality) of Astrakhan and established itself along a major caravan route used by Central Asians to get to Mecca.6 Further imperial conquests to the south and the east—of the northern shores of the Black Sea, Crimea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia—added millions of new Muslim subjects to the empire’s already large and internally diverse population, and brought a web of ancient caravan routes within Russia’s borders.

For centuries Muslims across Eurasia had been traveling these lands and routes to reach Mecca. Many took sailing vessels across the Black Sea to Istanbul (Constantinople) to witness the sultan’s investiture ceremonies that marked the departure of the imperial hajj caravan from the Ottoman capital. Others, Kasym Mamad among them, cut south through the Caucasus to join imperial hajj caravans leaving from Damascus and Baghdad. Still others followed land routes through Afghan and Indian lands, to board ships bound across the Indian Ocean to Arabia.7 This traffic continued and in fact increased after the Russian conquests, with the introduction of railroads and steamships in the mid-nineteenth century that made the Russian Empire a center of global hajj routes and traffic.

Having inherited a hajj tradition through imperial conquests, Russia had to decide what to do with it. As one of the five pillars of Islam, and an obligation for Muslims, the hajj could not easily be banned or stopped—and, it offered Russia opportunities for managing and governing Muslims, as well as for advancing state and imperial agendas. To bring the hajj under state influence and control, Russia began to sponsor it in the nineteenth century. This sponsorship was at first improvised and episodic, as part of Russian efforts to consolidate rule in newly conquered Muslim regions. However, as the hajj grew into a mass annual phenomenon over the nineteenth century, Russia’s interests in it multiplied, and state support became systematic. While the tsar periodically announced bans on the hajj in the empire, particularly during wars and epidemics, and tsarist officials often expressed political and economic concerns about the hajj, Russia embraced a general policy of hajj patronage from the mid-nineteenth century onward.8

By sponsoring the hajj, Russia was not simply trying to control the pilgrimage, or contain the problems it engendered as a mass migratory movement. Rather, it was seizing a new opportunity created by imperial conquests to tap into and co-opt the hajj, a global Islamic network, as a mechanism of imperial integration and expansion. This was part of a larger process that had been under way in Russia since the late eighteenth century—and, more broadly, across European em-pires over the nineteenth century—whereby European colonial governments institutionalized Islam and Islamic practices to advance imperial agendas.9

Co-opting the hajj would not be easy. Contestation and ambivalence were inherent to the project from the start. Unlike the situation with Russian Orthodox pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which the tsarist government also began to sponsor in the nineteenth century, government support for the hajj was not organized through a centralized process, nor did the tsar ever publicly endorse it.10 This semisecrecy reflected concerns, widely shared among tsarist officials, that state support for the hajj could upset the empire’s Russian Orthodox faithful and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoyed prominence and a privileged position as the “preeminent” church of the empire and the ruling dynasty. The decision to sponsor the hajj grew from a gradually developing consensus within the government that Russia stood to gain more from sponsoring the hajj than ignoring or banning it. But as a non-Muslim empire, Russia faced unique challenges in persuading Muslims to recognize it as protector of the hajj, and to follow state-mandated routes and regulations.

Notwithstanding these challenges and complexities, Russia over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would build a transimperial hajj infrastructure that spanned thousands of miles and supported the tens of thousands of Muslims pilgrims who moved between the empire and Arabia every year. Many of Russia’s Muslims were critical of the tsarist government’s involvement in the hajj, but most relied on this infrastructure, to some extent, in making the pilgrimage to Mecca. Built upon Russia’s expanded consular networks in Ottoman and Persian lands—the result of extraterritorial privileges Russia had gained through peace treaties starting in the late eighteenth century—this hajj infrastructure was testimony to the dramatic changes in Russia’s internal demographics and relations with neighboring Muslim states, as well as its changing position in the world after its conquests of Muslim-majority lands.

The story of how Russia became patron of the hajj begins in the Caucasus. The Caucasus, a Muslim-majority region, was annexed by Russia over the first half of the nineteenth century through a drawn-out process of piecemeal conquest and war. There, against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing war against Muslim anticolonial resistance in the north and its efforts to consolidate imperial rule in the region, tsarist officials in the 1840s first began to organize coordinated, cross-border support for Russian subjects taking the popular Syrian route to Mecca, via Ottoman Damascus. Collaborating with Russian consular officials newly posted in Syria, tsarist officials in the Caucasus organized logistical, financial, and judicial support to assist small numbers of pilgrims, perhaps a few hundred a year, in making the hajj through Ottoman lands. Kasym Mamad was a typical beneficiary of this early patronage, as a Muslim elite with close ties to the nascent tsarist administration in the Caucasus.

This first instance of Russian organization of cross-border hajj patronage reveals how much tsarist officials saw strategic opportunities in the hajj. Russia wanted to establish stable rule in the Caucasus and expand its diplomatic presence and political influence in Ottoman Syria, a site of European imperial rivalries in the first half of the nineteenth century. Russian officials in both the Caucasus and Syria embraced hajj patronage to consolidate Russian power in their region, and in the process forged a new policy of Russian imperialism through Islamic networks.

Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus was a turning point in the empire’s history. Much has been written about the wide-ranging transformative effects of this conquest on the empire—how it gave Russia an “Orient” to civilize, allowed it to see itself as a colonial empire like its European rivals, and created a new imperial borderland, far removed from the center, to which the Russian state exiled undesirables.11 This conquest also integrated Russia into the world in new ways, through the web of human mobility networks that connected the lands and populations of the Caucasus to other parts of the world. The nineteenth-century Caucasus was a bridge between Russian lands in the north and Persian and Ottoman lands to the south, and a hub of ancient caravan routes along which people had been moving for centuries as merchants, travelers, and pilgrims.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the Caucasus remained a center of Eurasian hajj traffic. We see this by piecing together documents from Russia’s foreign policy archives. These archives contain numerous petitions from Muslim rulers from Central Asia and Persia, asking the tsarist government to allow their subjects passage to Mecca along their traditional routes, across the Russian steppe and through the Caucasus. These cases reveal the extent to which Russia’s southward expansion had made the hajj a diplomatic issue with neighboring Muslim states, whose rulers sought to keep the old routes to Mecca open for their subjects as a matter of their own prestige and political legitimacy.

In the early 1800s, Russia allowed foreign Muslims open access to these routes through a series of treaties with the Persians and Ottomans. In some cases the Foreign Ministry even arranged and subsidized travel for elite Muslims from Central Asia. This was a small-scale but nevertheless significant practice. It shows that rather than try to close these routes and prohibit hajj traffic through the empire, Russia instead embraced an informal role as “protector” of hajj pilgrims and routes in its diplomatic relations with its Muslim neighbors. In so doing, Russian tsars were acting in an ad hoc fashion much as Muslim emperors had since eighth century: they laid claim to the tradition and networks of the hajj for imperialist aims. At a time when Russia sought to develop commercial relations with Persia and Central Asia, its practice of supporting foreign hajj pilgrims was surely motivated by economic and strategic interests.12

Domestic Muslims, newly minted subjects of the tsar living in the Caucasus, were another matter. Russian policy toward these internal Muslim populations went through three stages. As the new ruler of the Caucasus, Russia first tried to prohibit the hajj. In 1822 Tsar Alexander I officially banned the hajj for Muslims in the Caucasus, at the urging of his trusted commander in chief of the region, A. P. Ermolov. This was above all a security measure. Like colonial officials operating in Muslim regions elsewhere, Ermolov was suspicious of the hajj as a “clandestine” activity that fed Muslim “fanaticism.” Faced with Muslim rebellions across the North Caucasus in the early 1820s, he worried that the hajj was feeding this resistance, and that disguised pilgrims were in fact arms smugglers and Ottoman agents. Writing to Russian foreign minister Karl Nesselrode in January 1822, Ermolov noted that many Muslims in the Caucasus made the hajj every year along routes through Ottoman lands, and he warned that the experience was surely strengthening their loyalties to the sultan and their resolve to resist Russian rule.13

Tsar Alexander I was reluctant about the hajj ban. He worried that Muslims would resent it, given Russia’s promise of religious toleration, but he agreed to it as a temporary security measure. Ermolov’s officials announced the ban throughout the Caucasus in early 1822, and threatened violators with state confiscation of their property, and deportation into Russia’s central regions.14 The tsar’s hesitation illustrates how Russia’s official policy of religious toleration, introduced in the late eighteenth century by Tsarina Catherine the Great to foster social control and imperial stability, was sometimes difficult for officials to reconcile with broader security concerns about the empire, particularly when it came to pilgrimage to holy sites abroad.

Russia’s hajj ban in the Caucasus was short lived because it did not...

Table of contents

• List of Maps
• Preface: Sources and Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Imperialism through Islamic Networks
• 2 Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims
• 3 Forging a Russian Hajj Route
• 4 The Hajj and Religious Politics after 1905
• 5 The Hajj and Socialist Revolution
• Conclusion: Russian Hajj in the Twenty-First Century
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index