Review of Eileen Kane's Russian Hajj

Friday, June 16, 2017

EILEEN KANE. Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 241. $35.00. 

Eileen Kane’s Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca traces what Kane describes as “the story of how Russia became patron of the hajj” (20). The book is primarily concerned with highlighting Russia’s “sponsorship” of the Muslim hajj to Mecca. To her credit, Kane makes a provocative argument in this volume, but the events she relates in support of this view tend to be more anecdotal than systematic. Chapters 1 and 2 look at the activities of a smallish number of tsarist bureaucrats working in Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, their assistance to Muslim pilgrims, and their proposals for legalizing the hajj, which was prohibited outright by Russian authorities for much of the nineteenth century. Chapter 3 discusses the decision by state officials in Russia to allow two steamship companies to transport pilgrims to the Ottoman Empire. Chapter 4 is devoted mainly to outlining the undertakings of one Said Gani Saidazimbaev, who provided false credentials to tsarist officials in his efforts to win their support for organizing the transportation of Muslim pilgrims. Chapter 5 describes the Soviet government’s cooperation in allowing foreign Muslims (but not Soviet ones) to transit across the USSR en route to Mecca. 

Source-wise, Kane employs mainly Russian imperial archival sources from St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, and the Foreign Ministry that showcase instances in which tsarist officials sought to work with, rather than persecute or harass, Muslim pilgrims. These materials are useful, but they would have been much more effective had they been discussed alongside the far larger set of documents in these same archives that demonstrate that Russian officials usually sought to prevent the hajj, rather than sponsor it. Meanwhile, Kane’s use of Ottoman materials seems to hold mainly symbolic value. She cites, by my count, a total of four documents from the enormous holdings of the Ottoman archives relating to Muslim pilgrims and Russia, raising the question of what, if anything, a professionally trained historian could expect to learn from such a tiny sample size. In any event, Kane does very little with the Ottoman materials, describing their contents in only general terms. 

Kane could have made up for the deficiencies on the Ottoman side of this study through closer engagement with Ottoman scholars whose work relates directly to Muslim cross-border travel between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman historian Ladle Can, for example, draws heavily from the Ottoman archives to look at the activities of Muslim pilgrims from Russia, but her work receives only perfunctory attention in this volume. Kane also appears unaware that the diplomatic assistance to Muslim pilgrims that was offered by tsarist Foreign Ministry officials was in fact provided to virtually any Russian Muslim residing in or traveling through the Ottoman Empire, whether or not they were on a pilgrimage. Whereas Kane sees this diplomatic assistance—which makes up much of the source material and arguments in the book’s first two chapters—as evidence that Russia was “asserting itself as patron and protector of hajj pilgrims” (36), better engagement with the historiography surrounding Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire would have indicated that this assistance had little or nothing to do specifically with their status as hajjis. 

For this reason and others, the overall argument of this book—that the Russian government was a hajj “sponsor”—does not correspond well with the relevant source material available in either the Russian or the Ottoman archives, and thus feels rather forced. Tsarist statesmen and bureaucrats viewed the hajj in a variety of ways, but the great majority of these officials—and their policies relating to the hajj—were focused upon either prohibiting or limiting Muslim pilgrimage across borders. While Kane at times appears ready to acknowledge this fact in the form of occasional caveats and asides, too much time and energy is spent trying to divert the reader’s attention away from what seems like a rather obvious point: Russia was by no means a “protector” of the hajj, and the few tsarist officials seeking to engage the pilgrimage more proactively—who themselves often held a personal financial stake in these proposals—were in most cases either ignored or shouted down.

Once Kane gets beyond the introduction and the book’s first two chapters and begins examining the handful of modest proposals that envisioned creating officially sanctioned hajj routes, Russian Hajj becomes more complex and interesting. Particularly in chapters 3 and 4, it is possible to catch glimpses of what this book could have been had Kane not been so determined to view the overall story from the perspective of such a small number of outlying cases. In these useful chapters, Kane skillfully outlines the ill-fated, short-lived, and halfhearted efforts that a small number of state officials made to legalize the hajj, and shows that there was considerable pushback against these proposals. These examples demonstrate the potential for a much more nuanced discussion of Russia’s hajj-related policies than Kane’s oft-repeated declarations of “sponsorship” allow for. Had Kane simply embraced the multiplicity inherent within tsarist attitudes toward the hajj—including those of both the hostile majority and the much less commonly seen outliers—the argument at the center of this study would have been much more convincing. 

Kane is on much stronger ground in arguing that that the tsarist state shared a far more complex relationship with Muslims than was perceived by an earlier generation of scholars obsessed with the theme of Muslim-state conflict in Russia. Echoing the views of Robert D. Crews, whose work has clearly influenced this volume profoundly, Kane rightly calls for looking more closely at points of engagement between St. Petersburg and the empire’s Muslim communities. While the weaknesses of these older approaches have already been exposed in the work of Crews and others, Russian Hajj nevertheless provides yet another useful counterpoint to the outdated notion that the tsarist state and Muslim communities were relentless adversaries. 

JAMES H. MEYER Montana State University

American Historical Review, June 2017, Vol. 122, No. 3 (June 2017), pp. 807- 808. 

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