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 Lale 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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I'd come back to Ulaanbaatar after having spent ten days in the Gobi and central Mongolia. While I'd been somewhat dismissive of Ulaanbaatar's charms upon my first arrival there, by the time the desert tour was over I had become much more enthusiastic about the city's advantages. I spent my last two days in Mongolia there, visiting some of the sites that I hadn't managed to see the first time around--like the Dinosaur Museum and the Black Market, where I bought some pretty cool Mongolian duds. I had a really great last dinner, and event went to a small music festival that was taking place close to my hotel. 
