Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca

After Russia became a crossroads of the hajj in the late 19th century, tsarist officials built the nation’s hajj infrastructure not simply to control and limit the pilgrimage, but to channel it to benefit the empire. Eileen Kane *05, director of the Global Islamic Studies Program at Connecticut College, argues that Russian patronage of the hajj also was about capturing new revenues and laying claim to Islamic networks to justify Russian expansion.