Imperial Mecca, by Michael Christopher Low (introduction)

IMPERIAL MECCA Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj

MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER LOW

introduction

Between Two Worlds An Ottoman Island Adrift on a Colonial Ocean [I]n Egypt, Arabia, and even in the Hijaz the English have taken some villainous measures and conspired to foment a plot to sever the Ottoman Sultanate from the Holy Islamic Caliphate. . . . The English are attempting to plant the seeds of all manner of disunion and strife within Islam . . . Piece by piece, I have submitted this information by telegraph . . . I have taken the necessary measures to uncover who is involved in this plot and get to the bottom of these diabolical enterprises.

—SALİH MÜNİR PASHA, OTTOMAN AMBASSADOR TO PARIS, 1899

IN THIS and many similar intelligence reports, Salih Münir Pasha, the Ottoman ambassador to Paris, repeatedly warned his superiors in Istanbul that the British Empire was engaged in a sweeping strategy to transfer the Ottoman Caliphate to the sharif of Mecca and bring that most sacred Islamic office under the sway of Britain’s Indian empire. By doing so he believed that the British planned to bring the Hijaz, Najd, and Iraq under British protection and eventually turn them into colonies such as Aden or any other British possession.1 Despite his dramatic tone, what is perhaps most notable about the ambassador’s breathless claims of “diabolical” plots is their utter ordinariness. Although the timing, detail, and plausibility of these files differ slightly from case to case, from the 1880s on this genre of intelligence reportage emerges as a ubiquitous feature of the Ottoman archival collections from the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) and the empire’s final years leading up to World War I. Reports of British efforts to transfer the caliphate from Istanbul to Egypt or Mecca and wider British strategies to colonize Ottoman possessions in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea come in many forms. There are lengthy briefs from Ottoman diplomatic personnel stationed in Europe, Egypt, and even [1]

between two worlds the empire’s fledgling network of consulates across the Indian Ocean. There was an almost endless supply of translations and press clippings from European, Egyptian, and Indian newspapers dedicated to this subject. There are also colorful reports from spies and informants ( jurnalciler) recounting their efforts to shadow anti-Ottoman propagandists.

In one such jurnalci report from 1910, an Ottoman informant warns of the rapidly multiplying Indian population in Mecca. As the author cautions, the Indian population numbered in the tens of thousands and had doubled several times over in recent years.2 A cursory glance at these numbers gives some credence to our informant’s concerns. In the 1860s, British consular reports estimated that there were at least 10,000 Indians living in Arabia.3 By 1880, the British consulate estimated that in Mecca alone, the Indian colony had reached as many as 15,000.4 By the close of the century, British subjects in the Hijaz, the bulk of whom were Indian Muslims, accounted for at least one seventh of the province’s total urban population. In Jeddah alone there were more than 300 Indian families. And as a result, over half of all Hijazi trade flowed through Indian hands.5 In short, Indians constituted both the single largest diasporic community in the Hijaz and the largest contingent of hajj pilgrims each year. In many ways Mecca was as much an Indian or Indian Ocean space as it was an Arab, Ottoman, or Middle Eastern one.

As the anonymous Ottoman informant hypothesizes, the British had undertaken a project to encourage Indians to take up residence in the Hijaz with the intention of using them to lay the groundwork for the ultimate goal of transferring the caliphate to the sharif of Mecca. As proof of this scheme, the author cites a recently published article in the pro-British Egyptian newspaper, al-Muqaṭṭam, which apparently had been translated and circulated in the European press. The piece, supporting British designs on moving the caliphate to Mecca, was signed anonymously “an Indian in Mecca” (Mekke-i Mükerreme’de bir Hintli). Here our Ottoman informant paints a scene worthy of a Hollywood spy thriller. He claims to have set out to uncover the identity of this Indian author. In the course of his inquiries, he discovers that the author had arrived in Cairo recently. The informant goes on to detail the whereabouts of what he believes to be an Indian spy in the service of the English Crown (İngiliz casusluğunda). Our Ottoman informant’s sources reported multiple sightings of this suspected Indian spy, tracing his movements from the offices of al-Muqaṭṭam through the labyrinthine alleys, [2]

between two worlds shops, and coffee houses of the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. In the end, however, the Ottoman informant claims that his suspect escaped back to Mecca, melting into the steamer traffic headed to Jeddah.

What is most striking about this evocative fragment from Cairo— regardless of the veracity of this kind of intelligence chatter—is that although it warns of precisely the kind of vague plot to transfer the caliphate as those “uncovered” by the Ottoman ambassador in Paris and countless others, the jurnalci’s version hints at something more specific. It suggests a deeper cluster of anxieties about the Ottoman state’s inability to fully control the Hijaz’s heterogeneous, mobile populations, whether Bedouin or transient foreign pilgrims, and strengthen its territorial sovereignty over this traditionally autonomous province. Due to its sacred status, the Hijaz was never an ideal—or even realistic—candidate for occupation, annexation, or formal colonial rule. Likewise, both British imaginings and Ottoman fears of a colonial plot to transfer or otherwise manipulate the caliphate—at least until the cataclysmic events of World War I and the Arab Revolt—remained entirely in the realm of fantasy. However, as this report suggests, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, Britain’s creeping involvement with the day-to-day affairs of the hajj and its diasporic colonial subjects had forced Ottoman officials to acknowledge the Hijaz’s vulnerable position as a contested frontier and interimperial borderland nestled in the extraterritorial shadows of the Raj’s Indian Ocean empire.

The vexing questions raised by these anxieties form the core subjects of Imperial Mecca. This book asks how European imperialism, the advent of steamship transport, and the increasingly interconnected nature of the Muslim world changed the traditional complexion of Ottoman pilgrimage administration. And in turn, the book addresses how the rise of colonial rule in the Muslim world altered the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with non-Ottoman Muslims. Did the diaspora of Indian Muslims sojourning or settled in the Hijaz represent the cat’s paw of British extraterritorial legal and political influence? Did the Ottoman state really consider ordinary pilgrims and diasporic subjects of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia living in Jeddah, Mecca, or Medina as potential fifth columns?6 To be clear, there is no evidence to suggest that Ottoman officials believed that Indian and other foreign Muslims ever actually constituted a seditious threat to the Ottoman state. However, by virtue of foreign pilgrims’ [3]

FIGURE 0.1 Indian pilgrim, 1888. Photograph by Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje/alSayyid ʿAbd al-Ghaffār. Source: BL: IOR, 1781.b.6/48, in Qatar Digital Library.

between two worlds acquisition of colonial nationalities and the extraterritorial legal claims this entailed, they provided a powerful pretext through which European states could interfere in the affairs of the Muslim holy places. As a result, Yıldız Palace officials were forced to impose previously unthinkable—even exclusionary—policies to shield the territorial sovereignty of the Hijaz from the potential threats posed by ordinary pilgrims and migrants whose colonial passports and nationalities had come to mark them unfairly as potential pawns of hostile European powers.

In turn this conceptual transformation of ordinary pilgrims into potentially dangerous foreign subjects opens a paradox. On one hand, how should we square these anxieties with the Hamidian regime’s promotion and even weaponization of supranational Pan-Islamic solidarity and spiritual authority as tools of geopolitical strategy? On the other hand, how could a non-Muslim colonial empire realistically hope to pose a credible challenge to the Ottoman sultan-caliph’s claims to Islamic legitimacy and sovereign authority over Islam’s most sacred sites? How did the introduction of this new colonial element alter the shape of Ottoman governance in the Hijaz and even threaten to unravel the region’s traditional system of layered sovereignty and power sharing between the central government and the Sharifate of Mecca? Finally, how did the late Ottoman state seek to defend itself and mitigate the symbiotic internal and external risks posed by this combustible mix of weak autonomous rule and aggressive colonial extraterritoriality?

Taking this heightened Ottoman sense of vulnerability as its point of departure, Imperial Mecca seeks to understand how European colonialism arrived in the Ottoman Hijaz as a steamship stowaway. It tells how the Hijaz and the hajj simultaneously were reshaped by the competing dynamics forged between the ever-expanding reach of Britain’s informal empire in the Indian Ocean and Arabia and the nascent projects of frontier modernization that the Ottoman Empire deployed to shield this most sacred, most exceptional territory. The book excavates the curiously understudied case of a far-away frontier province at the very heart of Islam and imperial legitimacy. It attempts to locate an enigmatic place caught between two imperial worlds, an Ottoman island adrift on a colonial ocean, lost in the gaping chasm between the area-studies regions that we now artificially divide into the Middle East and South Asia.7 [5]

between two worlds

The Steamship Hajj: Colonial Crises of Cholera and Muslim Mobility To begin this journey, we must start with the intertwined colonial crises of cholera and Muslim mobility that focused Britain’s and the rest of Europe’s attention on the Indian Ocean hajj for nearly a century. It is here that we find the deepest roots that fed and sustained this most brazen and unlikely of colonial challenges to Muslim rule and sovereignty in the age of imperialism. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the Ottoman Empire was no longer free to act as the sole custodian of the hajj. The affairs of foreign Muslim subjects making the pilgrimage to Mecca gradually came under the scrutiny and surveillance of European colonial regimes. For the first time in its history, the pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s most sacred rite, became an object of international regulation and non-Muslim intervention.

Although European interest in the hajj was a global phenomenon affecting multiple empires, the most decisive, most threatening driver of this dramatic shift in the administration of the hajj was the expansion of the British Empire in India and the rest of the Islamic world. As Britain’s power in the Indian subcontinent grew, so did its maritime supremacy throughout the Indian Ocean basin. Looking to secure its access to India, ward off its European competitors, and expand its commercial, political, and security interests in Arabia, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf, Britain intensified its role in the region by the transit opportunities that emerged with the development of regular steamship routes between the Mediterranean and India from the 1830s to the 1860s and the eventual opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

Although the impetus for the British Empire and Europe’s sustained diplomatic and security interests in the Hijaz and the Red Sea stemmed most directly from the international sanitary and trade concerns generated by repeated pilgrimage-related cholera outbreaks from the 1860s on, such interests cannot easily be separated from more directly political considerations.

In the decades following India’s Great Revolt of 1857–58 (variously known as the Great Rebellion or by its now antiquated colonial moniker, the Sepoy Mutiny), British officials also became obsessed with the Hijaz and the hajj as potential threats to the Raj’s security. In the wake of the uprising in India, British officials became convinced that a diasporic network of Indian dissidents, exiles, and outlaws domiciled in the Hijaz were complicit in violence against Christians in Jeddah. They also came to believe that these Indian [6]

between two worlds exiles might be exercising a radicalizing influence on returning pilgrims or forging anticolonial ties with the Ottoman state itself. By the late 1870s and early 1880s, this conception of the Hijaz was incorporated into new concerns that the region was becoming an outlet for Sultan Abdülhamid II’s Pan-Islamic outreach and propaganda to Muslims living under colonial rule. Despite their highly tenuous basis in reality, these deeply Islamophobic British fantasies of the Hijaz as a haven of criminals and fanatics or a den of Pan-Islamic and anticolonial radicalization constituted durable scripts that would partly define the empire’s expansionist interests in the region from the 1850s through World War I and its aftermath.

Although British administrators’ panicked suspicions of the hajj as a conduit for anticolonial subversion largely belonged to the realm of fantasy, the interimperial administrative challenges facing the rapidly industrializing hajj were all too real. With the dawn of the steamship era and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the volume of oceangoing traffic between India and the Red Sea increased exponentially. In the span of less than a generation, the spread of new networks of rail and steam linking the Mediterranean and the Middle East with the Indian Ocean and the rest of Asia revolutionized Muslim mobility and redefined the modern hajj. The contraction of space and time through faster and cheaper rail and steam connections enabled an explosion in travel opportunities for nearly all classes of Muslims. In short order the railheads and port cities of the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Asia were bringing the disparate peoples of the global umma into closer and more sustained contact than ever before. In the midst of this industrial transportation revolution, the hajj, Islam’s quintessential journey, swelled many times beyond its previous size. And in the process, the most basic experiences, rites of passage, laws, infrastructures, and material conditions of pilgrimage were transformed forever.8 With the hajj freed from the rhythms of sailing in accordance with the monsoon cycle, the costs of transport and the length of passage for Indian Ocean pilgrims were reduced drastically. Although previous generations of pilgrims were confined mainly to elite officials, wealthy merchants, and the ulema, the modernizing hajj also became accessible to Muslims of more modest means. As steamship services expanded, the numbers of ordinary pilgrims arriving in Mecca multiplied exponentially. With the opening of the Suez Canal, new steamship services also brought increased traffic from North Africa, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Mediterranean; [7]

FIGURE 0.2 Turkish (Ottoman) pilgrims praying on a steamship en route to Jeddah.

L’Illustration, March 16, 1901. Source: Khalili Family Trust, Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage Collection, ARC.PT 553.

between two worlds in addition, Russian subjects were making their way via the Black Sea. Although a still sizable proportion of pilgrims would continue to journey to Mecca aboard smaller sailing ships such as dhows and sambūqs, or by camel caravan, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, the traditional hajj of camel and sail gradually had succumbed to the modern pilgrimage of rail and steam.9 The vanguard of this steam-powered pilgrimage revolution was composed of growing numbers of Indian and Southeast Asian pilgrims. Around the mid-nineteenth century, the annual flow of oceangoing pilgrims from the subcontinent is estimated to have hovered between 5,000 and 7,000.10 By the 1880s, average numbers of Indian pilgrims rose to around 10,000.11 Doubling again during the pilgrimage season of 1893, the number of Indian pilgrims was reported to have exceeded 20,000.12 By the 1890s, Indian pilgrims accounted for roughly a quarter of all pilgrims arriving by sea. Combined with Jawis hailing from both British and Dutch jurisdictions in Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean pilgrims accounted for nearly half of oceangoing arrivals.13 By comparison, Ottoman pilgrims arriving in Jeddah accounted for less than 15 percent.14 Although Indians and Jawis sent the largest contingents of pilgrims each year, the growth of the steamship-era hajj was not confined to these groups. Around 1850, the total number of pilgrims was roughly 50,000. Two decades later the 1870s witnessed hajj seasons with estimates running as high as 200,000. By 1910, the number of pilgrims had crested over 300,000.

And after World War I, the golden age of the steamship hajj would stretch on until air traffic finally outstripped maritime arrivals in the late 1960s.15 The Indian Ocean’s steamship hajj burst onto the international stage in 1865. That year a particularly virulent cholera outbreak spread from India and struck the Hijaz. It was a Hacc-ı ekber year, when the standing at Mount Arafat falls on a Friday. Because such years are considered particularly auspicious, the number of pilgrims ballooned to four times the previous year’s attendance, leading to overcrowding and food and water shortages.16 Between March and April casualties ranged from 15,000 to 30,000 out of a total attendance of roughly 150,000. To make matters worse, when ships of returning pilgrims arrived at Suez in May that year, it was falsely reported that no instances of disease had been detected despite the fact that more than a hundred corpses had been tossed overboard during the voyage.

[9]

FIGURE 0.3 Map of Indian Ocean steamship hajj routes. Map created by Erin Greb.

between two worlds Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal, pilgrims moved by train to Alexandria. By the first days of June, cholera had arrived in Alexandria by rail.

The epidemic in Egypt would rage for months, killing 60,000. From there, cholera set sail across the Mediterranean to ports from Beirut and Istanbul to Marseilles and Algiers, setting off a chain reaction that eventually would ravage Anatolia, Europe, and Russia. By November 1865, cholera had spread as far as New York City and would smolder until 1874 in some locations. By the epidemic’s end more than 200,000 European and North American lives had been lost in major cities alone.17 In the wake of the global carnage of 1865, for the remainder of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire and Europe, acting on the conclusions of the 1866 international sanitary conference held in Istanbul, embarked on an ambitious and often highly contentious program of sanitary reform, surveillance, and quarantine.18 Given the severity of the 1865 epidemic, international attention immediately focused on India’s role as the cradle of epidemic cholera and the hajj as its most visible means of conveyance to the Middle East, Europe, and the rest of the globe. The relative affordability and democratization of the steamship-era hajj also made the journey possible for what came to be identified as a “dangerous class” of so-called pauper pilgrims (fukara-ı hüccac or miskīn) by both Ottoman and European officials.19 As the numbers of indigent, destitute, and stranded pilgrims rose, so did the incidence of death and disease in the Hijaz. Much to the dismay of Ottoman, Egyptian, and European officials, and to the great embarrassment of the British, who vehemently denied that British India and its pilgrims were the source of epidemic cholera, by the 1860s, international consensus was converging on the special connections among the hajj, India’s pilgrim masses, and the dissemination of epidemic disease.

From 1865–66 on, the Indian Ocean’s pauper pilgrims were repeatedly blamed for being the primary conduit for the globalization of cholera. In an attempt to discourage the poor, European colonial regimes marshaled Islamic legal arguments against making the hajj without the necessary physical and financial means. They advocated for the imposition of passport fees, financial means tests, and mandatory roundtrip tickets, and they even attempted to manipulate steamship markets to raise ticket prices. For its part, the Ottoman Empire found itself in an awkward position, trapped between a desire to protect its own territories from the ravages of cholera and the ecological fallout emanating from British India through more [ 11 ]

between two worlds stringent quarantine and mobility regulations and the need to protect the pilgrimage, Muslim religious liberty, and even the holy cities themselves from colonial intrusion.

The struggle to combat the scourge of cholera and manage the steamship hajj has been understood largely as a “European crusade” for nothing less than “global epidemiological survival.”20 Yet if it was a crusade, it was a deeply ambivalent one. For British officials in India, this combined crisis of cholera and Muslim mobility was complicated by the looming anxieties of Muslim-inspired political subversion that haunted colonial authorities in the wake of India’s Great Rebellion. Although colonial officials often were concerned that the hajj was a possible source of political subversion, they also feared that direct interference with this fundamental Islamic practice carried even greater potential to incite a backlash in India.

Despite the Raj’s ambivalence, fear of direct interference in the hajj should not be mistaken for disengagement or a lack of aggression. During the height of the cholera era, from the 1860s to the 1890s, these considerations placed Britain in direct conflict with the reform-minded public health policies being advocated by the Ottoman Empire and other European statesmen. Britain’s concerns were threefold. First and foremost, the Raj worried that restricting access to the hajj would agitate its Muslim subjects.

Second, Britain feared that strict quarantine measures would threaten the free flow of trade between India and Europe. As a result, British officials obstinately denied a mounting body of scientific evidence and international consensus that cholera was a contagious disease. Thus for three decades Britain obstructed and undermined Ottoman and international efforts to impose more stringent quarantine restrictions and documentary practices designed to limit the number of infected and indigent pilgrims and strengthen Ottoman sovereignty in the Hijaz and the Red Sea.21 Bearing Britain’s reticence in mind, we should be careful not to get too carried away with Foucauldian visions of colonial sanitary surveillance and security controls.22 An overemphasis on this framing tempts us to imagine stronger, more coherent public health and security apparatuses than the tense, often ad hoc interimperial practices that existed at the time.

This approach also runs the risk of conjuring a decisive European colonial response while willfully ignoring or failing to account fully for the agency and centrality of the Ottoman state’s role in the day-to-day reorganization and administration of the Hijaz and many of the international sanitary [ 12 ]

between two worlds measures, which often have been misleadingly ascribed solely to European colonial actors. As this study shows, the reality on the ground was a decidedly more muddled and complex patchwork of competing Ottoman, local, and European interests.

What is clear, however, is that from 1866 on, questions surrounding the hajj’s—and with it, the Hijaz’s—proper administration were no longer completely in Ottoman hands. Thereafter, stewardship over the hajj, although still primarily under Ottoman control, emerged as an internationalized issue that was subject increasingly to the extraterritorial and capitulatory demands of the European powers. Although the Ottoman Empire’s Board of Health (Meclis-i Umur-ı Sıhhiye or the Conseil Supérieur de Santé de Constantinople) ostensibly was responsible for administration of the international quarantine system and policing of the hajj, in reality this organization was itself a mixed body of Ottoman and European representatives, an almost perfect symbol of the Capitulations and European legal manipulation.

The situation in the Hijaz and the Red Sea was no better.23 By the 1880s, European consular agents in Jeddah were spending much of their time charging their Ottoman counterparts with fleecing pilgrims and gross medical and administrative incompetence. By contrast, Ottoman officials posted to the Hijaz rightly suspected that European attempts to extend consular protection to their colonial subjects merely provided a pretense for espionage and intelligence gathering.

However, as Ottoman officials well knew, the sultan-caliph and his administration could no longer govern the steamship hajj independently.

By the conclusion of the nineteenth century, the conduct of the hajj had morphed into an interdependent system requiring coordination and cooperation among the Ottoman Empire, British India, the Dutch East Indies, French Algeria, Russian Central Asia, and the rest of the European colonial world. Pilgrimage had become entangled in an interimperial web of overlapping—often conflicting—regulations governing passports, quarantines, shipping firms, pilgrimage guides, and camel brokers. The result was a weak and fractured regime of mobility controls, which produced decades of diplomatic gridlock and horrific levels of mortality and human suffering.

Owing to these competing interests, the steamship-era hajj produced the first global crisis of Muslim mass mobility. Muslims were racialized, pathologized, and singled out as the carriers of both dangerous microbes [ 13 ]

between two worlds and subversive, even uniquely violent, ideas. In many respects the plight of steamship-going Muslims invites loose comparisons with the present. Today the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 era has branded Muslims worldwide—even the most vulnerable refugee populations—as potential terrorists, giving rise to additional border security, more stringent passport and visa controls, racial profiling, and even outright travel bans. Although today’s Islamophobia revolves around air traffic, immigration policies, and the assumed threat of al-Qaeda or ISIS terrorists, such fears are neither new nor novel. Recent Western attempts to restrict Muslim travel, mobility, and migration share an intellectual lineage forged in the age of steam.24 Although their fears were not always grounded in reality, European colonial empires had the power to rewrite the terms of pilgrimage and Muslim travel. This power affected the lives of millions of ordinary Muslim pilgrims and migrants. And, as this book shows, it also dramatically reshaped the task of governing the Hijaz and the hajj for the world’s only remaining Muslim power. In this sense the first global controversies over Muslim mobility also help us to better understand the impossible dilemmas of Muslim imperial sovereignty in the age of European colonialism. In order to refocus our attention on how the Ottoman Empire dealt with this crisis, this book advocates a change in perspective, one that builds on and engages with the colonial archive and historiography of the hajj but recenters the story on the Ottoman Empire and the Hijaz.

The Caliph’s Double Burden: The Ottoman Pilgrimage State in a World of “Muslim” Colonial Empires In his seminal 1982 article, “Sanitation and Security: The Imperial Powers and the Nineteenth Century Hajj,” William Roff describes how the hajj came to be understood by British colonial administrators as a “twin infection” of sanitary and security risks.25 Following in Roff’s footsteps, conventionally, the steamship-era hajj has been treated, first and foremost, as a potential security threat to European colonial regimes, including British India, Dutch Indonesia, French Algeria, and Russian Central Asia. In this equation, colonial states are presumed to have feared Mecca as a meeting place of anticolonial exiles and outlaws or as an outlet for pro-Ottoman Pan-Islamic propaganda.

More recently, however, John Slight and Eileen Kane have complicated the [ 14 ]

“Buttressed by monumental archival research and charged with lively prose, this profoundly significant book steers us through intractable historiographical swells to arrive at a wholly new history of the late Ottoman Empire, one in which the Hijaz, Indian Muslims and Jawis, modern govermentality, debates over extraterritoriality, and science and technology are the main protagonists. A major achievement.�

A L A N M I K HAI L , author of God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World “Imperial Mecca illuminates the making of the modern hajj and technocratic regimes in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Arabia. Dislodging conventional emphases such as European fears of the Ottoman caliphate, ‘Pan-Islamism,’ or other forms of Muslim exceptionalism, Michael Christopher Low vividly depicts how new travel, communication, and surveillance technologies, interlaced with related environmental and epidemiological factors, shaped the opportunities and limits of Ottoman and British imperial power. A tour de force on the Indian Ocean hajj.�

FA I Z AH M E D , author of Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft Between the Ottoman and British Empires “Imperial Mecca is an exciting contribution to the literature on the international history of the hajj. Far beyond its religious significance, Low demonstrates on the basis of meticulous archival work that hajj management provided the entry point for the development of a modern Ottoman governmental rationality that operated through the management of mobility, disease, environment, and the law.�

JOHN M. WILLIS , author of Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER LOW is assistant professor of history at Iowa

State University.

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