Pilgrimage, Precarity, and Pandemics

Abstract

When COVID upended life in New York in March 2020, the blaring of ambulances became an unwelcome soundtrack to contemplating pandemics past and present. I had just published a book that examined how Central Asians experienced the pilgrimage to Mecca in the last decades of Ottoman rule. While cholera was a major part of that history, I did not engage extensively with disease—a personal choice informed by a desire to explore themes extending beyond the regulation of Muslim bodies. These included the sites and communities that shaped and mediated a difficult journey across multiple empires, as well as the fraught connections, liminal forms of legal belonging, and heightened and interrupted mobilities that were indisputably part of the hajj. As the horizons of life narrowed and mobility was increasingly constrained, I waited for a return to normal and thought about the magnitude of uncertainty pilgrims had faced. By fall 2020, it was already apparent that a return to normal was condemned to an indeterminate and distant future. People the world over were experiencing the kind of ongoing instability that many imagined to be endemic to the Global South or relegated to the past.Learning to live with the precarity engendered by pandemics was at the heart of many pilgrimage accounts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author of one such text, Mirim Khan, was among thousands of Central Asians who set out for Mecca each year, originating from lands ruled by the Russian, British, and Chinese empires.1 Like his fellow travelers, Mirim Khan faced the continual threat of cholera, a highly infectious waterborne bacterial disease of the small intestine that spread from India to Arabia and recurred as many as forty times between 1832 and 1914 (McNeill 269). Yet, in contrast to his ubiquitous criticism of the crowded trains and steamships and arbitrary international public health regulations that fed the recurrence of devastating outbreaks, Mirim Khan devoted considerably less space to cholera itself. Despite the conditions he described—wherein pilgrims aboard trains and steamships were packed like melons and stacked like jugs in spaces that he at times likened to coffins—Mirim Khan repeatedly exhorted readers to follow in his path. Hardship was not only integral to the hajj, he said, it also increased its spiritual rewards.Were these the writings of a religious zealot irresponsibly urging others to risk their lives? How had the periodic recurrence of cholera on the roads to Mecca shaped his views on travel? Prompted by these questions, this essay considers what histories of the hajj can teach us about our own collective experience of the pandemic, as well as stubborn tropes of Muslim fanaticism and fatalism embedded in colonial epistemologies.■ ■ ■In an influential study of tsarist Russia and Muslim pilgrimage, Daniel Brower traced a shift from repression toward religious tolerance in the 1870s, when colonial expansion in Central Asia increased the empire’s population of Muslims. Brower showed how the military governor-general of Russian Turkestan, K. P. von Kaufman, challenged the Ministry of the Interior’s plans to ban the issuance of hajj passports due to cholera. In voicing his support for the right of Muslim subjects to travel on the hajj, however, Kaufman’s views were steeped in what Nükhet Varlık terms “epidemiological orientalism” (58). Kaufman argued that attempts to regulate pilgrimage would be risky and ultimately futile, since “no epidemic, be it cholera or even the plague, will uproot in the fanatic the compulsion to pray at the tomb of Mohammed.” Such measures, he argued, would “unfavorably influence the masses of this fanatical population” (Brower 575). Kaufman’s simultaneous contempt for Muslims and his advocacy of their right to travel, Brower noted, captured tsarist Russia’s ambivalence toward hajj.This ambivalence would continue to inform how Russia, as well as Britain, approached the hajj throughout the steamship era. As important studies by John Slight and Eileen Kane have shown, these rival empires saw opportunities in regulating the mobility of their Muslim subjects and, by the turn of the twentieth century, worked to harness hajj-related governance and patronage in the service of expanding their influence and power. Whereas Britain became involved in hajj regulation in the 1860s to respond to public health concerns that extended from South and West Asia to Europe, “imperial engagement with the pilgrimage rapidly encompassed a variety of areas beyond trying to prevent the spread of epidemic disease,” and the empire began to facilitate pilgrimage “in an ultimately futile attempt to gain legitimacy among its Muslim subjects” (Slight 5). For tsarist Russia, the decision to sponsor the hajj was not “to guard against perceived sanitary and political threats” but “was ultimately an attempt to instrumentalize the pilgrimage to advance secular state and imperial agendas” that ran the gamut from integrating Muslims and profiting from the business of pilgrimage to expanding power in Ottoman lands (Kane 9). But as both Britain and Russia sought to regulate cholera and establish their legitimacy among Muslim subjects, they frequently hampered the implementation of strict quarantine regulations and filtered resistance to their rule through the lens of Muslim fanaticism and fatalism. In his rich exploration of Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean hajj, Michael Christopher Low elucidates how Muslims were “racialized, pathologized, and singled out as carriers of both dangerous microbes and subversive, even uniquely violent, ideas.” These legacies, he argues, continue to inform contemporary Islamophobic restrictions on “Muslim travel, mobility, and migration that share an intellectual lineage forged in the age of steam” (Low 13–14). Orientalist views of Muslims from the steamship era were thus (re)inscribed in modern mobility regimes.■ ■ ■Despite technological advances that facilitated the speed and reduced the cost of the hajj, travel to Mecca remained difficult. For Central Asians who chose the route via Istanbul, the journey could involve multiple quarantines in remote settings along the Black, Aegean, and Mediterranean Seas. The Ottoman central government was particularly invested in minimizing the risk of epidemics in the imperial capital and frequently prevented foreign pilgrims from disembarking in Istanbul, where many travelers hoped to see the sultan-caliph, visit shrines, and connect with members of diasporic communities. When cholera was reported in Russia, for example, Ottoman authorities directed ships to stations in the Black Sea and Aegean and sometimes prohibited pilgrims from disembarking altogether until they reached Arabia.2This was the case for a group of pilgrims aboard a Russian steamship in the winter of 1910. The travelers had erupted in anger after being shuffled through various quarantine stations. “Enraged pilgrims waiting for quarantine at Klazomen aboard the Çar steamship,” the Ottoman Interior Ministry reported, “sought to destroy the quarantine stations, even though cholera appeared amongst them.” The ministry directed officials in the Aegean to ensure that the ship did not advance until Ottoman health officials cleared the pilgrims for continued travel. Two days later, authorities in the port city of Izmir notified the Interior Ministry that they had dispatched a religious scholar and gendarmes to placate or, if need be, contain the pilgrims. The communication included a petition from a pilgrim representative, Reza Quli Agachiyeff, who wrote on behalf of a group that had waited twelve days at the Kavak Black Sea station and seven at Klazomen (near Izmir). The pilgrims had been split into different quarters, diseased and healthy. He explained that no symptoms had appeared among the latter for over five days and pleaded they be allowed to proceed to Mecca without further delay, since the hajj was to begin in two weeks.3It is not clear if Reza Quli and the group made it in time, but the incident reminds us of the range of responses to governmental restrictions on mobility. Despite episodic violence, most pilgrims demonstrated pragmatism in adhering to public health regulations and responded with equanimity to an intrusive and often degrading system that did not mitigate the larger structural problems feeding the proliferation of disease. Likewise, Ottoman bureaucrats sought to enact strict quarantines, even when they knew that this would potentially sully the reputation of the Ottoman caliphate. Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to curbing cholera was British imperial officials’ denial of its transmission and policies that privileged free trade. As Low writes, “Britain remained decidedly less concerned with controlling cholera’s transmission from India to Europe than with the protection of its Indian trade route against quarantine restrictions” (141).4 As pilgrims experienced these restrictions—which often included isolation under harsh conditions and tense encounters with foreign officials (including Ottomans)—it was not lost on them that the crowded vessels and quarantine stations were often the very sites of contagion. Pilgrims grappled with international public health and mobility measures shaped by bureaucratic incompetence, imperial rivalries, and colonial priorities that put the expansion of economic and political power above their welfare. More than a hundred years later, Americans were subject to similar developments. As US federal agencies and state governments enacted divergent, often contradictory public health measures throughout 2020–22, they hampered an effective national response—even as they were united in privileging the economy over the safety of most citizens.At the global level, reactions to pandemic-related restrictions shed new light on the specious dichotomies of an irrational Orient and an enlightened West. When Saudi authorities severely restricted the pilgrimage, for example, allowing one thousand people from within the Kingdom to perform the rites, versus 2.5 million Muslims from all corners of the globe in 2019, there were no major violent protests or upheavals (Guardian, “Pilgrims”). The Guardian reported that the Saudi government’s decision “rock[ed] the Muslim world,” but primarily with grief (“Hajj Pilgrimage”). Many had waited for years in national quotas, sold property to finance their trips, and dreamed of stepping foot in Mecca. The few who could go were reassured, the Guardian reported, by Saudi precautions such as sterilizing the stones that pilgrims used to symbolically stone Satan (“Pilgrims”). The hajj was canceled again for international pilgrims in 2021. The feared violence never came to pass.Throughout both hajj seasons, the news was full of stories about pandemic denial and the difficulty of enforcing requirements to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus among people who wanted to travel, go on cruises, shop, and convene in large groups in North America and Western Europe. “After Months of Debate, England Requires Face Mask for Shoppers,” read one Guardian headline. A year later, the paper ran a story about England lifting restrictions on masks, even as the Delta variant surged. In the United States, the New York Times reported that New York City would pay “holdouts” to get vaccinated. But “despite the rising number of Delta variant cases, officials said they were not yet ready to follow federal guidance and require masks indoors” (New York Times, “N.Y.”). Rather than draw on the arsenal of adjectives reserved for people of the Global South, mainstream media contextualized these choices within the framework of perceived affronts to “personal liberties,” distrust of government, misinformation, and, later, pandemic and mask fatigue (Guardian, “England”).■ ■ ■As the changing molecular structure of the coronavirus has become embedded in the quotidian rhythms of life, it is clear we can do more to contextualize the choices of people in the past. This begins with recognizing that hajj in the steamship era could not be safely regulated because empires sought to maintain the flows of people and goods that nourished circuits of trade and geopolitical ambitions, not because irrational and zealous Muslims would not abide by restrictions to protect their health. If it was true that for some pious individuals “to die en route was . . . an act of God,” this should not lead us to generalize that “disease and pilgrimage were . . . psychologically as well as epidemiologically complementary” (McNeill 243). Rather than masses of fatalistic pilgrims, pandemics owed their widespread intensity to colonial empires and their prioritization of economic growth. The same can thus be said for late capitalist nation-states. By late 2021, when the Omicron variant led to unprecedented rates of infection, the US Centers for Disease Control reduced the recommended quarantine period to five days to ensure that there were no shortages of workers (New York Times, “C.D.C.”). At the time of the completion of this essay, the US airline industry had rolled back measures such as mandatory in-flight masking. The consensus among most people was that it was time to resume normal life—even if life was nowhere close to anything of that nature.In light of continually evolving calculations about individual autonomy, the economy, and public health, we should take seriously the ways in which people in the past—particularly those subjected to the violence of colonialism—weighed their choices about mobility. Pilgrims traveling in the steamship era were not facing a singular outbreak. They were living through what we might term a state of pandemic. Mirim Khan’s exhortations to go on the hajj can be read as a choice between indefinitely postponing life or taking risks—including one that offered a chance for spiritual renewal and fulfillment. If a constant refrain in the evolving soundtrack to pandemics past and present has been precarity, adapting to new realities can be interpreted as an act of necessity, pragmatism, and hope, rather than fatalism.I am grateful to Sherene Seikaly for her encouragement and incisive feedback. I also thank Nora Barakat, Fahad Bishara, Stacy Fahrenthold, Zoe Griffith, Adeeb Khalid, Nada Moumtaz, and Abraham Silberstein for invaluable support and suggestions at different stages of the writing of this essay over the course of the pandemic.