John Slight
Introduction
Europeans produced and accumulated a vast body of information on the peo-ples, societies and polities they encountered, and, in many cases, came to rule over during the age of empire. This material was recorded in numerous formats, including maps, account-books, official reports, censuses, gazetteers, published books and pamphlets, and by a wide variety of authors, including consuls, colo-nial officials, travellers, doctors, and missionaries. Islam was an important sub-ject of enquiry for Europeans engaged in this information gathering.1 Given the size and number of Muslim polities, and the geographical spread and demo-graphic strength of Muslims from West Africa to Southeast Asia, this was unsur-prising.2 Many of Islam’s religious practices attracted European attention for a number of purposes—scholarly, ethnographic, economic—and often inter-sected with colonial administration, such as the municipal regulation of what were termed ‘Muslim festivals’, such asʿĪd al-Fiṭr.3
But the scale and scope of the Hajj set it apart from Islam’s other religious practices as a subject and object of enquiry for Europeans. The Hajj is the largest annual gathering of people on the planet for a religious purpose. Every year during the imperial era, hundreds of thousands of men and women, many of whom were colonial subjects, made the momentous decision to leave their homes across Africa and Asia to set out on the often long journey to the Ḥijāz, and the Holy City of Mecca, to perform the Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam. This chapter focuses on the efforts to obtain, collate, and interpret information on the Hajj by officials working for the British Empire. Beginning in the 1870s,
1 David Motadel, “Introduction,” inIslam and the European Empires, ed. David Motadel (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–34, 26–30.
2 Ira M. Lapidus,A History of Islamic Societies(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
3 See for example Garcin de Tassy,Mémoire sur des particularités de la religion, Musulmane dans l’ Inde, d’après les ouvrages Hindoustani(Paris: De l’ imprimerie royale, 1831). For the Hajj, a foundational work is F.E. Peters,The Hajj(Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 1994).
when Britain’s engagement with the Hajj hugely expanded due to the opening of the Suez Canal and the threat of epidemic diseases linked to pilgrims’
movements, the chapter ends on the eve of the Second World War, which marks a caesura in the pilgrimage’s history, on the cusp of a world in which post-colonial nation states, oil production, and air travel dramatically transformed the Hajj experience.4
This chapter focuses on the British Consulate in Jeddah, the nearest port to Mecca where the majority of colonial pilgrim-subjects arrived and departed from. Jeddah contained the consulates of several European powers in this period, such as France, Russia and the Netherlands, as well as other powers with Muslim subjects, such as Persia.5 The principal forms of information produced by Britain on the pilgrimage from the late 1860s were the annual reports on the Hajj, which form this chapter’s principal source-base.6 The chapter will chart how British knowledge production changed over time, being affected by wider concerns that ranged from the threat of epidemic disease and political changes in the Ḥijāz, such as the shifts from Ottoman to Hashemite then Saudi control.
These moments of flux often dictated the content of information gathered on the pilgrimage and the way in which this material was interpreted and presented in official reports.
Through a critical analysis of these archival sources, the chapter will argue that the Muslim employees of the Jeddah Consulate played a vital role in the production of British knowledge related to the Hajj. Many Hajj reports were authored by Muslim Vice-Consuls. Although numerous Hajj reports carried the imprimatur of the British Consul, substantial parts of the information contained within these documents had been sourced from the Muslim Vice-Consul and his interlocutors, who included pilgrims and the inhabitants of Jeddah, Mecca and Medina. The chapter will demonstrate how information was received, interpreted and presented by the British consulate in Jeddah in its reports to officials in London and elsewhere in Britain’s Muslim empire, especially in India, which accounted for the largest number of Britain’s pilgrim-subjects. As Eric Tagliacozzo has stated, British official documents “give a real sense collectively of how the British Empire conceptualised the Hajj through
4 Britain’s engagement with the Hajj is detailed in John Slight,The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865–1956(Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2015).
5 Ulrike Freitag, “Helpless Representatives of the Great Powers? Western Consuls in Jeddah, 1830s to 1914,”Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History40.3 (2012): 357–381.
6 Records of the Hajj,Volumes 1–10, Alan Rush ed. (Slough: Archive Editions, 1993), hereafter cited in abbreviated form asRoHand the relevant volume number.
the lens of the ‘official mind’”.7 Yet long-standing concepts of imperialism’s
‘official mind’ need revision, to account for the fact that, despite imbalances of power, these Muslim employees also formed part of this ‘official mind’ in relation to British knowledge of the Hajj, and imperial policies towards the ritual.8
The remainder of the chapter places the example of knowledge production at the British Consulate in Jeddah in a wider colonial context by examining the simultaneous production of Hajj reports in Bombay, the main port of departure for Indian pilgrims. This corpus of knowledge built up by consular and colonial state entities is then considered alongside a number of non-official sources, such as Richard Burton’sPilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah(1855–1856), to consider how influential such sources were on official understandings of the Hajj.
European interactions with the Hajj formed an important part of European-Muslim relations in the age of empire. Britain’s Hajj reports made an important contribution to official British understandings of, and interactions with, the ritual. This chapter’s analysis of the Hajj reports contributes to studies of Euro-pean knowledge of Islam in the age of empire, and responds to David Motadel’s call that there is a “need for further systematic exploration of official govern-ment docugovern-ments … which concern Islam.”9
Colonial Knowledge, Islam, and the Hajj
There has been extensive scholarship on colonial knowledge as an important component in understanding the nature of empire and imperialism.10 Stud-ies have pioneered deconstructive and critical readings of colonial sources in contrast to traditional imperial history that approached such texts
instrumen-7 Eric Tagliacozzo,The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the pilgrimage to Mecca(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11.
8 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny,Africa and the Victorians: the official mind of imperialism(London: Macmillan, 1961).
9 David Motadel, “Islam and the European Empires,”Historical Journal55.3 (2012): 831–856, 856.
10 Motadel, “Introduction,” 26. Much scholarship on colonial knowledge relates to South Asia. On colonial knowledge and Africa, and other types of colonial knowledge produc-tion in the fields of cartography, medicine and science, see Tony Ballantyne, “Colonial knowledge,” inThe British Empire: themes and perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2008), 177–198, 184–185, 187.
tally as objective and factually correct.11 Key works in this field include that of Michel Foucault on discourse and the power-knowledge nexus, and Edward Said’sOrientalism, which viewed the discipline and practice of Orientalism as a system of knowledge production that created hierarchical oppositions between Europe and the ‘Other,’ emphasising the power of representation for the sake of colonial domination.12 Gayatri Spivak raised a further important critique of the colonial archival record, stating that people only appeared in it when they were needed to further the aims of the coloniser.13 In these interpretations, colo-nial knowledge was produced to enable economic exploitation, conquest and colonisation; little can be retrieved from these sources beyond European dis-course. These reductionist readings of the colonial archive have been critiqued by Kim Wagner and Ricardo Roque, who persuasively argue for a “constructive attitude of critical engagement” with these archives in order to understand the nature of colonialism, remaining aware of the archives’ limitations and exclu-sions, yet also appreciating their heterogeneous, complex nature and ambigu-ous meanings. In their view, “it makes little sense to dismiss colonial knowledge as being of inferior empirical value.”14
How should historians read these sources in relation to studying colonial knowledge? Ann Laura Stoler has advocated using reading strategies such as reading along the grain, studying the ethnography of the archive, paying par-ticular attention to the trajectories of specific documents in colonial archives to delineate the workings of colonial knowledge and governance.15 Conversely, reading against the grain of these documents can attempt to recover the words and agency of indigenous people. This chapter employs both strategies, along-side fully acknowledging the role played by indigenous agents in supplying and translating information for their European employers or producing accounts themselves.16 Scholars have argued that such actors played an important role
11 Ballantyne, “Colonial knowledge,” 177–178.
12 Edward Said,Orientalism(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Michel Foucault, Dis-cipline and Punish: the birth of the prison(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
13 Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?”, inMarxism and the interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. Ballantyne, “Colonial knowledge,” 180.
14 Kim Wagner and Ricardo Roque, “Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge,” in Engag-ing Colonial Knowledge: readEngag-ing European archives in world history, eds. Kim Wagner and Ricardo Roque (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–34, 1–6, 15.
15 Ann Laura Stoler,Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 2009); Wagner and Roque, “Introduction,” 14, 18.
16 Wagner and Roque, “Introduction,” 18, 23. An important study that examines indigenous
in the construction and mediation of colonial knowledge, sometimes manipu-lating colonial perceptions to suit indigenous agendas. Consequently, colonial archives are “not simply synonymous with Western agency” and are a space for
“countless fine negotiations, exchanges, entanglements and mutual accommo-dations.”17
Amidst the vast amounts of information gathered by the European powers that now reside in these archives, religion was a vitally important category of analysis for colonial authorities.18 In relation to Islam, European colonial and imperial officials produced an enormous amount of documents on the reli-gious beliefs and practices of Muslims. These sources illustrate how notions of Islam influenced colonial and imperial policies and practices, such as the idea that Islam was an “organized religion that could be understood,” the influ-ence of travel accounts on colonial officials, and the role of Muslim intermedi-aries and informers in shaping European perceptions of Islam.19 In India, colo-nial authorities saw religion as a key lens for understanding sub-continental societies.20 Colonial conceptions of religious differences between Hindus and Muslims were central to British understandings of India’s societal dynamics.
British perceptions of Islam remained ambivalent and complex throughout this period, although a period of hostility after the Indian Rebellion of 1857 gave way to a more sympathetic approach by the late nineteenth century, albeit still laced with prejudice. David Motadel argues that studies of Islam and colo-nial knowledge “tend to underestimate the diversity of images of Islam” based on the methodological habit of not defining the source-base clearly, consid-ering together official sources produced by those working for and within the colonial or imperial state alongside sources produced from outside these struc-tures, such as literature, art, journalistic articles, pamphlets, and travel writings.
These types of sources need to be separated out more carefully, to bring out this material’s multiple purposes and audiences.21
Studies of the production and reception of colonial knowledge and Islam tend to be geographically bounded to a particular colony or territory, despite the efflorescence of scholarship on transnational history, focusing on the
move-agents in this knowledge-formation process is C.A. Bayly,Empire and information (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
17 Wagner and Roque, “Introduction,” 24–25.
18 See for example Peter Gottschalk,Religion, Science and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
19 Motadel, “Islam and Empires,” 851–853.
20 Ballantyne, “Colonial knowledge,” 190–192.
21 Motadel, “Islam and Empires,” 855–856.
ments of peoples, goods and ideas across national and colonial borders.22 The Hajj is a prime example of this type of movement, yet does not conform to a traditional site of European colonial knowledge production in the historiog-raphy. Nevertheless, studying transnational actors such as pilgrims can con-tribute to rich historiographies that are focused on particular territories. Every year, tens of thousands of European colonial subjects left areas under Euro-pean rule or influence to travel to the Ḥijāz, an imperial space under Ottoman rule, to perform the Hajj, and European consulates in Jeddah produced thou-sands of pages of documentation recording this phenomenon. Although the European representatives in Jeddah were consular rather than colonial, we can justifiably call this material ‘colonial knowledge’ given that part of its focus is on colonial subjects and what affected these subjects during their pilgrim-ages.
In Sugata Bose’sHundred Horizons, he explains that “the colonial perception of the pilgrimage as ordeal and the pilgrim as victim gives a very partial, loaded and distorted picture of the journey to Mecca. Yet that perception needs to be analysed, because it impinged directly on the conduct of the pilgrimage.”23 Bose examines the 1926 pilgrimage report of the British consulate at Jeddah as a “perfect example of the colonial view of the Hajj,” focusing on the British Consul’s perception of the Hajj and pilgrims.24 This chapter extends Bose’s analysis by focusing in detail on the selection, production, and presentation of information regarding the Hajj in the consulate’s pilgrimage reports over roughly half a century. While acknowledging that the official sources dwell on the pilgrimage’s material difficulties and are “indispensable to reconstructing the broad lineaments of the annual Hajj,” Bose perhaps unfairly criticises them for conveying “little of the spiritual fervor of the individual pilgrim or, indeed, of the collective experience of the faithful” nor providing any sense of the spiritual experience that transcended pilgrims’ trials and tribulations.25 The Hajj reports were never intended to perform such roles, being collated and written with the instrumentalist objective of providing information on the
22 For example, George Trumbull,An empire of facts: colonial power, cultural knowledge and Islam in Algeria, 1870–1914(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Two succinct overviews of transnational history are Akira Iriye,Global and Transnational History: the past, present and future(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Pierre-Yves Saurnier, Transnational History(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
23 Sugata Bose,A Hundred Horizons: the Indian Ocean in the age of global empire(Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2006), 206–207.
24 Bose,Hundred Horizons, 209–211.
25 Bose,Hundred Horizons, 207, 220.
Hajj to those in British officialdom who had dealings with the pilgrimage. As a source for analysing British knowledge of the Hajj, however, they remain invaluable.
As to the purposes of this knowledge, Eric Tagliacozzo has argued that the accumulation of information on pilgrim-subjects by European consulates in Jeddah was designed to exercise supervision over colonial subjects. In his view, there was a “huge and ever expanding apparatus of colonial control” in place by the interwar period, with European consulates in Jeddah engaged in colo-nial espionage in the Ḥijāz, serving as hubs of a “vast system of espionage and control over pilgrims by Western power.”26 The Hajj was viewed as a “feared transmission vehicle of militancy and subversion,” and control over the pilgrim-age was seen as “fundamental to ensuring the bedrock of European rule.”27 This speaks to a wider debate among scholars who have emphasised the power of colonial knowledge as enabling colonial conquest and sustaining colonial rule and control.28 Bernard Cohn argued in his influential work that the adminis-trative processes of the colonial state in India were designed to control local societies, and state practices were based on the production and ordering of this knowledge.29 However, in relation to the Hajj and Britain, colonial knowledge was often imperfect and partial, and there were real limits to the reach and effectiveness of colonial surveillance and supervision of pilgrims, especially once pilgrims disembarked from their ships onto the soil of the Ḥijāz. Many parts of the pilgrimage remained firmly beyond the reach of the information-gathering apparatus of the British consular authorities, whether they were British or Muslim.
The Hajj Reports of the British Consulate at Jeddah
From the 1860s, Arabia was a space of increasing interest to Britain. Informa-tion on the Hajj was believed to have a variety of practical applicaInforma-tions, which included signalling the presence of epidemic disease in Arabia to imperial authorities, monitoring pilgrims who might pose a threat to British imperial interests, and highlighting instances of British pilgrims’ mistreatment in the
26 Tagliacozzo,Longest Journey, 177–178, 299–300.
27 Tagliacozzo,Longest Journey, 178–180.
28 Spivak, “Subaltern” and Nicholas B. Dirks, “Foreword,” in Bernard Cohn,Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India(Princeton, n.j.: Princeton University Press, 1996), ix–xviii.
29 Cohn,Colonialism.
Ḥijāz, which could be taken up with the local authorities in Arabia as one method of exercising British influence in the area. Britain’s ability to gather information on their pilgrim-subjects differed from place to place; this task was easier when pilgrims were on board ships to and from the Ḥijāz, given their enclosed nature.30 Indeed, reducing pilgrims to numbers and presenting the Hajj in numerical terms formed a substantial part of the Hajj reports. From the first very brief Hajj report in 1869, the volume of information collected by British consular authorities expanded from 1878 with the appointment of Dr. Abdur Razzack on Hajj-related duties. The conditions of the First World War meant the priorities of British information-gathering shifted, reflected in reports by Muslim officials. After the war, the Jeddah consulate’s Hajj reports became ever-more voluminous, covering a very wide variety of topics on the Hajj, with the Indian Vice-Consul, Munshi Ihsanullah, taking a particular con-cern with the various difficulties British pilgrims faced while in the Ḥijāz. As Eric Tagliacozzo has pointed out, this information-gathering formed part of a broader trend that sought to supervise colonial subjects through legal and coer-cive means. However, attempts at supervising and regulating some pilgrims, such as so-called “pauper” pilgrims from India, were limited. The Hajj reports were one component of a broader British effort to “know Islam” and contained various negative representations of pilgrims, which formed part of a broader discourse around the religion.31 The contributions of Britain’s Muslim employ-ees to these Hajj reports played an important role in shaping these discourses and furthering these broader aims.
Britons’ engagement with the Ḥijāz began in the seventeenth century, with a small number of merchants based in the Ḥijāz’s port city of Jeddah. Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt led to naval actions by British forces in the Red Sea in 1799–1800, and relations were opened with the Sharif of Mecca.32 The foun-dation of official British representation in the Ḥijāz was the establishment of British Agents in Jeddah, Suez, and Qusayr in October 1837, upgraded to Vice-Consuls by the Foreign Office one year later.33 The British consulate at Jeddah was the base for official information-gathering efforts regarding the Hajj, which were catalysed by two factors, disease and the opening of the Suez Canal in
Britons’ engagement with the Ḥijāz began in the seventeenth century, with a small number of merchants based in the Ḥijāz’s port city of Jeddah. Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt led to naval actions by British forces in the Red Sea in 1799–1800, and relations were opened with the Sharif of Mecca.32 The foun-dation of official British representation in the Ḥijāz was the establishment of British Agents in Jeddah, Suez, and Qusayr in October 1837, upgraded to Vice-Consuls by the Foreign Office one year later.33 The British consulate at Jeddah was the base for official information-gathering efforts regarding the Hajj, which were catalysed by two factors, disease and the opening of the Suez Canal in