Ottoman Mecca and the Indian Ocean Hajj

with Michael Christopher Low

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| In the Hijaz, the Ottoman Empire managed not only Mecca and Medina--the two holiest cities in Islam--but also port cities of the Red Sea with connections to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this episode, Michael Christopher Low explains how the empire ruled this region as the hajj transformed thanks to steam travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While European colonial anxieties about the hajj focused on epidemic disease and subversive politics, Ottoman concerns centered on the legal status of the region and its infrastructural networks. Although projects such as the Hijaz Railway are often understood as manifestations of Abdulhamid II's commitment to pan-Islam, Low suggests that these measures were more accurately a product of emerging technocratic forms of Ottoman governance. He also discusses continuities with the Saudi state. Low's book is Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj. 

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In the Hijaz, the Ottoman Empire managed not only Mecca and Medina--the two holiest cities in Islam--but also port cities of the Red Sea with connections to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this episode, Michael Christopher Low explains how the empire ruled this region as the hajj transformed thanks to steam travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While European colonial anxieties about the hajj focused on epidemic disease and subversive politics, Ottoman concerns centered on the legal status of the region and its infrastructural networks. Although projects such as the Hijaz Railway are often understood as manifestations of Abdulhamid II's commitment to pan-Islam, Low suggests that these measures were more accurately a product of emerging technocratic forms of Ottoman governance. He also discusses continuities with the Saudi state. Low's book is Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj.  

Contributor Bios

Michael Christopher Low received his PhD in International and Global History from Columbia University in 2015. Low is an Assistant Professor of History at Iowa State University and is currently a Senior Humanities Research Fellow for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020) and co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). His articles have also appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Environment and History; the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Jadaliyya; and the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Low also sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Global History and the Journal of Tourism History.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Further Listening

	Lale Can	191 4/18/15	Central Asians and the Ottoman Empire
	Dženita Karić	406 3/17/19	Bosnian Comrades on Hajj
	Cemil Aydın	313 5/16/17	The Idea of the Muslim World
	Eileen Kane	219 1/8/16	Russian Hajj
	İsmail Yaşayanlar	454 3/12/20	Osmanlı Devleti'nde Salgın Hastalıklarla Mücadele

Credits

Episode No. 501
Release Date: 7 April 2021
Recording Location: Abu Dhabi and Somerville, MA
Audio editing by Sam Dolbee  

Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street"; Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route"

Bibliography courtesy of Michael Christopher Low

Select Bibliography

Seema Alavi, Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire (Harvard University Press, 2015).

Mesut Ayar, Osmanlı Devletınde Kolera: İstanbul Örneği (1892-1895) (Kitabevi, 2007).

Cemil Aydın, The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, 2017).

On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020).

Birsen Bulmuş, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Lâle Can, Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Lâle Can, Michael Christopher Low, Kent F. Schull, and Robert Zens, eds., The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020).

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2000).

Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (I.B. Tauris, 1998).

Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003): 311-342.

Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans, 1573-1683 (I.B. Tauris, 1994).

Ulrike Freitag, A History of Jeddah: The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Nile Green, ‘The Hajj as its Own Undoing: Global Infrastructure and Integration on the Muslim Journey to Mecca,’ Past & Present 226, no. 1 (2015): 193-226.

Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2006).

Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1969-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Cornell University Press, 2013).

Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam, and the Politics of Difference: Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919 (Brill, 2011).

Michael Christopher Low, “Empire and the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and Pan-Islam under British Surveillance, 1865-1908,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 2 (2008): 269-290.

Michael Christopher Low, “Global Public Health and the Ghosts of Pilgrimages Past,” Jadaliyya (2012): http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27263.

Michael Christopher Low, “The Indian Ocean and Other Middle Easts,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 549-555.

Michael Christopher Low, “Ottoman Infrastructures of the Saudi Hydro-State: The Technopolitics of Pilgrimage and Potable Water in the Hijaz,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, no. 4 (2015): 942-974.

Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 768-796.

Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016).

William Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 1840-1908 (Ohio State University Press, 1984).

Murat Özyüksel, The Hejaz Railway and the Ottoman Empire: Modernity, Industrialisation and Ottoman Decline (I.B. Tauris, 2014).

William Roff, ‘Sanitation and Security: The Imperial Powers and the Nineteenth Century Hajj,” Arabian Studies VI (1982): 143-160.

Umar Ryad, ed., The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire (Brill, 2017).

Gülden Sarıyıldız, Hicaz Karantina Teşkilatı, 1865-1914 (Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1996).

Gülden Sarıyıdız and Ayşe Kavak, eds., Halife II. Abdülhamid’in Hac Siyaseti: Dr. M. Şakir Bey’in Hicaz Hatırları (Timaş Yayınları, 2009).

Radhika Singha, “Passport, ticket, and India-rubber stamp: ‘The problem of the pauper pilgrim’ in colonial India, c. 1882-1925,” in Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds., The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean region (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

John Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865-1956 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2015).

Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford University Press, 2013).