Ottoman History Podcast - Ottoman Mecca and the Indian Ocean Hajj

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

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.  « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. In this episode, we talk with Michael Christopher Lowe, an assistant professor at Iowa State University and currently a senior humanities research fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has a new book called Imperial Mecca, Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hodge with Columbia University Press. We discuss how thinking about the hajj requires thinking beyond borders of various studies. We tend to think of the Ottoman Empire as being part of the Middle East. And I would make the argument that places like the Hijaz, Yemen, Hadhramalt, they belong in the Indian Ocean as much as they belong, you know, in the basket of Middle Eastern studies

or in a way that we think about the Ottoman Empire. His book joins a body of scholarship illuminating how steam power, cholera, and colonialism all came together to shape pilgrimage in the 19th century. From the 1880s until 1957, European empires controlled, you know, the public health infrastructure of, you know, the holiest right in Islam. It's kind of an astounding story if you sort of step back from it. But he also worked to emphasize perspectives beyond European colonial sources.

I wanted to make sure that we didn't sort of have a myopia where we only saw the Hajj as something that was pathologized and a piece of colonial disorder, right? I wanted to sort of see this through the lens more of Muslim eyes, whether that be the eyes of an Ottoman bureaucrat or the eyes of a pilgrim. In the process, he offers new insight into the thinking of state officials on topics often associated with the rule of Abdulhamid II. Pan-Islam was not first and foremost,

religious motivations were not first and foremost in their minds. first and foremost, religious motivations were not first and foremost in their minds. It was all of these you know, infrastructural state building, centralizing impulses. This and more in a minute when our program continues. So I wonder if we might start with you just giving us a sense of what Hajj was like in 1850,

what the Hejaz was like as part of the Ottoman Empire in 1850? If you were to think about the Hajj in 1850, you know, you might be looking at a total attendance, as best as we could tell, maybe 50,000 for a total attendance of Hajj around 1850, maybe 5,000 or 10,000 coming from South Asia in a given year. By the time we get to the 1880s, the 1890s, World War I, we were getting Hajj seasons of 200,000 pilgrims, 300,000 pilgrims, and eventually when you get further on into the 20th century, you know, prior to air traffic, 400,000 was sort of a high-end number. So really in the century between 1850 and 1950, this sort of age of steam, you had at least a six, seven, eight-fold growth

of the Hajj, which, you know, it might not sound so enormous in some respects, but there were no infrastructures for this kind of growth. So you immediately, between, say, 1830 and 1880, you had the ability to move massive numbers of people into a space that didn't have infrastructure and really didn't have sort of basic resources, whether it be water, foodstuffs, any kinds of metrics that you want to apply to it, and certainly not the healthcare infrastructure that it, and certainly not the healthcare infrastructure that it would need. On the Hijaz side, you know, obviously in the early part of the 19th century, you have the, you know, the first Saudi state will have the occupation of

Mecca and Medina. And then, of course, Mehmed Ali's Egyptian rule and a certain level of bureaucratization of the Hejaz comes in. And really between, you know, the beginning of the 19th century and 1840, there's no central Ottoman state. I mean, Istanbul is really not the party in charge of the Hejaz. And so you have a post-1840 restoration. And so in the 1850s, Ottoman rule in the Hejaz is pretty shaky, and it's being rebuilt. And this is also at the same time that you're having, you know, lots of pressure being brought

to bear on the Ottomans to reform. You think all of your, you know, typical Tanzimat era narratives, slave trade suppression becomes a big issue, which of course becomes extremely controversial in the Hejaz. You have an outright rebellion in the mid-1850s, led by the Sharif of Mecca. And then in 1858, you have this so-called massacre of the Christian population. The violence of 1858 is a significant moment in the history of the Hejaz, but it's often misunderstood. The 1858 violence is difficult to sum up in a sort of pithy way. The easiest way that I can explain it is you have Indian merchant families and essentially a dispute over inheritance and power of attorney and a family that is split between basically being under the protection of the British flag and some taking recourse in the Ottoman courts.

As a result of this dispute over a ship, essentially, it boils down to a familial dispute over a ship. ship, essentially, it boils down to a familial dispute over a ship. Under admiralty law, the British maintain that you cannot change the flag of a ship that's been registered under the British flag. The Ottoman governor allows for this change to be made. The ship switches from a British flag to an Ottoman flag, and then eventually it's boarded by the British. The flag is pulled down, and this becomes a kind of cause celebre, right? In both the Arabic source material, there's a chronicle by Ahmed bin Zaini Dahlan that tells this story. But then also in the Ottoman archival material, you get stories the flag was torn down. It was stomped on.

It was thrown into the sea. This was an insult to Islam. It was an insult to the community. It was an insult to the sultan. Depending on each narration, it's sort of like a fish story. It gets bigger and bigger as you go along. So this is the way that the British narrate what happens, essentially, is that this is a dispute over power of attorney.

And yes, it is. But of course, it hinges on the fact that you're able to go to a British consul and have them intervene in local politics. Right now, this brings to light a lot of things that had been simmering. Obviously, slave trade suppression, suppression of certain monopolies, assault monopoly, which had infuriated certain, especially Hadrami local figures. And so, you know, a mob is assembled and they attack consular authorities, both British and French. And, you know, some 20 odd Europeans are killed in the process, including, you know including two diplomats in the process. So this becomes an internationalized issue in which the British are demanding justice

via the capitulations and these, again, internationalized Ottoman legal structures. And so I think this is really the first moment where a local dispute becomes really a sort of European or international dispute in the Hijaz. It crystallized a lot of misperceptions on the part of Europeans, in particular the British, because they contended to conflate the violence in Jeddah with, of course, the Great Rebellion in India in 1857-58, or the Sepoy Mutiny, to use the old colonial terminology. And so they tended to see this as anti-colonial, rabble-rousing violence that was part and parcel of the exile of certain ex-mutineers or unsavory characters who had been shunted off to the hijabs,

and that they were in turn causing the violence. It takes the form of Muslim versus Christian violence, but the roots of it are a dispute between Muslims. And the thing that catapults it to this kind of religious dimension is this question of extraterritoriality. This has traditionally been narrated as communal violence. And I don't think that that's the match that lit the fuse. I really believe that it's extraterritoriality. And then you see the through line if you start from there and the kind of legal and international legal machinations that flow from 1858 really sort of continue on from that point forward. So there's a kind of paranoia among the British

about Muslim mobility and motion between South Asia and the Hejaz. But there are also real connections there. I wonder if you could talk more about kind of disentangling that paranoia from those real connections? You know, certainly there is a large diasporic community, both of South Asians, Southeast Asians, and then of course a Hadrami community. By the time you get to the beginning of the 20th century, you certainly have claims that, you know, in Mecca, at least a quarter of the population is Indian. Several hundred families in Jeddah itself, probably about 50% of all trade that flows through Jeddah is in Indian hands. And so this really gives you a sense, right, that, and I think this is part of my bigger claim, is that we tend to think of the Ottoman Empire as

being part of the Middle East. And I would make the argument that places like the Hijaz, Yemen, Hadhramalt, they belong in the Indian Ocean as much as they belong in the basket of Middle Eastern studies or in a way that we say about the Indian diaspora, aside from the sort of just sheer weight, demographic and economic power, is that they're really localized. You know, you have figures who become local elites, sheikhs. The Hanafi Mufti, you know, in the 1880s is Indian. And so they're real power brokers. They may be seen on paper as, you paper as foreign passport holders at some point, but really this is a community that was long well established. And so they're as much locals as they are foreigners. So that's another sort of thing to disentangle in the book is that you have a

pre-existing set of communal relations and then an influx of both British extraterritorial power and many more mobile bodies, you know, coming into the scene at the same time. The British are concerned about what's happening when Muslims go from South Asia to the Hijaz. They see it as a locus of pan-Islam, a locus of anti-colonialism, even if they're not exactly using those terms. Are the Ottomans concerned about these linkages? So I think that the extraterritoriality part is a creeping concern. And one of the ways that I see this playing out is, of course, you have the Islahat Fermanah in 1856. But, you know, of course, this is kind of a condition, really, of the maintenance of Ottoman sovereignty in the face of, you know, Russian aggression. And so reforms are required in order for this

umbrella, really, of British safety or sort of European international recognition to continue. And one of the things that becomes really problematic after the Islahat Fermanah for the Hijaz is the way in which the British start to use the idea of the capitulations. It becomes less of a unilateral grant of privileges, which we would think of it from, you know, the early modern period, that this was advantageous for the Ottoman Empire to say, you know, European traders, non-Muslims come into the empire, you'll be exempted from certain conditions of Ottoman and or Islamic law, and, you know, this is good for business, essentially. That's sort of the short and sweet version of it. By the time we

get to the 19th century, and especially after 1856, this becomes seen as a kind of bilateral treaty. And the way that this plays out in the Hijaz is that the capitulations are seen as something that is fundamental to the functioning of European-Ottoman relations. And so from the 1850s, but particularly from the 1880s onward, the British start to say things like, if you cannot observe the capitulations in a given territory, then you're not really sovereign. You're essentially not able to fulfill your duties, both in terms of maintaining peace and security, but also in terms of maintaining your relationships with Europe. In which case, they threaten, maybe we need to find an alternate sovereign. Of course, waiting in the wings is the Sharif of Mecca at all times. So there's always a veiled threat. a huge question, both in terms of mobility and in terms of sort of biopolitical control over

people in this region. So how does that manifest itself and how does it change over time? Maybe the first thing that I would say about this question is, you know, in the literature as it had played out, you know, up until my book, I think that cholera became kind of the starting point for a lot of the story of European interest in the 19th century hajj. And I think that that's a perfectly good place to start in many respects. It's the thing that really drew in Europeans and required them to administer and try and legislate around the hajj. And one of the factors that made it a really global and international issue. So that's important. But at the same time, I wanted to make sure that we didn't sort of have a myopia where we only saw the Hajj as something that was pathologized and a piece of colonial

disorder, right? I wanted to sort of see this through the lens more of Muslim eyes, whether that be, you know, the eyes of an Ottoman bureaucrat or the eyes of a pilgrim. And so I think casting a critical eye on the sort of cholera narrative that comes out of European sources became a big part of what I was trying to do by balancing it out with Ottoman ones. Ottoman ones. Now, the emergence of cholera, you know, really from 1817, the 1820s, you get a combination of things. The movement of British troops, obviously, you know, aggressive military expansion in the Indian subcontinent, eventually the application of steam traffic across the Indian Ocean connecting with the Mediterranean, Europe, and ultimately globally, allows what had previously been an endemic disease pool that was sort of circulating within the Indian subcontinent in the Ganges Delta. But once you get both the British Empire and faster steam technology, you're able to export this disease pool and make it not endemic or epidemic, but pandemic and really

globalize that disease pool. And of course, because of the volume of traffic coming between the Indian Ocean and the Hijaz, Mecca became, you know, kind of ground zero. Also, because you have a large gathering where you're mixing together populations, you know, from so many diverse places. And it became a kind of truism that if you had cholera outbreaks in India in 1831, in 1832, you would see it in the Hijaz and it would bloom, you know, more broadly or 1865, 1866. You know, you would see it pop up in Bombay. It would be in Mecca. All of a sudden you'd have it in Istanbul. It would crisscross the Mediterranean, and you'd find it in New York a year later. Right, so we see this pattern playing itself out, and of course the international sanitary conferences that emerged in the 1850s, I think the signature one for our purposes is the one that was held in 1866 in Istanbul. for our purposes, is the one that was held in 1866 in Istanbul. Really, again, this is a sort of signature moment because it is a recognition that the Ottoman Sultanate, the Caliphate,

could no longer be the sort of sole custodians of the Hajj because interest in this question had become globalized. And so the sort of legislation and administration of this question then became shared between not only the Ottomans and the British, the Dutch, the French, Russian Central Asia, Austrians. It really sort of became a kind of pan-European concern. Concerns about cholera and British subjects on pilgrimage led the British to nominate a Muslim named Abdurizik as vice-consul in the Hejaz, something that would actually lead to complicated legal clashes. You know, after the 1866 sanitary conference in Istanbul, there was broad agreement that there needed to be quarantines and surveillance of pilgrims as they moved from the Indian Ocean to Mecca. Now, it took about, you know, 10 to 15 years for those structures to really sort of manifest themselves in a meaningful

way. But by the time we get to the late 1870s, the Raj and the larger British Empire were starting to sort of come to grips with the need to understand the Hajj, that having a European consul who could only move around in Jeddah, obviously couldn't go into the interior as a non-Muslim, was really disadvantageous to their interests. So in the 1870s, 1878, I believe, Abd al-Razak was nominated as a, you know, a sensible gentleman with no Wahhabi leanings, no, you know, particularly, you know, boisterous Muslim sensibilities in the mind of, you know, these colonial officials, that he would be a responsible party to be able to surreptitiously go on Hajj and write a report, break it down into its, you know, day by day minutiae and really what the

sanitary, legal, financial concerns looked like for South Asian pilgrims transiting between India and the Hijaz. And so he makes that trip. And, you know, it's interesting. He, you know, he says, if I were to be found out, you know, what would they do to me? This would cause such a stir. And here I am, a Muslim, traveling and collecting data on behalf of a Christian power. to provide political information espionage for British authorities and it's really unclear what actionable espionage he provides. He certainly is a listening post in the Hijaz. The Ottomans believed a different British Muslim affiliated with the consulate had been involved in an episode in 1881 in which the British secured a sample of water from the Zamzam well in Mecca and claimed that it proved that Mecca, not India, was the source of cholera. Whenever I talk about cholera

or these kinds of ecological questions, people say, oh, you know, the sick man of Europe. And the point that I would make is that the Ottomans were actually, again, in this state building, you know, improvement of governmentality mode, you know, up on the latest and greatest scientific theories, this British Indian state is wedded to really old, outmoded, and, you know, eventually, by the time we get to the 1890s, kind of quackery. So you, if you make this comparison head to head, these claims about, you know, Ottoman incompetence or weakness, they're harder to substantiate. And so I really thought that this comparison is kind of useful for that kind of big picture claim. But even if the Ottomans could disprove the British charges,

they still had to deal with the creeping challenge of imperialism by extraterritoriality. They saw clearly that the next move was to open up a consulate in Mecca itself. And so on those grounds, my kind of favorite governor, Ottoman governor in the book, Osman Nuri Pasha, you know, writes a sort of blistering defense of sort of the stakes that were involved in this. But of course, you know, there are practical matters. You know, you have thousands and thousands of British subjects, you know, moving around Mecca. What happens if one of them has a legal dispute, a financial dispute, a power of attorney question, real estate transaction? They get in a fight, you know, really mundane things. And so there has to be some

mechanism for working that out. The Ottomans, of course, were keen to make sure that consular authorities could not apply the capitulations to the Hijaz. They had been specifically excluded from the capitulations, you know, all the way from early modern times. Of course, that was not how the British in the late 19th century read the question. And they said, you know, you have to have some sort of consular representation. And so in response, Osman Nuri Pasha, you know, said, anyone who is in any legal jeopardy in Mecca can't be subject to consular court. They have to be subject to Sharia court. And there's a way in which the layered sovereignty and the imperfectness, the lumpiness of Ottoman sovereignty, the power sharing agreement with the Sharif of Mecca allows them to do this. could perform really diplomatic duties, could apply the capitulations, and could act on behalf of British subjects traveling in the Hijaz. You mentioned that Osman Nuri Pasha is one of

your favorite bureaucrats. What makes him your favorite? He experiences a kind of meteoric rise through the ranks and a series of promotions between 1880 and 1882 that eventually make him commander-in-chief of Ottoman forces in the Hejaz and also the governor. And this is a moment where, if my reading of the situation is correct, that Abd al-Amin II toyed with the idea of a more centralized Hejaz. And he really gave Osman Nuri Pasha carte blanche to build an actual state in the Hijaz, right? So, you know, if we think about the power sharing agreement with the Sharifate of Mecca that had existed since early modern times, really the Ottoman state before the 1850s, certainly, but certainly still into the 1880s, was a kind of seasonal caravan state. It was a security force.

It was not the Tanzimat state that we would think of, you know, in the 1880s. And so that really had to be built. And I think this is one of the big kind of problems with the pan-Islamic narrative about the Hijaz as a kind of asset, a point of strength for the Ottoman Empire, is that the state was, you know, just terribly, terribly feeble. And so Osman Nuri Pasha comes in and, you know, he writes this kind of technopolitical, technocratic kind of reading of the need to bring the Bedouin to heel, to build infrastructure, to build schools, to sort of provide basic services of the state

in order to sort of create the kind of power that I think post-Tanzamat bureaucrats envisioned as being effective statecraft, effective governance. He comes up in a variety of ways, whether it's things like real estate. And he says, look, Indonesians and Indians own, depending on how you slice it, an eighth, a quarter of all the real estate in the Hijaz, and they're not being taxed. All of this wealth is just being siphoned off. And then, of course, then it gives the Europeans, European governments, pretext to intervene legally and interfere in the internal affairs of the Hijaz. And so he sort of draws out this Hijaz that's sort of caught between the competing forces

of Bedouin mobility, extraterritoriality on the part of the Europeans, and then the problem, which I think is the sort of key problem of the Hijaz in his mind, and to my mind as well, is autonomy. And so all of these questions, he says, if you want to have sovereignty, you're going to have to centralize the state in some way, shape or form. And so he wages a real power struggle and effectively by about 1882, 1883, strips the Sharif of Mecca of most of his power, but it doesn't last. I mean, he sort of pokes the bear. He continues to sort of needle the locals in a variety of ways. And eventually, Abdulhamid II

has had enough and replaces him in 1886. And it was a real lesson learned for the Sultan, I believe. From that point forward, he was much more content with a sort of autonomous Sharifate and a sort of semi-autonomous Hijaz in which he used infrastructure building and sort of new mechanisms of border security, passports, sort of new tools, if you will, of governmentality, eventually the Hijaz railway, telegraphs, things like that, to sort of build a state around the Sharifate and sort of narrow that room for autonomy. To have done otherwise was to sort of court an all-out sort of military occupation, which surely then would have, again, drawn the Europeans into the situation. So it was a balancing act. What I propose is that he built around, he did his best

to sort of bring the Hejaz closer and closer to Istanbul through a kind of technocratic state building project from the 1880s onward. So it seems like the Hejaz is presented as both exceptional and not in the eyes of officials. What I see is from 1880 onwards, essentially from Osman Nuri Pasha onward, you have the construction of some middle ground. It's not a perfect example of the Tanzimat, but it's certainly not the exceptional, totally exceptional case that we tend to, I think, assume. The other point that I would make about the exceptional character of the Hijaz is that if you look at the Ottoman Empire, a very large number of provinces were exceptional or privileged provinces, you know, these eolate montaze, you know,

these special provinces. And so, you know, to my mind, I would ask the question, why is Hijaz sort of cordoned off and thought of as so different from other provinces? I accept the fact that there are religious reasons for that. But in practice, the Ottoman state is doing this kind of thing all over the place. And so I kind of, I really want to interrogate that. I assume that I'm going to get pushback about this and that people are going to have opinions one way or the other. But I think that it's worth having this conversation about, you know, really how exceptional is the Hejaz at the end of the day. And certainly European empires don't see it as such. And that matters too. It's not just how Istanbul wants to define itself in the sort of real politic, the sort of real politic, the sort of power calculations of the period. It matters also what the European neighbors think too. So we've talked a lot about

kind of British and Ottoman clashes. We've alluded to the Sharif being there as well. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit more about local Ottoman subjects in the Hejaz. I think that we tend to think of the Ottoman state versus the Hejaz, you know, a sort of center periphery struggle. And one of the big storylines, and it's true for some, you know, a variety of reasons, that the Bedouins can be an obstacle to the imposition of a more fulsome state, you know, sort of a deeper reach of the state. But one of the things that I found was that it was actually urban Ottoman subjects who could be the most obstreperous.

And so you think back to our conversation about the Jeddah massacre in 1858. These were urban interests who were being affected by the rise in steamship traffic or the rise in consular authority. In chapter four, we have this similar kind of problem that Osman Nuri Pasha is struggling with. He tends to frame things as, you know, the lack of the state, you know, works to the advantage of these, you know, wild and savage Bedouins. But in fact, when he tries to build these new aqueduct systems and reform the water infrastructure in the region, it's actually urban interests who had monopolized essentially rainwater tanks and were making profits off of that,

who started to sabotage his projects. And you have a kind of a constellation of interests. Some of them overlap completely between, you know, businessmen in Jeddah. These could be, again, Indians, Haldramis, Ottoman subjects. Then, of course, you have the Bedouin, the Sharif himself, and other foreign interests as well. And there is this sort of constellation of interests that form various kinds of monopoly or cartel arrangements around pilgrimage guides, camel hires, access to water, all kinds of it's it's really autonomy it's really the sort of power sharing agreement between you know the hijaz province the governor and the sherefate that

legal constitutional arrangement causes the ottomans so many problems and then the bedouin question is kind of an extension of that. Now, there are some physical and mechanical issues, right, of traversing the desert when you try and bring in the telegraph and railway. But again, all of those questions flow from that sort of central question of autonomy and their inability. And right down to the end, right, the CUP government at the very end of things is trying to sort of say, let's crush the Sharifate and finally make a break from this. But it's just impossible for them to do. And it's a little bit like a race against time for them. They're trying to build up these machineries of a new state, but they really kind of run out of real estate before World War I. I mean, the Hejaz Railway comes in at the

end of the period that you're interested in. It's connected to these processes that you've talked about of kind of a material foundation for the Ottoman state, maybe for pan-Islam, if you want to think of it like that. I expect you have a more complicated view. In the, you know, the longue durée story of the Hejaz Railway, when people from the 1860s, 1880s began to imagine the possibility of this railway, it was always to connect militarily, to bring the Hijaz to heel, to narrow the sort of scope of autonomy in the region, and to be able to move men and materiel, and really to connect Syria, but ultimately Istanbul, with the frontiers, even as far as Yemen.

And the men who were making these proposals had, generally speaking, had some experience with the Hijaz. And part of their logic for presenting the project, pan-Islam was not first and foremost, religious motivations were not first and foremost in their minds. It was all of these infrastructural, state-building, centralizing impulses and military and strategic impulses to think about this space that was so far away from Istanbul and so weak, especially as a sort of navally connected space, right? That, you know, by the time you get to the turn of the century, it was very clear that in any ensuing conflict that British naval supremacy would completely cut the Hejaz off. And so I think that that was a prime mover. The welfare of the pilgrims was not a significant part of the calculus. And why do I say that? Well, there were alternate plans,

of course, to build a much cheaper and much shorter railway between Jeddah and Mecca, and they never got actuated, partly because the Ottomans were afraid that that would just be a sort of welcome mat for Europe, you know, put the railway in and the Europeans would sort of, ride along the rail and they would be there immediately. But the fact that they didn't really act on that, I mean, Indian pilgrims or Indian fundraisers were quite upset by the time you got to World War I that this, you know, quintessential peace, and in fact, the peace that had been advocated, you know, all the way back in the 1880s by someone like Osman Nuri Pasha had never been built. Instead, they opted to build the piece that was, you know, connecting, you know, their military

power and ability to move materiel and compensate against, you know, British naval power. So I just think that there are those two sides. There's the sort of strategic and the pan-Islamic, but we sort of miss the degree to which, you know, this was kind of a race against time for the Ottomans to, you know, bring this frontier into the fold before it was too late. And, you know, again, for my money, finding material and technical questions that either contradict or are in friction with pan-Islam was sort of the point of the book, was to really complicate that story that we like to tell ourselves about the sort of worldview of Abdulhamid II. And what I found on the ground and in the archive just didn't match completely with that.

What do we see in terms of continuities between this story of Ottoman technocratic development in late 19th and early 20th century, and what becomes Saudi Arabia in the 20th century? From the Saudi perspective, we forget, I think we tend to think of Saudi Arabia as a post-1970s, post-oil wealth state headed from Riyadh. But actually, in the 1920s, the state was built around the Hejaz. The principal revenue stream was coming from Hajj, right? And so, in fact, I mean, if we even think about the discovery of oil, the desperation with which the Saudis were reaching out to someone like Carl Twitchell, trying to get oil concessions, was in part a sort of extension of the Great Depression,

you know, depriving them of their revenue stream with dwindling numbers of pilgrims in the late 1920s and early 1930s. So I just think that thinking about connections between what the Ottomans were trying to create and what comes after is a really useful thing. The external relations of the Hajj was a very slow decolonial process. It didn't end with the Ottomans in World War I. And I think that that's just worth underscoring that from the 1880s until 1957, European empires controlled the public health infrastructure of the holiest right in Islam. It's kind of an astounding story if you sort of step back from it. One of the artifacts of this infrastructural control was the island of Cameroon, located off the coast of Yemen. In the wake of the 1866 International Sanitary Conference,

this island was eventually chosen as the site of quarantine for incoming pilgrims. It operated until the 1950s as a condominium between the British and the Dutch. So I had the good fortune to, I guess, the good timing to end up studying Arabic in Yemen in 2006 and 2007. It was really a sort of fortuitous window. And so, yeah, I was lucky enough at the time, Kamran, if I'm remembering correctly, it was a Yemeni German businessman who had opened up a kind of dive shack. Right. So he was doing, you know, little tours and, you know, a Red Sea diving. I showed up there with a couple of my classmates. You know, we were traveling around various places in Tehama,

and I basically had a photocopied British map of quarantine facilities from sometime around, you know, World War I. I was actually able to, there's an arch, there's this photograph that's in the book, and found a brick that was stamped with the word sanitaire. It was really interesting to get to walk the place in summer to sort of feel this just brutal, brutal heat, you know, well above 100 Fahrenheit, and get a sense for what the geography of this place looked like and talk to people about, you know, what that Hajj period meant to them, what it was remembered as.

Obviously, they were curious that I was interested in talking about this. And there were stories like Indonesian pilgrims who were relatively wealthy throwing coins off the side of the boats and that local boys would dive in to fish them out of the water. They talked about bodies being dumped instead of being buried, being dumped into the sea, obviously because of cholera. They talked about the disinvestment, right, of the Yemeni state. Are they saying that for the benefit of, you know, this Western kid who shows up with a British map? You know, take it with a grain of salt. You know, the benefit of, you know, this Western kid who shows up with a British map? You know, take it with a grain of salt.

You know, the stories of suffering that pilgrims told about being in this really difficult environment, it made it much, you know, much easier to connect with. In terms of continuities that you see with the present, I mean, I would guess there are a lot, right? You have cholera in Yemen. We have the global pandemic we're living in. Restraints on where certain people can go. Questions about legal authority. Which of these jumps out to you the most? I think the thing that I would say about this is the lessons of the 19th century for Saudi Arabia have been deeply internalized. And why do I say that? Maersk was a big scare. There have been deeply internalized. And why do I say that? MERS was a big scare. You know, there have been polio scares in the 20th century. There were still cholera outbreaks. You know,

SARS was an issue. Ebola was an issue. Every few years there have been, you know, various public health questions that have gotten international attention. And commentators, even people like myself, go, oh, is this going to be the big one? How is Hajj going to be implicated in this? And ultimately, what I think Saudi Arabia has done and proven is that they understand that messing things up in association with the Hajj carries such a dramatic price for them. Their responsibility to their citizens, or subjects rather, to the Muslim world, but also

the accountability that is held over them in terms of their responsibilities to the non-Muslim community, the rest of the global international community, is so great that I think that their cautiousness was really manifested in this sort of socially distanced, modified, sort of symbolic hajj that they put on. And I think it's interesting if you contrast that, right? So what did the British do in the 19th century? They allowed pilgrimage to go forward because they didn't want it to interfere with economic activity. So even though they knew in a given year thousands of people would die, they said, we can't do anything. We don't want to, you know, upset Muslim sensibilities. We'll have an uprising. And, you know, here are all these

financial reasons why we shouldn't do this. We're totally against quarantine, etc. And a denialist strand, a propaganda strand to say that cholera wasn't communicable or that it was miasma based reminds me a lot of the kinds of media that came out of the UK and the United States during the early stages and unfortunately later stages of the COVID pandemic. So I think that there is some story about capitalism and some story about, you know, the Western imagination about pandemics, that those lessons have not been internalized. This had been speculated about for many, many years, you know, how would Saudi Arabia fare in the event of a pandemic? Because ultimately the Hajj has the potential, any large gathering has the potential to be a catastrophic event. And they handled it with considerable responsibility. And you can't always say that about the Saudi state. But in this case, you have to recognize that they did a good job. Yeah. I mean, I guess the more cynical explanation of it would be that

Saudi is not dependent on revenue from Hajj in the same way as it was. I don't know if that's accurate. I mean, that would be one guess that I would have. Yeah, it's definitely not. But I mean, certainly shutting down travel has interfered with their move to tourism. I mean, I can't turn on the TV here every five seconds, you know, discover Saudi comes on and, you know, Neom and all of that stuff. So they definitely have wanted to open up. And this was not in their plans for the, you know, the year 2020, 2021. You can certainly be cynical about the Saudi state. I don't want to, you know, be a cheerleader for the Saudi state. But I think in this case,

they erred on the side of caution and look all the better for it. Are there other things that we should, that I should have asked you? Was there something you were hoping I would ask that I didn't? No, this was good. I mean, it's really nice to have... That's Michael Christopher Lowe. His book is Imperial Mecca, Ottoman Arabia, and the Indian Ocean Hodge,

out now with Columbia University Press. So yeah, I think that this is good. with Columbia University Press. Of course, as always, you can find more information on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, including a bibliography of relevant works and other information. You can also join us on Facebook, where the community of listeners is over 35,000 strong. That's it for this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. Until next time, take care.