John Slight - The British Empire and the Hajj: 1865–1956

The

British Empire and the Hajj

18651956

JOHN SLIGHT

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England 2015

Copyright 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover art: (top) The National Archives; (bottom) Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

978-0-674-50478-3 (hardcover)

978-0-674-9158-24 (EPUB)

978-0-674-91581-7 (MOBI)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Slight, John, 1983

The British Empire and the Hajj: 18651956 / John Slight.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Muslim pilgrims and pilgrimagesSaudi ArabiaMeccaHistory. 2. Great BritainColoniesAdministration. 3. Great BritainRelationsSaudi ArabiaHistory. 4. Saudia ArabiaRelationsGreat BritainHistory. I. Title.

BP187.3.S59 2015

297.3'52409dc23

2015007426

Map of places mentioned in the book

Credit: John OConnor/John Slight

THIS BOOK IS a study of the British empires interactions with the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, from 1865 to 1956. The crucial events of these dates are the 1865 cholera epidemic, when pilgrims carried this disease from India to Arabia and enabled its spread to Europe, prompting greater British involvement in the ritual, and the 1956 Suez Crisis, which forced Britain to temporarily cede control of its Hajj administration in Saudi Arabia to its Pakistani counterparts. In examining Britains wide-ranging and complex engagement with the Hajj, this book argues for a fresh angle of vision in viewing the British empire through the conceptualization of a British Muslim empire. Islamic scholar David Margoliouth, writing in 1912, believed that Britain was the greatest Moslem power in the world, an opinion shared by many British statesmen, politicians, officials, soldiers, academics, and journalists.beyond such rhetoric, this book asks: What were the material considerations of Britains engagement with Islam?

British interactions with the Hajj are an ideal case study for focusing attention on the broader importance of Islam and Muslims to the British empire, and on the concept of Britain as ruler of a Muslim empire. As the fifth pillar of Islam, the pilgrimage to Mecca is an important Islamic practice. The Hajj is simultaneously local and transcontinental, as pilgrims travel from their homes across the world in order to gather in one place in Arabia: the Holy City of Mecca, a location of great religious and geopolitical significance. The pilgrimage is the most significant large-scale movement of people in history for a common religious purpose. In the period covered by this book, a large proportion of pilgrims came from territories under various forms of British control. The Hajj and the pilgrims that performed this ritual became a subject of great interest to imperial powers, Britain first among them. Britains engagement with the pilgrimage became an established feature of imperial administrations across Africa and Asia. This work argues that as a result of the scope and depth of British involvement in the pilgrimage, Britains Muslim empire was a tangible political, organizational, and religious entity. This conceptual vision of the British empire provides a valuable new framework for examining Anglo-Muslim interactions in the imperial era and for rethinking the nature of Britains imperial experience.

In global terms, the British empires first religion was Islam. Britain ruled over the largest number of Muslims in the world during this period, and its empire contained more Muslims than any other religious group. Across British territories in Africa and Asia, Islam was a common thread. If one reflects on the spatial dimensions of Britains Muslim empire, Britain possessed what can be termed an inner empire of territories that had substantial Muslim populations. Ranging from West Africa to Southeast Asia, this inner empire included the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Northern Nigeria, Sudan, Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Egypt, Somaliland, Palestine, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States, Aden, India, Malaya, Brunei, and Sarawak.

Through analyzing Britains relationship with the Hajj, this book argues that the governance of religious practices, central to the exercise and legitimation of imperial power, is a vital framework of inquiry in assessing the imperial experience.space. Islamic practice could not be ignored or neatly categorized as a tradition that was set in aspic or occurred in a vacuum, whatever the views of some British officials and observers might be. Technology, disease, the movements of people and ideas, politics, ideologies, charity, trade, social relations, law, international relations, and warall these were entangled with many Islamic religious practices that, in turn, shaped, and were shaped by, British imperial governance. It is this wider landscape of imperial interactions with Islamic practice, outside the scope of this work, that lends further empirical weight to the concept of Britains Muslim empire, in addition to the case study of the Hajj on which this book focuses.

By the early twentieth century, the Hajj had become an everyday part of imperial administration.

This book focuses mainly on the territories in Britains Muslim empireIndia, Malaya, Sudan, and Nigeriathat accounted for the vast majority of Britains pilgrim-subjects who traveled to and from the Hijaz every year. Despite the important differences between the internal dynamics of these disparate societies, as well as their local and regional contexts, each year thousands of people from all these places made the same momentous decisionto leave their homes and set out for the Hijaz to perform the Hajj. Some returned, others settled in the Hijaz, and others died during their journeys or in the Hijaz itself. In any history book, there are limits of coverage, and this list obviously excludes several British territories from which Muslims went on Hajj.

Geographically, the Indian Ocean has been a favored space of inquiry for historians such as Sugata Bose who have studied Britain and the Hajj.

Although the Indian Ocean is an important space in which to examine Britains interactions with the Hajj, this book uses what Thomas Metcalf terms a transcolonial framework in order to encompass a broader space. This includes territories in the Indian Ocean world and those beyond it that had connections to the Hijaz by means of the Hajj. Despite their different histories, considering India and Malaya together because the Hajj from these places was a principally maritime enterprise, and bringing Nigeria and Sudan into this analytical framework, given that pilgrims from these territories crossed the Sahel and the Sahara (a space comparable to the Indian Ocean in the sense that both are vast interconnected spaces over which people, goods, and ideas travel) offers a broad scope for comparative analysis of how these British territories grappled with the pilgrimage. Taken together, these places highlight the immense diversity and interconnectedness of Britains Muslim empire, which stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea, and provides a new perspective on Britain and the pilgrimage.