Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire is a highly innovative and creative exploration of the hajj and its multilayered contexts in the late Ottoman Empire. While not neglecting the religious facets of the hajj and its practitioners’ Sufi imaginings, in particular, the book ranges widely and expertly across numerous themes, historical fields, and geographies. A primary focus is on the experiences, aspirations, and hardships of Central Asian travelers, mostly from Russian- and Chinese-ruled Turkestan. Crucially, Spiritual Subjects goes beyond reconstructing the politics of inter-imperial mobility to explore the pilgrimage as a more open-ended form of migration and to reconstruct the complex politics of extraterritoriality, subjecthood, and legal nationality.
As Can convincingly shows, the circulation and, frequently, the settlement of foreign pilgrims in Istanbul and elsewhere presented the Ottoman government with a host of challenges, not least because these pilgrims had access to an international legal system that positioned them as potential protégés of European colonial powers with extraterritorial authority. The Ottoman response to shifting geopolitical pressures was thus a key factor shaping the trajectory of the hajj. Multiple states competed to gain political and economic leverage by offering protection to pilgrims, while the sultan sought to counter these claims by asserting his role as a universal caliph and protector of these populations. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy worked to undermine legal maneuvering that might further constrain imperial authority. In Can's productive framing of the hajj, a metaphysical journey intersects with multifaceted conflicts about pilgrims’ legal standing and nationality.
Moving across spatial and temporal scales, Can skillfully brings these multiple narratives together by interweaving and juxtaposing disparate themes, sources, and analytical methods. These include a microhistory of a Central Asian hajji named Mirim Khan in Chapter 1 and a “bottom-up history” of a Sufi lodge in the Ottoman capital in Chapter 2 (p. 29). The story then pivots in Chapter 3 to a reconstruction of legal cases involving Central Asian pilgrims navigating Ottoman courts to claim particular privileges based on their status as foreigners under European colonial protection. Chapter 4 centers on an examination of petitions seeking assistance from the Ottoman sultan, while the fifth and final chapter explores the very localized and particular circumstances in which Central Asians became Ottomans in the early twentieth century.
One of the most striking features of this study is its grounding in an eclectic and challenging body of sources, which Can thoughtfully mines to illustrate the many arguments that structure the narrative. For instance, the book offers a nuanced and detailed account of the hajj in the era of colonial rule and of the steamship and railroad through a close reading of a text sketching one hajji's arduous route from Tashkent to Ottoman Mecca. Written in Turki (Chagatai) and published in lithograph editions between 1907 and 1915, Mirim Khan's narrative stresses the journey's religious dimensions, which Can interprets as the reflection of “a particularly mystical view of the hajj” and as “a response to its reconfiguration through new cities and experiences” (p. 43). Istanbul takes center stage in this text. It focuses on the imperial glory of the capital and, in a stylized and flattering manner, accents its Sunni heritage in describing its shrines, relics, and mosques, as well as the awesome power of the sultan as ghazi, a “holy warrior” (p. 49). Nonetheless, as Can emphasizes, this account of the hajj operates on multiple planes. More than a travelogue, Khan's work “should be read as part of a Sufi tradition that promoted mobility on the path to enlightenment” (p. 58).
Can applies the lens of microhistorical analysis again in focusing on a single Sufi lodge in Istanbul, the Sultantepe Özbekler Tekkesi, as “a microcosm of relations between Central Asians and Ottomans” and as a place where pilgrims formed networks with locals and frequently took up avenues for naturalization as Ottomans (p. 68). Registers in a private collection of lodge documents permit Can to reconstruct the worlds of its past visitors and inhabitants, “Bukharans, Andijanis, Kashgaris, and Afghans,” among them (p. 71). Authorities at the lodge recorded the names, places of origin, ages, occupations, and movements of their guests. At the same time, they monitored the conduct of visitors on behalf of the state. Rowdy pilgrims, drinkers, and sexual harassers faced expulsion. Beyond regulating the movement of these foreigners, government officials also used the lodge to demonstrate the sultan's care for his coreligionists. “By connecting new arrivals to employment, health care, lodging, spiritual life, and social activities—the constituent elements of a (trans)regional network,” Can argues, the lodge forged ties among “diasporic communities anchored in a familiar religious ethos” (p. 93).
Once on Ottoman soil, Central Asians were more than religious pilgrims. Many claimed the status of British and Russian subjects, which, in theory, permitted them to take advantage of capitulatory privileges in legal disputes with Ottoman subjects and one another. Drawing upon Ottoman Foreign Ministry and other imperial archives, and highlighting the role of geopolitical competition in the conferral of extraterritoriality, Can examines how the decades-long struggle to define legal nationality and sovereignty in the Ottoman context affected foreign Muslims who had settled in the empire. Can concludes that Ottoman authorities managed to constrain the efforts of litigants claiming to be protégés of a European state by advancing the sultan's claim as caliphal guardian of these populations and by invoking international legal principles.
Analyzing petitions that Bukharans, Kashgaris, and others sent to the government, Can concentrates on their claims to be “subjects of the caliph” who merited protection and material assistance (p. 126). Petitioners “pragmatically used an Islamic vocabulary that prompted Ottomans to action,” while the state increasingly shifted to a position of wariness about the dangers accompanying this mobile and potentially uncontrollable population: “[T]here was too much at stake for unchecked mobility: jurisdictional sovereignty, public health and order, and the material burdens on a bankrupt empire engaged in multiple wars and conflicts” (p. 146). By the early twentieth century, Can contends, the caliphal responsibility to aid pilgrims had become a considerable burden, and the government sought to curtail the hajj and impose greater control over pilgrims, even working with Russian authorities to repatriate Muslims to Central Asia. Still, by the outbreak of the First World War, as Can shows, the Ottoman state had not fully resolved all of the challenges of managing pilgrims and of establishing clear parameters defining legal nationality. Plenty of foreign Muslims managed to settle in Ottoman territory, she notes, without the trouble of jurisdictional jockeying, resort to protégé status, or even of formal naturalization. Some became Ottoman nationals; others did not.
Moving between microhistory and geopolitics and the investigation of interregional migration and local legal disputes, Can makes a forceful case against the reductionist scholarly tendency to reduce Ottoman dealings with Central Asians and others to Pan-Islamic or Pan-Turkic politics. Her subtle readings of these disparate sources point instead to the seemingly endless varieties of engagement that Central Asian pilgrims might have with the Ottoman world. A singular strength of this work is its openness to embracing the complexity, even the messiness, and variety of these hajjis’ lives and of their contingent embedding in the Ottoman setting. Importantly, Spiritual Subjects sustains a very capacious understanding of the hajj as far more than a religious rite or form of mobility. “Visiting the tomb of a companion of the Prophet Muhammad, finding work in a coffeehouse, or being treated for illness at an Ottoman hospital for the Muslim poor,” Can argues, “were just as much a part of the experience of modern hajj as was quarantine or obtaining mobility documents” (p. 28).
That said, traversing this heterogeneous and difficult source base may give rise, depending upon one's definition of politics, to some interpretive tensions. Can's pilgrims qua litigants tend to appear as self-interested actors who are “pragmatic,” “expedient,” and in search of “the most advantageous legal affiliation” that would “maximize the benefits available to them because that was how things were done” (p. 33). Such descriptions are frequently paired with the insistence that asserting a claim to nationality or protection should not be confused with expressions of political allegiance or loyalty (p. 124). By this account, all of the pilgrims’ activities swept under the rubric of the hajj, then, seem to be essentially apolitical. To be sure, the texts that Can perceptively analyzes may not be the most revealing guide to what we might call the political imaginations of her subjects. Still, some readers might wonder whether alternative formulations might be viable.
I offer this last consideration more as a speculative reflection than a criticism. Spiritual Subjects is a masterful study of deep learning and analytical sophistication. It bridges Ottoman, Russian, Chinese, Islamic, and global history subfields with grace, style, and creativity, presenting novel and important insights on a strikingly wide and diverse set of themes.
