The Mechanics of Mecca: the Technopolitics of the Late Ottoman Hijaz and the Colonial Hajj
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The Mechanics of Mecca: The Technopolitics of the Late Ottoman Hijaz and the Colonial Hajj Michael Christopher Low Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Michael Christopher Low All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Mechanics of Mecca: The Technopolitics of the Late Ottoman Hijaz and the Colonial Hajj Michael Christopher Low Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources as well as published materials in Arabic and modern Turkish, this dissertation analyzes how the Hijaz and the hajj to Mecca simultaneously became objects of Ottoman modernization, global public health, international law, and inter-imperial competition during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that from the early 1880s onward, Ottoman administrators embarked on an ambitious redefinition of the empire’s Arab tribal frontiers. Through modern engineering, technology, medicine, and ethnography, they set out to manage human life and the resources needed to sustain it, transform Bedouins into proper subjects, and gradually replace autonomous political life with more rigorous forms of territorial power. At the same time, with the advent of the steamship colonial regimes identified Mecca as the source of a “twin infection” of sanitary and security threats. Repeated outbreaks of cholera marked steamship-going pilgrimage traffic as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from diasporic networks of anti-colonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. In contrast to scholarship framing biopolitical surveillance over the hajj as a colonial project, I emphasize the interplay between European and Ottoman visions of quarantines, medical inspections, steamship regulations, passports, and border controls. As with other more overtly strategic projects, such as rail and telegraph lines, I argue that the Ottoman state sought to harness the increasing medicalization of the hajj, Hijazi society, and the Arabian environment as part of a broader assemblage of efforts to consolidate its autonomous southern frontiers. Although historians have frequently held up the Hijaz and the pilgrimage to Mecca as natural assets for the invention of Hamidian tradition and legitimacy, they have often failed to recognize or clearly articulate how the very globalizing technologies of steam, print, and telegraphy, which made the dissemination and management of the Sultan-Caliph’s carefully curated image possible, were only just beginning to make the erection of more meaningful structures of Ottoman governmentality, biopolitical security, and territorial sovereignty in the Hijaz possible. And while modern technologies clearly lay at the very heart of the Hamidian impulse to reform, develop, and modernize the empire, concomitantly these very same technologies were also extending British India’s extraterritorial reach into the Hijaz. Thus, as an alternative to the traditional “Pan- Islamic” framing of the late Ottoman Hijaz, this study seeks to identify the assemblages of legal, documentary, technological, scientific, and environmental questions, the “everyday details” and quotidian “mechanics,” which were actually escalating and intensifying Anglo-Ottoman and wider international clashes over the status of the Hijaz and the administration of the hajj. In a sense, this dissertation is also a history of negation, absence, and contradiction. In order to better understand the possibilities and the limits of late Ottoman rule in the Hijaz, I spend much of this study detailing the enormous obstacles to territorial sovereignty and modern governmentality through an investigation of their Janus-faced inversions, autonomy and extraterritoriality. I argue that the autonomous legal status, exceptions, and special privileges enjoyed by both the Sharifate of Mecca and the Hijazi population (Bedouin and urban) laid bare the compromised nature and limits of Ottoman sovereignty and provided both the gateway and the rationale for the extension of the Capitulations and European extraterritorial protection into corners of the Ottoman world and Muslim spiritual affairs, which prior to the late-nineteenth century had been inconceivable. Table of Contents Note on Sources, Transliteration, and Dates…ii Acknowledgements…v Introduction: Scraping Away the Veneer of Pan-Islam: Excavating the Material Histories of the Late Ottoman Hijaz and the Colonial Hajj…1 Chapter 1: Building a Province, Searching for Subjects: Osman Nuri Pașa and the Shifting Meanings of Autonomy on the Tribal Frontier…41 Chapter 2: Unfurling the Flag of Extraterritoriality: Foreign Muslims, Muslim Consular Agents, and the Evolution of the Capitulations in the Indian Ocean Hijaz…87 Chapter 3: Quarantine and the Global Crisis of Cholera: The Ottoman Sanitary State and Its Limits…158 Chapter 4: Nature or the Nature of the State?: Infrastructure and the Environmental Imaginaries of Pilgrimage and Potable Water…230 Chapter 5: The Sharif’s Share: Pauper Pilgrims, Passports, and the Failed Regulation of Indian Ocean Mobilities…263 Epilogue…333 Bibliography…345 i Note on Sources, Transliteration, and Dates At its core this dissertation is a trans-regional and comparative study. It situates the nineteenth-century Hijaz and Arabian Red Sea littoral between two rival imperial powers, the Ottomans and the British. From a spatial perspective, it challenges the seemingly obvious notion that the nineteenth-century Arabian Peninsula can or should be understood exclusively or even primarily through the Cold War lens of Middle Eastern area-studies and its preoccupation with Arab nation states. Instead, this study positions the Hijaz as a liminal borderland between the Ottoman Empire’s Arab frontiers and the British-dominated Indian Ocean. And in order to fully represent the full trans-regional texture of the nineteenth-century Hijaz, the pages of this dissertation are populated by a dizzying mélange of Ottomans, Arabs, Europeans, Indians, Jawis, and Hadramis. In order to strike a balance between these overlapping worlds, this project is based primarily on archival research conducted at the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul and The National Archives of the United Kingdom (formerly the Public Record Office) at Kew. In addition to these two main collections, I also used the British Library’s Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections (India Office Records) and the Thomas Cook Group Archives. Likewise, in Istanbul I also made use of the Beyazit Devlet Kütüphanesi and the İslam Araștırmaları Merkezi (İSAM). Despite its trans-regional vistas, the core of the original scholarly contribution made by my research comes from Ottoman and Turkish archival and published sources. In transliterating Arabic, Ottoman, and modern Turkish source materials, I have generally been faithful to International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) transliteration guidelines. When quoting from printed sources where the Ottoman Turkish has already ii been rendered into Latin script, I have generally kept to the original author’s transliteration. However, due to the inconsistent usages among Turkish authors, in both Ottoman and modern Turkish transliterations I have eliminated all long â, î, and û diacritics from words of Arabic origin. So throughout the text you will find İslam and not İslâm. And wherever possible, I have tried to opt for the simplest modern Turkish renderings in order to avoid Ottoman spellings littered with diacritics for Arabic characters like ‘ayn and hamza. Because Ottoman and modern Turkish are the primary research languages featured throughout this study, I have generally opted for Turkish rather than Arabic spellings for Islamic terminologies and technical concepts like mücavirin, istitaat, or ulema. However, for terms and places commonly known in English, I have opted for the most widely accepted Arabic transliterations. Thus, I have used hajj and not hacc, fatwa and not fetva, and jihad not cihad. Place names follow their primary linguistic affiliation. So it is Jidda not Cidde. Likewise, I refer to the Hijaz not Hicaz. For individual names and titles, however, it gets a bit trickier. I have tried to transliterate titles and proper names in a way that reflects each individual’s primary official or linguistic affiliation. All Ottoman officials’ names are rendered with Turkish spellings. Thus, it is Mehmed Ali and not Muhammad ‘Ali. By contrast, for the Arabic cultural milieu of the Hijaz and the Hadrami diaspora, I refer not to Avnürrefik Pașa, Şerif or Emir of Mekke, but ‘Awn al-Rafiq, the Sharif or Amir of Mecca. Finally, this study also includes the names of a great many colonial subjects either working for or receiving protection from the British consulate in Jidda. For these names, I have generally tried to retain the Latin transliterations used in British documents. Thus, for the iii Indian Muslim vice-consul, I use Dr. Abdur Razzack and not Dr. ‘Abd al-Razzaq. Likewise, for the British translator at Jidda, it is Yusuf Kudzi and not Qudsi or Kudüslü. At least part of the logic behind retaining these idiosyncratic nineteenth-century spellings is to ensure that readers with an interest in the British Empire will be able to locate and match these names with other archival and secondary materials. However, for a diasporic figure like ‘Umar