In 1877, Russian authorities in Turkestan arrested an Ottoman mullah who was reportedly spreading anti-tsarist propaganda in the Kazakh steppe. Upon closer inspection, the man turned out to be neither an Ottoman subject nor a Muslim religious leader. This article follows the travels of Hajji Ahmed, a young merchant from Dagestan who was at different times accused of being a Russian spy and an Ottoman spy. His three petitions and tsarist investigative reports reveal that he had traded throughout the Khanate of Khoqand, the Emirate of Bukhara, and tsarist Turkestan in the 1870s. This microhistory of a Muslim peddler offers a glimpse into tsarist anxieties about Muslim mobility and local fears of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It demonstrates that Russia’s colonial expansion provided new opportunities for tsarist Muslim subjects but also destabilized Central Asian societies and institutions, making the conditions of travel perilous. Tsarist paranoia about Ottoman emissaries, Tatar missionaries, and prospects of an anticolonial uprising led to Russia’s restrictions on transregional Muslim mobility.
