Robert Bianchi, Guests of God

As one of the central tenets of the Islamic faith, the Hajj is, at its most basic level, a religious phenomenon. Millions of people travel to Mecca each year to express and celebrate their faith and fulfill an extremely important obligation deeply steeped in religious history, symbolism, and practice. However, the vast numbers who make the pilgrimage, the enormous sums of money exchanged for their transportation, accommodations, and other expenses, and the cross-national interactions involved in managing these human and capital flows create major political implications that go well beyond the Hajj’s core spiritual purpose. Robert Bianchi’s book Guests of God undertakes an impressive study of the organization of the Hajj, how official government agencies are created to manage it, and the success and failure of political actors to use these organizations of Hajj policy to mobilize support for other purposes.
From an idealistic perspective, the functions of these agencies primarily fall in two categories: religious purposes (ensuring that as many people as possible will be able to complete this important task, and that first-time Hajjis are given precedence over those wishing to make repeated visits) and practical purposes (balancing the enormous numbers of people that want to go with the restrictions of space at the holy sites and national quotas). But as Bianchi notes, there are inevitably attempts by leaders to manipulate the system to increase their power, and the system itself is often created for these more cynical ends. Hajj accounts can be utilized as a source of revenue, and, more critically, governments can subsidize Hajjis or discriminatorily select those who get to make the trip in order to build political patronage in Muslim communities.
Bianchi argues that in addition to being a crass bastardization of a sacred religious institution, such efforts are “politically self-defeating,” and that manipulating the process for political advantage will be “quickly outweighed by losses of legitimacy and credibility” (p. 6). By carefully examining the history of political pressures around Hajj agencies in Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, Indonesia, and Nigeria he demonstrates that attempts at manipulation often lead to a backlash from non-Muslim communities and generate only marginal appreciation from those they benefit. Populations that lose see support for the Hajj as favoritism and thus oppose it, while populations that win take it for granted, and thus don’t offer significant electoral rewards. In the long run, Bianchi contends, the interference and favoritism hurts governmental credibility and legitimacy, and doesn’t bring about the intended effects. While he presents impressive evidence that such manipulations sometimes have large downsides, and can be prone to difficulty, he fails to convincingly demonstrate that these efforts will always fail politicians, either in his specific cases or as an abstract position.
Although in none of the countries was Hajj management a clean an easy tool for actors to build political power, in none of the countries was it entirely useless either. Attempts to court specific electoral groups or establish Islamic credibility of major figures did meet with some success in certain instances. They certainly weren’t successful in every case, and often the gains were short lived and came at the cost of increasing religious factionalism, but they did occasionally serve as effective, albeit limited, means for accomplishing political goals. Politicians won in areas where they would otherwise have lost, or at least mounted strong challenges where they otherwise might not have received any support. Further, stepping back to the more general question of whether Hajj policies could in theory be a tool to build political patronage, limited successes doesn’t necessarily imply the impossibility of greater success – the failures might simply be a result of the difficulty of managing complex political pressures in the cases where it was tried, and of imperfect efforts to do so. It is certainly a common practice (particularly in countries with a single dominant religion) for regimes to attempt to control religious institutions and symbols to increase their own power, either by positioning themselves within that community to generate support or by coercing the institutions into taking positions that justify and legitimate government policies. While this is a fine line that state leaders must walk to use religious institutions to advance their causes without controlling them so much that they lose the respect of the people (and thus become useless), it is a balance that can be achieved, at least within limited time periods or limited policy areas. Often, particularly in the case of states that frequently face major crises, short-term political tools may have to take precedence over long-run considerations. Thus, manipulating Hajj agencies may be an invaluable tool for politicians to use to achieve their ends in some cases.
Bianchi is therefore correct to argue that attempts to build patronage through Hajj policies are risky, and that they may not always have the intended consequences, but he is not necessarily right to dismiss them entirely as a potentially effective means of achieving political ends. Although the historical record is at best mixed, there still appear to be certain situations within his cases where politicians have successfully used the Hajj to advance their aims, and ultimately the limitations of previous attempts to wield it as a tool don’t necessarily demonstrate the impossibility that it could be used in that way. The very fact that it has been tried so often suggests that policy makers, at least, believe it can be useful. It seems likely that they are sometimes correct.