When COVID upended life in New York in March 2020, the blaring of ambulances became an unwelcome soundtrack to contemplating pandemics past and present. I had just published a book that examined how Central Asians experienced the pilgrimage to Mecca in the last decades of Ottoman rule. While cholera was a major part of that history, I did not engage extensively with disease—a personal choice informed by a desire to explore themes extending beyond the regulation of Muslim bodies. These included the sites and communities that shaped and mediated a difficult journey across multiple empires, as well as the fraught connections, liminal forms of legal belonging, and heightened and interrupted mobilities that were indisputably part of the hajj. As the horizons of life narrowed and mobility was increasingly constrained, I waited for a return to normal and thought about the magnitude of uncertainty pilgrims had faced. By fall 2020, it...

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