This paper explores the conflicting international and imperial regulations and practices governing passports, quarantines, shipping firms, pilgrimage guides, camel drivers, and even the legal interpretation of Islamic ritual itself. In both the high diplomatic negotiations and on-the-ground contestations over these questions, Pan-Islamic rhetoric became the inter-imperial lingua franca of solicitude for the welfare of pilgrims. Rather than inspiring dramatic humanitarian reforms, however, Pan-Islam generally undermined and contradicted Ottoman efforts to impose modern forms of governmentality, underscore the empire’s territorial sovereignty, and fully apply biopolitical documentary practices and border controls. For the Indian Ocean pilgrims caught in middle, it was precisely this vicious cycle of legitimacy claims that ensured British caution and lax safety standards even in the face of ghoulish rates of morbidity and mortality. Neither side was willing to risk being accused of interfering with pilgrims’ sacred obligations to perform the hajj. The collective failure to regulate the hajj opened space for the institutionalization of suffering, corruption, and monopolistic business practices on local and global scales. The weak chains of inter-imperial regulation were easily evaded and conditioned through the collaboration of the Sharif of Mecca, Ottoman provincial administrators, European steamship companies, elements within the European consular community in Jidda, and the trans-oceanic networks of Indian and Hadrami commercial interests controlling the pilgrimage transport and brokerage industries linking Mecca and Jidda with India, Singapore, and Java. At the center of these networks stood the autonomous Sharifate. This autonomous space at the heart of the steamship-era pilgrimage combined with the presence of large numbers of non-Ottoman Muslims controlling the commercial and financial services of the region simultaneously underscored the gaping holes in Ottoman sovereignty and attracted increasing levels of British attention to the “maladministration” of the Hijaz and hajj.