This paper explores how Ottoman officials framed the hijra – the act of moving from an area of non-Muslim rule into the territory of Islam (dar al-Islam) – as a component of migration management. Migration regimes, that is, the policies, practices, and infrastructures designed to regulate mobility – create distinctions within migrant populations. These distinctions include distinctions between those who sojourn and those who intend to stay long-term; distinctions between documented and undocumented migrants; distinctions between desirable populations and undesirable ones; and distinctions between those who conjure a sense of moral obligation among host communities (e.g. refugees/forced migrants) and those who do not (e.g. economic/labor migrants). During the Hamidian era (1876-1908), Sultan Abdulhamid II cultivated Islamic Ottomanism as a unifying ideology predicated on the sultan’s role as caliph, mobilization of Islamic religious symbols, and attention to improving Muslims’ economic and educational status. In this paper, I examine official records from the Migration Commission, Foreign Office, and Yildiz Palace to argue that even as Ottoman Islamism unfolded as a unifying ideology, the hijra, that is, the religious obligation to move, became a component in how officials distinguished not just between Muslim and non-Muslim migration but also among Muslim immigrants. In the nineteenth century, Ottoman territorial loss and European colonial rule encouraged Muslim populations to question whether migrants living subject to non-Islamicate governments were religiously obligated to move, and if they were, whether the Ottoman sultan, as caliph, had an obligation to provide them refuge. I argue that officials’ treatment of the question of the hijra sheds light on the consolidation of Ottoman migration control. Ultimately, bringing the hijra into the question of which Muslims the state was obligated to welcome reinforced the principle that the state had the right to deny entry to others. Recent consideration of Islamic Ottomanism has shown that the Ottoman state’s attempts to cultivate a secular nationality (Ottomanism) and to elevate the role of the sultan-as-caliph to appeal to non-Ottoman Muslims were at times contradictory political impulses. Scholarly work on an essential Islamic practice – the hajj – has highlighted the utility and limitations of Islamism and Pan-Islamism as analytic devices for understanding the Hamidian regime. The empire had to balance its role in facilitating the hajj with its concerns over sovereignty and nationality. This paper contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of Islamism by assessing the significance of the hijra as another Islamic-based mobility embedded within Hamidian-era governing practices.