Reading hajj narratives against political-administrative archives, this article elaborates a global microhistory of how the Meccan pilgrimage afforded new horizons of Muslim engagement as the Mughal and Ottoman empires declined and decentralized to give way to European hegemony (c. 1750-1830). It is argued that the sacred sites of Arabia acquired novel meaning for Indian pilgrims seeking a mirror for moral and political regeneration at home. At the same time, the turbulence of imperial transformations induced greater willingness to come to grips with the realities of votive travel, and in turn greater recognition of perceived differences between global Muslim cultures encountered on hajj. Hajj accounts thus signaled a radical break from classical genres, wherein objective experiences were subordinated to the immanent. Recovering the itineraries of Rafi‘-ud-Din Muradabadi (1721/22-1810), a north Indian Sunni scholar who journeyed by sea, and ‘Abdul Husain Karnataki (d. 1830), a southern Indian Shi‘a royal who traveled overland to the Hijaz, the essay observes that, conceived in the shadow of regime change in India and the Indian Ocean, their reflections anticipated essential modern trends in Muslim mobility. These included discrete distinctions between its religious and irreligious entailments, and an emergent episteme that further illuminates how the Muslim world was reimagined after the Muslim empires.