The introduction into the Ottoman Empire (and thus globalization) of statistical and probabilistic risk assessment methods during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was part of broader processes of global standardization – of time, space, and energy, as well as of economic and government measures. Yet what this paper seeks to explore is a paradoxical linkage and co-dependence between this particular process – the rise of actuarial science in the Middle East – and religious transformations pointing to almost opposite ethical and epistemological horizons. How was the rise of new quantitative protocols for managing uncertainty, and the penetration of the multinational insurance industry into the Empire, enabled by the hajj, and how did actuarial science, in turn, help shape this religious experience and the community formed around it? The “democratization” of the hajj to Mecca in the age of steam resulted in fusing together the “Ummah above-” and “below the wind”, solidifying South- and South-East Asia’s role in the Islamic community. These processes reconfigured the class, ethnic, and religious profile of the Muslims traveling to the Arabia. The ordeals of steam travel (steamers made pilgrimage quicker and safer, but also more frightening), amplified also by print and intercontinental telegraphy, animated a lower-class and sufi-inflected pursuit of rizq (divine reward), manifested in communal solidarity and heterodox forms of piety onboard and onshore. At the same time, these very ordeals, instances such as maritime accidents in the Red Sea, helped establish the actuary tables for steam navigation and stabilized “risk” (the etymological derivative of rizq, but otherwise its secular-liberal mirror image) as a key organizing principle of steam navigation in these waters. Finally, these interfacing processes pushed to action Islamic reformers who sought to tilt the newly emergent “pan-Islam” toward what they regarded as rational avenues, for instance by promoting the introduction of insurance.