Very belatedly for someone who works on Islam in Africa, I read through parts of Marcel Cardaire’s L’islam et le terroir africain (1954) the other day. I hadn’t had much interest in the book before, given its implicit racism and the fact that it’s discussed extensively in more recent, secondary literature, but it’s now relevant to a project I’m working on, so I took a look.
Among various interesting bits, one thing that jumped out at me was Cardaire’s figures for the 1952 hajj (or, to take his phrasing, entry visas for Saudi Arabia in 1952, which I assume corresponds at least roughly to the hajj figures). He only lists figures for a few regions and countries, but here they are from largest to smallest. The total visas, he said, was 148,175
- 27,611 Egyptians,
- 18,314 Pakistanis,
- 10,645 Indonesians,
- 10,218 Indians,
- 9,623 Turks,
- 9,233 Sudanese (then “Sudanese Egyptians,” since Sudan wasn’t independent until 1956),
- 6,101 Thai
- 3,569 Iranians,
- 1,634 Afghans,
- 853 West Africans (called “Senegalese” by the Saudis but coming from across the region)
- 30 Japanese,
- 22 Chinese,
- 1 American
Sahel Blog 
30 Japanese?
My American cousins were brought up in Abqaiq in the fifties, the “Aramco brats”.
None or very few of the Americans were muslim.
Not all visas are related to hajj.