steam-ships transporting Indian Muslims to the Hajj as mainly responsible for the globalisation of cholera. The Ottoman state consequently instituted a quarantine system using the Red Sea to protect public health. Britain tried to undermine this system in the coming decades fearing public backlash in India and restrictions on its ability to engage in free trade. The first controversy surrounding the safety of water from the Zamzam Well began in 1883 CE. In 1881 CE, James Zohrab, British Consul in Jeddah sent samples of Zamzam water to Edward Frankland, who published his findings in 1883 CE. Frankland claimed the water from the well to be six times more contaminated by animal waste than sewage in London. Arguing that due to human waste being simply buried in the ground in Mecca, the groundwater had become highly contaminated and a source of cholera. This situation, coupled with the city's visitors from all around the Muslim world, is meant to have spread the disease effectively throughout it. He ultimately called for the closure of Zamzam as a public health measure to protect the people of Asia and Europe. Frankland's report became the basis for a treatise presented to the Ottoman Board of Health by the Dutch emissary thereto. The treaty was received very negatively and interpreted to be anti-Islamic propaganda. Mehmed Şakir Bey, an epidemiologist, was so outraged that he consulted Bonkowsky Paşa, the Sultan's head chemist, and Ahmet Efendi, professor of chemistry at the Ottoman War College, for further scientific inquiry. Their testing revealed nothing dangerous about the water of Zamzam. By comparing their results to the results Frankland had published they began to publicly doubt the authenticity of his sample, as his sample was almost as saline as sea water. Additionally they explained that the water in Mecca's aqueducts and that from Zamzam came from entirely different sources, that pilgrims did not so much as bathe near the Masjid al-Haram, and that Zamzam could not be a cholera source because Mecca did not see annual cholera epidemics during the Hajj. Related to their doubts of the water's authenticity they began to speculate that Yusuf Kudzi, a British protected person and associate of Zohrab, had been the source of the water and had contaminated the water to embarrass the Muslim world. Kudzi was of Russian-Jewish ancestry, he had been born in Jerusalem and was a convert to Islam. The Ottoman establishment of