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1 A CHURCH FOR ISLAM

In 1802 Fayz Khan (Fay! KhÁn al-KabÉlÅ) was laid torest in a shrine at a mosque complex in Kabul. With the passing of this Muslim scholar, an era came to a close. A guide on the path of Islamic mysticism, he had inherited the wisdom of a lengthy chain of Sufi masters. Fayz Khan himself transmitted the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, who had formulated a critique of Islam in his native India of the late sixteenth and early seven- teenth centuries. Celebrated by his followers as the “Renewer of the Second Millennium,” Sirhindi argued that “unlawful innovations” had corrupted Islam. He taught that the pursuit of Sufi knowledge, paired with rigorous devotion to the essence of the divine path, the shari‘a, showed the way to renewing the faith. Sirhindi’s vision in- spired the emergence of a new community. Drawn from members of the Naqshbandiyya, a Sufi brotherhood established in the four- teenth century, his devotees formed an offshoot, the Mujaddidi or- der, which lost one of its most authoritative figures with Fayz Khan’s death in Kabul.1

Mourning for this holy man spread beyond the local faithful, for

Kabul and Fayz Khan’s circle had drawn Muslims from throughout Eurasia. In the second half of the eighteenth century, hundreds of men traveled to Kabul from as far away as the Volga and Kama River valley, a region claimed by the Russians since the mid-sixteenth cen- tury. After some initial study with local mullahs, these young men set out across the steppe, retracing ancient caravan routes, to cen- ters of Islamic learning and piety in Transoxiana. The madrasas of Bukhara and Samarkand were revered throughout the world and of- fered training in the holy law and other religious sciences. Many of these students then traveled on to Kabul. Through Fayz Khan, they earned induction into the brotherhood that linked them to Shaykh Sirhindi and the wider Islamic networks of the subcontinent. These scholars then returned home to the Russian empire to pass on this learning in their own communities.2

It was not the death of Fayz Khan alone, however, that brought about a reorientation of this pattern of pilgrimage and study. Recent developments in the north also played a role. Under Catherine the Great, the Russian government had begun to reshape the horizons of its Muslim subjects. By the early nineteenth century, Muslims had recourse to an expanding network of domestic institutions de- voted to cultivating Muslim piety and learning within Russia. Mus- lims still traveled widely to seek religious blessings and wisdom. But now Muslims could construct mosques and madrasas, with govern- ment permission, in their own villages and town quarters. Moreover, Russia’s Muslims could look to their own authorities in the form of an Islamic establishment empowered by the government to resolve difficult religious questions, oversee appointments to mosques and schools, review disputes based on Islamic law, and issue legal opin- ions (fatwas) about them.

Catherine had not merely established a legal basis for the exis- tence of these institutions in Russia. She had instead transformed the imperial regime into a patron of Islam. The empress pursued a

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program of religious toleration in the spirit of the “well-ordered po- lice state” imagined by the jurists of Central Europe. Because toler- ated faiths were regulated by the police ordinances of the empire, they held out the promise of reinforcing autocratic power, particu- larly in restive areas where Muslims had repeatedly risen up against state authorities or joined the rebellions led by their non-Muslim neighbors. The empress hoped to ease tensions among Muslims and Orthodox missionaries, officials, and settlers in the eastern provinces bordering the steppe, but she also viewed Islam through the lens of imperial expansion. Accommodation became a means to win over Muslim intermediaries who might assist the regime in securing this frontier and projecting Russian power into the steppe, and toward the deserts and oases of Central Asia.

Having adopted the role of benefactor, a fundamental question re- mained: How would the empire discipline a faith whose every be- liever, in theory, might look to whomever he or she regarded as an authoritative guide to God’s will? This chapter examines the Russian state’s answer to this dilemma. Tsarist elites reasoned that Islam, like other faiths, would be useful to the empire when it conformed to a strict hierarchy and submitted to a domestic chain of command linked to St. Petersburg. For the multiconfessional architects of tsar- ist policy, Orthodox Christian and Protestant alike, the structures of the dominant church seemed to offer a model for such organization. Moreover, in looking abroad to the Ottoman empire, these officials concluded that Islam under the sultan conformed to such a hier- archy.

To domesticate Islam in the empire, and to turn Muslims away from alternative sources of authority in Kabul, Istanbul, and else- where, Catherine and her officials opted to introduce a churchlike organization among a population that had previously known no such institutions. The process was far from smooth. The state could not simply impose its will from above without the mediation of both

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Muslim elites and laypeople. In constructing this church for Islam, moreover, the regime found that its proper functioning depended on a close union between the mosque and the throne. Rather than merely subordinating Muslims to the empire, this institution created interdependence. These new structures of Islamic authority rested on tsarist police power.

Discovering the Turkish Creed

The Catherinian search for an organizational structure for Russia’s Muslim communities was a product of Russia’s engagement with the Enlightenment. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Russia’s pursuit of European learning furnished a fresh lens on Islam that compelled Muscovites to forget much of what they already knew about that faith. Like the Spaniards before them, Russians turned their backs on a lengthy period of shared experiences.3 With Euro- peanization, Russian elites turned abroad to understand their Mus- lim subjects at home.

For enlightened Europeans, Islam was not a “world religion” but “the religion of the Turks.” Indeed, to them conversion to Islam meant “to become a Turk.”4 Even Spanish writers treated the faith as a foreign novelty, apprehended only by studying the Ottomans. The biography of the Prophet, like the practice of polygamy, featured prominently in Italian, French, and Polish treatments of the faith. By the time Muscovites discovered these accounts, European writers had gone beyond mere religious polemic. Focusing on the life of Muhammad and the rites and customs of “the Turks,” Christian scholars had begun to systematize knowledge about Islam by focus- ing on the institutions of their geopolitical rival, the Ottoman state (see Figure 1).

In 1692 Andrei Lyzlov reworked many of these European ideas in

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a Russian context. His Scythian History claimed to relate the past and present condition of the peoples on the eastern and southern frontiers of Muscovy, including the Ottomans and their vassals, the Crimean Tatars. Though Lyzlov had gained firsthand experience during military campaigns against the Crimean khans, he relied chiefly on foreign texts. Closely following these sources, he labeled Muhammad a “cursed charmer” and the “diabolical” son of a Jewish

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Figure 1 A print depicting a ceremony at which Ottoman forces surrendered the for- tress of Kars to the tsarist army during the Crimean War. E. Iakov, Sdacha goroda i kreposti Karsa 16 noiabria 1855–go goda (1868). Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

mother. The origins of the faith could be traced, Lyzlov claimed, to “Muhammad’s charm” and his devious imagination. Islam was thus “lawlessness” (bezzakonie), the antithesis of a true creed (zakon).5

At the same time, European scholars judged Islam against a set of categories that seemed to define religion among all peoples. Chris- tian theology, though, shaped their expectations of other faiths. In this vein, Lyzlov described Muhammad’s legacy as a system of ten injunctions:

1. on frequent ablutions; 2. on the number of prayers; 3. on respect for parents; 4. on the observation of matrimony; 5. on circumcision; 6. on the assistance of the dead; 7. on war; 8. on charity; 9. on respect for chapels [mosques]; 10. on profession of one God.

Muhammad’s devotees, then, had a structure of rites and rules that were intelligible to Christians. Their religion ordered marriage and commanded filial respect. They professed monotheism, even ac- cording “Our Lord Jesus Christ” and “the Virgin Mary” a place in their sacred history.6 Thus observers like Lyzlov sketched a disjointed image of a religion marked by base deceit and disorder, but also re- sembling the structure of Christian theology.

Besides such scholarly treatises, Europe gave Russia a literary genre devoted to the adventures of Christians, like the writer Cer- vantes, who found themselves the captives of Muslim pirates and slave-traders. In the southern steppe, Russia had its own Barbary Coast. As Russian power stretched toward the Black Sea in the late seventeenth century, contacts with Muslims—Ottomans, Crimean Tatars, and Nogays—also intensified. Raiding and battle yielded Christian slaves for Muslim merchants. Those who managed to es- cape retained valuable information about their captors. One of the earliest Russian descriptions of the Ottomans came from the pen of

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F. F. Dorokhin, who returned to his native land in 1674 after twelve years of captivity.7

Aided by such informants, Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) drew on other European sources. While leading troops toward Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea, he commissioned a Russian translation of the Qur’an. Based on a mid-seventeenth-century French edition, it ap- peared in 1716 as The Al-Koran on Muhammad, or the Turkish Creed. The emperor also imported expertise supplied by numerous Chris- tian émigrés from the Ottoman empire, who knew a great deal not only about Islam but about the Ottomans’ treatment of the Chris- tian populations of their empire. In 1711, Dmitrii Cantemir, a for- mer governor of Ottoman Moldavia, defected to Russia. At Peter’s request, he composed A Book of Rules, or The Condition of the Muhammadan Religion, published in 1722. With the establishment of diplomatic representation in Istanbul, not only escaped captives, adventurers, and renegades, but Russian diplomats began to supply information about the “Turkish faith.” The essential window onto this religion came not from the neighboring Persians or the distant peoples of Arabia or India, but from the Ottomans. Like the Europe- ans before them, Russian writers applied the adjectives Turkish and Muhammadan interchangeably in describing Ottoman institutions and rites.8

Peter the Great’s plans to modernize the empire also included changes in the status of Russia’s Muslims. In a departure from Mus- covite practice, conversion to Christianity became a prerequisite for membership in the landowning service elite. Tatar nobles who re- fused to abandon Islam found their estates and Orthodox serfs con- fiscated by the state and found themselves demoted to the ranks of the peasantry or laborers for the admiralty. Peter subordinated the Church to the interests of secular government and declared tolera- tion for Protestants in a bid to attract foreign specialists. But the em- ulation of Europe also translated into state backing for figures within

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the Church and civil bureaucracy who advocated introducing Chris- tianity among non-Christians. Violence accompanied proselytiza- tion. In 1743 alone, state officials and churchmen may have de- stroyed 418 of the 536 mosques in the town and district of Kazan.9

The protection of Orthodox Christians, in the empire and in neighboring states alike, was a central priority of tsarist policy. Chris- tian converts from among Turkic and Finnic language groups ap- peared vulnerable to Islamic influence in areas where Muslims lived alongside them. The empress Anna (r. 1730–1740) tried to assert con- trol over Muslim men of religious learning among the Bashkirs, or- dering them to swear oaths that they would not “introduce anyone of other faiths to their religion and not circumcise [them].” Eliza- beth (r. 1741–1761) repeated this warning against Muslim proselytiz- ing among “Russians, as well as Kalmyks, Mordvinians, Cheremis, Chuvash and other people of every rank.”

Elizabeth’s concern with protecting the Orthodox prompted the regulation of mosque construction. She forbade the building of mosques in villages with Orthodox Christian inhabitants and set a minimum population requirement of two hundred males for the ex- istence of a mosque. Even though the empress prohibited mosques in mixed settlements, she opposed the destruction of mosques in other locales. And like her Muscovite predecessors, she recognized the importance of mosques as places where “Tatars of the Muham- madan faith living in Russia are brought to swear oaths [to the state] according to their [own religious] laws.”

On this issue, too, Elizabeth focused on the welfare of the Ortho- dox community as a whole. She pointed to the Ottoman empire and the potential repercussions for Ottoman Christians of tsarist policy. Explaining that the Tatars regarded attacks on their mosques as an “insult,” Elizabeth noted the danger that their grievances could reach “those places” where “people of the Greek [Orthodox] confes-

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sion live in other States, among Muhammadans.” She noted the risk of Muslim “oppression” of their churches in retaliation.10

Though Elizabeth reiterated earlier bans on forcible conver- sion to Orthodoxy, Christian proselytizing and the destruction of mosques provoked unrest among Muslims. Moreover, state expan- sion to the east of the Volga River toward the Ural Mountains led to armed confrontations with local Muslims, the Bashkirs. The influx of Russians and Muslim Tatars to areas of Bashkir migration and set- tlement increased competition for land and other resources on this steppe frontier. Russian officials blocked the pursuit of Orthodox proselytization and mosque destruction there; all the same, several decades of armed conflict culminated in 1755 in a revolt among the Bashkirs under the leadership of a Muslim leader, Mullah Batyrshah (BÁîïrshÁh). In the following year, St. Petersburg was compelled to reaffirm the right of Muslims in a number of Volga provinces to re- store or construct mosques in villages where no Christians were pres- ent. This measure afforded new security to mosques such as the one at Sterlibashevo (Istärlibash), built in 1722, and another established in 1745 in Kargala (Seitovskii Posad or Qarghalï), a Muslim mer- chant settlement outside of Orenburg; both quickly emerged as in- fluential hubs of scholarship and piety.11

After seizing the throne in 1762, Catherine tried to restore stability to these restive frontiers. In keeping with her self-representation as an enlightened ruler whose maternal wisdom would bring renova- tion, harmony, and justice to the empire, the empress inaugurated a new paradigm for the treatment of her Muslim subjects.12 Redefin- ing the goals of the state, Catherine blocked the bishops’ efforts to find new converts among the non-Orthodox. In 1764 she closed the office of the militant proselytizers who had antagonized Muslims and animists in the Volga and Kama River and Urals regions. In 1767 Catherine composed a treatise to demonstrate to both a domestic

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and an international audience that she was the enlightened sover- eign of a “European state” ruled by universal laws. In her Instruction to deputies who had been invited to participate in the drafting of a new code of laws, she proclaimed that public order and the general good suffered from religious persecution. “In so vast an Empire which extends its Dominion over such a Variety of People,” she an- nounced, “the prohibiting, or not tolerating of their respective Reli- gions would be an evil very detrimental to the Peace and Security of its Subjects.” Rejecting an older political maxim that advised rulers to insist on confessional uniformity within their states, the empress drew on European jurists and philosophers who contended that reli- gious persecution only stirred irrational passions. Religious discord harmed the welfare of the population and hindered its increase, which cameralist thinkers regarded as the foundation of a state’s wealth. For Catherine, this form of toleration was a pragmatic means to avert confrontation with “Obstinacy, quenching those Conten- tions which are contrary to the Peace of Government and to the Unity of the Citizens.”

But like most contemporary notions of toleration on the Con- tinent, her approach had explicit limits. It did not spell neutrality with regard to different faiths and forms of religious expression. She would not extend toleration to those whom the Church labeled heretics, freethinkers, or atheists. Nor did this conception preclude conversion to Orthodoxy at some future time. “There is no other Method,” Catherine advised, “than a wise Toleration of such other Religions as are not repugnant to our own Orthodox Faith and Pol- icy, by which all these wandering Sheep may be reconducted to the true Flock of the Faithful.”13

Cameralists theorized that proper state direction enhanced the contribution of religion to public order and the general welfare by instilling practical morality and providing ethical training. Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi maintained that “faith definitely belongs

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to the number of elements fortifying a state,” even though rulers should not regard it “as the single or most important basis of civil societies.” States had the obligation, moreover, to place definite bounds on the forms of religion that were to enjoy toleration. Justi cautioned the “Christian sovereign” against permitting the spread of “dangerous teachings” that might threaten the “tranquility and pros- perity of a state.” Citing the “dreadful Mexican faith” and the reli- gions of other non-European societies, he argued that “faith may contribute very much to bringing civil arrangements into perfec- tion” but advised that religious excess could lead to “various wild be- haviors and absurdities contrary to good morality.” He similarly con- demned religion that distracted people from work or procreation, or otherwise interfered with the economic priorities of the state. Justi warned that unbounded zeal “may also not only corrupt the morals of state inhabitants but also in various other ways do harm to the general good.”14

The cameralists had the toleration of Christian confessions fore- most in mind, but their lessons on the uses of religion as an instru- ment of state policy could apply to other faiths as well. Joseph von Sonnenfels recommended that each citizen in a state have a religion that “makes him love his duties.” The Viennese cameralist noted ap- provingly that “wherever the eye of the lawgiver and thus also the punishment of the judge cannot reach,” there would be the “exalted principle of God’s omnipresence as a witness and judge of all, even the most secret misdeeds” as the “single means to put a stop to evil undertakings.” He thus recognized the utility of any religion “that recognizes the judgeship of divinity.” Sonnenfels concluded that ev- ery religion that promised future “reward for righteousness and vir- tue” and the “punishment of vice” merited a place in the law of the land. Similarly, Immanuel Kant warned rulers not to mix matters of state and religion except insofar as religion contributes to the forma- tion of “useful citizens, good soldiers, and loyal subjects.”15

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Guided by her own definition of the utility of religion, Catherine carried through the ecclesiastical reform begun by Peter and im- posed further limits on the power of the Orthodox Church. Under state direction, Church leaders assimilated the lessons of cameral- ist thought; they placed new emphasis on education and the value of religion both for personal salvation and the general good. Ortho- dox elites also had to reconcile themselves to religious pluralism. Catherine’s plans for increasing the population of the empire in- cluded attracting foreign Catholic and Protestant colonists and an- nexing neighboring lands.16 Thus the partitions of Poland absorbed Catholics, Protestants, Uniates, and Jews; and the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula increased the number of Muslims.

Because her Instruction was more an abstract statement of philo- sophical principles than binding legislation, Catherine issued no general statement of toleration. Instead she made ad hoc announce- ments in various treaties and decrees pledging noninterference or re- spect for the status quo. This approach was not to be confused with individual freedom of conscience, however; and as even the Ortho- dox had learned, religious communities would exist only within a framework of hierarchical state regulation.

Valued as a comprehensive system of discipline, toleration be- came the responsibility of the policing institutions of the regime. Each subject, in turn, was obliged to profess a religion. Backed by the police, the laws governing each religion were binding on the confessional community as a whole, subordinating individual mem- bers to communal leaders appointed and supervised by the gov- ernment. Cameralist theories assigned the state broad discretionary powers in determining which questions of ritual and dogma merited state intervention. Catherine’s restructuring of ecclesiastical organi- zation and her claims about which issues belonged to the realm of religion and which to the regime compromised her pledges of non- interference with respect to each of the tolerated faiths.17

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At the same time, this mode of toleration served as a dynamic means to project imperial power across Russia’s frontiers, affording Russia opportunities to gain leverage in neighboring states. From Polish, Ottoman, and Persian lands, dissident Orthodox Christians (and even Polish Protestants) appealed to the empress for protection against religious persecution. A form of policing at home, toleration justified tsarist interventions abroad. Catherine’s enthusiasm for tol- eration in Poland provoked war with the Turks. In July 1768, Ortho- dox Cossacks, emboldened by tsarist involvement in Polish affairs, took up arms against their religious foes. Their offensive led them onto the territory of the khan of the Crimea, where they massacred local Jews. Despite the protests of the Porte, the Russians refused to break off their operations against Polish forces along the Dnestr River. In October the Ottomans, backed by the French, declared war on Russia.18

A number of figures around the empress argued for the seizure not only of the Crimean Peninsula but of Constantinople itself. Cast variously as the liberation of fellow Orthodox Christians, or Russia’s reclamation of its classical Greek heritage, the war inspired calls for the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. In a letter to Catherine of November 1771, Voltaire expressed hope that other powers would join her to “exterminate, under your auspices, the two great scourges of the earth—the plague and the Turks.” Upon learning that the sultan had hanged a Greek bishop, the philosophe advised her to “do the same to the muphti [mufti, a Muslim cleric] at the first opportunity.” Similarly, an ode celebrating the birth of the grand prince Konstantin Pavlovich praised him as the “Defender of the faith, glory of the Rus, / Terror and horror of the turban-wearers.” Others commemorated the annexation of the Crimea as “the first step toward cleansing Europe of Muhammadans and the conquest of Stambul.”19

This struggle with the Ottomans made their faith the subject of

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varied literary genres in Russia. While Russian readers discovered such texts as “The Life of the False Prophet Muhammad in Brief,” the court staged Voltaire’s play Muhammad, or Fanaticism, which sounded the well-worn theme of the founder’s deceit. Captivity nar- ratives, too, reworked confessional polemic, now as adventure tales. Appearing in multiple editions, The Unhappy Adventures of Vasilii Baranshchikov, a Petty Townsman from Nizhnyi Novgorod, in Three Parts of the World told the story of a sailor who became an Ottoman slave and later an infantryman (Janissary) in Istanbul. Like other such captives, he was forced to undergo the rite of circumcision and become a Muslim. Baranshchikov took a Muslim wife, he main- tained, under constant surveillance and pain of punishment. He was nonetheless tormented by memory of his “dear fatherland Rus- sia,” his “Christian faith,” and his wife and three children back in Nizhnyi Novgorod. The unhappy convert missed “the way of life and morals of the Russians, which are unlike those of the Turks.” Even though the Turks had converted the “Christian Greek church,” Hagia Sophia, into a mosque, their faith had little to match his “Christian piety.” “In their mosques there is no image to bring to mind the Divine grace and wonder,” he complained. When an imam instructed him to take a second wife, a notion that increased his “disdain toward the Muhammadan religion,” Baranshchikov fi- nally resolved to flee “Tsargrad” for “his fatherland Russia.”20

The anti-Muslim rhetoric of this sailor’s adventure tale and other texts like it did not, however, prompt a shift in how the regime man- aged the imperial confessional order. Indeed, in the midst of the first Russo-Turkish war (1768–1774) of her reign, Catherine broadened the legal basis for toleration. In June 1773 she qualified the rules pro- hibiting mosques in mixed settlements for the town of Kazan, where the Orthodox episcopate had protested the existence of two stone mosques in the old Tatar quarter. Catherine supported a gover- nor who had cited her Instruction in permitting the construction of

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the mosques in the presence of churches and Orthodox converts. Though her decree mentioned the “toleration of all confessions,” it directly affected only these two mosques and the relations between local Church and state officials. As an explanation for her decree, the empress observed that “since Almighty God tolerates all faiths, languages, and confessions,” she would act in accordance with “His Divine will,” “wanting only, that among the subjects of Her Majesty love and harmony always reign.”21

Her caution was well founded. Muslim deputies to the Legislative Commission of 1767–1768 had voiced dissatisfaction with local ad- ministration; and a rebellion in the fall of 1773 in the eastern prov- inces demonstrated its scope. Alongside Orthodox dissenters (“Old Believers”), some Muslims joined the revolt under the banner of the Cossack Emelian Pugachev. Forced to shift her troops from fighting the Ottomans to suppressing Pugachev, Catherine concluded the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. The pact opened up the Black Sea to the Russian navy, strengthened tsarist influence in the Cri- mea, and made St. Petersburg the guardian of Orthodox communi- ties under Ottoman rule. But in the long term the treaty’s ambigu- ous language clouded Russia’s gains by seemingly granting the Porte a say in Muslim affairs beyond its borders. Although fear of Ottoman intervention on behalf of Muslims was not new, Russian expansion had brought these two states into closer contact and increased the number of Russia’s Muslims. Anti-Muslim critics such as Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov would warn that all Muslims remained “born enemies of the Christian” who harbored memories of the time when they ruled “over Russia.” Tied by faith “with the Turks,” they waited for the outbreak of “war between Russia and the Ottoman Porte, at which time these peoples will openly show their loyalty to them.”22

The empress nonetheless overrode objections from the Church and other critics because Islam seemed useful to her pursuit of enlightened cameralism, a benefit to order and discipline among

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her subjects. She was aided by a new body of European literature that suggested how Islam fit the criteria laid out by cameralists like Sonnenfels: the “Turkish creed” appeared less alien than it once seemed. These works interpreted Islam for an audience of educated Russians using Christian categories. More didactic than polemical, these authors were concerned with identifying seemingly universal features of religion. To be sure, they argued, Muslims erred by ele- vating Muhammad to a height that only Christ is worthy of, a fault they highlighted by referring to the religion as “Muhammadanism” (magometanstvo). European commentaries nonetheless highlighted a shared monotheism: “The Turks worship one God, one deity, or entity, the creator of heaven and earth, the rewarder of the good, punisher of the evil, having created Paradise for the former, eternal torments for the latter.”

The likenesses between Islam and Christianity did not end there. Though the Turks held Muhammad to be God’s greatest prophet, they still believed in “the Ten Commandments of Moses” and “ob- served its prescriptions.” They kept Fridays holy, “like Christians, Sundays.” They gathered in “temples” for prayer and celebrated, “as among Christians,” a holiday after a month of fasting, calling it not “Easter” but “Bairam.” Differences remained, of course. Muslim men could take four wives; for “sacraments,” they knew only that of circumcision.23

The structure of guides like An Abridgement of the Muhammadan Faith (1784), a translation from an anonymous Latin text, invited readers to appreciate theological and moral principles held in com- mon. The Abridgement presented Islam as a “Turkish creed,” incor- porating eight commandments as well as the Seven Deadly Sins known to Christians. The Turkish faith knew rituals, clergy, and final judgment in heaven and hell. Its commandments communi- cated moral and social lessons, regulating family and community. The first enjoined worship of a single God and his prophet Muham-

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mad. The second instructed the faithful “to do as much as possible to try to preserve loyalty, love, honor, and kindness toward par- ents, and do nothing against their will.” Subject to special instruc- tions on regular mosque prayers, fasting, and charity, Muslims, too, were disciplined by a universal social code. Besides prescribing entry into matrimony and forbidding the taking of human life, the creed taught the Golden Rule. “That which you do not wish on yourself,” its third commandment warned, “do not do to others.”24

Though Russian observers remained sensitive to doctrinal differ- ences between Islam and Orthodox Christianity, they nevertheless identified in Ottoman religious institutions a hierarchy akin to a church. The appearance of new vocabulary in the Russian language reflected these associations. Just as the generic Muscovite term for “non-Christian” (basurman) largely gave way to the more specific “Muhammadan” (magometanin), the titles of the Ottoman religious establishment entered Russian in the early eighteenth century.25

An extensive taxonomy of Muslim offices appeared in Fedor A. Emin’s description of the Ottoman empire, published first in 1769 and reprinted in numerous editions thereafter. The author had come to the attention of tsarist authorities under murky circum- stances in 1758, introducing himself as “Mahomet Emin” to the Rus- sian ambassador in London. Claiming to be a native of the Russian empire (originally a Pole, by another account), Emin described how he had served the Ottomans for some two decades as a Janissary and a convert to Islam. After settling in Russia, he adopted Orthodoxy, mastered Russian, and became an influential informant on Otto- man life. His was one of the first accounts to translate the titles of Muslim men of religion into Orthodox ecclesiastical language. He rendered the title of the head of the Ottoman religious establish- ment, êeyhülislam, as “patriarch,” and likened imams to “priests” and Islamic law court judges, kadis, to “archpriests.” Muftis were the equals of “priors” in small towns and “bishops” in larger ones; der-

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vishes were no more than “monks.” When Russian scholars began to explore their own Muslim peoples, they likened the ranks of mullah and abyz to “our priests,” while the “muezzin corresponds to the post of our sacristan.” These terms—and their seeming equivalents in the Orthodox Church—became mainstays of writing about Is- lam, even while they retained an exotic flavor, as when Russian courtiers dressed up as “muftis” and “Janissaries” at masquerades in St. Petersburg.26

“Muhammadans” thus seemed to have a “clergy” as well as a monotheistic creed, derived from a sacred book, with norms resem- bling canon law. Their “law,” complete with concepts of sin and re- pentance and of heaven and hell, related actions in this world to eternal punishments and rewards. Such images enhanced the value of Islam in the eyes of officials who saw in it a means to make the threat of God’s judgment complement the more conventional sanc- tions of imperial rule. Even Russians who mocked the historical Muhammad as a charlatan often conceded, grudgingly, that Islam shared too much in common with Orthodoxy to be dismissed en- tirely. Maksim Nevzorov was one such ambivalent critic, who mar- veled at visiting a mosque in early nineteenth-century Kazan. The faithful prayed with such “extraordinary reverence,” he wrote, that it seemed as if “during prayer they feel in a palpable way the presence above them of God, the strong, the powerful, and the fearsome.” Muhammadans felt “the power and might of God,” though, he re- gretted, they did not “feel His love” in Christ. The origins of the faith seemed to explain why. The “Muhammadan religion” had been coupled together from “all the faiths then existing, particularly from the Jewish faith,” making mosques resemble “the Jewish tem- ple.” Despite these faults, comparisons with “the ignorance of pa- gans and idol-worshippers” showed that

Muhammad opened in his teaching a sliver of the moon to those wandering in the impenetrable night of ignorance and

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godlessness; for out of fairness one may say that those who continually feel above them God the just, almighty and the avenger of all injustice are less likely to do evil to others than those not recognizing any supreme authority in the world at all, or those rejecting His Providence for our well- being.

Thus while Muhammad himself was a “total cheat” and a seducer of virgins, who turned sons against fathers, he had advanced his people beyond primitive paganism and idolatry.27 As a deterrent against evil and a warning of divine punishment for earthly sins, Islam appeared useful, if imperfect. Moreover, the costs of the alternative—repres- sion—had proved too high. The empire thrived on order; and while toleration dealt a blow to the Church at home, it aided the Orthodox in Muslim lands and laid the foundations for future expansion.

Throne and Mosque

Russian officials who embraced this vision of the utility of Islam still faced a number of challenges. It was not enough to declare tolera- tion and leave Muslims and other non-Orthodox Christians to their own devices. The “well-ordered” European state that Catherine hoped to construct in Russia assigned all faiths a role in sustaining the empire. Whereas European administrators had envisioned lean- ing on generic Christian teachings in support of the state, Russian officials confronted the task of adapting other doctrines to this task. Moreover, the tsarist government encountered a fundamental di- lemma about linking the presumed usefulness of Islam to the prac- tice of ruling the empire. Unlike the Protestants and Catholics—but similar to the Jews—of the western borderlands, the Muslims in the east had no preexisting church structures to incorporate into the bu- reaucracy in St. Petersburg. In a polity in which even the dominant faith had been subordinated to secular oversight since Peter, a faith

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without hierarchical organization was unthinkable. There could be no throne without an altar, and no altar—or mosque—without the throne.

To realize Islam’s potential contribution to the empire, Cathe- rine’s administrators set out to find a mode of organization to disci- pline the faith and its officiants and draw them into state service. They devised a composite institution, drawn first from the model of the contemporary Orthodox Church, but also from the supposed guardians of the Islamic tradition, the Ottomans. Officials did not seek to recreate an exact replica of the Ottoman religious establish- ment. Yet they aspired to create institutions consonant with what they thought to be the authentic religious norms upheld by their ri- val. To tsarist administrators, these designations seemed to parallel ecclesiastical ranks in the Church. These likenesses suggested the possibility, indeed the necessity, of organizing a centralized ecclesi- astical hierarchy under the direction of the state. The elaboration of this organization drew upon the priorities of clerical discipline and training shared by post-Reformation Protestant, Catholic, and, later, Orthodox Church elites.28

The outbreak of a second Russo-Turkish war in 1787, following on Catherine’s annexation of the Crimea as well as her expansion of po- licing into the provinces, focused the regime’s attention on the cre- ation of an Islamic establishment under imperial direction. A con- frontation with a charismatic Sufi leader, sparked by the Russian burning of his village in Chechnya in 1785, had further highlighted the danger of sedition bred by religious loyalties that ignored state boundaries. Catherine condemned this shaykh Mansur as a “de- ceiver” and a “false prophet” (lzheprorok), incited by the Ottoman sultan, Selim III.29 In the context of the war, St. Petersburg sought to deflect the sultan’s claims on all of Russia’s Muslims. The setting that Catherine’s officials chose for the new institution reflected their ambitious aims. They aspired to make use of a domestic source of Is-

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lamic leadership in a volatile region still smoldering from Puga- chev’s rebellion. Located on the eastern stretches of the empire, some 1760 kilometers from Moscow, the Orenburg territory formed a borderland north of the Caspian Sea along a mixed forest zone and the edges of the grassy steppe. Originally fortresses on a defensive line constructed along the Ural, Belaia, and Samara Rivers and the Ural range, the towns of Ufa and Orenburg safeguarded Russia from the turbulent steppe world of raiding horsemen, forming a border between settled agriculture and the pastures of the nomadic Small and Middle Hordes of the Kazakhs. These towns also opened up to the East, serving as entrepots for diplomatic exchanges and trade with Russia’s nomadic neighbors as well as with the peoples of Cen- tral Asia, China, and India.

The initiative for a state-sponsored hierarchy for Islam grew out of this steppe frontier environment where Russian officials had al- ready employed Muslim clerics as intermediaries in dealings with Muslim Tatars, Mishars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and foreign merchants. Initiated by Bashkir religious scholars in the 1730s, Muslim over- tures to the state had sought official recognition for their shari‘a courts and special recognition for esteemed Muslim jurists (ÁkhÉns or akhunds). In 1754 the government appointed Mullah Batyrshah to one of these posts, but he proved a liability. In the following year he led a rebellion against the regime, and the Russian administrator had to resort to forging letters in the name of another Muslim reli- gious figure to deter the Kazakhs from joining the fray. Batyrshah nonetheless proclaimed his innocence, avowing that he had always “enjoined good and forbade evil” for the benefit of society and had preached loyalty to the authorities, according to the Qur’an: “O Be- lievers [moeminler]! Obey the padishah of our time and his gov- ernors.”30

Russian interest in using such religious precepts only increased. In 1785 the governor-general of Simbirsk and Ufa petitioned Cath-

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erine to elevate a Muslim scholar from Kargala, Mukhamedzhan Khusainov (1756–1824), to the post of “first akhund of the region,” with a salary of 150 rubles for “border and external missions,” a sum that was doubled the following year. Yet it was the new governor-gen- eral who arrived from the recently annexed Crimea, Baron Osip A. Igel’strom, a nobleman from a Protestant Baltic German family, who proposed to institutionalize Khusainov’s authority as part of a broader strategy of offering state support for the Muslim faith. Drawing on his experience as an administrator in the Crimea and a participant in Russia’s diplomatic relations with the Ottomans, the governor-general associated Islam with sedentary agricultural and trading communities. Igel’strom saw schools, courts, mosques, mar- kets, and hostels (caravansaries) as means to promote the settlement of nomadic Bashkirs and Kazakhs and turn them away from raid- ing. Catherine supported him, drawing on the treasury to commis- sion numerous mosques on the steppe frontier and in Western Sibe- ria. Moreover, to propagate a proper understanding of the faith, Catherine ordered the printing in 1787 in St. Petersburg of the Qur’an, to be distributed to the Kazakhs on the frontier without charge; by the end of the century this press had printed at least an- other thirty-six hundred Qur’ans for sale to Russia’s Muslims.31

From the eastern frontier, these institutions faced across the steppe. It was hoped that upon seeing firsthand Catherine’s care for the welfare of Islam, the merchants who frequented Orenburg’s markets from Persia, Bukhara, India, and beyond would carry word of her patronage along the caravan routes to the East, inducing other “Muhammadan peoples” to seek her enlightened protection. In two decrees of September 1788, Catherine called for the estab- lishment in Ufa of an “Ecclesiastical Assembly of the Muhamma- dan Creed” (dukhovnoe sobranie Magometanskogo zakona). The em- press appointed the familiar frontier hand, the thirty-two-year-old Mukhamedzhan Khusainov, to head the institution. Given the title

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mufti, with an annual salary of fifteen hundred rubles, Khusainov was to be aided by “two or three Mullahs chosen from among the Kazan Tatars,” a people who had long produced loyal tsarist servi- tors. The decrees assigned them the task of securing control over “mullahs and other clerical ranks [dukhovnye chiny] of the Muham- madan faith” in all provinces of the empire where Muslims lived, with the exception of the Crimea, where Catherine proposed to es- tablish at a later date a separate institution along similar lines.32

In 1789 Igel’strom elaborated on the responsibilities of the Assem- bly, reflecting official concern with imposing order and discipline on Muslim religious life. Igel’strom recommended that the Assembly be subordinated to the provincial administration on an equal footing with other judicial organs. His regulations defined the duty of the As- sembly as “the examination of knowledge of the rules and rites of the Muhammadan faith of all who have the desire or are chosen and found worthy to become mullahs and akhunds or another title of an ecclesiastical rank and sent by the provincial administration for test- ing in this assembly.” Before traveling to Ufa, prospective mullahs or akhunds were to attain, with certification from the district police chief, “residents’ approval” testifying to their “behavior” and appro- priate residence. Candidates were then to appear before the Assem- bly, which would appraise not only the candidates’ knowledge of the faith but also their political reliability and moral qualities. Following the approval or rejection of the candidate, the Assembly was to sub- mit the results in writing for the confirmation of the provincial ad- ministration.33

Igel’strom added that besides checking the qualifications of those wishing to assume “ecclesiastical ranks,” the Assembly would also “hear and decide cases belonging to the religious part of the Mu- hammadan law, like circumcision, marriage, divorces, and mosque service.” This institution would afford a voice to the Muslim laity: “Whoever is not satisfied with the decision of a mullah or akhund is

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to be free to announce his dissatisfaction to the Ecclesiastical Assem- bly and request that it take the case under its consideration.” He thereby delegated to the Assembly an appellate function with the power to overturn decisions taken at the mosque level. The gover- nor-general thus envisioned this institution as a center of doctrinal authority, assigning it the task “of extending the utmost supervision so that . . . superstition and other abuses that cannot be tolerated do not creep in.”34

Below the Assembly, Igel’strom called for a closely regulated net- work of mosque communities, using the Orthodox parish as a stan- dard. His guidelines regularized and integrated these communities, known as mahallas in Tatar sources, into a wider framework of bu- reaucratic supervision. Like Orthodox villages, Muslim settlements would have to meet a minimum population requirement before re- ceiving permission to found a mosque; however, Igel’strom also per- mitted mosques in smaller communities, “as long as Muhammadans perform the five daily prayers [there].”35 Placing the Assembly be- tween petitioners and Russian officials, Igel’strom entrusted it with reviewing requests for mosque construction before forwarding them to provincial officials, who had the final authority.

In addition to controlling the number and size of Muslim par- ishes, the Assembly was charged with monitoring the “mosque servi- tors” attached to them. Since Peter, Church and state officials had combated the appointment of “excess” clergy, who ostensibly exacer- bated clerical poverty and burdened parishioners. In the view of sec- ular officials, such clerics better served the “public good” by taking up more “useful” professions. Permitting only the necessary number of “ecclesiastical officials,” Igel’strom eliminated the “superfluous and idle.” Igel’strom’s rules restricted the legal performance of cleri- cal duties to men licensed by the state, effectively creating an official Muslim clergy where none had existed before. They instructed the

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Assembly to take care that no one “appropriate of his own accord the title of akhund, imam, or mullah for himself.” Another set the num- ber of akhunds per district at no more than two, adding that they were to oversee “the mosques, schools, and servitors attached to them.” Igel’strom also entrusted the Assembly with supervision of Muslim schools. The schools were confined to mosque complexes, and only instructors who had been examined by the Assembly were allowed to teach in them.36

The new institution, first called the Ufa Ecclesiastical Assembly of the Muhammadan Creed, later the Orenburg Muhammadan Ec- clesiastical Assembly, soon bore the imprint of its Muslim head as well. The son of an imam from the village of Kargala, Khusainov had studied in local schools before traveling to Bukhara and Kabul, where he studied under Fayz Khan, the figure with whom this chap- ter began. From the 1770s he had worked closely with imperial of- ficials and acted as their agent on the southeastern frontiers. In the Northern Caucasus, he negotiated Muslim acquiescence to Russian rule. In the steppe east of Orenburg, he lobbied the Kazakhs to pledge loyalty to the tsar, while appealing to them to deepen their devotion to their religious obligations in the community of Islam.37

Later, he solidified these bonds by marrying his daughter to the head of the Kazakh Inner Horde settled between the Volga and Ural Rivers.

Despite the patronage of Igel’strom and the empress, the ini- tial powers of the office did not match the ambitions of Mufti Khusainov. In 1792 he had requested the right to hold serfs, explain- ing that his rank made him “the first among Muhammadans” and that he merited the favor, “like those who have rendered service from ancient times until now.” He had brought Kazakhs under “the invincible Russian scepter” and mediated conflicts between them and the Russians. Enjoyed only by the nobility and royal family, the

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privilege of serf ownership befitted his position, he argued, while the religious obligation to enter into a legal marriage according to “the Muhammadan law” made it a practical necessity.38

Guided by the enterprising Khusainov, the Assembly boldly as- serted its power over the Muslim men of learning and piety in its first decade. By 1800 the mufti and three judges attached to the Assem- bly, aided by a staff of six secretaries and translators, had adminis- tered oral examinations for more than nineteen hundred clerics.39

Records from 1791 show that these included 527 mullahs, who led mosque prayers and offered instruction, and 339 azanchis (muez- zins), who sang the call to prayer; besides various specialized titles related to teaching, seven men bore the title akhund, designating se- niority in a particular locale. In the early nineteenth century, the reach of the Assembly nonetheless remained weak, and its ties to mosque communities superficial. With a meager staff and budget, the Assembly lacked its own building until midcentury, apparently housing its offices and archive with those of the provincial govern- ment. Equipped with these modest resources, the Islamic establish- ment faced numerous difficulties in imposing clerical discipline and a parish structure on the Muslim communities under its jurisdiction.

Though Catherine backed Igel’strom’s project, opposition came from officials in the capitals and, in particular, from provincial au- thorities. Some regarded the institution as a threat to their power. The civil governor of Orenburg complained that when the Assembly opened on 4 December 1789, local officials did not understand either its “direct duty” or its responsibility to check the qualifica- tions of “ecclesiastical officials of the Muhammadan faith.” Gover- nor Frizel advised against giving too much latitude to the mufti and Assembly, pointing to the fragility of local administration and “the fanaticism of a people little-educated but steeped in the coarseness of their ideas.”40

Frizel insisted that Russian officials retain absolute authority over

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their Muslim charges. He defended their involvement in disputes among Muslims, especially relating to marriage, for “difficulties in the adjudication of cases concerning [marital] union among Mu- hammadans are worthy of the regard of higher government.” The hierarchy overstepped its powers to such an extent, he charged, that the Assembly considered the provincial government “merely an ex- ecutive instrument of its decisions.” Frizel called for provincial au- thorities to exercise strict control; otherwise, he warned, “the biased evil and self-interest of ecclesiastical officials of the Muhammadan faith will never be prosecuted.” The governor found the mufti over- ambitious, noting Khusainov’s proposal that the Assembly in Ufa be replaced by a “College of the Muhammadan Faith” in St. Peters- burg, directly under the sovereign. With this, the mufti aspired to become, Frizel argued, “the direct ruler over the faith professed by Muhammadans and simultaneously over this people.” He con- cluded that “the ecclesiastical authority over the local Muhamma- dan people must in no way be strengthened in its functioning.”41

Mistrust of this new office was not confined to provincial bureau- crats alone. Muslims, too, had mixed reactions to the new state- appointed head for the empire’s Islamic community. The idea of an official muftiate apparently did not by itself provoke significant oppo- sition. Muslims may have adapted to this body because analogous institutions had been known among Muslims in past times; they also existed in contemporary societies, most notably in the form of the Ottoman êeyhülislam and the graded ranks of judges, scholars, and teachers subordinated to him.42 For critics, the legitimacy of the muftiate suffered from the behavior of Khusainov. Of modest back- ground, he alienated Islamic scholars and laypeople by assuming the role of exclusive arbiter of Islamic orthodoxy for scattered com- munities that had previously sought guidance from multiple cen- ters of Islamic learning, from Kabul to Cairo. His critics had studied with many of the same teachers who had trained Khusainov. Per-

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sonal rivalries also played a role. Many of the scholars who loathed Khusainov had vied for his office; some never forgave him for thwart- ing their aspirations to become the leading Muslim authority in the empire.

Charges of corruption and bias eroded Khusainov’s moral author- ity, though his enemies distinguished his behavior from that of the state and sought to enlist the government against him. Islamic texts that circulated in the Russian empire and Central Asia outlined the codes of behavior and moral qualities required of a mufti.43 But his opponents did not cite them in their protests. Before an audience of Russian officialdom, they characterized his behavior in terms famil- iar to opponents of malfeasance in the bureaucracy. They used a vo- cabulary of venality and favoritism, pointing to both his “corruption” and his association with behaviors that Islamic law had forbidden.

In 1805 a Kazan merchant of the first guild denounced Khusainov in a petition to the tsar. Abdulla Khasamdinov accused the mufti of violating “the order of the liturgy,” by which he meant neglect of the appointed times for prayer. The mufti committed further acts against the shari‘a, Khasamdinov charged, like wearing silk clothes and us- ing silver spoons. He had even extorted money from candidates who traveled to Ufa to be tested by the Assembly. Those who refused to pay, the merchant claimed, were given questions during the exam “that may not exist at all, and because of this [Khusainov] rejects them as if they were not capable and worthy.”44

The judges in the Assembly defended Khusainov. Khamza Emangulov explained that he was obliged to recognize and honor him as a “sage mentor.” Refuting the first charges, the judges in- sisted that they all prayed at the same time. When investigators from the provincial administration interviewed mullahs who had passed through the examinations, prayer leaders also attested to his probity: twenty-four in the district of Sviazhsk and forty-three in the district of Mamadyzh in Kazan Province denied being forced to pay bribes.

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But others sided with the mufti’s accusers. A mullah from Kazan came forward to back Khasamdinov’s accusation, as did a mullah from Tsarevokokshaisk and another from Spassk. Several others from the old Tatar suburb of Kazan added that Khusainov “curses them with abusive words, threatens them with exile to Siberia, and takes money from them.” An assistant to a local akhund, Salikh Akhmetev, complained that the mufti’s “pointless” summons to Ufa cost him fifty rubles. Forty-six villagers from Starye Tigana informed investiga- tors that when the mufti had passed through their village twenty years ago, he had not compensated them for the twenty horses he took. Despite these accusations, investigators remained unconvinced. One official rejected the last charge, noting that “twenty years ago a mufti of the Muhammadan faith had not yet been appointed in Rus- sia.” By the autumn of 1805, more than fourteen thousand Muslims from various districts in Kazan Province had testified that the mufti had never abused them “with insults and oppression” nor extorted money from them.45

The controversies surrounding the first mufti did not end here. Clerics and laypeople joined provincial officials in raising further charges. When Orenburg authorities accused Khusainov of violating his office in 1811, the case precipitated a broader debate about the authority of the mufti. The resulting legislation elevated the status of the office for Khusainov and his successors by removing the mufti from the provincial Chamber of the Criminal Court. It transferred cases involving the holder of this office to the highest judicial body in the empire, the Ruling Senate in St. Petersburg. Among his co- religionists, Khusainov claimed the power to declare who did—and who did not—belong to the community of the faithful: in reports to officials in 1815, and again in 1818, he asserted that “whoever scorns the decision and fatwa of a mufti should not be considered a Muslim.”46

Even though Khusainov had now been elevated as the highest Is-

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lamic authority in the empire, his power still did not go unchal- lenged. Lay accusations against his “bias” in marriage and divorce cases prompted officials to refine further the authority of the post. A conflict about the punishment of Muslims for adultery reflected continued uncertainty about the power of the mufti and, more gen- erally, about the relationship between civil and religious authority. Officials recalled that they had responded to complaints against Khusainov’s handling of marital disputes by instructing him to re- view each case together with other members of the Assembly. Fol- lowing his tenure, the Senate ruled in 1832 that civil authorities were not to execute the “personal decisions” of the mufti—in this case, or- ders from “religious authorities” to apply corporal punishment to adulterers.47 Though this decree aimed at delineating more clearly the lines between “civil” and “ecclesiastical” authorities, the two would remain intertwined.

Dissenters from the Church of Islam

Cultivating this mutual dependence, the first mufti ventured to in- strumentalize the very regime that sought to make use of Islam in managing the empire. He actively sought out alliances with St. Pe- tersburg to support his authority in the face of opposition from both Muslim notables and provincial officials. In June 1815 he turned to Alexander N. Golitsyn, the director of the Main Administration of the Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions. Khusainov complained about local authorities who had supplied “Muhammadan clergy” with passports permitting them to leave their parishes for extended periods of time. Some of these officials had even issued permission for the pilgrimage to Mecca. These officials undermined his ability to control the clergy, the mufti protested, even though he had served the state “with zeal,” persuading “the Muhammadan people as well as its clergy” to lead tranquil lives and obey established authorities.

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Adding that these clerics engaged in “evil affairs,” Khusainov felt it his duty to bring this information to Golitsyn’s attention. He insisted that he did not want “praise” or reward from St. Petersburg but instead acted out of “devotion to my imperial Russian fatherland [vserossiiskoe otechestvo]” and “out of sorrow for my pastorate.” Pro- fessions of patriotic fervor and episcopal concern helped gain the measured backing of officials in the central government and earned him a place in a wider imperial elite as a member of the Free Eco- nomic Society, the Order of St. George, and even the Russian Bible Society.48

Khusainov’s connections in the capital still did not guarantee the Assembly the degree of ecclesiastical control envisioned by its archi- tects. A conflict between Khusainov and a mullah in Kazan Province highlights key dimensions of the mufti’s struggle to project his au- thority into local religious life over the objections of officials and, most dramatically, his co-religionists. The case sheds light on reli- gious debate and on the interplay of village politics and the of- ficial Islamic establishment in shaping local disputes about wider controversies. Argument about Islamic tradition extended beyond a scholarly elite. It linked the competing voices of the lettered and un- lettered alike to debates throughout the Islamic world, engaging vil- lagers of different social categories through bonds of patronage and the pursuit of the Sufi path. Such important controversies called for powerful arbiters.

In October 1801, Mufti Khusainov wrote the Ruling Senate in St. Petersburg to communicate disturbing news he had received from a Muslim notable of the old Tatar suburb of Kazan. According to his informant, a lower court had unsealed in the village of Ura (Orï) a mosque that the mufti had ordered closed in the previous year in a ruling confirmed by the Senate. Khusainov emphasized his own role in interpreting for his readers the activities being pursued in this mosque. “It is my office and duty,” he explained, “to watch so

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that among my fellow countrymen [edinoplemenniki] no provoca- tion may arise among the simple folk, especially from ecclesiastical officials who are ignorant of the law or are schismatics [raskol’niki], which would lead to depravity and disobedience to authority.”49

The mufti underscored the threat of what he portrayed as the in- evitable union of religious schism and revolt. He blamed the re- opening of the mosque on the “intrigues and cunning” of a for- mer mullah, Khäbibulla Khuseinov, whom the mufti had “long ago found to be an opponent of our law, that is, a schismatic.” The mufti’s conflict with this village mullah embroiled him in a complex dispute rooted in the locale. One kin group’s claims to preeminence in religious affairs had recently split the community. A prosperous village dotted with small factories and inhabited by artisans and fishermen, Ura was also home to merchants who traded with Cen- tral Asia.50 Hostility toward Khäbibulla Khuseinov’s notions of Is- lamic piety further intensified the tensions that divided a stratified community.

The patriarch of the leading family in the village, the Näzirs, had founded a stone mosque there following his return from study in Bukhara in 1787. Khäbibulla became the prayer leader, apparently after one of his female relatives married into this family. Relations soon soured among these in-laws, however, and several members of the Näzir clan began to voice their opposition to him. Mömëin b. Tahir b. Näzir complained to Ufa about the new appointment, pro- testing, “I built this mosque only for myself and my children, and none of us are satisfied with mullah Khäbibulla being the imam.”51

The sources do not reveal whether the mufti formally ordered Khäbibulla’s dismissal. It appears instead that the mullah deflected pressure exerted by the Näzirs by leaving the mosque that they claimed as their family patrimony.

When his brother, Fätkhulla b. äl-Khösäen b. Gabdelkärim al-

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Öri, took over the imamate at the village’s stone mosque in 1799, Khäbibulla moved to found his own mosque.52 Arguing that the vil- lage needed a mosque (perhaps without mentioning the existing mosque), Khäbibulla requested permission to construct another one in Ura in 1800. The Assembly approved his petition, and with the aid of villagers who recognized him as their Sufi guide (ishan or ÅshÁn), Khäbibulla built a new wooden mosque near the older one for his followers. Meanwhile, feuding in the village of Ura continued. The men of influence in the village—the bÁys—repeatedly appealed to the Assembly seeking assistance against Khäbibulla. The mufti then gave orders for him to be removed from his post and for his mosque to be sealed (or, by one account, burned).53 Yet, as Khusainov discov- ered sometime in the latter part of 1801, a local court had reversed his instructions and unsealed the mosque.

Khäbibulla had found a more powerful patron in local govern- ment. A petition campaign had apparently met with success. His fol- lowers, including a number of Mishars who joined him as he trav- eled in the region preaching and offering instruction, had submitted petitions to the governor in support of Khäbibulla.54 In another di- rect challenge to the power of the office of the mufti, a provin- cial official granted Khäbibulla permission to return to his posi- tion, displacing his brother, Fätkhulla, the replacement approved by Khusainov.

These supporters backed Khäbibulla again when the bÁys mobi- lized their servants and factory workers against him. Armed with cudgels, the two groups came to blows in the village in fierce fight- ing. Despite the threat of continued violence and the opposition of the mufti and his brother Fätkhulla (who occupied the post of “se- nior akhund” for the district from 1819), Khäbibulla continued to at- tract devotees from around the region. He also established a Sufi shaykh’s lodge (khÁnaqÁh) in the village, where he apparently trans-

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mitted the mystical religious knowledge he learned from his guide to the Sufi path, Fayz Khan, from whom he had received a license (ijÁzah) while studying in Kabul.55

Sufism, alone, was not the source of the conflict with Khäbibulla. Mufti Khusainov, too, had studied with Fayz Khan; Fätkhulla appar- ently shared the sober legalistic outlook of the Mujaddidis as well. Rather, it seems that Khäbibulla’s claims to spiritual leadership in both Ura and the region as a whole, based upon a broad follow- ing among unlettered Muslims, threatened both Fätkhulla and the mufti. Khäbibulla had even challenged Khusainov for his office, of- fering himself as a candidate.56

Khäbibulla apparently upset scholars like his brother by assum- ing leadership of a Sufi orientation that appealed to the common people. His charisma radiated beyond the village, drawing Mishars and other recruits from throughout the region. At the same time, Khäbibulla’s religion set his followers apart and fractured the local community of the faithful. In perhaps the most telling of his charges against Khäbibulla, Khusainov complained that this mullah had in- tended to found a “shaykh’s home,” a place to lead his followers in Sufi rituals and prayers under the pretense of converting the mosque into an orphanage. In criticizing Khäbibulla, the mufti did not condemn Sufi practices in general. He focused his ire instead on the “schismatic rules” introduced among the “simple folk” by Khäbibulla following his travels to Bukhara and especially to Kabul. Khäbibulla’s adherents spread word of his teachings from a text enti- tled A Lesson for the Ignorant, the work of a tenth-century jurist. Mishars are said to have associated Khäbibulla’s appeal with this text, a collection of brief sayings and admonitions on morality and piety and excerpts from the Qur’an and hadith (accounts of the words and deeds of the Prophet and his Companions), which circu- lated among Muslims elsewhere.57

According to Khusainov, Khäbibulla and his followers had even

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traveled in the steppe and spread his teachings among the Kazakhs. Ordered by Baron Igel’strom to put an end to the “agitation” that this had provoked among them, Khusainov countered Khäbibulla by delivering “exhortations” and “commentary on the rules of the Mus- lim faith” in the steppe and condemned Khäbibulla’s acts as “very contrary to our law.” As justification for his campaign against the shaykh, he cited a policy established in 1746 by the former governor of the Orenburg territory, Ivan Nepliuev, which called for the re- straining of Muslim leaders who caused “unrest” among the people. In the meantime, Khusainov received word that a Tatar in the dis- trict of Petrovsk in Saratov Province, Khamza Aitov, had also begun to carry on “various acts of provocation and agitation among the sim- ple folk,” naming himself a follower (murid) of Khäbibulla. More- over, Khusainov claimed, Aitov had “willfully” founded a mosque in the village of Ust’ Uziliakh, thereby committing an act of open disobedience to the government. The mufti also persuaded Count Viktor Kochubei, the minister of internal affairs, that Khäbibulla and a companion, Mullah Shaban, had deceived villagers through- out Saratov Province by presenting the former as a “saint and mir- acle worker” (ugodnik bozhii i chudotvorets). Khusainov accused them of collecting money from the gullible, for which they founded their own “treasury.”58 In the tsarist empire, such a display of unbri- dled religion was politically suspect, even among the non-Orthodox who were otherwise unaffected by the Church’s history of schism and political revolt.

The opponents of Khäbibulla and Shaban cast them as a direct threat to the official Islamic hierarchy. A mullah in the district of Kuznetsk reported to the Assembly that the two had formed a special “judicial chancellery,” where Khäbibulla held forth from an expen- sive chair, which no one else was permitted to occupy. This Sufi guide even dared to hold “daughters of peoples of the Russian-Greek confession” as “hostages.” Khäbibulla and Shaban nonetheless con-

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tinued to travel around gathering followers, the mullah claimed, though such acts violated Islamic and imperial law. Based upon this denunciation, Saratov authorities investigated whether Khäbibulla had acted as a “false prophet” or had committed an “illegal innova- tion” (novizna). When the criminal court looked into the matter, claims that the shaykh had instructed followers to take Russian wives and concubines could not be substantiated.59 Muslim feuding had entangled the police, but Islam had still not demonstrated its utility for the empire.

A Faith for the Tsar

Governor Igel’strom and Mufti Khusainov had imagined Islamic in- stitutions sponsored by the regime as means to project the regime’s authority on the eastern borderlands and beyond. The Orenburg muftis continued to play an important role both on the frontiers and in Russia’s relations with other Muslim states. But in the second quarter of the nineteenth century the Ministry of Internal Affairs de- voted more attention to elaborating a role for the Assembly and mufti as instruments of administration within the empire.

St. Petersburg called upon non-Orthodox faiths to aid the secu- lar arm of government, just as they expected the Church to employ its spiritual authority to maintain law and order among its flock. Through the mufti, the government aimed to utilize the authority of Islamic doctrine to compel the acquiescence of its Muslim subjects in temporal affairs as well. Khusainov’s insistence upon the binding, rather than merely advisory, character of the fatwa accommodated officials’ search for a religious underpinning for the autocracy. The preaching of Islam would instill active regard for the obligation to serve “tsar and fatherland.” Thus lawmakers turned to the mufti seeking religious legitimation. His sermons, instructions, and legal opinions became indispensable tools for the transmission and dis-

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semination of state directives, paralleling the role of the Church in communicating tsarist decrees to the Orthodox population.

After Khusainov’s death in 1824, subsequent muftis also demon- strated their willingness to employ their interpretation of Islamic writ to legitimize tsarist law. Upon Russian officials’ direction, the second mufti, Gabdessaliam Gabdrakhimov (in office 1825–1840), issued a fatwa in 1831 instructing Muslims to send their children to Kazan University for medical training. In the following year, he mobilized citations from the Qur’an, hadith, and a Hanafi legal text to per- suade Muslims, as the civil governor of Orenburg Province had re- quested, that laziness and the shirking of work had no place in reli- gion. Emphasizing the necessity of work in protecting one’s family from poverty and avoiding sinful pleasures, the mufti ordered clerics to exhort their parishioners to sow and harvest at the appropriate times.60

Like Khusainov, Gabdrakhimov still faced competing sources of Islamic authority whose networks extended through madrasas and Sufi lineages throughout the region. Like so many other scholars, he had studied at a madrasa in Kargala. A controversy in the late 1820s and early 1830s nonetheless demonstrated the limited extent of the mufti’s capacity to sway Muslim opinion. Gabdrakhimov clashed with a Muslim scholar in Kazan and with rural mullahs among Bashkir regiments over whether it was permissible for Muslims to obey a decree of February 1827 declaring a three-day waiting period between a person’s death and burial. In 1829, St. Petersburg ap- pealed for Gabdrakhimov’s help in countering objections to the leg- islation voiced by the senior akhund of Kazan, Abdulsatar Sagitov. After several years of study in Bukhara (and a close association with the Bukharan amir Haydar), Sagitov had established a reputation as an authoritative jurist and mullah of the “Fifth Cathedral” mosque community in Kazan, where his father and brother also ran a ma- drasa. The akhund had campaigned for the office of mufti when the

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post became vacant following Khusainov’s death, but his candidacy faltered on the objections of the governor of Orenburg Province. Sagitov again placed his knowledge at the disposal of imperial au- thorities when he objected to the burial decree.61

In asking that Muslims not be subject to the new law, he argued that Muslims must be buried on the day of their deaths or risk viola- tion of the shari‘a and pointed to previous legislation establishing “freedom” for the exercise of the Muslim faith in Russia. He com- plemented his citations of eighteenth-century decrees and charters with one of the hadith that warned, “When one of you dies then do not hold him as in a prison but hasten to put him in the grave.”62 But in November 1829 the mufti countered Sagitov’s argument. In con- structing his refutation, the mufti built upon the rationale offered by Grigorii I. Kartashevskii, the director of the Ministry of the Religious Affairs of Foreign Faiths. When Kartashevskii requested his input against Sagitov, he reminded Gabdrakhimov that this law was “a general Police measure, that is, strictly speaking not one concern- ing the faith of any peoples that inhabit Russia.” Should this law present “difficulties” in connection with “Muhammadan law,” he continued, “then the higher Muhammadan ecclesiastical authori- ties would render assistance to the government by averting these difficulties in its instructions, for the benefit of Muslims themselves.” In complying with this request, the mufti insisted that the shari‘a presented no obstacles to this policy, which he regarded as binding for Muslims. Quoting from the original correspondence, Gabdra- khimov added that it would be “welcome for the government to pub- lish [this] law to prevent such unhappy cases” when “people who are actually not dead have been buried alive out of haste in burial.”63

But some officials remained uneasy about the compatibility of Is- lamic law and state decrees on burial. This uncertainty arose largely out of distrust of Gabdrakhimov and his dual role as supreme juris- consult and imperial servitor. When officials consulted with the reli-

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gious authorities in the Crimea, a mufti appointed by the govern- ment for this locale replied that Islamic law definitely commands burial on the same day of death. Citing legal texts establishing this opinion, the mufti asserted that the people regarded this practice as a “doctrine of the faith.” One Russian official understood the Crimean cleric’s response to pose “definite difficulties” for this legislation. He questioned Gabdrakhimov’s consent with the new law, voicing his suspicion that it had been based more on “obedience to the govern- ment” than on fidelity to “orthodox” Islamic legal doctrine. Thus tsarist authorities were not content to have the imprimatur of the mufti alone. They insisted on establishing the true meaning of the shari‘a, even as state-backed Muslim authorities disagreed about its interpretation.

The approach devised for the Jews of the empire appeared to offer a way out of this impasse. Like Muslims, Jews were bound by reli- gious law to bury their dead on the same day. In a proposal ap- parently initiated by the future Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), the Jew- ish Committee recommended that Jews be permitted this “custom” temporarily until “they are prepared by exhortations through their rabbis” to conform to the burial law. The administration thought this solution applicable to Muslims as well, though with the provi- sion that the “Muhammadan parish clergy” notify police authori- ties before performing burials in cases where there may be “doubt about death.” It also attached the condition that, like the rabbis, the “higher Muhammadan ecclesiastical authorities do not cease to take all possible measures at their disposal to persuade Muhammadans of the beneficial goal for themselves of the imperially approved opin- ion of the State Council.”64

When the measure came before Nicholas I, it stood out as a de- parture from policies aimed at standardizing the law and equalizing civic duties, as in the extension in 1827 of military conscription to the Jews. Consistent with his personal involvement in the formula-

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tion of policy toward Jews, the tsar rejected the measure in his own hand: “Do not deviate from the general rules, for Jews too will be made subject to them.”65 In this case, concern with application of general legal principles and the wider imposition of civic obligations overrode uncertainty within the Ministry of Internal Affairs about es- tablishing accord between the laws of the empire and the particular- istic legal cultures of its subject peoples.

Though the tsar and the Orenburg mufti supported the new burial regulations, many clerics and laypeople remained uncon- vinced. They still feared that postponing the burial of Muslims would contravene God’s command. The legislation threatened com- munal performance of the ritual and prayer obligations attending the death of a Muslim. It provoked anxiety and alarm among the liv- ing about the fates of deceased relatives and about their own stand- ing in God’s judgment. The Qur’an and hadith provided the faithful with detailed prescriptions for the washing and shrouding of the body of the deceased, the saying of prayers, the procession to the place of burial, recitation of the Qur’an, and the placement of the body in the grave in the direction of prayer. Death brought the sepa- ration of body and soul and, later, their reunion in the grave, where the deceased faced interrogation by the angels Munkar and NakÅr. Depending upon the answers to questions posed by the angels, the deceased might experience “the punishments of the grave” or re- wards as a token of God’s mercy—until the appointed hour of the resurrection and final judgment.66

How the living coped with, or surreptitiously eluded, a law that in- troduced an unsettling temporal dimension into this eschatological order remains unclear. Spokesmen for these communities neverthe- less campaigned for its repeal. In 1831, scholars from Kazan peti- tioned Nicholas I, who rejected their request; and clerics from other regions continued to protest. To the great displeasure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, fatwas and “exhortations” from the mufti’s pen

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failed to persuade Muslims that the government’s instructions were “useful and even essential” for them. In December 1833, Minister D. N. Bludov urged Gabdrakhimov “to make an effort again to- ward the eradication among the Orenburg Muhammadans of preju- dices and biases that are so harmful for themselves, paying special at- tention thereby to the clergy, who have a powerful influence on them.” Officials nervously watched Bashkirs of the Fifth Canton of Orenburg Province throughout 1834, when rumors circulated hint- ing at escalating protest against this legislation, reportedly led by an official mullah recently returned from pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj. In conjunction with Governor V. A. Perovskii, the Assembly compelled eleven of these Bashkir scholars to travel to Ufa to sign an oath pledging compliance with Gabdrakhimov’s fatwa sanctioning the burial law. Finally, in September the Assembly ordered an “Asi- atic printing house” in Orenburg to print thirty-five hundred copies of a fatwa in Tatar directing Muslims to wait three days before bury- ing their dead.67

Despite the establishment of a domestic Islamic hierarchy, this controversy—and the anxieties it provoked about pilgrims—shows how international ties persisted as a challenge to attempts to create a Muslim community defined by the borders of the empire. While celebrated madrasas and Sufi guides drew the tsar’s Muslims to Bukhara, Istanbul, and elsewhere, pilgrimage brought foreign Mus- lims to Russia. With the founding of Odessa as a port on the Black Sea in 1796, a new route to Mecca became established by way of Is- tanbul. For Muslims from neighboring regions, the trade corridors across the steppe and through Russia’s south to Astrakhan and then Odessa now also facilitated the hajj. In 1803, Alexander I approved a request from Bukharan merchants to pass through Russia on the way to the Holy Places.

Geopolitical considerations soon gave rise to new concerns. Be- tween 1804 and 1813, Russia was at war with one or both of its south-

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ern neighbors. The Ottomans, in particular, retained claims on the loyalties of Muslims on Russia’s frontiers. Throughout the nine- teenth century, the Sublime Porte dispatched emissaries to the Caucasus. In 1813 they carried decrees instructing communities in Daghestan to celebrate the accession of a new sultan. Invoking the traditional practice of recognizing a Muslim sovereign, the instruc- tions called on preachers to mention the name of the sultan in Fri- day sermons. When a son was born to Mahmud II, the Ottomans summoned Muslims throughout the Caucasus to offer prayers. Later the Ottomans directed Daghestanis and others to celebrate the lib- eration of Mecca and Medina from the “false religion” of the Wah- habis (referred to here as “Kharijites”) and the return of the Holy Cities to the sultan’s guardianship. Just over a decade later, war re- turned to these unstable frontiers. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1826–1828, a Russian general advised the Adygei people of the North- ern Caucasus that “this war does not concern you” and that “the Russian government will not confuse you with the Turks.” With Rus- sian control still weak in many places, the Adygei preferred to keep their options open. In the 1830s, Muslim resistance to the Russian advance stiffened, prompting new misgivings about the dangers of Muslim solidarity. By 1843 the Russians learned that Adygei commu- nities had sent a delegation to Istanbul seeking the protection of the sultan.68

In the quarter century following Alexander’s decree on the hajj, Russian authorities had grown anxious about transimperial contacts from the east. Sufis now appeared as agents of “fanaticism,” and not only in the Northern Caucasus, where Russian commanders identified Sufi networks as the backbone of the anti-tsarist resistance movement. In the early 1830s the Asiatic Committee, a coordinat- ing body for policy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, proposed to ban hajjis from traveling from towns such as Tashkent, Khiva, and Bukhara through Russia to Istanbul and Mecca, “in order to break

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their ties with our subjects, which from experience have turned out harmful, for these Asiatics, and Dervishes in particular, instead of going to Mecca for worship, have stayed among us in places inhab- ited by Muhammadans, [and] incited in the latter fanaticism and have engendered all kinds of subversive principles.” Unlike the li- censed mullahs who retained their utility for the state, “these people have been judged to be not entirely useful by the government.”

The Orenburg governor, P. P. Sukhtelen, shared this view, calling them “useless people, whose whole life consists in vagrancy and fraud.” For Sukhtelen, such hajjis were a burden not only to the state but to their co-religionists in Russia, for they “have great influ- ence on the minds of our Muhammadans, which they always use for evil, preaching among them hatred toward Christians and against the government itself, so that they gain the trust of their co-religion- ists and the opportunity to live at their expense.” Henceforth, cara- vans of merchants and hajjis were not to be permitted beyond trad- ing centers. The government warned the governors of Astrakhan, Orenburg, and Western Siberia not to permit these “dervishes” to stay on and become Russian subjects.69

Similarly, authorities in the Caucasus began to deny local Mus- lims permission to go on the hajj. In 1842 the War Ministry secretly ordered the Orenburg governor, V. A. Obruchev, to pursue this same strategy there. Once again, utility and security defined the ex- tent to which the state would accommodate religious practice. Pil- grimage diverted Muslim soldiers and officials from service, the min- ister argued, and hajjis in general returned with an “influence on their co-religionists [that is] unfavorable to us.” But even in an- nouncing this modification in policy the authorities remained sensi- tive to the charge of violating the principle of toleration. As recently as 1830 the governor-general of New Russia and Bessarabia, M. S. Vorontsov, had discouraged Crimean officials from impeding local pilgrims at all. Invoking Catherine’s promise of toleration, he rea-

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soned that adherence to this pledge “was and will be one of the pri- mary reasons for the loyalty of conquered peoples, of the greatness and strength of Our Fatherland.” Not only would such interference be “contrary to the system of our Government,” Vorontsov con- tended, but abandoning “previous experiences and promises” might increase “fanaticism.” All the same, by 1842 the Ministry of War justi- fied interference but cautioned secrecy. Like his peers in the Cauca- sus, the Orenburg governor was instructed not to reveal these mis- givings about the hajj; rather he was to turn down the would-be pilgrims’ travel applications “on various plausible pretexts.”70

Yet the hajj continued in spite of periodic harassment, and the next decade brought more danger from the south. In 1844 the war against the forces of Imam Shamil in Daghestan and Chechnya was ten years old. Consuming hundreds of thousands of soldiers, it would drag on for two more decades. Continued resistance had given rise in official circles to the belief that a “new teaching” had been brought by “shaykhs from Persia and Turkey.” When officials informed Nicholas I, the tsar secretly directed them “to prohibit completely the entry across our borders of any figures of Muham- madan ecclesiastical rank,” including Russian subjects, if they had acquired religious training abroad.71 Thus, in deterring pilgrimage and study abroad, the regime sought to limit tsarist Muslims’ con- tacts with other centers of piety and learning. This move, in turn, bolstered the domestic Islamic establishment as the doctrinal pivot of Islam for Russia’s Muslims.

The search for congruences between the muftis’ inter- pretation of the best interests of Muslims and tsarist administrative demands led to the improvisation of a common moral language. For Russian authorities, sin formed the basis of a universal moral order binding the interests of the empire to the moral teachings of

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religion. In this, as in other assumptions about Islam, Russians’ un- derstanding of Orthodoxy served them as a guide. Since Feofan Prokopovich’s “Sermon on Royal Authority and Honor” (1718), the Church had instructed the Orthodox “that he who resists the powers [of government and other authorities] is resisting God and that one must obey not only out of fear of wrath but also out of conscience.” The identification of offenses with divine retribution presumed a moral system defined, above all, by the principles of sin and punish- ment. As Prokopovich explained, “the highest power is established and armed with the sword by God and . . . to oppose it is a sin against God Himself, a sin to be punished by death, not temporary but eter- nal.”72 A number of officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and lo- cal administration discerned an analogous moral order in “Muham- madanism”: it appeared to confer a concept of moral consequence upon actions that concerned the state.

Russian officials frequently invoked the angry God that they dis- cerned in Muslim theology. Commanders in the Caucasus cast re- bels as traitors and threatened them with “destruction” (istreblenie). In 1829 Nicholas I defined the army’s mission there as “the pacificat- ion for good of the mountain peoples or the extirpation of the recal- citrant.”73 Facing the forces of the shaykh Kazi Mullah, General-Ad- jutant Pankrat’ev attacked his opponent as an enemy of God and of Islam. In an appeal to the “mountain peoples of Daghestan” in 1831, the general deplored those “who, joining the perfidious and deceit- ful Kazi Mullah, believe his false words, which are contrary to the will of God, his prophet, and the holy books.” Motivated only by self- interest, his jihad had spilled “human blood in vain” and had only harmed “his co-religionists, the inhabitants of these lands.” “Oh, Muslims!” Pankrat’ev urged,

Avoid the consequences and reprimands, to which you are subject in this, as in the next life. Here you will be deprived

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of all of your property. But there you will have to answer to God, that you did not execute the will, as stated in the Qur’an. Don’t lead yourself to ruin. This deceiver lies to you. We favor all faiths and confessions, [and] even encour- age peoples’ fulfillment of their rites, for we all believe in one and the same God. Look at the Muslim peoples living within Russia itself, do they not follow their own confession, do they encounter an impediment in the fulfillment of rites and do they not solemnly praise in the mosques the name of God [and] his prophet?

All those who rejected the general’s words risked “complete destruc- tion.” In later proclamations, the general warned that it had been the devil, not God, who had sent this traitor, a patricide and merchant of vodka and wine, “to spill Muslim blood and bring misfortune to all of Daghestan.”74

Tsarist authorities preferred to make such appeals using Muslim voices. For their part, the Orenburg muftis accommodated their superiors by stressing those teachings about sin that most approxi- mated Orthodox notions. Their instructions and fatwas paired down the variegated vocabulary that Islamic scholars had devised to expli- cate the nature of wrongs and of Muslims’ duty to forbid them.75 Un- derscoring the Qur’anic injunction to “command right and forbid wrong,” these texts also aimed at harmonization with the theologi- cal orientation of the Church. They placed singular emphasis upon sin as “transgression” of divine command. When his “wrath” was provoked by such offenses, God rained punishment down upon sin- ners in this world and the next. Overlooking dissimilarities in doc- trine, state authorities and Muslim clerics perceived a common reli- gious idiom focused on sin; they employed it when officials sought to invoke the cautionary prospect of divine reckoning to reinforce the prescriptions of imperial law. Cooperation between officials and

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Muslim intermediaries grew out of the articulation of this idiom of moral guardianship.

In 1836 Mufti Gabdrakhimov issued “religious instructions” that reflected the convergence of Islamic piety and official notions of patriotic duty under Tsar Nicholas I. The mufti urged Muslims “to be wholeheartedly submissive to Almighty God, follow the path shown by Him, fulfill obligations placed on you, do good, [and] avoid evil.” Demonstrating the utility and responsiveness of the Is- lamic hierarchy to the shifting needs of state administration and ide- ology, Gabdrakhimov’s instructions called for a form of patriotism that the Orthodox Church had only recently espoused. Contempo- rary Orthodox primers taught that the fifth commandment enjoined obedience not only to parents but to ecclesiastical and temporal su- periors: subjects were the “children of the ruler and the fatherland.” Whereas earlier catechisms had stressed the Christian duty to sacri- fice one’s life for the tsar, Metropolitan Filaret’s catechism of 1828 (citing John 15:13) extended this obligation to include not only the tsar but the fatherland. Gabdrakhimov echoed this patriotic empha- sis, directing Muslims “to be obedient to the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Pavlovich and obey all commands emanating from him; to serve the Tsar and Fatherland by faith and justice, in accordance with sworn oath and loyal duty, without sparing one’s life.”76

Russian officials backed the proposition that Muslims who re- fused to embrace this patriotism angered God. Thus the Orenburg governor, O. L. Debu, asked the mufti to assist in the “eradication” of an act that violated both the shari‘a and imperial law. He com- plained that “many Muhammadans avoid state service and, fearing [military] recruitment, commit self-mutilation in its various forms, thereby committing a criminal act.” The governor requested “fre- quent exhortations and sermons of a religious nature” to persuade Muslims that “the goal of each loyal subject is to serve his true, natu- ral Sovereign Emperor faithfully and unhypocritically and with all

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means available to strive toward the good of service for His Impe- rial Majesty, zealously guarding the interests of the State against the encroachment of enemies.” Taking up the governor’s request, Gabdrakhimov ordered clerics to read his instructions to their pa- rishioners, reminding them that “each orthodox Muslim [pravov- ernyi musul’manin] is obliged to obey the authorities and laws, not to commit illegal acts, to be submissive to fate, patient in everything and to put trust in Merciful God . . . [and] to enter willingly and readily into state service.” Citing the Khadimi, a commentary on a pietistic work by the sixteenth-century Ottoman preacher Birgili, the mufti warned that “self-mutilation is one of the greatest sins, invok- ing God’s anger and punishment.”77

Gabdrakhimov praised submission to the political and social or- der of the empire as a religious act. The mufti pointed out that every Muslim “should be content with [his] fate, should bear misfortunes sent by God patiently and without complaining and be grateful to God for all good and pleasure in life, which He sends to him, re- membering that acts contrary to this are regarded as great sins and invoke God’s anger and punishment.” Gabdrakhimov concluded by reminding his co-religionists “that in one of the lines of the Holy Qur’an it says to be obedient to God, the Prophet, and authorities, and [that] the Prophet Muhammad said ‘Obey authorities and be submissive, whatever troubles and hardships may stand in the way of fulfillment of this duty.’”78

Provincial authorities and the Orenburg mufti cooperated in uti- lizing the authority of the office, bolstered by reference to Islamic texts, to cast as “sin” behaviors deemed contrary to both Islamic and imperial law. The impact of Gabdrakhimov’s instructions remains difficult to gauge, even though reports of mutilation declined in the 1840s.79 In other instances, the translation of imperial writ into Is- lamic doctrine proved even more complicated. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, a campaign to utilize the authority of the mufti pointed

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to the difficulties that state officials and Muslim clerics alike faced in searching for correspondences between different faiths. In October 1849, Vladimir Obruchev, the military governor of Orenburg, turned to the third mufti, Gabdulvakhid Suleimanov (in office 1840–1862). With the approval of Nicholas I and the military, the governor pro- posed to tackle the spread of venereal diseases among Bashkirs and Mishars. His plan called for medical examinations for brides and grooms, a measure to be introduced not only among these two groups administered by the Department of Military Settlements, but among all Muslims in the region. Governor Obruchev sought out Suleimanov’s help because he feared “abuses” on the part of medics and midwives charged with conducting the exams. More impor- tantly, he suspected that these precautions may “be taken by the Bashkirs for oppression and give birth to false understandings,” rais- ing the specter of disorder. Obruchev requested that the mufti

compose, in accordance with the rules of the Qur’an, an ex- hortation in a religious spirit to the effect that Muhammadans infected with venereal disease must regard entrance into marriage before medical treatment of the dis- ease as the gravest sin and that they should try their utmost to observe cleanliness and neatness in their way of life and avoid all contact with those afflicted by the disease.

The text was meant to dispel “false understandings” and “serve as confirmation of imperial will” and the “solicitude of the govern- ment, which endeavors to preserve their health.”80

In this case, the governor’s solicitude extended to the wording of the mufti’s “exhortation.” Before being distributed to and read by clerics “in mosques at prayers on holidays or outside of them before meetings of the people” in the provinces of Orenburg, Perm, and Viatka, as well as among Muslims serving with the Orenburg and

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Ural Cossacks, the text required Obruchev’s approval.81 Under the governor’s pen, the mufti’s directive went through several drafts.

In the first draft, Mufti Suleimanov, who had also studied in Kargala’s madrasas, underscored Muslims’ duty to submit to the “most gracious command of the Sovereign Emperor.” Outlining the responsibilities of parents, guardians, brides, and grooms, he warned that anyone offering any “falsity” about the health of marriage part- ners would be regarded as “disobeyers before the Holy Qur’an and the hadith of the Prophet as well as the commands of the Sover- eign Emperor.” The guilty would be punished by military court. Referring to another hadith, Suleimanov added that each head of household, “father, mother, or guardian,” is obliged, “like a shep- herd,” to watch over those in their charge and to preserve them from “harmful diseases.” They were to see that Muslims washed once a week “in warm water” and then put on “clean underwear” and also observed “neatness in your homes with clothes, dishes, and generally in [your] way of life.” In case of outbreak of disease, parents and guardians were to ensure that the infected received treatment.

To this formula, Suleimanov added his own diagnosis of the prob- lem. The mufti pointed to “adultery,” though Obruchev apparently had not raised this factor as one of the causes of syphilis among these peoples. “Muslims must,” Suleimanov instructed,

repent of adultery and refrain from it because where adul- tery is committed it is said that Almighty God punishes . . . [the guilty] with wholesale death and harmful diseases, for in the Qur’an it is mentioned in several articles that adultery is a great sin and a depraved path.

In a gesture directed as much to the presumed ecumenicism of his superiors as to his co-religionists, the mufti added that, besides the Qur’an, the “holy books of the Torah, Gospels, and the Psalms of

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David” also regard the offense as a “great sin in this world and the next.”82

A miscalculation soon followed upon this diplomatic move. Though Suleimanov had appealed to the authority of other holy books, he reminded the faithful that the Qur’an prescribed one hun- dred lashes for “the debauched.” Invocations of corporal punish- ment may not have raised objections in a society where the knout and the lash were the familiar mainstays of justice. But the original guidelines for the Islamic establishment explicitly proscribed the ap- plication of Qur’anic punishments as an infringement upon a more “enlightened” imperial law.

Obruchev’s response reflected Russian officialdom’s conception of the utility of Islam at midcentury. He quickly answered Suleima- nov’s draft with corrections and additions. But he did not expressly object to its reminder about the penalties that the Qur’an called for in the case of extramarital relations. Rather, in the revision that the governor returned to the mufti for translation into Tatar, he removed all reference to the “command of the Sovereign Emperor,” empha- sizing instead the authority of the mufti and the threat of God’s pun- ishment. In the language that Obruchev inserted into the “exhorta- tion,” the mufti spoke to the “most honorable akhunds and mullahs” as “the Head of the Clergy of Muslims appointed by the Govern- ment.” Referring to these clerics as “my sole collaborators,” the mufti was to request their assistance in warning “all the faithful” of the dangers of disease. “What could be a greater sin?” this version of the instruction asked, regarding parents who have rejected treatment and burden children born with the disease. Such a person becomes a “criminal before God as well as the Prophet Muhammad, thereby violating the commands of our Holy Qur’an.”83

Obruchev’s draft differed from Suleimanov’s original in that it omitted reference to imperial law. Quoting from a saying attributed to the Prophet, the governor concluded that

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God demands that Muslims observe ablutions and neatness in everything and that God has offered medicine for the treatment of illness . . . is it not obvious that they [who] nonetheless disobey the commands of the Creator and His Prophet . . . will be held accountable before God?

Again referring to the Qur’an and hadith, the governor identified cholera as the instrument of God’s punishment, saying that God had dispatched the deadly visitor to the region “for our sins.” In 1831 cholera had “prematurely swallowed up . . . thousands of Muslims who did not follow God’s commands.” “Should we not,” it contin- ued, “rectify ourselves and ask God with tears of repentance—to have mercy on us.”84

Though Obruchev incorporated Orthodox language in his appeal for “tears of repentance,” he underscored the primacy of narrowly Is- lamic obligations. His draft studiously avoided mention of govern- ment decrees. The wording that he chose for the mufti reminded Muslims that the Qur’an and hadith directed them to follow “those who have authority over you” as an “amir” and recalled the necessity of punishing those “who oppose the command of the Sultan.” He emphasized the role of “your Mufti, as father and pastor caring for his flock in the name of God and his Prophet,” and equated obedi- ence to God with adherence to measures that the mufti “found nec- essary” to combat disease. The governor’s text also recast the role of the government. Deleting reference to Jewish or Christian texts, it described the state now as a guardian of Islamic orthodoxy. God would bring the guilty to account, and “the government itself will not hesitate to judge you as disobeyers of God and His Prophet.” By this account, the regime disciplined not for its own sake, but for Islam.85

This formulation of the consequences of transgression only con- fused further the relationship between Islamic and imperial law.

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Like many of his predecessors, the governor once again suggested that the police powers of the regime would be mobilized to reinforce the writ of orthodox Islamic opinion, even in the absence of specific legislation to this effect. This blurring of the boundaries between state and Islamic law became marked, too, in the area of criminal law. According to the criminal code, many crimes entailed moral of- fenses that required both temporal and religious punishments. In the case of offenders belonging to the Orthodox Church, its jurisdic- tion often overlapped with that of the state.

The discretion of local officials played a decisive role in determin- ing the availability of police power for such purposes. In 1824, Gen- eral A. P. Ermolov instructed Islamic authorities in the Caucasus to compel fulfillment of one of the five pillars of Islam; “the people must without fail” give alms (zakat), he ordered, to provide for the maintenance of “holy persons.” But he did not specify how such an injunction would be enforced. Similarly, legislation confirming that the “Muhammadan clergy” was subject to corporal punish- ment called for the quick notification of communities when a cleric was deprived of his rank, to allow new clergymen to be nominated “so that there will not be stoppages in worship.” Tsarist officials re- jected the corporal punishments prescribed by Islamic law for of- fenses also punishable by state laws. Some Muslim authorities still ordered these penalties, but officials and Muslim clerics reached a compromise by devising a common vocabulary of repentance. For many Muslim thinkers, repentance (tawba) marked one of the first stations of the Sufi path, a turning away from sin and a turning to- ward God, an obligation achieved, in the words of the great Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, through “knowledge, regret, and renuncia- tion.” Muslims could pursue this path as an individual endeavor elsewhere, but not in the Russian empire, where the law prescribed the mediation of an official cleric, as in the Orthodox Church.86

In the system formalized under Nicholas, crimes committed by

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Muslims frequently called for an Islamic punishment in addition to that imposed by the criminal statutes. A case that began with a sim- ple theft typified this overlap of temporal and religious discipline. In 1856, Abdulnasyr Suleimanov, a Muslim from the village of Ura, had been arrested for theft. In prison with Russian inmates in Kazan, Suleimanov had requested permission, perhaps in hopes of reducing his sentence, to convert to Orthodoxy. But before he went through with the conversion, his jailers transferred him to another cell. There his plans were complicated by the fact that his jail mates were fellow Tatars; he now found himself surrounded by co-religionists, who, moreover, happened to be observing the holy month of Ramadan. By the time a priest arrived to baptize him, Suleimanov had re- thought his offer to convert. For refusing the sacrament, the authori- ties removed him from the cell with the Tatars. They placed him in a room by himself, but his troubles did not end. In solitary con- finement, his prosecutors observed, the hapless villager was over- whelmed by “extraordinary boredom and melancholy [and] took it into his head to take his life.”87

Suleimanov survived the attempt and confessed his crime. In ad- dition to the jail time he was serving for theft, the court ruled that he must now also face a second penalty for his suicide attempt. Citing articles 1944 and 2077 of the criminal code, the court deferred to the Orenburg Assembly, upon whose decision “the measures of punish- ment” depended. The Assembly ordered that Suleimanov pursue “repentance through the parish imam,” whose “exhortations” were to deter the offender from committing such acts in the future by warning him of the grave consequences to be meted out both by temporal law and, in the afterlife, “God’s judgment” (sud Bozhii).88

Ties between the official representatives of the Islamic and Orthodox Christian traditions went beyond claims of moral guardianship. On behalf of the empire, Muslim and Orthodox cler-

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ics not only monopolized the definition of sin and its renunciation through repentance. They also asserted control over the ritual ties that linked these faiths to the state in novel ways. In both traditions, religious symbols and rites had long served as the principal means to affirm or deny a ruler’s legitimacy. In the Russian empire, the liturgi- cal calendar of the Orthodox Church fused with the many holi- days celebrating the Romanov dynasty. Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Easter, and other holidays affirmed “the charisma of other- ness and dominance” that elevated the monarchy and underscored its bonds with God and its devoted Christian subjects.89 Like these holidays, the birthdays and name days of the imperial family brought Orthodox peasants, townspeople, and officials to the local cathedral or chapel to pray for the dynasty. A model of social relations through- out the empire, the image of the royal family prevailed in the day-to- day ritual and ceremonial life of the empire in a variety of settings ranging from the village school to the army regiment.

Prayers for “His Imperial Majesty and Most August Family” claimed a singularly prominent position in the ritual calendar of non-Orthodox subjects as well. For many Muslims this dynastic pri- ority harmonized with the Islamic tradition of mentioning the name of the ruling sovereign before the sermon (khutba) preceding Friday communal prayers. The preacher’s mention of the ruler and his prayer for God’s blessing on him was a marker of legitimacy in Mus- lim societies. Omission of the ruler’s name announced a shift in the political allegiances of the preacher or leading scholars, a signal that might sway mass opinion in times of succession struggles, rebellions, and war.90

From the late eighteenth century, preachers prayed for the tsar and royal family from the pulpits of mosques in the Russian empire. With the support of the Orenburg mufti, the regime sought to rou- tinize the practice in all mosques. As with oaths sworn on the Qur’an at legal proceedings and at induction into military or civil service, most Muslim scholars and laypeople adopted these prayers as legiti-

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mate religious obligations.91 Stretching back to the sixteenth century, Muslim noblemen had performed similar demonstrations of loyalty to an Orthodox ruling house. The dynasty esteemed vows pledged upon the presumably indissoluble bonds of religion, even a religion it regarded as “foreign” and otherwise flawed. In the nineteenth cen- tury, more and more Muslims of different social backgrounds experi- enced oath taking. They swore allegiance to the tsar and offered prayers for him and the imperial family at the Friday congregational prayers and numerous other Islamic holy days. Remembrance of the Romanov dynasty assumed a central position among the commands of Islamic worship for the community as a whole.

The invocation of God’s blessing on the tsar may have enhanced the integrative role of the monarchy by cultivating Muslims’ feelings of devotion to the sovereign and patriotism for the empire. The pen- chant for direct supplication to the tsar among Muslim subjects suggests that, at the very least, most regarded the tsar as an agent of justice and protection who might right the wrongs inflicted upon Muslims by erring bureaucrats as well as by neighbors and relatives. For more skeptical minds, the Orenburg mufti’s support for the offer- ing of prayers for the tsar invited critical reflection upon the legal status of the Muslim community under Christian rule. The contro- versy emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when a few Islamic jurists voiced conflicting legal opinions about the definition of the Russian empire as the House of Islam. In as- suming their posts, Khusainov and the judges who joined him had signaled their conviction that Muslims could fulfill their religious duties in Russia, thereby recognizing it as a land with the status of dar al-Islam. In effect, this position affirmed the tacit consensus achieved by subsequent generations of scholars inhabiting territories conquered by Muscovite rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Early debates about the loss of Islamic political leadership in

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these regions remain unclear; however, it appears that these scholars did not believe that the prevailing conditions resembled those faced by the Prophet Muhammad, who led his community from Mecca, where Muslims faced persecution, to a settlement that came to be known as Medina. This migration, the hijra, became a model and, according to many sources, an obligation for able-bodied Muslims who possessed the means to flee the “House of War” or “House of Unbelief” and, by some accounts, wage war (jihad) against these lands of infidelity and unbelief.

Disagreements divided legal scholars who analyzed the exemplary behavior of Muhammad and interpreted God’s will for the hijra. A few early legal theorists concluded that the obligation to migrate had been confined to the lifetime of the Prophet. Some regarded it as a duty that might be performed by a few members of the community on behalf of the collective, while others concluded that the reten- tion of even a few provisions of the shari‘a in a non-Muslim land ex- empted Muslims from the requirement. Later, important Sufi think- ers would view the hijra as a spiritual and ascetic passage and a command to be performed internally, as a “migration from the land of human beings to the presence of Allah.”92 Debate on the subject intensified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as “reformist” movements in the Hijaz and West Africa took up arms against oppo- nents whose profession of Islam they rejected as “unbelief” and as more and more Muslim rulers were forced to surrender sovereignty over their lands to European colonial powers.

In Russia, as in India, Muslim jurists of the Hanafi school of law confronted similar circumstances. In both settings, a non-Muslim regime curtailed some aspects of Islamic law. Both permitted the functioning of Islamic courts and the administration of the shari‘a, but they limited the application of the law to matters concerning personal status, like marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Despite the loss of political power, the Muslim communities of the subconti-

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nent, like their co-religionists to the north, enjoyed the right to con- struct mosques and schools. Muslims were allowed to announce the call to prayer from the minarets of these mosques, unlike some Mus- lims under Christian rule elsewhere. They could attend Friday and daily prayers, fast, give alms to the needy, and celebrate religious feasts; they performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, though the regime attempted to regulate the practice. The ability to perform these obli- gations under British and Russian rule was a crucial factor in the cal- culations of Muslim jurists. The choice of migration or armed strug- gle, on the other hand, entailed substantial risks. The majority of Hanafi scholars thus judged the two empires part of dar al-Islam; they even recognized non-Muslim rulers’ right to appoint Muslim governors and judges.93 In both empires, a minority of scholars dis- sented, though they also cited Hanafi sources in support of their views.

But unlike the British government, the tsarist regime patronized a central body whose head claimed the authority to issue binding le- gal opinions on such questions. Here, too, the Assembly and its mufti failed to establish a monopoly on religious authority. These ef- forts faltered even despite the mufti’s assertion of the right to issue binding fatwas with the support of the tsarist administration. Other learned men of religion continued to interpret and transmit Islamic knowledge on behalf of local communities throughout the region. A few notable scholars who opposed Mufti Khusainov challenged him on the issue of Russia’s legal status for Muslims as well.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, a Muslim scholar spoke out against the saying of Friday congregational prayers in the empire. Following his return in 1798 to the village of Isliaikino after studying in Bukhara, Samarkand, and Kabul, ‘Abd ar-Rahim Utiz Imani de- clared that the shari‘a forbade Friday prayers in the dar al-Harb. Rus- sia must be regarded as the “House of War,” he argued, because ac- cording to Hanafi law Friday prayers may be performed only when a

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Muslim governor rules and when a Muslim judge guarantees the ap- plication of Islamic law.94 Word of Utiz Imani’s pronouncement spread as his manuscript treatises circulated and his students traveled to other mosques and madrasas to debate the issue with other schol- ars. The dispute continued to engage jurists and sparked a broader debate about the use of “independent reasoning” (ijtihad) versus “imitation” (taqlid), or the following of authorities of the Hanafi school.95 Yet the judgments of these scholars did not inspire either hijra or an external jihad.

Most scholars negotiated more subtle, intermediary positions. They neither offered unconditional support for the regime nor rejected outright its status as guarantor of the empire as the “House of Islam.” When the state did compel Islamic authorities to legitimate policies that Muslim jurists and laypeople rejected as unlawful, the latter typ- ically resorted to strategies of stealth or avoidance. In response to measures like the burial legislation of 1827, Muslims largely tried to evade enforcement rather than assume a wholly oppositional stance that would have led to the momentous undertaking of emigration or rebellion.

More than mere instruments of imperial policy, the muftis Khusainov, Gabdrakhimov, and Suleimanov used the Islamic estab- lishment as well as imperial administrative and police power to advance their interpretation of the best interests of the empire’s Muslims. But their vision for the community frequently met with op- position from Islamic scholars and laypeople alike. For the most part, Muslim clerics appear to have understood that the regime maintained an interest in the fulfillment of orthodox Islamic rulings, even if Muslims and state officials had different motivations for seek- ing their implementation. In 1848, ten imams from the village of Kargala petitioned the Assembly to be relieved of the obligation to say prayers for the tsar on a series of occasions listed by a recent gov- ernment circular. They did not renounce the principle behind the

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practice of praying for the emperor, but they expressed the fear that prayers offered on days other than Fridays and Islamic holidays “for an increase in the victories, might, and prosperity of his imperial majesty” would not “be received by God and that through this we would make ourselves sinful before him.” The group also submitted citations from texts such as the Khadimi, a commentary favored by the mufti, as well as the sura An-Nur of the Qur’an in support of their argument. When police investigated, the petitioners denied in- volvement and laid the blame exclusively on a mullah beyond the reach of the law: the suspect had died during a recent cholera epi- demic.96

The petitioners backed down in the face of police pressure. But the incident points to a sense of the possibility of arriving at a coinci- dence of interests between Muslim religious authorities and tsarist officials. The imams calculated that they could gain exemption from the prayers by appealing to textually sound interpretation of God’s command. Their petition assumed that the Islamic hierarchy and tsarist authorities would yield to their objection in the name of or- thodoxy. The arrival of the police disabused them of this notion, of course. An earlier generation of prayer leaders might have re- nounced this obligation with impunity, and no superior body would have imposed a settlement upon disputing scholars. But these imams now confronted a centralized hierarchy backed by the police. Through this structure, they had become linked to the state. Their appointments depended upon a license from the mufti in Ufa and the approval of the governor. Once registered in the archive of the Assembly, these imams could not legally move on to a new mosque or school to flee the commands of the hierarchy. The regime re- garded resistance to any of its institutions as a political offense, and those who ran afoul of official Islamic authorities and their tsarist backers risked removal from their posts and imprisonment or exile.

The Orenburg Assembly furnished the state with a means to im-

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pose clerical discipline and doctrinal uniformity in Muslim parishes. But its capacity to perform this function did not derive from the nat- ural leadership of the Muslim elites chosen by the Ministry of Inter- nal Affairs. It hinged instead on the cooperation of state officials. The scattered mosque communities under the Assembly continued to resort to their own religious guides, and the mufti in Ufa had to depend on the assistance of imperial officials to establish his power there. Aided by a select group of Muslim allies, imperial officials erected a churchlike hierarchy to make this tolerated religion “use- ful” for the empire. In practice, its utility depended upon the fragile interdependence between Muslims and state authorities; each side pursued its own interests by appealing to the other’s religious con- victions.

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