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4 NOMADS INTO MUSLIMS

T hrough regulation of the Muslim family, the tsar-ist regime gave impetus to novel understandings of the Islamic tradition. Unsatisfied with contradictory pronounce- ments from various intermediaries, the bureaucracy sought out sources that revealed the shari‘a, not as a malleable system of eth- ics and moral injunctions, but as a rigid code of law that Russian officials could administer without the aid of Muslim informants. Emerging out of interactions between litigants and the bureaucracy, a more uniform and disciplined Hanafi legalism derived by Oriental studies experts from a narrow set of texts channeled police power into the mosque community on behalf of clerics and litigants who succeeded in appealing to such visions of law. This new emphasis on the certainty of scriptural norms yielded unsettling effects. The redefinition of what was authentically “Islamic” in terms of a limited selection of texts and fixed rules raised questions about the religiosity of tsarist subjects who understood the faith differently, and even called into question Catherine the Great’s original vision for the un- ruly eastern frontier.

This chapter explores the conquest of the steppe east of the Oren- burg frontier as a turning point in imperial policy toward Islam. Be- ginning in the 1730s a number of elites from the three Kazakh tribal confederations, or hordes, inhabiting the north Caspian steppe had sworn oaths of loyalty to Russia based on the Islamic faith. From the late eighteenth century, the regime had supported the spread of Is- lam among these nomads. Catherine recognized that the Kazakhs had not embraced Islam in the same manner as the Tatars on the Volga River but was convinced that, with regular access to mosques and Islamic schools and with the assistance of the Tatars, they might adopt a more “civilized” way of life, turning to trade, agriculture, and a disciplined monotheism.1 Catherine had wagered that her pa- tronage of Islam would ultimately transform the steppe, turning pas- toralists into farmers and raiders into loyal artisans and merchants. However, the cultivation of Islam was a central element of steppe frontier policy only before the tsars came to fully control the region. Seen through the lens of the emergent Hanafi orthodoxy, the peo- ples of the steppe now appeared in a different light. Their religion, to the extent that one could be identified according to the new criteria, scarcely resembled the faith of the other Muslim peoples of the em- pire. Here the regime confronted yet another difficulty. Like the Uniate Church, which the emperor Paul (r. 1796–1801) is said to have dismissed as “neither fish nor fowl,” the religion of the Kazakh nomads did not fit easily into the classificatory schemes of the Rus- sian authorities. Was the regime bound to tolerate a faith that was alien to this people? Had toleration in the steppe amounted to trea- sonous conversion of would-be Christians to Islam?

Tsarist expansion in the nineteenth century lent a new cast to Russia’s centuries-old encounter with the steppe. As tsarist forces ex- tended a line of fortresses from Orenburg and Omsk toward the Syr Darya river in Transoxiana in the 1840s and 1850s, the state began to assume responsibility for the administration of the nomadic peoples

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of the steppe. The extension of tsarist rule over the grazing lands of the Kazakhs brought into the steppe Cossacks, soldiers, Slavic colo- nists, and administrators like the Russian official shown in Figure 5 with his family and an assembly of Kazakh notables in front of a nomadic tent. Once divided into three confederations, the Ka- zakhs now found themselves ruled from the Orenburg governor- generalship, Siberia, and the khanate of Kokand, which expanded north from the densely populated Ferghana and Syr Darya valleys. In the 1860s, further Russian offensives brought some two and a half million Kazakhs under tsarist rule. The arrival of the Russian admin- istrators and settlers initiated a period of turmoil in the steppe. Natu- ral disasters—such as droughts and apocalyptic storms—heightened competition for access to grazing lands. Kazakhs struggled to survive these harsh conditions; many of them were forced to give up herding

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Figure 5 A Russian official and his family with Kazakh elders. Courtesy of George Kennan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-128111.

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

to settle permanently. Relations with the Russians were also tense. Colonization, a chaotic affair managed haphazardly by administra- tors, put many Kazakhs at risk for survival. Elite families adapted better than others, and the sons of notables gained access to Russian educational institutions. At the same time, for many Kazakhs, more was at stake than their herds and pastures. Disputes about religion became yet another feature of the steppe world turned upside down by incorporation in the empire.2

Officials rethought their approach toward Islam in the steppe as they took on the direct administration of this space. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, they began questioning the fun- damental assumptions behind Catherine’s policies. First, Russian ethnographers and Kazakh informants cast doubt on the nomads’ af- filiation with Islam. They claimed that the state had erred in intro- ducing the faith among a people who lacked any understanding of religion or who had only little sympathy for Islam. Many of these same observers called on the state to support the conversion of Kazakhs to Christianity rather than Islam. Second, officials who had been involved with both the Kazakhs and Muslims from the Orenburg and Volga regions now concluded that Catherine’s policy had been mistaken in treating Islam as a bulwark of the state.

Without abandoning support for Islamic institutions elsewhere in the empire, tsarist authorities revised their policies of religious toler- ation for the steppe. They opted to treat the Kazakhs as a special case, distinguishing them from both Muslims in the neighboring Orenburg region and the settled Muslim populations of Central Asia. Once convinced that the Kazakhs were not truly Muslims, Russians looked to Kazakh customary law (adat) and the clan elders who administered it to perform many of the same tasks that they had elsewhere assigned the shari‘a and Muslim clerics. These new ad- ministrative ideas also found resonance in the Northern Caucasus, where in the 1860s the Russians finally overcame the mountaineers

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and established administrative control. There, too, officials seized upon the possibility of using ostensibly secular custom in place of the shari‘a to link local communities to tsarist administration.3

In the steppe, officials confronted communities deeply divided by questions of religious identity. Kazakhs identified themselves as Muslims in some contexts, but ‘ulama from beyond the steppe and even some Kazakhs themselves faulted the migratory lifestyle that kept these nomads from constructing their own mosques and schools. In the eyes of their critics, they neglected prayers, education, fast- ing, pilgrimage, and other Islamic duties. Many mullahs viewed the Kazakhs as a people badly in need of instruction about the strict fulfillment of the shari‘a norms deemed orthodox in the madrasas of the Volga region and Transoxiana.

Faced with competing claims from the Kazakhs themselves about their religious identities, tsarist officials aligned themselves with like- minded Kazakhs who shared their goal of directing the Kazakhs away from Islam. From midcentury, the state became a central ac- tor in a struggle already under way among the Kazakhs between proponents of the shari‘a and guardians of custom, adat. Some Russophone Kazakhs defended Islam as an instrument to bring “en- lightenment” to the steppe; others questioned Catherine’s use of Ta- tar teachers and missionaries to pursue her goal of civilizing these nomads. Kazakhs who rejected Islam and Tatar influence became the allies of administrators who sought to establish their own author- ity in the regulation of everyday life in the steppe. In conjunction with these native informants and the factions of Kazakh elders who backed them, regional governors advocated state support for secular customary law, in place of the shari‘a, as a more reliable and useful alternative to government reliance on Muslim men of religion. At the same time, the regime assumed a role in shaping customary law by linking the office of the judge (biy) to government administra- tion. Officials supervised elections and appointments to the position

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and confirmed or overturned their judgments. From the 1860s, of- ficials became deeply involved in the affairs of these communities. They frequently shaped the outcome of these struggles by endorsing elders who opposed mullahs and their calls for submission to Is- lamic law.

The incorporation of the Kazakhs into the empire redrew the boundaries of religious toleration. Tsarist law granted non-Orthodox communities “freedom of religion,” including the right to arrange marriage and family matters according to the rules of their faiths. In the steppe, however, local officials challenged Kazakh recourse to Is- lamic law and severely restricted access to mullahs and holy men from the Volga and Urals regions as well as from Transoxiana. Be- tween the 1850s and 1890s, officials tried to suppress transregional re- ligious contacts without publicly renouncing the basic principles of toleration, which they continued to value as a means to gain lever- age in neighboring Muslim lands. For the sake of imperial order, moreover, the Russians feared the confrontations that an open aban- donment of toleration might incite.

Governors undermined the general statutes on toleration with ad- ministrative decrees that closed mosques and schools. But in doing so, they deprived themselves of the regulatory apparatus that accom- panied toleration throughout the rest of the empire. Their treatment of religious institutions and Muslim networks in the territory im- peded the formation of links between Muslims and the state. At the turn of the century, these administrative measures alienated Kazakh elites and commoners alike. Joined by Muslims throughout the em- pire, they responded with increasing demands for legal rights, in- cluding access to mosques, Islamic schools, and the ability to live in accordance with the shari‘a. Together with the colonization of their pasture lands by Slavic settlers, such policies weakened the local presence of the regime, making its hold on the steppe increasingly precarious.4 Fearing unrest and the unsupervised activities of Mus-

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lim clerics, at the turn of the century the government responded by returning, but only partially, to pairing toleration with hierarchical oversight.

Russia’s challenges in the steppe resembled those of other mod- ernizing states confronting nomadic populations. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the tsarist state acted much like its Muslim rivals. In the Ottoman empire and later in Afghani- stan, centralizing regimes limited the autonomy of mobile com- munities. They imposed taxes and military duties, and promoted sedentary agriculture. The expansion of officially sponsored reli- gious institutions—what the Ottoman administrator Osman Nuri Paêa called the “civilizing fold of the éeriat [Islamic law]”—was criti- cal to the penetration of the state into autonomous tribal areas.5

The imposition of legal norms elaborated by official religious es- tablishments in these states, as in the north Caspian steppe, rested on claims about religious orthodoxy and authenticity. Like the Kabyle in North Africa, Kazakhs were regarded by neighboring Mus- lims (and in modern ethnographic literature, by themselves) as im- perfect Muslims.6 Such thinking shaped French, British, and Rus- sian colonial policies on behalf of the secular “custom” of the tribe and against Islamic law, but they should not be taken at face value as evidence of Kazakh irreligiosity or impiety.7 The controversies sur- rounding Kazakh religion reveal instead the ascendance of a more exclusive understanding of Islamic orthodoxy in the minds of eth- nographers, officials, imperial informants, and intermediaries. In practice, such normative notions did not always gain state backing. Nor did they preclude religious change and the continual elabora- tion of distinctively Kazakh Muslim identities. As Allen Frank has shown, Kazakhs experienced a kind of “Islamic transformation” un- der Russian rule in the nineteenth century.8 Kazakh notables initi- ated contacts with neighboring Muslim scholars, recruiting them to train their children. Kazakh parents sent their children to regional

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centers of Islamic learning and piety, such as Semipalatinsk and Petropavlovsk, or to madrasas in Kargala, Astrakhan, and Troitsk. They consumed Islamic literature, including poetic works relating the lives of major Islamic figures, printed in inexpensive editions in Kazan and Orenburg. Many even began to rework their ancestral af- filiations, remembering Muslim ancestors in place of others. De- spite contentious disputes among tsarist officials and shifts in policy, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Pax Russica continued to sustain conditions that fostered the spread of new forms of Islamic piety in the steppe.

Civilization through Islam

Under Catherine, state elites associated Islam with civility. As part of her plans for the pacification of the southeastern borderlands, the state sponsored the construction of mosques and Islamic schools staffed by Tatar teachers.9 The establishment of institutions rooted in a monotheistic and cosmopolitan religion appeared to offer an economical and enlightened way to settle and civilize the Kazakhs. Besides blocking the influence of the Ottoman sultan, the cultiva- tion of Islam would turn the Kazakhs away from cattle-stealing and slaving raids on other restive frontier subjects, including the Bash- kirs, Kalmyks, and Russians.

Through the mosque and the school, imperial rule was to “instill in [the Kazakhs] humanity and better manners.”10 The agents of im- perial rule were to include men of religion recruited from the towns and villages of the Volga region and the Orenburg territory, includ- ing the first mufti of the Orenburg Assembly. The regime called on its Muslim subjects to show the Kazakhs the benefits of an industri- ous and moral life under tsarist protection. But Kazakhs were not simply the passive objects of this imperial strategy of Islamicization. From the late eighteenth century, they petitioned Russian authori-

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ties to permit Muslims from the Volga and Orenburg regions to live among them as religious scholars.11

Catherine expressed certainty that new mosques would “attract other nomads inhabiting [the area] near our borders.” She suggested that the cultivation of Islam “might with time be more effective in imposing discipline than more severe measures.” The empress also proposed the construction of “Tatar schools on the example of those in Kazan” and caravansaries alongside mosques, which were to take on a “decorous” appearance with the construction of stone fences around them. According to this plan, future mosques were to be built in the most accessible locations to accommodate up to fifteen hundred people. The local governor, Osip Igel’strom, called for the appointment of mullahs “from among the loyal people of the Kazan Tatars” to “various Kazakh clans [rody]” as a means to inculcate “loy- alty to us and to dissuade them from raiding and pillaging on our borders.” In the following year, Catherine called “very useful and necessary” the division of the steppe into three parts, with towns to be constructed in each, together with “mosques for their main clans, schools, and markets.”12

Alexander I continued Catherine’s policy of treating Islam as a means to transform Kazakhs into imperial subjects. Licensed mul- lahs and other official men of religious learning and piety played a pivotal role. Scholars and merchants from Kargala, the Tatar village near Orenburg, supplied the imperial regime with a host of interme- diaries. At frontier trading posts and in the mobile Kazakh encamp- ments, these Tatars translated for Russian officials, recorded various transactions, arbitrated disputes among Kazakhs and Russians, and negotiated diplomatic agreements.13 From Ufa, the Orenburg mufti issued roughly a dozen fatwas enjoining Muslims to take up agri- culture. Most important for tsarist authorities, licensed imams like Mukhammed Mukhamedov administered oaths on the Qur’an to Kazakh elders, binding them as “loyal subjects” to the tsar.14

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Tsarist strategy bore fruit at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury when a Chingisid khan named Bukei fled one of the Kazakh tribal confederacies, the Small Horde, with several thousand tents and settled between the lower tributaries of the Volga and Ural rivers, where many took up “useful” trades like commerce and agri- culture. Though the government divided supervision of these com- munities between the military governor of Astrakhan and the Oren- burg Frontier Commission, St. Petersburg accorded the khan broad autonomy in organizing the internal affairs of the communities, which later came to be known as the “Bukei” or “Inner Horde.” There the founding of Islamic institutions accompanied patronage of agriculture, artisanry, and trade as well as the development of a bureaucratic administrative structure. Muslims from outside the horde contributed to this process, and the khan devoted special at- tention to the recruitment of Tatar mullahs. In 1811 Bukei petitioned the foreign minister, Count N. P. Rumiantsev, seeking legal sta- tus for three Tatar clerics. Having escaped captivity at the hands of other Kazakhs in the region of Bukhara and having married Ka- zakh women, Tatars had taken up posts as mullahs among Bukei’s Kazakhs. The numbers of such mullahs rose to 126 by the late 1840s.15

Bukei’s son Dzhangir founded a hierarchical organization of ‘ulama patterned on the Orenburg Assembly, an institution to which the khan was connected by marriage to the daughter of the first mufti.16 The tsarist government confirmed one of these clerics as an akhund to head this institution. Besides examining the qualifica- tions of candidates who aspired to positions as licensed mullahs, the akhund propagated religious knowledge among the Kazakhs. Patents bearing the stamp of Dzhangir and the chief akhund instructed mul- lahs to “build mosques and schools” and “celebrate weekly and an- nual holidays.” Dzhangir’s directives emphasized the importance of literacy and enjoined the daily performance of prayer and the keep- ing of fasts. The khan ordered these official mullahs to lead the peo-

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ple in prayer and to deliver “exhortations to the simple Kazakhs” in accordance with a model to be given them by the akhund. They were to instruct the “simple and ignorant Kazakhs in all rules of our religion,” assign Muslim names to newborns, and perform circumci- sions, marriages, and burials.

Marriage practices were to come under particular scrutiny. The khan directed his mullahs to challenge customary practices like that of bridegrooms going “to their fiancées before the wedding, accord- ing to the former Kazakh custom.” Dzhangir’s new rules governed exchange of kalym and the remarriage of widows (now made depen- dent upon the consent of both mother and father). In the same spirit, the mullahs of the Inner Horde were to persuade the wealthy to pay alms (zakat). They were to dissuade the “simple and ignorant” from committing violence and theft and urge them “to honor, re- spect and always be loyal to the Sovereign Emperor and his of- ficials.”17 Like the Orenburg mufti, the khan and his akhund were to cultivate Islam as an institution of social discipline and as a way to keep order in the family and sanctify Kazakh ties to the Russian tsar.

Though the Inner Horde was settled on Russian imperial territory, Dzhangir ruled like a Muslim sovereign. The ceremony marking his elevation to the position of khan of the Inner Horde in 1824 in the town of Ural’sk was orchestrated by tsarist authorities but conse- crated by the swearing of an official religious oath and the kissing of the Qur’an under the supervision of a Muslim cleric. When he is- sued rules in 1836 regulating market behavior, Dzhangir warned that “drunkenness cannot be tolerated among Muslims according to our religious law,” advising Russians and others to “behave them- selves decently, without allowing insults, quarrels, and fights” arising from this vice. His officials even collected an Islamic tax (zakat), though it did not meet with universal approval. Mullahs complained to Dzhangir that elders resisted all charity, and that “the simple

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people, due to the ignorance characteristic of the Kazakh, do not obey.”18

The khan also cultivated ties to the Russian bureaucracy and uni- versity. He sent the children of elites to Russian schools, though he also promoted Islamic education for these students. In 1842 Dzhangir proposed the appointment of a scholar from Kargala, Sadreddin Aminov, to provide young Kazakhs selected for study in the gymnasi- ums of the imperial capital with a preparatory education at the head- quarters of the khan in “Arabic, Persian, Tatar, and Russian” as well as in “elementary sciences and the Muslim law.” Dzhangir himself acted as patron of book publishing. On a trip through Kazan in 1844, he persuaded Professor Kazem-Bek to publish a Hanafi legal text (the Mukhtasar al-vikayet), a publication that the khan hoped to distribute among the Kazakhs and Kazem-Bek intended to make “useful for the Orientalists of Europe.” The Inner Horde became both a consumer and a supplier of Kazem-Bek’s renowned publica- tions and other books from the printing presses of Kazan University, while Dzhangir collected dozens of Turkic, Persian, and Arabic manuscripts for the library of the university, where he was awarded the title “honored member.” By 1840 the elite surrounding the khan included figures like twenty-eight-year-old Kubbulsyn-khodzha Karaulov. Claiming descent from a saintly lineage, Karaulov repre- sented a new generation formed by an imperial military education under Nicholas. At the Nepliuev Military Institute he had studied “French, German, Russian, Arabic, Persian, and Tatar; sciences— history, geography, arithmetic, Russian literature, the basic princi- ples of mathematics, physics, and natural history.”19

Nicholas I, too, encouraged the Kazakhs to adopt the orthodox norms championed by the regime’s Islamic institutions. Orthodox Christian missionaries and some local officials objected to state in- volvement in the promotion of Islam among the Kazakhs, but cen-

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tral government officials remained convinced of the connection be- tween the development of sedentary life and the cultivation of what they believed to be normative Islamic practices. In 1851, A. Evreinov, a tsarist official, showered praise upon Dzhangir for promoting the transition from pastoralism to farming and trade.20

Muslims, Manichaeans, and Pagans

The extension of tsarist administration across the southeastern fron- tier and the incorporation of the Kazakhs confronted the state with complex challenges to arrangements worked out in St. Petersburg and Ufa for the organization of Islam. Not only did officials face the difficulty of integrating a vast population of clan-oriented pastoral- ists, but the religion of these newest subjects unsettled the concep- tual certainties that underlay the hierarchical structures of religious toleration. Tsarist officials faced conflicting theories about the Ka- zakhs’ religion, which they understood to be closely tied to the no- madic way of life.

Judging Kazakh society against impressions of Islam formed in the emergent centers of orthodoxy like Istanbul and Kazan, officials and experts under Nicholas I and Alexander II searched in vain for the conventional markers of Islam as they knew it. The Kazakhs seemed to lack both mosque and clergy. Ethnographers applied comparative schemes that relied on normative and objectified notions of reli- gion.21 Most of them even rejected the self-identification of many Kazakhs as Muslims, regarding them instead as a people indifferent to religion. Local officials seized on what they supposed to be the ab- sence of religion among the Kazakhs as evidence that this peo- ple stood ready for a form of state-directed transformation unthink- able among other subjects in the grip of “Muhammadanism.” Some scholars argued that they differed from pagans only because Cathe- rine’s steppe policy had exposed them to Islam. From midcentury,

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local officials joined bishops in the Orenburg region in lobbying for a rejection of the policies inherited from the empress. They argued that her patronage of Islam had outlived its day as a strategy to pac- ify the southeastern frontiers. In the meantime, provincial officials moved closer to the position of Orthodox prelates, who disparaged Islam as a force that opposed state interests.

Early in the reign of Nicholas I, provincial officials had reacted with alarm to mass renunciation of Orthodox Christianity and the flight to Islam among baptized inhabitants (or their descendants) in Turkic and Finno-Ugric language communities.22 Officials prohib- ited any confessional change, other than baptism into the “preemi- nent and predominant” Orthodox Church, which enjoyed the ex- clusive right to proselytize, and they accused the “Muhammadan clergy” and the Orenburg Assembly of inciting this religious change. They were confirmed in their attitudes in the 1830s when news of Shamil’s war against tsarist rule in the Northern Caucasus reached the Volga and Urals regions.

From the 1850s, relations with the Ottoman empire and develop- ments elsewhere in the Islamic world figured into arguments against continued Russian state patronage of Muslim institutions.23 The ex- periences of European powers reinforced tsarist elites’ anxieties about “fanaticism” and “hatred of Christians” as the forces animating Mus- lim rebellion and misrule everywhere. Resistance to French rule in Algeria, the 1857 “mutiny” in British India, and Muslim rebellion in the Qing empire all attracted the attention of the reading public. At the same time, Pan-Slav intellectuals depicted conflicts with the Ot- tomans, as in the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, as symptoms of a universal struggle between Or- thodox Christianity and Islam.

Within Russia, the development of new academic disciplines came to play a role in the reformulation of religious policies. Ethnogra- phers and geographers built upon the work of their forerunners in

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the natural sciences. The proliferation of classificatory descriptions of the lands, peoples, flora, and fauna of the empire in the 1830s and 1840s differed from earlier projects not only in their range and scope but also, more importantly, in their orientation. Often sponsored by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the authors of such studies believed that scholarly knowledge would facilitate more systematic and ef- ficient forms of police administration and economic development.24

Institutionalized in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society in the 1840s, ethnography cast the heterogeneous confessions of the empire in a new light. Ethnographers offered their studies to admin- istrators, but ethnographic description was susceptible to reinterpre- tation in the tsarist chancelleries. Ethnographic knowledge was only one of several variables available to policymakers. The perspective of imperial informants and, above all, police concern with order were more frequently decisive in shaping policies.

The first major study devoted exclusively to the Kazakhs appeared in 1832 and became the primary point of reference for imperial administrators. Aleksei Levshin’s Description of the Kirgiz-Kazakh, or the Kirgiz-Kasak Hordes and the Steppes expressed skepticism about the true character of Kazakh religion. “What is your reli- gion?” Levshin recounted asking two Kazakh informants. “We do not know,” they replied. He claimed that “the majority of their compatriots” offered the same response, leading him to conclude that it was indeed difficult “to decide what the Kazakhs are: Mu- hammadans, Manichaeans, or pagans?” The Kazakhs had an under- standing of a “Supreme Being,” he observed, and many of them “worship according to the Qur’an,” but “others mix the teaching of Islam [Islamizm] with the remnants of ancient idolatry.” Still oth- ers believed that human life is overseen by a “good deity” named “Khudai” and an “evil spirit” known as “Shaitan, the source of evil.”25

Despite the confused amalgamation of three distinct religious sys-

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tems in these beliefs, for Levshin the true measure of Kazakh reli- gious ignorance lay in their resort to various “spirits,” “sorcerers,” and “fortune-tellers.” Observers of Kazakh life in earlier periods, like the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, had recorded the promi- nence among the Kazakhs of men who worked cures and predicted the future. But observers had not portrayed these individuals as cen- tral to Kazakh religion. Indeed, in Pallas’s account they largely stood outside Kazakh religion; they enjoyed their position in the steppe only due to the paucity of “Muhammadan clergy” there.26 For Lev- shin, however, Kazakh belief in magical forces represented a con- tamination of religion generally. Just as he maintained that no le- gitimate religion should bear traces of “magic” or “superstition,” Levshin refused to recognize as anything other than “Manichaean” his informants’ reference to Khudai (perhaps from KhodÁ, “God” in Persian) and Shaitan (“Satan”).

Levshin nonetheless decided that the “Muhammadan religion” was the most important element in this “mixing up of various con- fessions.” Though he saw Kazakhs as lacking the “fanaticism” that he identified with Muslims elsewhere, he believed that traces of Islam among the Kazakhs accounted for their hostility toward “unbeliev- ers,” including Christians, Buddhists, and Shi‘ites (even though he claimed the Kazakhs had only a dim understanding of the differ- ences separating Sunnis and Shi‘ites). Discounting the concern of many Kazakhs for daily prayers and fasting, Levshin focused instead on polygamy as the essential tenet of Islam that Kazakhs had em- braced most fully.27

Having cast doubt on the coherence and seriousness of Kazakh re- ligious convictions, Levshin’s contradictory but influential Descrip- tion bolstered critics of tsarist policy. Given the scarcity of “zealous Muslims” among them, he reasoned, “Islam might completely die out,” were it not for the “clerics” who acted as its sole proponents. He stressed that these clerics were outsiders to Kazakh society. Some

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came from the towns of Bukhara, Khiva, and Turkestan. Others held appointments sponsored by the Russian government as scribes for khans and clan chieftains. Levshin’s assertions about Kazakh indif- ference to religion in general and Islam in particular outlived the author; and his portrayal of itinerant and state-sanctioned mullahs as the treacherous purveyors of an alien—and politically subversive— tradition among credulous pastoralists had a lasting impact. Imperial officials and Orthodox churchmen used his claims as empirical evi- dence against state support for Islam. Under Nicholas I, Levshin’s work became paradigmatic in academic circles. Yet claims based on ethnography alone failed to displace established administrative prac- tices.

More important than ethnographers were Kazakh informants. With the establishment in the early 1840s of Russian schools in fron- tier settlements and the entry of Kazakhs into the regular ranks of the military, sons of notables emerged as both intermediaries and al- lies of Russian proponents of an activist state role in the transforma- tion of the steppe. In mediating interactions between indigenous elites and officialdom, some informants presented evidence of local customs and mores that made Islam appear foreign to the Kazakhs. But this society and the informants who spoke for them were di- vided. Even Kazakhs who had advanced through the ranks of Rus- sian education and military service were split on the question of Islam. Some portrayed the religion as a danger to tsarist rule; oth- ers championed the link between the spread of Islam and the devel- opment of Kazakh society. Whereas military officer and ethnogra- pher Chokan Valikhanov insisted on the irreligiosity of his people, Mukhammad-Salikh Babadzhanov focused on the Inner Horde and the leadership of Dzhangir to chart the parallel advance of “prog- ress” and Islamic education.

In a letter of December 1860 published in the Northern Bee, a St. Petersburg daily, Babadzhanov, an advisor to the administration of

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the Inner Horde, avowed that “in the soul of every Kazakh is a Muhammadan of the Sunni sect.” This fact went unnoticed, he said, because of his co-religionists’ “shaky knowledge of the rules of religion, which they combined with popular habits.” Tatar mullahs had been importing literacy and knowledge since the 1830s, but Babadzhanov criticized as “brutality” the pedagogy of these mullahs, whom he treated as interlopers. He reserved his praise for Dzhangir and the school that the khan established at his headquarters. There, in addition to the “rules of the Muhammadan religion,” Kazakh children studied the Russian language. For the improvement of the “moral life”‘ of the horde and the “development of their mental ca- pabilities,” he credited its khans: Bukei had resolved to lead “our Kazakhs” from the steppe to the territory of Astrakhan, “where they acquired a gentle disposition,” and Dzhangir, “by his own example of zeal and fervor for the study of Tatar reading and writing, the rules of Islam, and the Russian tongue and script, demonstrated to the Kazakhs that study is degrading to no one and is never too late.” Is- lam, Babadzhanov argued, brought “enlightenment” to the Kazakhs and made them better Russian subjects.28

While Babadzhanov defended Islam among the Kazakhs in the press of the capitals, officials in Orenburg challenged the claim that Islam had advanced the cause of enlightenment in the steppe. The ambitious Vasilii V. Grigor’ev sought to make his mark by reorient- ing policy away from its reliance upon Islam. A newcomer to the frontier, Grigor’ev arrived in Orenburg in 1852 after training as an Orientalist in Odessa and St. Petersburg. He had served in the De- partment of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions within the Min- istry of Internal Affairs before assuming other ministerial posts; he also served as one of the principal figures in the Imperial Russian Geographical Society.29 Upon arrival in Orenburg, Grigor’ev received orders to investigate charges of corruption leveled against the leader- ship of the Bukei Horde. When authorities in St. Petersburg directed

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him to investigate Dzhangir’s family after the khan’s death in 1845, Grigor’ev distinguished himself as a vigilant guardian of the state’s interest against figures in local government whom he dismissed as neglectful in their supervision of the horde.

The scholar had not served long in his new assignment before he managed, despite the khan’s reputation as a “loyal agent of civili- zation and defender of Russian principles in the horde,” to uncover the damage caused by him and his family, who, in the words of Grigor’ev’s biographer, constituted “an evil” inflicted upon Russia that surpassed the damage wrought by all of their predecessors put together. “Vestiges of immorality” were Dzhangir’s legacy. Worse than laying personal claim to the more than one million acres occu- pied by the horde, Grigor’ev maintained, Dzhangir had served “his own interests” in converting the Kazakhs to “Muhammadanism, about which they had no idea before him.” He had succeeded in “impregnating” the “upper class” with “the ignorant Muslim pride that is hostile to Christianity and enlightenment.” In pursuit of this end, Grigor’ev charged, Dzhangir had cultivated “a whole army of mullahs,” “the class of the population of the horde, which is the most immoral and hostile to the Russian government.” Combining self-interest and “fanaticism,” the “cunning” Dzhangir had been the first of the Kazakh khans to compel the collection of the Islamic zakat in addition to the formerly voluntary Kazakh tax, the sugum.30

Grigor’ev’s contribution to frontier administration lay in his asser- tion that some good could come of Dzhangir’s “evil.” Disillusioned by the khan’s misrule, Kazakhs had come to rely on “conscientious Russian bureaucrats.” This development led Grigor’ev to infer, ac- cording to his biographer, that “the horde would be capable of quietly accepting any transformation, all possible rapprochement [sblizhenie] with the imperial system, as long as it is carried out care- fully and with skill.”31

A Kazakh informant reinforced Grigor’ev’s argument. Chokan

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Valikhanov combined his linguistic skills and Russian military cadet education to become the most prominent interpreter of Kazakh soci- ety in the 1860s. He earned the confidence of the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, who praised him as “the first Kazakh with a fully Euro- pean education” and expressed his “love” for him. The son of a nota- ble from the Inner Horde who had entered imperial service in the 1830s, Valikhanov collected intelligence and produced ethnographic knowledge about the peoples of the steppe and oasis towns of Cen- tral Asia for the military and Asiatic Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He seems to have regarded Alexander Kazem-Bek as a rival; his colleague Khusain Faizkhanov complained in a letter to Valikhanov from the capital in 1863 that “Kazembek is translating the canons of Muhammad and making himself out to be an aristo- crat.”32 He used his status as both a claimant to the line of Chingiz Khan and a scholar of the European discipline of ethnography to ar- gue for a wholesale reorientation of tsarist policy toward the nomads.

Valikhanov called for direct state intervention in the steppe and official commitment to the active “spread of European enlighten- ment.” In a memorandum composed in late 1863 or early 1864, he warned against support for Islamic institutions and personnel among the Kazakhs: “Islam cannot help the Russian or any other Christian government, [and] one cannot count on the loyalty of a mercenary Tatar clergy.” Drawing on his recent study “Traces of Shamanism among the Kazakhs,” Valikhanov maintained that Islam remained an alien and marginal force that “has still not eaten into our flesh and blood.” Though Islam threatened “the division of the people in the future,” he explained, a “period of dual faith [dvoeverie]” still prevailed in the steppe, “like that in Rus’ during the time of the ven- erable Nestor.” Resembling Russians in ancient times, the Kazakhs remained pagans at heart.33

Valikhanov’s rise coincided with the fundamental restructuring of imperial institutions in the “Great Reforms” after Russian defeat in

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the Crimean War. Following the abolition of serfdom, the govern- ment of Alexander II planned major judicial reforms.34 These in- cluded the establishment of courts that would expand the reach of imperial law on a more uniform basis throughout the empire. Valik- hanov opposed the encroachment of imperial law, however, by ap- pealing to a long-standing principle in the restive borderlands. He suggested that the practice of administration through “customary law” might be a pragmatic alternative to the state promotion of Islam and a promising vehicle for the gradual integration of the Kazakhs into mainstream life in the empire.

The officially sanctioned practice of customary law had a lengthy history in the administration both of Orthodox peasant communities and of indigenous groups inhabiting the borderlands. As early as the second quarter of the eighteenth century, tsarist authorities had di- rected the tribute-paying peoples of Siberia to adjudicate disputes among themselves before their “elders.” Lawmakers later concluded that peoples who differed so much from Orthodox peasants in their beliefs, manners, appearance, and general way of life must have distinctive legal norms as well. The state conferred the right to live according to customary law upon peoples who seemed to occupy a lower level of social organization and who appeared to need pro- tection from more cunning human predators, like Russian colo- nists and administrators. A decree of 1783 awarded the various peo- ples inhabiting Irkutsk Province “the freedom to settle civil affairs among themselves orally” before their “elders or elected [people].”35

Of course, the state maintained its monopoly on the administration of judicial affairs in which it had an interest, and it defended its pre- rogative to define crimes punishable by the general laws.

In practice, local officials became deeply embroiled in determin- ing which form customary law took in each community. Like their contemporaries in the British East India Company, Russian authori- ties sought out those indigenous notables and texts that appeared to

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preserve knowledge about local “laws and customs.” In Bengal, ad- ministrators translated and compiled texts in search of a compen- dium of rule-based “Hindoo” and “Muhammadan” law to aid British colonials in policing indigenous legal personnel.36 Tsarist bureau- crats pursued similar sources. In Siberia, they solicited authorita- tive texts from indigenous contacts. Russians hoped these records would help them sort out appeals and the conflicting assertions ad- vanced by “dissatisfied” interpreters of customary legal norms. Tsar- ist officials were from the outset implicated in the elaboration of customary law. By entertaining petitions from dissatisfied litigants, they created an appellate mechanism, making governors and police key actors in the definition and implementation of customary legal norms.37

Mikhail Speranskii’s Siberian statute of 1822 made the discovery of these legal norms a collaborative project between bureaucrats and indigenous informants.38 Officials collected information from “dis- tinguished natives,” and a state committee sifted through them to as- certain which of the “laws and customs” seemed most appropriate for the administrative purposes of the regime. Finally, at a stage three steps removed from the native assembly, the governor-general confirmed or rejected the committee’s selection of legal materials. The laws “characteristic to each tribe” were then to be administered by “elders” and others chosen by the community. Tsarist officials oversaw their work and applied the rules derived from this joint ef- fort.

Among the Kazakhs, Valikhanov acted as a key protagonist in de- fining the “customary law” that emerged from fierce competition among elders and other Kazakhs. In the early 1860s the central min- istries discussed introducing a new system, a form of mixed court, the “justice of the peace court” (mirovoi sud). Originally intended for peasants and townspeople following the abolition of serfdom, it consisted of an elected justice of the peace who presided over civil

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suits and tried petty criminal cases on the basis of the imperial law or customary legal norm that he judged most appropriate. But in 1864 Valikhanov composed a memorandum arguing for the retention of the Kazakh court of elders based on customary law, instead of the mixed court. Invoking John Stuart Mill, Valikhanov urged caution in the pursuit of reform and advised attention to the study of the “mental, moral, and political qualities” of the people to be affected. “The conditions of the tribal organism, of environment, climate, and soil should always be at the forefront,” he insisted, “for all human in- ducements and motives are conditioned by the combined influence of physical and social factors.”39

Recent European history had illustrated the perils of applying the- ories that ran contrary to the spirit of a people. Russian history, too, had produced its negative models of this kind of reform: “It is not without reason that our contemporary historians attribute all of our social ills and anomalies to the shattering and anti-national spirit of the Petrine reform.” But Valikhanov dissociated himself from a “narrow [theory] of nationality [narodnost’]” that celebrated particu- larism for its own sake. He argued instead that “the acquisition of European, universal enlightenment and the energetic struggle with obstacles that hinder attainment of this goal should form the end goal of every people capable of development and culture.”40

An avid student of ethnographic theory, Valikhanov was sensitive to the complex interdependence of culture and biology. He main- tained that “culture can change the organism of a person for the better, like cultured nurturing improves the stock of domestic ani- mals.” “In order to make the Kazakhs capable of the apprehension of European ideas of change,” Valikhanov advised, “one must first de- velop his skull and nervous system by means of education.” Intro- duced in the Kazakh steppe in 1824, Speranskii’s reforms had lacked such an understanding, according to Valikhanov. The most recent committee established in 1852 to solicit “popular opinion” from “dis-

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tinguished” Kazakhs as the basis for judicial reform among Siberian Kazakhs risked producing an equally harmful outcome. “Popular opinion” he dismissed as “nothing other than the babble of foolish children.”41

Valikhanov denounced as self-interested the assertions made to the committee by “a privileged class of the Kazakh people.” First, he explained that the campaign to solicit information from Kazakhs had been severely flawed. “Indifference,” “ignorance and incompre- hension of their interests,” and mistrust of the government had all combined to taint responses to the committee’s questions about Ka- zakh legal customs. Second, not all respondents agreed. The “popu- lar masses” wanted their “court of biys” to remain in its “ancient popular form,” while “the office-holding, titled, and wealthy Ka- zakhs” clamored for recognition as “justices of the peace” or “judi- cial officials.” Although Russian officials on the investigating com- mittee welcomed the elders’ appeals for the “reform” of Kazakh judicial life, Valikhanov rejected their responses to official queries as “intrigues” founded on “base motives.”42

Valikhanov offered instead “statistical and historical facts” about Kazakh legal institutions with the aim of protecting the interests of the largest group of inorodtsy in the empire (numbering nearly eight hundred thousand as subjects and another two hundred thousand who had not yet pledged allegiance to St. Petersburg). He con- cluded that the “most ancient” court of biys “fully corresponds to the present [stage of] development of the Kazakh people.” Despite forty years of Russian influence, Valikhanov noted, the court of biys had remained “as it was for hundreds, maybe for a thousand, years before us.” The Kazakhs rarely complained about the decisions of these courts or appealed to Russian law, he claimed. The few cases involv- ing complaints against the rulings of biys and resort to imperial courts had involved elites who were “stamped with popular disdain, completely immoral people, who hoped through Russian bureau-

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crats to rectify by illegal means a case lost in a popular court.” More- over, Valikhanov claimed, even Russian litigants and defendants of- ten preferred the court of biys to Russian judicial procedure; in that year alone, dozens of such cases had been handled in this manner in the district of Kokchetav.43

He argued that the justice of the peace court proposed by reform- ers for the Kazakh steppe was not the equivalent of the court of biys, as many officials (and some Kazakh elites) had alleged. Unlike these justices, biys were not elected or appointed by anyone and did not receive a fixed salary, meet official qualifications, or serve in a fixed jurisdiction for a set term. Rather, Kazakhs assumed the title biy on an informal basis.

The Kazakh scholar likened their authority to that of “poets, scholars, and lawyers” in Europe. There the people regarded Shake- speare and Goethe as great poets, basing their judgment on informal popular opinion, “not on the decrees of governments or on the for- mal elections of the people.” A biy acted as a judge only when liti- gants freely turned to him because he enjoyed a “good reputation” (khoroshee renommée). The court of biys differed further from the projected justice of the peace court in that it convened only irregu- larly. In contrast to the new courts, Valikhanov noted, a biy offered an individual ruling only when litigants belonged to his clan (rod) and consented to this procedure. The main virtue of the court of biys was the “absence of formality and all official routine.” Valik- hanov contended that its informality precluded various kinds of “in- trigue.” Litigants were free to choose their own biys, without the burden of official elections that could be manipulated by clan alle- giances and the greed of Russian officials. “Formalism and bureau- cratic routine,” he maintained, would bring only “stagnation” to a people for whom these strange laws were still ill-suited. Reform should instead correspond to the “material needs” and “national character” of the population whose improvement was at stake.44

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He charged previous lawmakers with violating this principle in as- signing Muslim mullahs the management of cases involving Kazakh marriage and divorce. In all but the district of Kokchetav, Valik- hanov asserted, Kazakhs had responded to inquiries about customary law with the request that “cases about marriages and divorces, now in the charge of the mullahs, be returned as previously to the court of biys.” He repeated his contention that the Kazakhs had been Mus- lims “in name alone” and had formed a “particular Sunni schism [sunnitskii raskol] in the Muhammadan world” before becoming subjects of the Russian empire. They had never accepted “Muslim laws,” which “were introduced to the steppe by government ini- tiative.”45

Valikhanov expressed dismay at a policy of “affirming Islam, where it was not fully accepted by the people itself.” He accused “the great Speranskii” of acting as the “apostle of Muhammad” in the Siberian steppe because he named mullahs and proposed the construction of mosques and Tatar schools. Marveling at how such a figure had be- come the “disseminator of such an ignorant and savage teaching,” Valikhanov surmised that the only possible explanation lay in the fact that it had been unseemly in Speranskii’s day to recognize as Russian subjects a people that had “no religion” or to acknowledge officially a group of “schismatics, even if Muslim.” He lamented that Speranskii had judged support for their conversion to Christianity impolitic.

In the meantime, Valikhanov pointed out, the Orenburg frontier administration had begun to take measures to counter the “develop- ment of Islam” and had prohibited Tatars from acting as mullahs or residing there for extended periods of time. In Siberia, by contrast, local administration had perpetuated Speranskii’s “protective sys- tem” in relation to Islam, thanks to which the religion had made “gi- gantic steps” among the Kazakhs of the region. He believed that “half-literate mullahs from among the Tatars and fanatic emigrants

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from Central Asia, who present themselves as saints,” had engaged in “our moral corruption” with the support of the government. “We must know,” Valikhanov warned, “what kind of people among us in the steppe occupy priestly offices, to whom is entrusted the moral state of the Kazakh people and [their] legal proceedings with respect to such a difficult social question as marriage.” Inveighing against the Tatars who made up the majority of these mullahs (“swindlers without exception”), he condemned the “dark reign” of a “people ig- norant in the highest degree, hardly able to read and write, but in- fected with dark fanaticism and savage superstition.” Appealing to the authority of one of the most renowned Russian Orientalists at midcentury, he noted that Professor Il’ia N. Berezin had shown, through study of the Qur’an and the hadith, that “Islam and educa- tion are incompatible, even hostile notions, one supplanting the other.” Valikhanov dismissed the possibility of a “reformation in Is- lam,” a religion formed on the “wild barbaric prejudices of nomadic Arabs of the sixth century, the traditions of spiritualists, Yids [zhidy], and the assorted hocus-pocus of Persian magicians of the same pe- riod.”46

Worse than the Islam of Turks or Persians, he insisted, Tatar Islam was a form of “Puritanism.” “Tatars reject poetry, history, mathemat- ics, philosophy, and all natural sciences,” Valikhanov alleged, “re- garding them as temptations for the weak human mind, and confine themselves to Muslim scholastics and casuistry alone.” From the Tatars, Kazakhs had learned to read books and poems written in the Tatar and Chagatay languages. In turn, this exposed the Kazakhs, Valikhanov speculated, to the teachings of Shamil, the formidable opponent of tsarist rule in the Caucasus, and other kinds of “fanati- cal chaos.”47

Valikhanov urged the government to turn from concern with pros- ecuting cattle and horse theft and “generally disciplining the Kazakh people” to their education and to the scrutiny of the mullahs and

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dervishes corrupting them. He also proposed another means of re- forming Kazakh marital practices. To curb “the rude custom” of promising Kazakh girls in marriage from a very young age and with- out their consent, the government had assigned the regulation of marriage and divorce to the mullahs. He argued that this mistake could be corrected and the practice reformed even without the me- diation of Muslim clerics. The government could instead compel se- nior sultans and administrators to maintain “strict supervision,” “un- der threat of responsibility,” so that fathers did not marry off their sons and daughters before a certain age and without their approval. He warned that “police supervision and the spirit of the age” would require time to effect the desired changes and added that the large numbers of complaints and petitions about Kazakh marital disputes had demonstrated that even “the Muslim shari‘a was completely powerless against the force of deeply rooted custom.” In the interest of impeding the “harmful influence of any ultraclerical direction on the social development of peoples,” and combating the mullahs and their “fanaticism,” Valikhanov concluded that the state should re- move marriage from the control of Muslim authorities and, “in ac- cordance with the people’s demand, leave cases concerning mar- riage and divorce as before to the court of biys, all the more so since for the Muhammadans marriage is not a sacrament.”48

Valikhanov’s goal of preserving the sway of “custom” against the encroachment of Islamic law called for a departure from imperial practice. In each confessional community, the state had reinforced the power of ecclesiastical authorities over family affairs. Among the Kazakhs, however, local clan elders maintained that cases involving marriage and divorce should belong to the court of biys. In antici- pation of a reorganization of law courts among the Cossacks and inorodtsy of western Siberia, the administration of the governor-gen- eralship had recruited Valikhanov to gauge opinion among local elites about possible reactions to the projected reforms. As their re-

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plies reveal, Valikhanov’s efforts did as much to shape as to reflect the opinion that reached officials.

The Kazakh sultans and biys of the districts of Kokchetav, Ak- molinsk, Atbasar, and Baian-Aul expressed the same demands, in nearly identical language, as Valikhanov had articulated in earlier memoranda on the reform of Kazakh customary law courts. All voiced their desire “to preserve intact the customs of our ancestors, which satisfy completely our kin-based way of life.” They asked that the government leave their “court of biys and assemblies, which have existed among us since time immemorial, in all their force.”49

In the “spirit of the new statute on the organization of courts and ju- dicial proceedings,” however, these informants conceded that “some additions and changes” might be “useful.” In each district, they in- sisted on the broadest jurisdiction for the judicial authority of biys and their application of “custom,” though some deferred to the au- thority of imperial courts in judging many offenses enumerated in the tsarist criminal code.

Though advanced in the name of custom and a traditional “kin- based way of life,” the informants’ demands concerning marriage and divorce revealed widely varying practices. Elites in the district of Akmolinsk asserted that disputes involving marriage and divorce be- longed to the court of biys, though they included the provision that licensed mullahs might participate in appeals. In Atbasar, by con- trast, sultans and biys sought support for the displacement of mullahs and Islamic law altogether in language that betrays the imprint of their interviewer, Valikhanov: “Since marriage does not constitute a sacrament among us, but is a simple agreement, we ask then that dis- putes about marriage and divorce, now adjudicated by licensed mul- lahs, be left to the adjudication of biys according to [our] own steppe laws and customs.” Respondents from Baian-Aul also requested that lawmakers intervene on their behalf. They requested that “disputes about marriage and divorce, which have been up to this time in the

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hands of mullahs, be returned to the court of biys.” Clan-based nota- bles echoed Valikhanov in turning to the state to solicit assistance against the mullahs’ challenge to the fragile authority of the biys. Ap- pealing to distant tradition, they sought to reverse contemporary practices and check the power of the spokesmen for shari‘a-based le- gal norms.50

Legislation of October 1868 initiated the formal inte- gration of the steppe into the administrative structure of the empire. It backed Valikhanov’s claims about the predominance of Kazakh custom and the authority of biys in administering legal norms in family and other disputes. But contradictory principles animated lawmakers in composing this provisional statute for the military ad- ministration of the territory. On the one hand, the division of the area formerly ruled by the Kazakh hordes into four administrative re- gions—Ural’sk, Turgai, Akmolinsk, and Semipalatinsk—and their further subdivision into districts, aimed at weakening the “clan prin- ciple” among the Kazakhs. As one Russian official and expert on Kazakh customary law observed, the legislation divided the popula- tion into townships and settlements “with the goal of separating Kazakh clans, because the unification of one large clan under the power of one clan chieftain was recognized as harmful in the politi- cal sense.” On the other hand, the customary law said to be rooted in this same “clan principle” lay at the heart of the new policy orienta- tion. The elders who interpreted and administered this law were to serve as adjuncts to imperial rule in their role as the guardians of all matters falling under the category of “civil affairs” as well as a large number of those belonging to “criminal law” in the tsarist system.51

The 1868 statute assigned marital and family affairs to the court of biys, where they would be adjudicated “according to popular cus- toms,” endorsing patriarchal customary law at the expense of the

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shari‘a. Where marital disputes were concerned, the law instituted a unique mechanism of appeal that linked the practice of custom- ary law to administrative authority. Like earlier legislation on other forms of customary law (as well as on the handling of Muslim inheri- tance disputes under the Orenburg Assembly), article 163 permitted the “side dissatisfied with the decision of the customary court” to turn with a complaint to the district chief, who then assumed the power to decide the case. Litigants who declined to accept this judg- ment could also present complaints to the governor. Appeals arising from marital and other disputes linked Kazakh custom to tsarist law. Ethnographers and administrators praised Kazakhs who turned to imperial law; and they lauded the influence of the general laws on customary law. Even so, the number of appeals never satisfied these officials.52

In the last decades of the century, there emerged from various lo- cales evidence that proponents of Islamic law were gaining ground in the struggle between shari‘a and adat. The scholar Wilhelm Radloff found proof of this religious change in Kazakh songs. He termed the didactic songs that he collected “book songs” because Kazakh singers recited them from texts, whereas others were sung by heart. According to Radloff, the composers of these songs had been mullahs, and through these songs they had introduced Per- sian and Arabic words and grammatical constructions into the Ka- zakh language. Acting as the “messengers of Islam,” these songs had spread the religion “like a slowly creeping poison.” Through them, he charged, the small number of literate Kazakhs had become “alienated from the spirit of the people [Volksgeist].” The songs en- joined acceptance of the Prophet’s message and emphasized ritual purity, the giving of alms, the centrality of prayer, recitation of the Qur’an, and the avoidance of sin in a world where humans were mere “guests.”53

In the late 1880s, N. I. Grodekov, an administrator and ethnogra-

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pher, observed this “striving toward the shari‘a” in many areas. Ka- zakhs such as the elder Umurbek of Aulieatinsk district told him that “we are slaves of the shari‘a, [and] we do not stand up for adat.” Oth- ers had adapted elements from tsarist law, adat, and the shari‘a. Court registers examined by Grodekov listed rulings issued “accord- ing to adat,” “according to full adat,” “according to the shari‘a,” and for a particularly weighty judgment, simply “according to the law.” He also reported the proliferation of mosques and the swearing of oaths at the graves of Muslim saints and elsewhere “according to the shari‘a and the law.” At the same time, he observed some variation and selectivity in Kazakh appropriation of Islamic law. A notable near Tashkent apparently made enemies when he demanded that his wife wear a veil and occupy a separate space in their dwelling. His opponents also criticized his ban on singing at his daughter’s wedding. They accused him of taking this practice from Muslims (referred to here as “Sarts”) in the neighboring city. Moreover, of- ficials received more and more petitions from Kazakh communities to permit the introduction of Islamic law among them.54

Tsarist authorities blamed Muslim missionaries. In the Volga and Urals regions, Church and state officials had already marked Mus- lim men of religion as potential subversives. In their minds, the re- curring episodes of apostasy from the Orthodox faith reflected the work of the “Muhammadan clergy.” Priests and police joined in condemning itinerant as well as licensed mullahs when convert communities coordinated mass renunciations of their baptismal rites (or those of their eighteenth-century ancestors) and declared alle- giance to Islam.55

Though St. Petersburg had long sent Tatar mullahs to the steppe as missionaries, spies, merchants, and intermediaries, local officials now viewed such figures as interlopers. Following Valikhanov, other Russophone informants offered scholarly evidence supporting fron- tier officials’ assertions about the predatory activities of Tatar mul-

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lahs. The ethnographer Shakhimardan Miriasovich (Ivan Ivanovich) Ibragimov depicted itinerant mullahs from Kazan, as well as those from neighboring khanates, as exploiters of the credulous Kazakhs. The unlicensed “pretenders” had gained greater influence among them than the small numbers of official clerics permitted by the ad- ministration, Ibragimov suggested, because of their constant atten- tiveness to the ritual and other needs of the folk. He added that the Kazakhs had special regard for holy men whom they recognized as descendants of the Prophet, alongside sultans, as representatives of a hereditary elite.56

Imperial authorities and ethnographers also singled out Sufi guides (ishans) as particularly harmful agents of exploitation and deception whose selfish interests made them political adversaries of the state. In 1867 provincial officials identified the village of Sterlibashevo in Ufa Province as a “Muhammadan center” and the home of a char- ismatic “saint” who attracted followers from among Bashkirs and Tatars as well as Kazakhs. The tsarist conquest of much of Tran- soxiana, which the Russians called Turkestan, brought with it a Tro- jan horse, “Muslim clericalism.” “This merging of the Kazakhs, who have long been indifferent to any faith, with Bashkir and Tatar clergy is very harmful,” warned one official, “especially if one considers that in the recently acquired region of Turkestan fanaticism is even more developed among the people than among the Bashkirs and Tatars.” Peter Pozdnev, too, argued that the Sufi guides of the Naqsh- bandi brotherhood in Orenburg Province exerted a dangerous influ- ence on the Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and Turkestanis. Emphasizing ten- sions between mystics and more worldly Muslims, he charged that ishans “excite fanaticism in the people not only against Russians and non-Muslims generally, but also against Muslim rulers and clergy, when they regard it necessary for their own interests.” As examples he cited episodes in 1868 when “dervishes” had supposedly turned Kazakhs in the Orenburg region against the imperial state. In the

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same year, he charged, they had discouraged Kazakhs in the district of Akmolinsk from accepting insignia distinguishing those assuming official posts.57

Pozdnev also referred to evidence gathered by “experts” on Ka- zakh life in the governor-generalship of Turkestan (established in 1867), who characterized ishans as “parasites” who not only caused great harm to the Kazakhs in “the economic sense” but also had an impact that was “disadvantageous in all respects for the successes of civilization.” In the official newspaper of Turkestan, G. A. Aren- darenko presented an alarming picture of Sufi influence on Kazakh followers (murids).

The influence of ishans on their murids is reflected on the whole cast of life of the latter: they wear turbans, perform prayers conscientiously, strictly observe fasts, establish mosques together in nomad encampments, send their chil- dren to town religious schools, where in a decade they cram them full with all the nonsense of Muslim learning, [and] turn them into sanctimonious hypocrites, and thus the Kazakh people degenerates generation after generation as a result of this ruinously perverted upbringing.

In language often used to describe Tatars—and in the western prov- inces, Jews—Arendarenko also accused Sufis from Central Asian towns (referred to here by the ethnonym “Sart”) of combining their missionary activities with a vile form of predatory self-interest. With their “typical greediness, with the insatiability characteristic in such proportions only of the nature of a Sart,” Arendarenko charged, the Sufi Sart “squeezes everything from his victim, beginning with do- mestic [items], naturally, [ranging from] the best animals to comely Kazakh girls, whom ishans either take for themselves as wives or give to relatives as calmly as [they would give] a horse.”58

General N. A. Kryzhanovskii, the official entrusted with the Oren-

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burg frontier region, reasoned that he could curb the “influence of the Muhammadan clergy on the Kazakhs” by removing them from the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Assembly, an institution that he and other provincial officials regarded as a serious rival to their author- ity. Already in October 1852, Count Perovskii, the governor of Oren- burg and Samara Provinces, had instructed the Assembly not to in- volve itself in Kazakh affairs. The statute of 1868 also reiterated Kryzhanovskii’s insistence on shielding Kazakhs from its grasp.59

But Kazakhs continued to appeal to Ufa for direction in religious matters. In 1866 Orenburg officials learned that Kazakhs still turned with marital disputes to the Assembly, which accepted their cases, citing a provision of the Digest of Laws that established the right of each “tribe” or “people” to enter into marriage according to its own laws and customs without the interference of Church or state of- ficials.60 Moreover, in September 1869 Kryzhanovskii complained to the minister of internal affairs that official mullahs from various areas had been sending denunciations to the Orenburg Assembly about Kazakhs who refused to perform religious rites. Besides clerics who asked the Assembly to help them discipline the irreligious in their charge, nonclerics also petitioned for the intervention of the Assembly. These Kazakhs insisted on the mediation of their disputes by Islamic scholars on the basis of the shari‘a.61

Tsarist authorities were forced to rely on threats prohibiting the mufti and officials in the Assembly from receiving such appeals or maintaining contact with the scholars and men of religion who served Kazakh communities. At the same time, critics of state policy argued that the advance of the shari‘a at the expense of the ostensi- bly secular patriarchy of adat furnished evidence for the need to abolish the Orenburg Assembly. In 1884 the missionary and Oriental studies scholar Nikolai I. Il’minskii wrote to the procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev, to alert him to the danger that he saw in the Assembly as a “Muslim cultural center in Russia.”

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Tatars used it to “unify and join” all the Muslims of the empire, he charged, citing recent German unification as a “model” for this kind of activity. Though Kazakhs had been removed from the jurisdiction of the Assembly, Il’minskii complained, “their heart is drawn to it by an old habit.”62

Missionaries such as Il’minskii continued to insist that Islam had not truly sunk roots among the nomads, though it was only in the mid-1880s that the Imperial Orthodox Missionary Society extended its network into the steppe. To their disappointment, missionaries encountered competition from Tatars and other Muslim subjects whom the Orthodox suspected of pursuing their own missionary agenda. Robert Geraci has demonstrated that missionaries even sus- pected the Kazakhs of making Muslims out of the Russian colonists and Cossacks whose isolated settlements lacked churches. Fault- ing Russian officials, one of these missionaries, Father Nikol’skii, pointed to an administrator who, donning Kazakh clothes, promoted the performance of Islamic rites, though Kazakhs were in fact “not fully Islamicized.” It was thus “a Russian Orthodox man,” he com- plained, who “with a peaceful conscience, decides to teach the Kazakhs the correct fulfillment of religious, Muslim laws.”63

An Islamic Restoration

Steppe policy came under fire from another angle as well. Some ob- servers argued that official assumptions about Kazakh indifference to religion had led authorities to neglect the possibility of religious change. Believing that customary law would perform the disciplin- ary functions that religion fulfilled elsewhere in the empire, officials had failed to erect an institutional apparatus for state control of steppe religion. Shakhimardan Ibragimov and other critics of Tatar mullahs and Turkestani holy men pointed out that, contrary to the stated aim of steppe policy, the scarcity of licensed mullahs had

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made Kazakhs more reliant on itinerant prayer leaders whom the state could not monitor or control. Citing evidence from the district of Karakaralinsk, Ibragimov noted that state-approved religious lead- ers had taken to delegating ritual and other responsibilities to “pri- vate figures.” This development in effect broke down the distinc- tion, long esteemed by officials, between a “Muhammadan clergy” and a “laity.” In turn, it had given rise to frequent complaints about marital disputes that ended up before tsarist authorities. Karakara- linsk officials complained that “illegal” marriages had proliferated. Performed without rites administered by the proper authority—and without the necessary registration in the official record—these un- regulated marriages violated imperial law, as did unions between un- derage children or between older adults and young children. The court cases brought to light by Ibragimov suggested that the disputes that grew out of these arrangements sowed familial conflict and thus social discord and moral disorder in the steppe.64

Accounts like Ibragimov’s provoked yet another policy shift. Law- makers were forced to rethink their strategy of leaving Kazakh re- ligion without hierarchical regulation. This reorientation brought steppe administration closer in line with the imperial practice of es- tablishing hierarchical institutions in each confessional community in the empire. Indeed, in 1872 the tsarist state had created official Islamic hierarchies for the Sunnis and Shi‘ites of Transcaucasia; and their efforts to form similar regulatory bodies in the Northern Caucasus continued.65 At the same time, tsarist expansion deeper into Central Asia and the establishment of the governor-generalship of Turkestan brought several million more Muslims under tsarist rule and intensified official misgivings about the Islamic contamina- tion of the steppe from this new territory.

Following the introduction of a new statute on the organization of Turkestan in 1886, the steppe nomads came under separate jurisdic- tions, including two governor-generalships, the Orenburg region,

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and western Siberia. Comparison of the state of “the religious af- fairs of the natives” in each territory revealed widely varying ap- proaches to Kazakh religion.66 Reasserting the prohibition against the involvement of the Orenburg Assembly, a commission of Ak- molinsk and Omsk officials proposed to make local authorities ar- biters of appointments to, and removals from, officially regulated clerical posts. Echoing Ibragimov, they maintained that

supervision of the activity of mullahs officially confirmed in their own posts, and thus acting freely and openly, is much more convenient than supervision of the activity of persons not officially authorized for this and thus operating under the cover of secrecy and under the protection of figures who turn to them.67

The proposal permitted Kazakh communities to elect only one mul- lah per district, a unit encompassing several thousand tents stretch- ing over hundreds of square kilometers. It also imposed numerous constraints on these candidates. Mullahs had to be chosen exclu- sively from among “Kazakhs, [who are] Russian subjects” and who had not been tried in court or placed under investigation. Moreover, the plan afforded imperial officials, from the local district chief to the governor, broad, though ill-defined, discretionary powers in con- firming or rejecting appointments. Mullahs were not to enjoy any special privileges, such as a state salary or exemption from taxation, and communities that chose to assume their mullahs’ obligations required the permission of the regional administration to do so. Governors also assumed the authority to make the construction of mosques, the establishment of religious schools, and monetary con- tributions to these institutions contingent upon their approval.

Clerical supervision of marriage stood out as an area of special concern. The commission of Akmolinsk and Omsk officials objected to inconsistencies in imperial law that in some locales left mullahs

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in charge of Kazakh marriages, including the keeping of official reg- isters. They proposed that oversight of Kazakh marriages be trans- ferred, along with record keeping, to Russian officials, citing a simi- lar policy for Old Believers, dissidents from the Orthodox Church, as a precedent. Commissioners saw this measure as a necessary step toward the introduction of order to Kazakh marriage, but they noted that these goals did not include a defense of the indissolubility of Kazakh marriage. In their view, Kazakhs based the institution of marriage on coercion and violence rather than the consent of the bride, and this the commissioners condemned. Their aim, they noted, was “the protection of the woman in the Kazakh family” from her male relatives.68

Disregard for the woman’s consent was the chief fault of Kazakh marriage, according to this commission. It concluded that “the ma- jority of Kazakhs regard their own daughters and widows as valuable goods and trade them.” Kazakhs did not acknowledge “that the law offers her the right of free choice of a husband.”69 The commission explained that Kazakh women rarely complained about their lot, though some took their cases to the customary law court. At the woman’s insistence, these cases sometimes ended up before a Rus- sian official, the district chief, who would then abrogate this type of marriage on the grounds that it had not been recorded in the official register.

Complaining that mullahs colluded in the practice of dismissing the rights of Kazakh women, and that this violated Islamic law, the commission backed officials who sought to compel mullahs to per- form marriages only in cases where the bride offered her consent and witnesses certified to this. It also supported the demands voiced earlier by a number of elders in Valikhanov’s survey of legal practices and institutions by severely curtailing the role of mullahs in adminis- tering marital affairs. In place of the mullahs, elders and township

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administrators were to maintain registers of births, marriages, and deaths.70

Despite the mediating role of Kazakh elders, the commission pro- posed provisions to make Kazakh marriage practices conform in a number of key points to imperial marriage law (based in its funda- mentals on Orthodox canon law). The draft prohibited elders from concluding marital agreements on behalf of males younger than eighteen and females younger than sixteen, or in cases where both parties had not offered their consent, or when parents or others had attempted to coerce the bride and bridegroom. Finally, elders were obliged to confirm that a legal divorce or the death of a first husband had made previously married women eligible for remarriage. In the eyes of the commission, such marriages would take effect only when the necessary witnesses and participants had signed the agreement before the elder.

The proposal added that the marrying parties were permitted, if they so desired, to turn to a local mullah or other Kazakhs “for the reading of a prayer.” Russian officials did not view this rite as obliga- tory, noting that “in and of itself [it] has no meaning for recognition of the legality of the marriage.” The commission also threatened any non-Kazakhs who performed religious rites at marriages or any other occasions with criminal persecution for “the assumption of power not belonging to oneself.” As with marriage, Kazakh divorce would belong to the realm of customary—not Islamic—law.71

Lawmakers remained divided on the role of the state, however. In 1887 a steppe administrator named Egorov elaborated on the recom- mendations made by Ibragimov and the commission of regional of- ficials. He claimed that the Russian government had always main- tained “the principles of religious toleration, to which the successful spread of Russian rule in Asia owed [so] much.” Egorov’s memoran- dum of 1887 identified “two main systems” in policy toward the reli-

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gious affairs of inorodtsy. The first had prevailed in the European provinces, Siberia, and the Caucasus. According to this scheme, the government had assumed responsibility for naming and confirming “ecclesiastical figures” and for determining their rights, obligations, authority, and jurisdiction. In the second system, which the govern- ment had improvised more recently for the new imperial posses- sion of Turkestan, the state had regarded the religious matters of inorodtsy as “their private relations.” It did not confer upon the “clergy any official significance” or assign them any rights or duties.72

Criticism of the “first system,” the policies in place in territories integrated into the empire in earlier periods, shaped the drafting of a new statute for the steppe under the conservative Alexander III (r. 1881–1894). Its authors had come to regard Islam as a generic foe of state interests. In lending the Muslim “clergy” an “official charac- ter,” the government had enabled “the strengthening and intensi- fication among the inorodtsy of dogmas tolerated in the Empire, among which Muhammadanism by its essence has an anti-state and hostile character in a Christian land.”73

The influence of an official clergy had been particularly “unfavor- able” on the Kazakhs, who had adopted only the few “Muhamma- dan rites and views” that did not conflict with “the immemorial cus- toms of the Kazakh people, representing the product of its tribal, clan, and historical life.” Immune to “fanaticism,” they remained Muslims only “superficially and in name.” The Kazakhs had no in- digenous clergy, this memorandum asserted, and the state need not supply them with one, given that “any literate Kazakh” might bear the title mullah and recite the prayers that made up “almost all of the religious ritual among them.” Egorov concluded that the ap- pointment of official mullahs in the steppe would only strengthen Is- lam there and thus be “harmful for state interests.”74

Unlike bureaucrats in Kazan, Samara, Orenburg, Ufa, Astrakhan, and elsewhere who had to contend with a century-old official Is-

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lamic hierarchy, steppe authorities made use of the broader latitude at their disposal to devise new institutions and policies. Critics seized on the institutionalization of Islam as the single greatest obstacle to the “Russification” of the steppe and the “removal [from it] of Mus- lim foundations.” They claimed that only Islam stood in the way of the transformation promised by colonization and the closer integra- tion of the steppe and its population into the administrative and cul- tural life of the empire.

With the gradual penetration into the steppe of Russian set- tlements and the growth of the Russian population, under the influence of Russian administration, courts, trade, and industry, and with the spread of Russian schools and espe- cially with the introduction of military service, the Kazakhs should without doubt, in time, become Russian, become imbued with Russian views and understandings, [and] turn in large part to a settled way of life and Christianity.75

The memorandum recommended that proposed legislation forego any regulation of Kazakh religious affairs, using as a model the 1867 statute for the Turkestan governor-generalship, which denied Ka- zakh mullahs any “official significance.”

Contrary to the recommendations of this last memo- randum, the statute that became law in 1891 made appointments of Muslim clerical figures on a uniform basis. The statute on the ad- ministration of Akmolinsk, Semipalatinsk, Semireche, Ural’sk, and Turgai reaffirmed the policy that limited inhabitants there to one mullah (chosen from among this same population) per township unit, a territory drawn to enclose between one and two thousand tents (kibitki). As Kazakh critics pointed out, this policy often permit- ted only one mullah for a territory the size of France. Communities

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required permission from the governors to construct mosques, for whose upkeep only consenting members of the community were made responsible. Such support would have to come without the aid of Muslim endowments, because the statute prohibited them in these territories.76

The government thereby reasserted a measure of state supervision by making mullahs subject to the approval of local governors. How- ever, the approach expounded in the internal memorandum of 1887 still had a meaningful, if indirect, impact. Its formulation of the problem of religious toleration accorded with the outlook of tsarist officials in the steppe governor-generalship: the local administration should deal with the religious affairs of “Asiatic inorodtsy” not “in the form of law, but by means of administrative orders, not to be openly promulgated in the manner established for laws.” Secrecy was necessary, it explained, “because any restrictions on religious freedom and constraints on the clergy may easily be understood and interpreted as the persecution of Islam and religious intolerance, which [would be] awkward for our influence in neighboring Mus- lim countries of eastern and southern Asia.”77

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stealthy “ad- ministrative orders” played an increasingly important role. They be- came the primary means for closing mosques and Islamic schools and for taking clerics under police surveillance and arrest. Gover- nors and local police claimed to leave intact the narrow legal basis for toleration, but they simultaneously used the cover of administra- tive fiat to restrict the practice of Islam without openly undermining the geopolitical goals that they associated with toleration.

Officials shifted toward a policy of close regulation and surveil- lance of a small number of state-approved mullahs among the Ka- zakhs in the 1890s, but debates continued about the relative weight of custom and religion. In 1890 the official Kazakh Steppe Paper ran an editorial that asked, “Is the court of elders necessary for the

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Kazakhs?” The editorial answered in the affirmative, maintaining that the resolution of disputes before “a court of biys and senior men” was a natural extension of Kazakh domestic life, where “all quarrels, insults, fights, and other squabbles” were resolved by re- course to this institution. “Each biy and elder regards it as a sacred duty at the hearing of a case to render the litigants completely im- partial justice,” it argued. The editorial contrasted the calm and or- der of the court of biys to the raucous procedure of “our lowest po- lice instances,” which the Kazakhs regarded as “wild” and “feared . . . like fire,” and argued that only this type of court was “thinkable” under such conditions, instructing its readers to “rejoice, that the Kazakhs are attached to their own popular customs to such an extent that for the adjudication and resolution of affairs they resort to them, and not to the shari‘a.” The editorial offered the optimistic assertion that members of the horde turned to the mullah and the shari‘a only in cases involving inheritance and divorce, whereas they brought all other disputes and suits before “distinguished figures” who adjudi- cated these cases “according to popular customs.”78

Other Russian observers rejected this portrait of the vitality of cus- tomary justice among the Kazakhs. In 1892 an expert on Muslim le- gal affairs who had worked a number of years in administration in the Caucasus pleaded in the Journal of Civil and Criminal Law against officials’ tendency “to idealize the patriarchal charm of the customary court.” N. A. Dingel’shtedt maintained that the “privi- lege” of living “according to adat” had left “the people and the Kazakhs in particular dissatisfied with their own court.” Since 1867, he argued, the people had found neither impartial justice nor any- thing “customary” in these courts. In place of “ancient adat,” Ka- zakhs confronted “some kind of mixture, where there are fragments of both the shari‘a and Russian laws, but [where] the main element is represented by arbitrariness.”79

Dingel’shtedt departed from received opinion among officials in

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the steppe and Turkestan governor-generalships when he declared that the “customary court had had its day” and that the court of the justice of the peace should at last replace it. Dingel’shtedt was among the few Russian authorities who viewed the period since the establishment of tsarist administration as a time of uncertainty and discord in which novel conflicts troubled Kazakh communities. Many Kazakhs had adapted to new forms of sedentary life, while reg- ulations and administrative practice had unwittingly transformed their courts, which were now “customary in name alone.” Where Kazakhs once invited a biy to resolve disputes among them, elec- tions introduced by tsarist legislation produced “government biys confirmed by the governor and decorated with a special badge.” Dingel’shtedt portrayed this change as “an almost total betrayal of custom.” Much more important, he maintained, it had caused “the decline of justice,” so that “several million people dream with mel- ancholy of finding not so much the lost adat as a fair court and jus- tice.”80

By the end of the nineteenth century, growing numbers of Ka- zakhs sought permission to opt out of the “customary” justice criti- cized by Dingel’shtedt. Rejecting a form of customary law in which Russian bureaucrats played a dominant role, these demands also centered on changes in tsarist policy toward religion. Numerous Kazakhs called for a separate institution headed by a mufti in the steppe from at least 1888, when discussion of projected changes to the statute on the administration of the steppe regions provoked de- bate both within and outside the bureaucracy.

Petitioners calling themselves the “Ural and Orenburg Elders” de- manded the right to apply a uniform and systematic Islamic law un- der a muftiate. These Kazakh elders imagined this institution explic- itly as a guardian of the shari‘a. It would also perform some functions related to ecclesiastical control, but its chief task would be to combat the reign of “custom” where it conflicted with the shari‘a. The elders

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backed their request by appealing to immemorial tradition. “For ages, we, the Kazakh people of the Muhammadan faith,” their peti- tion explained, “had made use of the decisions of muftis and kadis of those khanates in whose vicinity we lived.”81 They had turned to the Islamic jurists and judges of Tashkent, Turkestan, Samarkand, Kokand, and Khiva for the resolution of religious questions. After the Kazakhs “became subjects of His Imperial Majesty,” they no longer had a mufti of their own, though they had expected the regime to provide them with one. The absence of an Islamic jurisconsult had resulted in “defects in our shari‘a matters.” Though the temporary statute had permitted the selection of official mullahs for each ad- ministrative township, the petition complained, these mullahs “do not merit the appointment” because their educational preparation had not been certified by a mufti.

But it was the anarchic state of marriage and the family that chiefly concerned these petitioners. Widows used the permission of state authorities to remarry without regard for the waiting period es- tablished by Islamic law. Women had also been turning to these of- ficials to receive divorce papers “without any inquiries on the basis of the shari‘a.” Similarly, they charged, individual family members were inserting officials in the middle of inheritance cases in order to secure sanction for the denial of inheritance shares to their broth- ers. The elders also challenged practices long defended by many Kazakhs and others as central to immemorial custom: they casti- gated the continuation of a controversial practice (often criticized in Russian official and public circles) whereby relatives compelled a widow to remarry into the family of her deceased husband and give up control of the inheritance left to her and her children.82

Their religious affairs suffered, the elders pointed out, because the decisions of the licensed mullah in each township had “no power, due to the mullah’s lack of rights.” The temporary statute had weak- ened “the power of his decisions,” referred to here as “fatwas,” by al-

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lowing cases to be transferred to a civil jurisdiction in the event that both litigants remained dissatisfied with the handling of their case according to the shari‘a. Meanwhile, biys decided cases contrary to the shari‘a, even though, their petition conceded, “cases decided by custom, but needing adjudication according to the shari‘a, should be decided in agreement with the spirit of the one and the other.” To re- solve these difficulties, the petitioners called for a “single, learned person empowered to resolve controversies of every kind among our mullahs and to interpret the meaning of the shari‘a,” citing the examples of the early Islamic community, when the Prophet adju- dicated all disputes among his followers, and of Abu Hanifa, the founder of the eponymous school of legal interpretation to which most Muslims of the empire belonged. Finally, the Ural and Oren- burg Elders tried to support their case for their own muftiate by dem- onstrating that the condition of Islam among the Kazakhs had much improved. They enjoyed the services of “quite good mullahs, ma- drasas, [and] mosques,” their children studied, and worthy ishans led followers in the Sufi path, “so that the fulfillment of religious rites is much better than before.” “Charity and good works” on behalf of the poor deserved a place among this people as among others.83

Officials dismissed this and similar demands from Ka- zakh notables for a steppe muftiate. As police resorted to administra- tive measures to close Kazakh mosques and arrest clerics, Kazakhs is- sued more frequent demands for a reevaluation of their legal status and mobilized petition campaigns in defense of mosques and ma- drasas. In the early twentieth century, Kazakhs pointed to assaults on laws guaranteeing “freedom of religion” as a violation of their “rights.” In addition to the encroachment of Slavic settlers on their grazing lands, restrictions on Kazakh access to clerics and Islamic education increased tensions in the steppe.

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In abandoning its search for allies among steppe Muslims in the 1850s and 1860s, the state had departed from established practice in the territory under the Orenburg Assembly, in the Crimea, and, from 1872, in Transcaucasia. At the same time, this new direction put tsarist practice more in tune with new policies in the Northern Caucasus and with nearly contemporary European strategies, such as those of the French toward the Kabyle in North Africa and of the British toward the Punjabis in British India. Like the Russians in the Northern Caucasus, the French and British tried, without much success, to reinforce the secular custom of the tribe with the aim of supplanting—and guarding against—Islamic law. In the sec- ond half of the nineteenth century, Russians, too, were affected by changing European ideas about the incompatibility of Islam and what contemporaries understood to be progress and civiliza- tion. Tsarist administrators came to see that state reliance on Islam clashed with a new objective in the steppe—the cultural assimila- tion of the Kazakhs, their transformation into Russian speakers and Orthodox Christians.

Steppe officials were partially constrained by the basic principles of religious toleration in the tsarist law code. As even the opponents of Kazakh mosques and Islamic schools admitted, the toleration of Islam (albeit limited) in the steppe remained a useful means to in- fluence opinion in neighboring Islamic lands that might, with time, be persuaded to submit to the empire with the promise of protection for the Muslim faith. Moreover, officials remained bound to the practice of affirming orthodox Islam outside of the steppe. Steppe authorities denied Kazakhs full toleration as Muslims because their religion did not appear to correspond to the normative definition of Islam as these bureaucrats knew it: pastoralists could not be true Muslims because they lacked mosques and a clergy like Muslims in Kazan or Istanbul.

Through each of these policy shifts, official thinking remained

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flexible. When evidence emerged of growing Kazakh attachment to the shari‘a, recourse to itinerant mullahs, and potential unrest due to restrictions on mullahs and Islamic law, the state fell back on an improvised policy of regulating Muslim institutions, though with the use of clandestine administrative tools. By the end of the nine- teenth century, steppe police found themselves once again involved in monitoring appointments to mosques and schools and even in ad- judicating disputes among Muslim Kazakhs.84 Although these ar- rangements restored some continuity to tsarist policy toward Islam, they failed to achieve close ties to local communities like authorities had forged in other Muslim regions of the empire. Such measures weakened the ability of the regime to police the Kazakhs and direct the course of colonization there. In Kazakh communities that had only a single mullah, children could not study the fundamentals of religion, and the shari‘a did not govern the Muslim family. There the state planted shallow roots, scattering seeds of volatility on the horizon.

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