http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/print/khal02_.html

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 10 dated 24 May 2007

Tolerating Islam
Adeeb Khalid


For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia by Robert
Crews · Harvard, 463 pp, £0.00

In 1902, Mirza Siraj Rahim, the son of a wealthy merchant from Bukhara, set
out on a grand tour that took him to all the major capitals of Europe. He
travelled first to the Ottoman Empire, and spent twenty days in Istanbul. He
was delighted to be in the capital of the only sovereign Muslim state of any
consequence, and a sense of Muslim pride is palpable in his account. Having
toured the sights, Mirza Siraj wanted to see the sultan, Abdülhamid II, in
person. Abdülhamid was a recluse, who emerged from his palace only once a
week, to say Friday prayers at an imperial mosque nearby. Attendance at the
mosque was limited to high functionaries and a few carefully chosen guests.

Bukhara had been subjugated by Russia in the 1860s. Having absorbed some of
its territory into the new province of Turkestan – roughly, present-day
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – the Russians established a protectorate over the
rest, leaving the emir on his throne, but taking charge of external
relations. So Mirza Siraj turned to the Russian Embassy, ‘the protector and
supporter of us Bukharans throughout the world’, for help in obtaining
admittance to the imperial mosque. He was received by the second secretary,
who talked to him about the attitude of the Bukharans to their Russian
overlords, and sent an official request to the Ottoman Foreign Ministry for
a laissez-passer for Mirza Siraj. The following Friday Mirza Siraj was able
to visit the mosque.

There was nothing unusual about this episode in the high age of empire, when
the vast majority of the world’s Muslims lived under European colonial rule,
for the most part peacefully. Indeed, they were more likely to wage war on
behalf of European empires (as they did during the First World War) than
against them. British consulates throughout the world offered similar
‘protection’ to the British Empire’s Muslim subjects, and France claimed to
be a ‘puissance musulmane’ when it came to fighting the Ottoman Empire in
1915. Like all other colonised populations, Muslims adapted to the imposed
new order, adopted it, appropriated it, and were profoundly shaped and
reshaped by it. It is salutary today, when the crassest notions of conflict
between civilisations dominate public debate, to remember that such conflict
is neither inevitable nor historically the norm.

What is interesting about the story of Mirza Siraj is that it pertains to
Russia, an empire usually dismissed as a ‘prison house of nations’ (the
phrase was coined by Lenin and shared by his critics). Russia has a long
history of interaction with Islam, and at the turn of the 20th century, its
empire included a very large Muslim population. That history is all too
often reduced to a simplistic narrative of brutal conquest followed by
ham-fisted rule. The episodes we call to mind are the prolonged and bloody
wars in the Caucasus in the 19th century, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in the late 20th, and the current conflict in Chechnya.

This is beginning to change. The Russian Empire has made a comeback since
the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Russia itself, the twin losses of
superpower status and of the Soviet narrative have resulted in a new
fondness for the country’s imperial past. The post-Soviet public holds up
the tsarist empire as proof that Russia was a great power with a glorious
history. Russians also look to the imperial past for lessons in how to deal
with contemporary concerns, with ethnic diversity, for example, or
regionalism or relations between religious communities. (Curiously, the
tsarist empire is imagined as an empire without colonies; the Soviet
critique of colonialism seems to have stuck to the extent of making them
seem undesirable.) Scholars outside Russia have turned to the empire for
different reasons. The Soviet Union collapsed just as multiculturalism had
become a major academic preoccupation in the West, especially in the United
States. Historians have explored the mechanisms that held the Russian Empire
together, and by drawing on the vast amount of untapped material in Russia’s
archives, have been able to reconfigure the country’s imperial past.

While there is no question that the Russian monarchy was deeply rooted in
Orthodox Christianity, the Russian state dealt with the religious
heterogeneity of its subjects in a variety of ways. In the late 18th
century, inspired by Enlightenment ideas, Catherine the Great issued an
edict of toleration for all ‘foreign’ faiths in the empire. Toleration was
not the same as freedom of conscience of course but rather a means of
ensuring order and harmony among unequals. All subjects of the empire were
required to belong to an assigned confessional category and were bound by
imperial law to obey the clergy of that faith.

But how were Muslims to be tolerated and governed? The Islamic tradition
didn’t have a religious hierarchy resembling that of a church, and no single
individual was qualified to pass final judgment on questions of belief or
practice. In Islam authority lies not with church councils and the like, but
with individuals who derive legitimacy from their learning, piety, lineage
and reputation among their peers. This gives Islam an anarchic quality: the
authoritative opinions (fatwa) of one expert or one group can be countered
with the equally authoritative opinions of another; a set of devotional
practices adhered to by one group can be denounced by another.

This made it difficult, though not impossible, to use Islam as an instrument
of rule. Muslim rulers had worked out ways of keeping those who had
religious authority reconciled to state power. Catherine tried something
much more audacious (and modern). She established a ‘spiritual assembly’, an
institution that was both a church and a bureaucratic organ: in effect, a
Muslim counterpart to the Holy Synod, the body created by Peter the Great
earlier in the century to subordinate the Russian Orthodox Church to the
state. In the 20th century, many states, Muslim and non-Muslim, tried to
institutionalise Islam in this manner – Turkey has a Directorate of
Religious Affairs, France a Council of the Muslim Faith – but the Russian
attempt was the first.

Headed by a state-appointed mufti, the assembly was responsible for
licensing imams and overseeing the operations of mosques. Based in the
frontier town of Orenburg, its jurisdiction was limited to the empire’s
oldest Muslim communities, the Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga-Urals region
– today the Russian Federation’s republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.
The Russian Empire sought legitimacy in the eyes of its Muslim subjects by
claiming to be the upholder of Islamic values and the protector of Islam.
The Muslim scholars, the ulama, affiliated with the assembly came to see the
imperial state as a protector, and even the enforcer of their version of
orthodoxy, an orthodoxy formed through the confluence of the interests of
the ulama, the state and Russian Orientalists. For ordinary Tatars and
Bashkirs, the state, its courts, its bureaucracy and its police provided new
arenas in which to settle disputes, including disputes over matters of
faith. All this is a far cry from the myth of unbroken hostility between
Russia and Islam.

Robert Crews makes many of these points in his new book on Russia’s
management of its Muslim subjects from the reign of Catherine the Great
until 1917. Unfortunately, to make up for the sins of past generations,
Crews overcompensates. ‘The tsarist state,’ he writes, ‘lay at the heart of
Islam for most communities of the empire.’ Even in distant Turkestan, ‘the
tsarist regime functioned . . . as an arbiter of religious disputes.’ Taken
to this extreme, the argument is absurd. The bulk of the book’s evidence
comes from the archives of the Orenburg Assembly, and covers the middle
decades of the 19th century, but Crews insists on speaking more broadly of a
single ‘Islam policy’ that applied more or less across the board to all
Muslims in the Russian Empire throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the process, he bulldozes any subtlety, nuance or historical complexity
that might stand in his way. There is a great deal of evidence that he does
not utilise, and the evidence that he does present is often equivocal,
incapable of bearing the burden he places on it.

Russia had gathered its Muslims over the course of several centuries, and
different Muslim societies had been incorporated into the Russian state in
radically different circumstances, and on very different conditions. As a
result, they had vastly different legal statuses. The Volga-Urals region,
which had been under Russian rule since the middle of the 16th century, was
knitted into the administrative fabric of the empire, its population
integrated into imperial categories of rank and status, regardless of
religion. By the 19th century, Tatar nobles enjoyed all the rights of the
Russian nobility, and prosperous merchants occupied a key position in
Russia’s trade with Central Asia. The expansion of the late 18th and early
19th centuries brought many more Muslims into the empire. The annexation of
the Crimea in 1783 was followed by a mass exodus of the population to the
Ottoman Empire, but the aristocrats who stayed behind were absorbed into the
Russian nobility.

Conquests at the turn of the 19th century brought Russia into the Caucasus.
While Russian armies conquered the Transcaucasian principalities (including
present-day Azerbaijan) with relative ease, the peoples of the mountains
consumed Russian energies for the whole of the first half of the century.
Their final subjugation came only with the capture of their military and
spiritual leader, Shamil, in 1859, and the region remained under military
administration until the end of the old regime. Turkestan, conquered between
1864 and 1889, in the context of imperial competition with Britain, was
ruled more distantly still. The Russians found its heat and dust utterly
alien, and patterned their rule on the model of the French in Algeria and
the British in India.

In the Crimea and the Caucasus, the empire created spiritual assemblies
modelled on the assembly in Orenburg. In Turkestan, however, Islamic
practice remained beyond the control of the state; traditional patterns of
learning continued and even flourished. The ulama accommodated themselves to
the new political realities, but they were never brought under the
bureaucratic control of a spiritual assembly.

By the time the Russians conquered Turkestan, the notion of tolerance had
come under attack. Along with tolerance, the Enlightenment had brought the
concept of fanaticism to Russia, and Russian administrators in Turkestan
deemed Islam to be inherently ‘fanatical’: the question was how to curb or
contain the phenomenon. Konstantin von Kaufman, the first governor-general
of the province, forbade both Orthodox missionaries and functionaries of the
Orenburg Spiritual Assembly to enter his domain, on the grounds that both
had the potential of ‘igniting’ fanaticism. The goal instead was
ignorirovanie, a disregard of Islam on the part of the state that, Kaufman
thought, would lead to its withering. Kaufman died in 1882, and some of his
successors advocated greater regulation of Islam, but Turkestan’s
remoteness, physical and philosophical, and a general lack of resources
ensured that Russian rule sat lightly until the old regime expired.

Did Muslims really see the Russian state as a legitimate arbiter of disputes
and an enforcer of Islamic orthodoxy? It was one thing for the state to
attempt to create a ‘church’ for Islam; quite another for that attempt to
succeed. Most of Crews’s evidence for the success of the venture comes from
imperial documents. But the real evidence about what Muslims thought of the
assembly has to come from Muslim sources. Such evidence exists, but is to be
found in dusty old books in Muslim languages in Arabic script, and I’m not
sure that Crews has the skills required to use it. Historians who have done
serious work on the Muslim sources report that religious practice and
learning remained largely beyond the control of the state. Muslims could be
peaceful and loyal subjects of the empire, ready to use its institutions and
influence, as Mirza Siraj did, but without seeing religious significance in
any of it.

Indeed, in Islamic terms, the Orenburg Assembly’s authority was always
suspect. The first muftis were scholars, although not of the first rank, but
in the middle of the 19th century, the government began to appoint nobles
educated in Russia to the post. Why would an imam who had studied with
prestigious scholars in Bukhara feel compelled to heed the opinions of a
mufti appointed by the state? Many ulama had doubts about the authority and
legitimacy of the assembly and dealt with its bureaucracy only to the extent
that they needed to get paperwork done. The assembly did not in any case
claim jurisdiction over Muslim education or the intricate web of Sufi
practices that defined religion for most of the empire’s Muslims.

Yet for all that, the assembly became an important feature of Muslim public
life in the Volga-Urals region. At the turn of the 20th century, some even
sought to turn it into an elective body, and thus make it a platform for the
articulation of Tatar and Muslim interests within the empire. The assembly
survived into the Soviet period, but then everything changed drastically.
The Soviets, as we know, were suspicious of all religion, and during the
1920s and 1930s anti-religious activists and ‘militant atheists’, most of
them Muslim, destroyed mosques, madrasas and shrines, or took them over for
‘socially useful’ purposes; Islamic scholars, denounced as enemies of the
people and of Reason itself, were sent to labour camps or executed. In 1930,
the mufti Rizaetdin Fakhretdin pleaded with an official in the Kremlin that
‘the Tatar clergy was at the point of being expunged from the face of the
earth.’ In the end, it was a close-run thing. Islam survived, but it was
profoundly marked by the experience. What also survived was the Russian
imperial method of dealing with ‘foreign’ cults: Stalin even established a
‘spiritual administration’ in Central Asia. Today, ‘spiritual
administrations’ directly descended from the one created by Catherine in
Orenburg in 1788 continue to provide the state with the means of managing,
containing and supervising Islam. How well they succeed is open to question,
but they are a tangible legacy of Russia’s imperial past.

Adeeb Khalid teaches history at Carleton College in Minnesota. His Islam
after Communism has just been published.