Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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10
Islam in the Russian Empire
vladimir bobrovnikov
Islam in tsarist Russia has been studied in the Cambridge History for more
than a century. Together with more recent scholarship in Russia and abroad,
these works have produced a substantial body of literature focusing chiefly
on the topics of Muslim resistance to Russian expansion, and controversies
between Islamic ‘reformism’ (jadidism) and ‘traditionalism’ (qadimism).
1
Of
course, these problems were of great importance for specific Muslim regions
in limited historical periods. But they do not exhaust all the diversity of topics
concerning Islam in the imperial context. Moreover, both themes used to be
approached according to misleading nationalist and modernist conceptions.
Taking Islam and the Russian empire for natural antagonists, such a vision
relied on the Orientalist approach representing Islam as a homogeneous and
timeless entity opposing all non-Muslim cultures. In reality, Islam and the
empire seemed to have interacted with each other more often than they
engaged in conflict.
Tsarist Russia brought under its control numerous diverse populations
inhabiting traditionally Muslim lands in the Volga-Ural region, western Siberia,
the North Caucasus and Central Asia. The Volga-Ural region was Islamised
more than other Muslim lands of the empire. In the North Caucasus, Siberia
and the Kazakh steppe a gradual Islamisation continued until the first half of
the nineteenth century. The century and a half from the 1730s until the mid-
1880s was a period of rapid growth and shift for both the polity and Muslim
communities within it. At the end of the nineteenth century Russia housed a
I would like to thank Sergey Abashin, Dmitri Arapov, Allen Frank, Michael Kemper and
Paul Werth, whose critical comments on earlier drafts of this survey improved the final
version immeasurably. I am also very grateful to Dominic Lieven and Vera Prokhorova
for the corrections of the English text.
1 Typical of this approach are A. Bennigsen, Les Mouvements nationaux chez les musulmans
de Russie: le ‘Sultangalievisme’ au Tatarstan (Paris: Mouton, 1960); A. Rorlich, The Volga
Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); R. G.
Landa, Islam v istorii Rossii (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1995).
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Islam in the Russian Empire
diverse population of some 14 million Muslims (out of a total population of
150 million subjects).
In response to the challenges of Russian rule local forms of Islam were
changing. The history of Islam in Imperial Russia can be roughly divided
into four periods. The first continued from Peter I’s reign (1682–1725) until
the late 1760s. While oscillating between relative toleration and missionary
attacks against non-Orthodox confessions, the government had no distinct
Muslim policy yet. The second period started under Catherine II (r. 1762–96)
and finished in the middle of the nineteenth century. It resulted in the acknowl-
edgement of Islam and the creation of official Islamic hierarchies. The third
period was related to the Great Reforms and continued until the beginning
of the twentieth century. The confessional policy became more complicated
and contradictory. Different projects of constructing a Muslim clergy came
into tension with one another. In the fourth period (1905–17) between the two
Russian revolutions Islam acquired a new political dimension. It was a time
of new fears and expectations of Islam both in the central government and in
regional elites.
There were some constants characterising the position of Islam during the
imperial period. Most of the Russian Muslims belonged to the Hanafi religious
legal school in Sunni Islam. Historically, Shafi‘is were dominant in Dagestan
and Chechnia only. The majority of Muslims in Transcaucasia and a number of
congregations in Central Asia belonged to Shi‘is. Muslim identity was granted
by membership in mosque congregations, which were mostly rural and often
scattered among larger non-Muslim populations. Basic Islamic institutions
included Friday and daily mosques, primary (maktab) and/or higher (madrasa)
mosque schools, as well as Sufi lodges with their own schools or khanaqahs
(holy places). All these institutions are often taken for granted. But in fact,
they did not constitute a ‘standard equipment’ for a Muslim community, as
Allen Frank has shown for the Volga-Ural region.
2
None of these institutions
was funded by the state. Depending on private funding they disappeared if
it stopped. Waqf foundations (property donated in perpetuity to a charitable
purpose) were not widespread in Inner Russia and had no tax-exempt status.
Muslim congregations settled their own religious and to some extent judi-
cial matters. Their autonomy was often taken for isolation from the outside
non-Muslim world. Actually Muslim communities maintained regular con-
nections throughout Russia and outside it, in particular with Islamic centres in
2 A. J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk
District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780–1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), pp. 176–210, 278–91.
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Transoxiana, Mogul India and the Middle East. Their main channels were pil-
grimage and exchange of Muslim students and scholars. The religious leader
of a community was the mullah (imam), known also as khatib. He conducted
the five daily prayers, pronounced the Friday sermon (khutba) and ensured
that the month of Ramadan and religious feasts were properly observed. In
addition, he could teach in mosque school as mudarris and resolve disputes
between community members as Muslim lawyer (qadi). But usually mullah
and qadi were different religious figures. The highest office in the Muslim
administration at the district (uezd) level was held by a specialist in shari‘a
law known as akhund (or akhun). He was elected by the community and then
appointed by a Russian governor of the province.
Supervising the political loyalty of Muslim elites, the Russian administrators
and central government did not meddle in the religious affairs of the Muslim
communities. Peter I and his successors of the first half of the eighteenth
century followed these principles of governance dating back to the reign of
Ivan IV’s son, Fedor Ioanovich (r. 1584–98). Adherents of all non-Orthodox
faiths were granted a moderated toleration, if they were ‘loyal subjects, good
tax-payers and soldiers’ of the empire. Members of the Muslim military elite
(mirzas/murzas) had entered the Russian nobility (dvorianstvo) under Mus-
covite rule. Some noble families like the Tevkelevs and Enikeevs remained
Muslims. In exchange for military and other services on the frontiers, the
Bashkir troops retained noble status and a degree of internal self-government.
On the other hand, Muslims were viewed with suspicion. Though Islam
had never been outlawed, conversion to Christianity was always encouraged.
From the fifteenth century onwards it was common for the Muslim elites to
convert to Orthodoxy and become Russiannobles (boiare, dvoriane). Godunovs,
Iusupovs, Urusovs, Tenishevs and dozens of other Orthodox noble families
were of Muslim origin. Muslims were attracted to Christianity by various
material and legal benefits or a fear of loss of privileged status. Sometimes
new converts received direct payment in money and goods. In return for
baptism, Peter I offered a three-year tax break, freedom from the military
draft and work in state factories. A decree of 1713 forced the Muslim nobility in
Kazan and Azov provinces either to be deprived of their estates and Orthodox
serfs or to convert to Christianity.
Given the absence of a specific code of laws relating to Muslims, state
policy towards Islam was in flux. Campaigns of forceful conversion followed
periods of toleration. The position of Russian Muslims worsened under Anna
Ioanovna (r. 1730–40) and Elizabeth Petrovna (r. 1741–61), when a mission-
ary campaign was launched in the Volga region. Beginning in 1731, with the
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Islam in the Russian Empire
establishment of the Commission for the Affairs of New Converts (Komissiia
novokreshchenykh del), headed by the Priest Aleksei Raifsky, Orthodox mission-
aries baptised about 8,000 Muslims in Kazan and Nizhnii Novgorod provinces.
In 1740–64 the Office for the Affairs of New Converts (Novokreshchenaia kontora)
worked under the direction of Archbishop Luka Kanashevich of Kazan in the
town of Sviiazhsk. Between 1740 and 1744 missionaries destroyed 418 of the
536 mosques in Kazan province.
3
Construction of new mosques was outlawed
(1742). Since many baptised Muslims (novokreshchenye) continued practising
Islam secretly, severe penalties were set up. For instance, in 1738 Orenburg gov-
ernor and historian V. N.Tatishchev ordered Toigil’da Zhuliakov to be burned
alive for ‘having been seduced to Muhammedan law again’.
A new period in the history of Islam in Russia began under Catherine II. The
empress continued Peter I’s conquests along the Black and Caspian seashores.
The most crucial acquisitions of her reign were Poland and Lithuania (1772,
1793, 1795), Crimea and the north-western Caucasus (1783), Dagestan’s lowlands
and eastern Transcaucasia (1796). These huge annexations introduced into
the polity numerous Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean
khanate, and the khanates and mountaineers’ confederations in the North
Caucasus and Transcaucasia, as well as from the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth. The authorities had to decide how to govern them.
Especially in the North Caucasus, Muslim elites loyal to the state encoun-
tered militant Islamic movements. Also, having been expelled from their lands
which were occupied by Russian fortresses and Cossack settlements, some ini-
tially loyal Muslims turned against the Russians. In 1785–90 a Chechen named
Ushurma, generally known as Sheikh or Imam Mansur (‘Victorious’), defeated
Russian troops in a number of battles. He used to be regarded as the first
militant Naqshbandi Sufi sheikh in the region. However, as Anna Zelkina has
shown, whether he was a Sufi or not, Mansur appealed to universal Sufi and
Islamic principles in attempting to consolidate mountaineers’ communities
around the shari‘a.
4
He headed the army of ghazis and sided with Ottoman
troops operating by the Black Sea shore. In 1791 Ushurma was captured in
Anapa, then sent to St Petersburg and imprisoned in the Shlisselburg fortress,
where he died in 1794.
3 E. A. Malov, ‘O tatarskikh mechetiakh v Rossii’, Pravoslavnyi sobesednik (1867), no. 3: 297.
See also Polnoe sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedaniia
Rossiiskoi imperii, 2nd series, vol. II (St Petersburg, 1872), no. 662.
4 A. Zelkina, In Quest for God and Freedom: Sufis Responses to the Russian Advance in the North
Caucasus (London: Hurst, 2000), p. 67. See also: A. Bennigsen, ‘Un mouvement populaire
au Caucase au XVIIIe si
`
ecle. La ‘Guerre Sainte’ du sheikh Mansur (1785–1791), page mal
connue et controvers
´
ee des relations russo-turques’, CMRS 5, 2 (1964): 175–9.
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Given the importance of Islam as a means of Muslim political mobilisation,
Catherine II changed the state’s confessional policies. The empress launched
a new policy of toleration of Islam and other non-Orthodox faiths. In 1773 her
famous ‘Toleration to All Faiths’ edict became law. Its purpose was mainly
to grant Islam legally recognised status. The construction of mosques was
permitted all over Russia. The empress’s Manifesto issued on 8 April 1783 con-
firmed a general trend towards the toleration of Islam. The state promised
the Muslims of Crimea ‘to protect and defend their lives, temples and natu-
ral faith’.
5
Later the same freedom was granted to other conquered Muslim
populations, like Lithuanian Tatars in Poland in 1795.
The government moderated the militant activities of Orthodox missionar-
ies. In 1764 the Office for the Affairs of New Converts was closed. Instead, the
authorities attempted to attract Muslim military and religious elites to empire’s
cause. According to the edict of 1784, Muslim princes and murzas were granted
noble status and privileges (except that they could not own Christian serfs) in
exchange for military or civil service. The state was engaged in mosque con-
struction. In 1769 Catherine II charged D. I. Chicherin, the governor of Siberia,
with building mosques for Central Asian (‘Bukharan’) migrants. In 1782 anew,
more ambitious programme was funded to build a series of mosques along the
Kazakh steppe acquired by the empire between 1731 and 1743. Tatar mullahs
were sent to propagate Islam among ‘wild nomads’ of the region. According
to the empress’s edict, the first Arabic version of the Koran was printed in
1787 under the supervision of the Tatar mullah Usman Ismail. Between 1789
and 1798 five successive editions of the Koran appeared, the last one in 3,600
copies. A Muslim state publishing house had been established in St Petersburg
and later moved to the town of Kazan (1802).
Both the causes and the effects of this confessional policy were misunder-
stood by the nineteenth-century missionaries, who criticised it. Catherine II
was held responsible for ‘Islamisation’ of Kazakhs and other ‘animist’ tribes.
She was supposed to have overestimated the role of Islam in Russia’s Orient.
6
But the Kazakh nomads became Muslim much earlier. Their Islamic insti-
tutions were less formal than among the sedentary populations, hence less
comprehensible to the empire’s functionaries and scholars. The empress was
not fascinated with Islamic exotics. On the contrary, her policy was guided by
5 D. Iu. Arapov (ed.), Islam v Rossiiskoi imperii. (Zakonodatel’nye akty, opisaniia, statistika)
(Moscow: Akademkniga, 2001), p. 47. See also pp. 45–6.
6 For instance, see E. A. Malov, ‘O tatarskikh mechetiakh v Rossii’, p. 22; I. Altynsarin,
Izbrannye sochineniia (Alma-Ata: Izd. AN KSSR, 1957), pp. 315–27. A substantial critique of
this stereotype is in Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions,pp.274–313.
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Islam in the Russian Empire
quite pragmatic concerns. As Catherine II confessed herself, she aimed ‘not at
introduction of Muhammedanism’, but at using Islam as a ‘bait to catch a fish
with’, in order to attach Muslim borderlands to Russia.
According to the Enlightenment’s ideas, each faith was treated accord-
ing to its utility to the state: the more it contributed to the maintenance
of the empire, the more was the scope of toleration. The regime supported
mostly ‘enlightened’ forms of religion, fighting against sectarians, ‘superstition
and other abuses’. Obligatory enrolment in a religious community brought
almost all Russian subjects under state supervision. In principle all subjects
by law had an ascribed confessional affiliation. In terms of the well-known
Foucauldian approach, the turn to regulatory toleration under Catherine II
can be treated as the transition to religious discipline using Islamic affiliation
as the means of domination and projecting imperial power on its frontiers.
7
Another important shift in confessional policy concerned the creation of an
official Muslim hierarchy. The idea seemed to be conceived on the pattern of
both the Holy Synod, and the modified mufti establishment in the Ottoman
Empire. As Dmitri Arapov and Robert Crews argued, the Ottoman experience
in administering Islam was seriouslystudied in tsarist Russia.
8
On 22 September
1788, the Orenburg Assembly (its full name was Orenburgskoe magometanskoe
dukhovnoe sobranie or OMDS) was set up by a decree of Catherine II.
9
In non-
official usage it was also called muftiate. Next year the office was opened
in Ufa. In 1796 it moved to Orenburg but returned to Ufa in 1802. OMDS
was responsible for opening and registration of mosque congregations in
St Petersburg, Moscow, Inner Russia, the Volga-Ural region and Siberia. The
Kazakh steppe was also placed under its jurisdiction in 1788–1868.
Based on both shari‘a and imperial laws, the Orenburg Assembly worked as
a kind of Muslim Supreme Court and issued legal decisions (fatwas) in matters
of marriage and divorce, inheritance, burial, as well as appointments of imams
7 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Penguin, 1977). For a useful discussion of regulatory toleration in tsarist Russia after
Catherine’s reign, see R. Crews, ‘Empire and Confessional State: Islam and Religious
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, AHR 108, 1 (2003): 50–83.
8 Crews, ‘Empire and Confessional State’, p. 57; D. Iu. Arapov, ‘Imperskaia politika v oblasti
gosudarsvennogo regulirovaniia islama na Severnom Kavkaze v XIX – nachale XX vv.’,
in I. L. Babich and L. T. Solov’eva (eds.), Islam i pravo v Rossii (Moscow: Izd. Rossiiskogo
universiteta druzhby narodov, 2004), vol. I, p. 24. The tsarist Islamic hierarchy followed
not so much Ottoman institutions, as their image constructed in the eighteenth-century
Orthodox ecclesiology. See F. A. Emin, Kratkoe opisanie drevnego i noveishego sostoianiia
Ottomanskoi porty (St Petersburg, 1769); Sokrashchenie Magometanskoi very (Moscow, 1784).
9 Arapov, Islam v Rossiiskoi imperii,pp.50–3, 205–8. For a thorough study of this institution
see D. D. Azamatov, Orenburgskoe magometanskoe dukhovnoe sobranie v kontse XVIII–XIX vv.
(Ufa: Ufimskii nauch. tsentr RAN, 1999).
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Non-Russian nationalities
and mosque building. The assembly staff included a council of three qadis
nominally headed by a mufti. In principle all members of the assembly were
supposed to be elected, but in practice Ufa’s governors appointed the mufti.
So religious as well as legal practices of Muslims were placed under state
control. Sufi networks were not legally recognised and hence not brought
under the control of the OMDS. Mosques, madrasas and waqf properties were
also beyond its direct authority and were regulated by the civil authorities in
provinces.
A more regulated pattern of confessional policy, fashioned according to
principles of the well-ordered police state (Polizeistaat),
10
was adopted under
Alexander I (r. 1801–25) and Nicholas I (r. 1825–55). Following the consistorial
pattern of Napoleonic France, Mikhail Speranskii, the influential adviser to
Alexander I, created a Department of Spiritual Affairs in order to ‘protect rites
of all the Russian and foreign faiths’. In 1810 the Main Directorate of Religious
Affairs of Foreign Confessions was set up and in 1832 turned into the Depar-
tament dukhovnykh del inostrannykh ispovedanii (DDDII) within the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, the most important ministry in the imperial government.
From the 1830s the ministry was responsible for maintaining the ‘principle of
religious toleration as far as this toleration corresponded to state interest’.
Its third division was charged with supervision over the Orenburg Assembly.
It is noteworthy that one petition from Orenburg mullahs in 1863 addressed
the minister of the interior as the ‘Minister of Interior and Muslim Religious
Affairs’.
11
While the administration provided new mechanisms of social control, the
law reinforced dependence of Muslim religious elites on the imperial admin-
istration. Towards the end of Nicholas I’s reign, laws and instructions as they
concerned Islam were compiled into a single Muslim statute drafted as a part
of the Statute of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions (Ustav dukhovnykh del
inostrannykh ispovedanii). It was published soon after the emperor’s death, in
1857. The application of Islamic law was limited. The use of corporal punish-
ment for alcohol drinking, theft and adultery according to the shari‘a criminal
law (al-hadd) was abolished. Beginning in 1828, village and town imams were
forced to compile registers (metricheskie knigi) of all marriage contracts, deaths
and legitimate births which happened in their communities. These registers
were used for tax rolls and were overseen by the Spiritual Assembly.
10 See M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in
the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
11 Materialy po istorii Tatarii vtoroi poloviny XIX veka: Agrarnyi vopros i krest
´
ıanskoe dvizhenie
50–70-kh godov XIX v. (Moscow and Leningrad: Izd. AN SSSR, 1936), p. 166.
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Islam in the Russian Empire
Under Nicholas I, Polizeistaat laws attempted to manage even symbolic
expressions of Islam. In 1829 Nicholas I himself approved a single design for
all future mosques of Russia inspired by the contemporary Orthodox Church
architecture. A decree of 1844 established mosques’ obligatory plan and loca-
tion. Mosques were to be constructed in settlements’ squares at a distance of
100 sazhen from the nearest church. It was allowed to build one mosque per
200 male Muslims. The more liberal government of Alexander II abandoned
obligatory model plans for mosques in 1862.
In the reign of Nicholas I the government became more anxious about an
unprecedented degree of power concentrated in the hands of the new Muslim
elites. In order to reduce the importance of the Orenburg Assembly, the second
Tauride Directorate (Tavricheskoe magometanskoe dukhovnoe pravlenie or TMDP)
was established. It had been envisaged in 1794 under Catherine II on the basis of
the former Ottoman offices of mufti, qadi-asker, etc., but was finally set up only
on 23 December 1831 in Simferopol’ in Crimea.
12
This office had jurisdiction
over the Muslim communities in Crimea, on the north shore of the Black Sea,
and in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rech’ Pospolitaia).
The Tauride Directorate was designed along the lines of the Orenburg
Assembly, following its main functions and personnel. It was headed by a mufti
and included five district (uezd) qadis, and a mufti’s assistant known under the
title of qadi-asker dating back to the Crimean khanate rule. In the TMDP a more
strict hierarchy of Muslim religious elites was set up. Village and town imams,
known as khatibs and mullahs, were put under the control of the district qadi
who in his turn obeyed the orders of the directorate. Contrary to the OMDS,
sheikhs of Sufi lodges were also included in the Muslim elite. In Crimea waqfs
were recognised and brought under the control of the directorate. Later they
were put under the control of the state.
How did Muslim religious elites respond to the challenges of tsarist policy in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? The toleration laws and recognition
of Islam brought about the blossoming of Muslim societies and their institu-
tions, in particular the growth of mosques, Muslim schools and the appearance
of a dynamic Muslim nobility and commercial bourgeoisie in the Volga-Ural
region and western Siberia. In 1911, the official statistics counted 6,144 mosques
in the OMDS’s jurisdiction and 845 mosques registered by the TMDP. Their
staff included respectively 12,341 and 981 licensed qadis, mudarrises, mullahs
and mu’adhdhins.
13
Only a few mosques were built or subsidised by the state.
12 Arapov, Islam v Rossiiskoi imperii,pp.58, 197–205, 247–50.
13 M. F. Farkhshatov, ‘Musul’manskoe dukhovenstvo’, in S. M. Prozorov (ed.), Islam na
territorii byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1999), fasc. 2,p.72.
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Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing until the early twenti-
eth century, Muslim elites were involved in lively discussions, touching upon
religious, social and political innovations affecting the Muslim communities
at large. In these discussions modern imperial issues were referred to through
traditional Islamic literary genres. The common Islamic learning was based
on a network of local Islamic institutions. Michael Kemper has termed these
kinds of debates ‘Islamic discourse’.
14
The crucial theme of Islamic discourse was the legitimacy of the Orenburg
Assembly, which was not accepted by all the Volga-Ural ‘ulama’. Some of
them, like Muhammedzhan Husainov, the first Orenburg mufti, supported
a new Islamic hierarchy recognising the empire as the ‘world of Islam’ (dar
al-Islam). The other Muslim scholars and Sufis considered the power of muftis
‘unpermitted innovations’ (bida’) from the Islamic point of view. An anti-
mufti position was most strongly defended in the works of the Sufi Abd al-
Rahman Utyz-Imani (or al-Bulghari, 1754–1835) and some Bashkir abyzes. The
most prominent anti-mufti movement was the Vaisov brotherhood founded
by a famous Tatar, Sufi Baha al-Din Vaisov (d. 1893) and later led by his son
Inan al-Din (d. 1918). It is interesting that they called themselves the ‘Blessed
community’ (firqa-yi najiyya) or ‘Vaisov’s Holy Regiment of the Old Believer
Muslims’ (Vaisov bozhii polk musul’man-staroverov) evoking the Old Belief that
they praised for rejecting ‘unpermitted innovations’ in Orthodoxy.
From the middle of the nineteenth century a new period in the history of
Islam in Russia began. The reign of Alexander II (r. 1855–81) was marked by
vast annexations of Muslim lands. Russian conquests in the Muslim East had
been completed by the mid-1880s. The end of the long Caucasian war (1864)
brought mountaineers of the North Caucasus under Russian rule. The last
acquisitions in western Armenia and southern Georgia (Muslim Lazistan) in
Transcaucasia dated from the Russian-Ottoman war of 1877–8. Between 1862
and 1885 the Russians conquered Central Asia. The khanates of Kokand, Khiva
and Bukhara were annexed. While the first was abolished, Khiva and Bukhara
were turned into Russian protectorates.
Some peoples and rulers accepted the imposition of Russian rule, while
others opposed the Russian presence in different ways. Forms of Muslim resis-
tance in the borderlands included revolts, raids into Russian lands, as well as
massive exodus to Iran and the Ottoman Empire. North-Caucasian ‘ulama’
14 M. Kemper, Sufis und Gelehrte in Tatarien und Baschkirien, 1789–1889. Der islamische Diskurs
unter russischer Herrschaft (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1998), S. 473–75. On criticism
by Tatar ‘ulama’ of the Orenburg Assembly within the regional Islamic discourse see
pp. 50–61, 66–70, 290–9.
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Islam in the Russian Empire
and the rulers of Bukhara and Kokand proclaimed ‘holy war’ (ghazawat as a
form of jihad) against Russian conquerors. In Dagestan and Chechnia an ima-
mate state emerged at the end of the 1820s. As Moshe Gammer and Michael
Kemper have shown,
15
it was based on shari‘a institutions and some changed
Sufi principles, notably murid-murshid relations borrowed from Sufi practices
and transformed into relations between a ruler and subjects in the jihad state.
Three successive imams, the most prominent of whom was Shamil (r. 1834–59),
involved village communities in the united administrative network, a principle
that was continued by the imperial authorities after the defeat of the imamate
in 1859. Shamil’s activities greatly resembled those of the emir Abdelkader in
French Algeria.
The imperial vision of Islam shifted once more. There appeared fears of
an Islamic threat. Encountering Muslim resistance in the borderlands, the
government became especiallyanxious about Sufism. The Russians mistakenly
took the jihad state for a Sufi network. They regarded different Sufi orders
and their lodges as branches of a ‘single anti-Russian movement’. The Muslim
resistanceof the North Caucasian mountaineers against Russia became famous
under the name of ‘M’uridism’.
16
Fears of Sufism provoked a number of anti-
Sufi decrees and persecutions. In 1836 Nicholas I forbade granting Sufi sheikhs
of ‘Asian origin’ Russian citizenship. They were prohibited to pass the Russian
frontier.
Despite the pacifist character of his teaching, the Qadiri sheikh Kunta-hajji
was arrested in Chechnia in 1863 and exiled to Nizhnii Novgorod province,
where he died in 1867. His followers were dispersed by Russian troops in the
village of Shali. Kunta-hajji’s movement was labelled ‘Zikrism’ after the Sufi
practice of loud prayer (dhikr) performed by his followers in contrast to ‘silent
dhikr’ adopted in the North-Caucasian branch of the Naqshbandiyya order. In
Inner Russia the Vaisov brotherhood was crushed in 1884. Its leader was put
into a madhouse and some members sentenced to hard labour in Siberia.
Under Alexander II and Alexander III (r. 1881–94) new fears about
Muslims emerged. There occurred a gradual re-evaluation of Islam. The ear-
lier confessional policy reflected the government’s indifference to knowledge
of Islam. Oriental studies (vostokovedenie), which had been launched in Rus-
sia by Peter I and flourished from the reign of Catherine II, were confined
15 M. Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Dagestan
(London: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 225–40; M. Kemper, ‘Khalidiyya Networks in Daghestan
and the Question of Jihad’, Die Welt des Islams 42, 1 (2002): 41–71.
16 A discussion of this notion in imperial practice and modern scholarship is examined in
V. O. Bobrovnikov, and M. Kemper, ‘M’uridism’, in M. S. Prozorov (ed.), Islam na territorii
byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, n.d.), fasc. 5.
211