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Non-Russian nationalities

mostly to the investigation of outside ‘classic’ Islam while neglecting its con-

temporary Russian forms. In the second half of the nineteenth century a

closer co-operation between the state and Orientalists occurred. It resulted

in the substantial growth of institutions and personnel familiar with Islam –

universities, scientiﬁc societies and museums. The Russians paid more atten-

tion to foreign models of colonial governance over Muslims such as French

Algeria, British India and Egypt. Knowledge of Islam, as has been argued in a

number of recent excellent studies on this matter,

became an important tool

of imperial governance.

At the forefront of this re-evaluation were missionaries and military ofﬁ-

cers. In this regard, Nikolai Il’minskii (1822–91), a professor of Turkic lan-

guages at Kazan University and the Anti-Muslim Missionary Division opened

in the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy in 1854, played a crucial role. Il’minskii,

Evﬁmii Malov, Gordii Sablukov and their students faulted the authorities for

their ignorance of the Islamic threat. They insisted on a meticulous study of

Islam, to combat ‘Muslim fanaticism’ in the Russian Orient. To carry out this

programme, eastern and especially indigenous languages as well as Islamic

scholarship were introduced into curricula at the Anti-Muslim Missionary

Division and the missionary schools. In 1870, under Il’minskii’s inﬂuence, the

government introduced a network of Russian Tatar schools for baptised Mus-

lims, where teaching was in Tatar. The same year Russo-Kazakh schools were

planned and soon opened to all Kazakhs.

There appeared a wave of Islamic literature and Orientalist criticism trans-

lated from different eastern and western languages. In 1845 A. K. Kazembeg,

a professor at Kazan University and the future dean of the Oriental Faculty

of St Petersburg University, published the shari’a compendium ‘Mukhtasar al-

wiqayat’. In 1850 Baron E. N. Tornau, a high ofﬁcial in Transcaucasia, compiled

‘An Outline of the Principles of Muslim Legal Science’ on French Orientalist

models. In 1875 Malov translated the ‘Critical Historical Introduction to the

Koran’ written by the German Orientalist G. Weil. The two ﬁrst direct trans-

lations of the Koran from Arabic were made by Sablukov (1878) and General

D. N. Boguslavskii (1871). In 1898 General N. I. Grodekov, the governor of Syr-

daria province, ordered the translation of the famous legal treatise ‘al-Hidaya’

17 R. D. Crews, ‘Allies in God’s Command: Muslim Communities and the State in Imperial

Russia’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University (1999); R. P. Geraci, Window

on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 2001); P. W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance and Confessional

Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).

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from its English version into Russian. These efforts fell perfectly into the cat-

egory which Edward Said has called a ‘philological Orientalism’.

Orientalist activities played an important but not hegemonic role in late

tsarist Russia. Inﬂuential liberal churchmen and ofﬁcials had never accepted

Il’minskii’s ideas. In 1870, in the reign of Alexander II, the Anti-Muslim Mis-

sionary Division was even closed, though again restored in 1884 under the

conservative Alexander III. New approaches to Islam were partly adopted by

the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The staff of the DDDII was drawn from Ori-

entalists of missionary or academic background. The department’s leading

consultant in the ﬁeld of Islamic law was Kazembeg, a Dagestani Persian of

Shi‘i origin converted to Presbyterianism in his youth. He and other academic

Orientalists, such as N. V. Khanykov, the eminent diplomat and high ofﬁcial in

the Caucasian viceroyalty (namestnichestvo), shared fears of militant Islam.

Imperial ofﬁcials were split into two factions. The ﬁrst insisted on the co-

option of Muslim religious elites into the state body. They argued for creating

new muftiates in annexed Muslim regions. The opposite faction discouraged

the creation of muftiates, pointing out the danger of concentrating power in

the hands of ‘anti-Russian fanatically minded mullahs’, as the inﬂuential war

minister D. A. Miliutin (1861–81) put it once.

The adherents of the second

faction supported thehands-offpolicy requesting‘disregardof thelocal Muslim

clergy’. The ﬁrst approach was backed up by the powerful Ministry of Internal

Affairs that attempted to spread its network through the DDDII over all the

Muslims of the empire. The second approach was more popular in the War

Ministry, which supervised Muslims in the borderlands. The situation actually

was even more complicated. Both factions existed in each ministry and among

different functionaries in provinces.

Ofﬁcials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs launched an ambitious pro-

gramme aiming toturn different groups of the Muslim religious elites (‘ulama’)

into a uniﬁed imperial estate (soslovie). Given the absence of Church and

clergy as such in Islam, imperial lawmakers ‘invented’ them in the frame-

work of previously established muftiates. Mosque congregations were turned

into ‘parishes’ (prikhod) modelled in the Orthodox fashion. Like Orthodox

priests in the bureaucratised hierarchy of the Holy Synod, loyal Muslim

‘ulama’ were co-opted into the imperial administration at village, district and

provincial levels, which granted them the privileged status of ‘Muslim clergy’

18 E. Said, Orientalism, 2nd edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995), p. 285.

19 D. Iu. Arapov, ‘D. A. Miliutin o “musul’manstve”’, Aktual’nye problemy gumanitarnykh,

sotsial’nykh, ekonomicheskikh i tekhnicheskikh nauk, vyp. 2,t.2 (Moscow, 2003): 227.

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(musul’manskoe dukhovenstvo). They were exempted from corporal punish-

ment and military draft. Muslim religious titles were included in the Table

of Ranks and divided into two separate groups. Mu’adhdhins and imams of

daily and Friday mosques known as mullahs belonged to junior clerics. Muftis,

qadis, akhunds and the qadi-asker in Crimea constituted the higher ‘Muslim

clergy’.

The position of the ‘Muslim clergy’ in the Orenburg Assembly differed from

that in the Tauride Directorate. In Crimea the ‘Muslim clergy’ became a more

closed estate group. Only male descendants of the local ‘ulama’ got access to

it. In the Orenburg Assembly lower and higher clergy formed two separate

groups. Junior clerics had no tax-exempt status and were ascribed to peasant

and townsfolk (meshchane) estates like members of their community. Only

senior clerics received a tax-free status. Their long service was rewarded by

personal noble status. Akhunds and mufti werepaid bythe assembly. The status

of a ‘Muslim cleric’ was available to every educated Muslim. A candidate had

to travel to the town of Ufa to pass an examination which tested his knowledge

of basic Islamic sciences and practices. Upon passing the exam candidates were

granted a licence (ukaz), and became known as ukaznoi mulla or mu’adhdhin.

Thenumberof regional Muslim hierarchies multiplied. Twomoremuftiates

were created in Tiﬂis on 5 April 1872. These were the Shi‘i and Sunni Transcau-

casian Directorates (their full ofﬁcial titles were Zakavkazskie magometanskie

dukhovnye pravleniia shiitskogo i sunnitskogo uchenii or ZMDP).

Like the other

muftiates they were charged with religious, legal and educational affairs of

Muslims. Contrary to the Orenburg Assembly, the ZMDP had a more hier-

archically fashioned collegial organisation that established a clear chain of

command running from the Russian viceroy to a local mosque. At the top

of the hierarchy was a Spiritual Board, headed by a mufti for the Sunnis or a

sheikh-ul-Islam among the Shi‘is. They ruled over provincial majlises, which in

their turn supervised district (uezd) qadis, teachers and students. The lowest

level of religious administration was a Sunni mullah (and a Shi‘i pish-namaz)

administering a Friday mosque, teaching in a Muslim school, if any, and com-

posing communal registers (metricheskie knigi) of parishioners.

Religious personnel of the Sunni and Shi‘i muftiates shared certain privileges

and institutions. Only Suﬁ leaders and their adherents, who were supposed to

share an anti-Russian position, did not receive privileged legal status and were

ascribed to the ‘lower classes’. The ofﬁcial status of the Caucasian Muslim

20 Arapov, Islam v Rossiiskoi imperii,pp.165–9, 210–47. See also ‘Instruktsiia o poriadke

ispytaniiana vstuplenie v musul’manskoe dukhovenstvo’ (1873), in Tsentral’nyi gos. arkhiv

Respubliki Dagestana, Makhachkala, Fond 26,op.2,d.14,pp.28–32.

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clergy was much higher than in the Tauride Directorate, and in particular in

the Orenburg Assembly. Likewise, they were divided into lower and higher

clergies. ‘Muslim clerics’ and their children were exempted from corporal

punishment, the military draft and tax payments. The senior clerics were paid

by the Russian administration, while the lower ones were subsidised by their

congregations. The Russian state covered all their travel costs and provided a

daily allowance. Having served more than twenty years, senior clerics were

granted personal noble status.

The emergence of the ‘Muslim clergy’ provided the state with able func-

tionaries in different spheres of imperial governance. Their number grew

quickly. In 1911 the ofﬁcial statistics counted 46,492 higher and lower Muslim

clerics in the Russian Empire. Not all of them had legally deﬁned status: 25,251

‘clerics’ from four Central Asian provinces were not included in the framework

of ofﬁcially recognised ‘Muslim clergy’.

The latter existed only in the regions

included in the jurisdiction of four muftiates.

In the second half of the nineteenth century ‘Muslim clergy’ were intro-

duced into the Russian army and navy, where the number of Muslims was

quickly growing, in particular after the establishment of compulsory mili-

tary service in 1874. Muslims of the North Caucasus and Central Asia were

exempt from conscription, but many of them served as volunteers in irregu-

lar Muslim regiments. To administer the military oath of allegiance and let

Muslim soldiers and ofﬁcers perform religious rites and duties prescribed by

Islam, a hierarchy of ‘Muhammedan clergy’ was created. It included a num-

ber of ofﬁcer and subaltern ranks from military Muhammedan mullah and

mu’adhdhin to akhund. The highest position was held by a senior akhund of

the Guards. Military Muslim ofﬁcers were drawn overwhelmingly from junior

and senior clerics attached to the Orenburg Assembly. The OMDS was also

charged with supervision over the Muslim military clergy in the Siberian, Ural

and Astrakhan Cossack Hosts.

The position of Muslim populations and elites in the Caucasus and Cen-

tral Asia much depended on local military governors. In 1844 the Caucasian

viceroyalty was created in the North Caucasus and Transcausasia. It was ruled

by a viceroy reporting directly to the emperor. In 1856–62 this ofﬁce was held by

Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, the victor over the famous Imam Shamil and Alexan-

der II’s personal friend. His successor was Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaevich

(1862–81), the emperor’s younger brother who had even more inﬂuence among

the highest imperial elite in St Petersburg.

21 Farkhshatov, ‘Musul’manskoe dukhovenstvo’, p. 72.

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In the Caucasus the so-called ‘military communal administration’ (voenno-

narodnoe upravlenie) was planned by Bariatinskii and carried out by Mikhail

Nikolaevich in the 1860s.

Muslim mountaineers were granted legal and

administrative autonomy under the supervision of Russian military ofﬁcers.

They were allowed to preserve their customs (‘adat), in particular village com-

munity and adat courts. Fearing Muslim resistance, Bariatinskii proposed to

undermine the inﬂuence of Muridism in the North Caucasus by strength-

ening customary law at the expense of shari‘a. Customary law courts under

the direction of Russian military ofﬁcers were designed. In practice, however,

mixed oral and mountain courts (mahkama) were created that followed princi-

ples of ‘adat, shari‘a and partly imperial laws. Without abolishing ‘old’ Muslim

religious elites, the authorities turned village imams into functionaries known

as mullah or efendi and reduced their number to one per 200 people. Waqf

properties and mosque schools became subject to state supervision.

A number of reasons, chieﬂy the massive exodus of Muslims to the Ottoman

Empire, prevented the government from introducing this model all over the

Caucasus. It was established only in the province of Dagestan, as well as in the

districts of Zakataly, Sukhum, Batum and Kars in Transcaucasia. Elements of

the military communal administration model were used in the north-western

Caucasus and the Transcaspian Province (present Turkmenistan). As a rule the

Caucasian experience did not ﬁt to the conditions of Turkestan. For instance,

in 1866 mixed mehkeme designed in the Caucasian manner and based on both

Islamic and customary law were set up. But they failed to work and unofﬁcial

qadis’ courts had to be restored.

The complicated system of Muslim administration in Central Asia is

still basically unstudied with the exception of a thorough account by

P. P. Litvinov on Turkestan.

Initially, Central Asian provinces were divided

into the Turkestan and the Steppe regions, Transcaspian Province, and the

khanates of Khiva and Bukhara, which were under a Russian protectorate.

The Steppe governor-generalship had been formed from the former Siberian

province and was subordinated directly to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The

war minister supervised the Turkestan governor-generalship.

In the governor-generalships of Central Asia ‘disregard of the Muslim

clergy’ prevailed. In this region, as in the North Caucasus, Islam was not

22 I attempted to compare this regime with other types of indirect rule of Muslims as

they were applied in the Ottoman Empire and French Algeria in V. O. Bobrovnikov,

Musul’mane Severnogo Kavkaza: obychai, pravo, nasilie (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura,

2002), pp. 147–75.

23 P. P. Litvinov, Gosudarstvo i islam v russkom Turkestane (1865–1917) (Elets: Elets gos. ped.

instit., 1998).

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institutionalised. In Turkestan, mullahs and other members of the Muslim

religious elites were not recognised. Fearing possible Muslim uprisings, the

authorities put waqf properties, holy places and Suﬁs under state control.

Wandering dervishes were prohibited to preach and recite prayers (dhikr)in

the towns. All practising Suﬁ masters, holy graves and mosque schools were

registered and became the subject of police supervision. They had no legally

deﬁned status or privileges. When the Turkestan region became indepen-

dent of the Orenburg Assembly in 1880, K. P. von Kaufmann, the Turkestan

governor-general, ordered the expulsion of all mullahs with a licence issued

in Orenburg (ukaznye mully).

The reaction of Muslim populations towards the new conceptions and

methods of the imperial government was mixed. Their attitudes varied from

open hostility to collaboration and to adaptation to imperial rule. As Paul

Werth has shown for the Volga-Kama region, missionaries failed to prevent

a return to Islam among baptised Muslims, although a segment of converts

did embrace Orthodoxy and came to represent a distinct group known as

‘kriasheny’.

In the Volga-Ural region, rejection of Orthodoxy continued, its

peak being the ‘Great Apostasy’ of 1866.

Imposition of new rules as well as persecutions of Suﬁs provoked a number

of local uprisings in the North Caucasus and Central Asia. In 1877 spontaneous

revolts broke out throughout Dagestan and Chechnia. Jihad was declared

and an Avar, Mohammed-Hajji, a son of the famous Naqshbandi sheikh Abd

al-Rahman al-Sughuri (1792–1882), was elected to the ofﬁceof imam. At Andijan

in 1898 there was a revolt led by a Naqshbandi sheikh Mohammed Ali known

as Dukchi Ishan. All these rebellions were defeated by Russian troops, while

their leaders were sentenced to death or exile in Inner Russia. Though crushed,

they strengthened Russian anxieties about Islam and especially Suﬁsm.

Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and especially in the

early twentieth century a ‘Muslim question’ confronted the tsarist regime. It

complemented a long list of the many other ‘alien (inorodcheskii) questions’:

Jewish, Balts, Polish, Ukrainian etc. Many conservatives considered a popu-

lation of about 20 million Muslim subjects a particular threat to the stability

and integrity of the vast empire.

The possibility of a Pan-Islamic uprising

haunted the minds of top-level state ofﬁcials such as K. P. Pobedonostsev, the

24 Werth, At the Margins,pp.147–76.

25 A thorough account of the history of the ‘Muslim question’ in late tsarist Russia

was made in E. I. Vorob’eva, ‘Musul’manskii vopros v imperskoi politike Rossiiskogo

samoderzhaviia: vtoraia polovina XIX veka – 1917 g.’, Candidate dissertation, Institute of

Russian History, St Petersburg, 1999.

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procurator-general of the Holy Synod (1880–1905), and S. M. Dukhovskoi, the

Turkestan governor-general (1898–1901).

From the 1860s until the 1910s, ofﬁcialsgenerated a great number of draft bills

concerning new Islamic institutions, in particular muftiates in separate regions

of the borderlands. M. G. Cherniaev, the Turkestan governor-general (1882–4),

set up a commission to create a separate Turkestan Spiritual Board. In 1898

the Turkestan governor-general Dukhovskoi returned to this idea, attempting

to bring mullahs, madrasas and waqf properties under state control. In 1889

the commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, Prince A. M. Dondukov-Korsakov

(1882–90) sent to the War Ministry his project of a separate Muslim muftiate

in Kuban and Terek provinces under his supervision. In 1906 the well-known

anti-Muslim activist and conservative V. P. Cherevanskii submitted one more

project for the Special Conference on the Religious Affairs of the Sunni Mus-

lims (Osoboe soveshchanie po delam very musul’man-sunnitov). He proposed to

dividethe Orenburg Assembly into three districts (centred in St Petersburg, Ufa

and Troitsk/Petropavlovsk) and to replace existing muftiates by eight new Dis-

trict Directorates in St Petersburg, Simferopol (Crimean), Tiﬂis (Caucasian),

Troitsk or Petropavlovsk (Siberian), Orenburg, Ufa (Bashkir) and Akmolinsk

(Steppe).

The impetus for a general shift in confessional policy grew considerably

in the years immediately before the revolution of 1905–7. Numerous projects

were submitted to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Though none of them were

carried out, they show well the existence of a substantial ‘reformist idea’ in

the government whose development did not depend entirely on revolution-

ary pressure, as Rafael Ganelin has argued.

As early as 26 February 1903,

Nicholas II promised ‘to strengthen the steadfast observance by the author-

ities concerned with religious affairs of the guarantees of religious tolera-

tion contained in the fundamental laws of the Russian Empire’. A decree of

12 December 1904, raising a number of the future reform issues, called on the

government ‘to take now . . . appropriate measures for the elimination of all

constraints on religious life not directly established by law’. At last, a decree

of 17 April 1905 conﬁrmed by the famous Manifesto of 17 October granted

Muslims and other non-Orthodox religious communities ‘freedom of con-

science’.

Religious conviction was recognised as the foundation of a formal

confessional status.

26 R. Sh. Ganelin, Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v 1905 godu: reformy i revoliutsiia (St Petersburg,

Dmitrii Bulanin, 1991).

27 PSZ, St Petersburg, 3rd series, vol. 23,no.22581; ibid., vol. 24,no.25495 and no. 26126.

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Islam in the Russian Empire

For their part, Muslim intellectuals began to seek the improvement of the

Muslims’ position in the RussianEmpire.From the 1880s the reform movement

known as jadidism emerged ﬁrst among the ‘ulama’ in Crimea and the Volga-

Ural region and soon spread in many Muslim regions of Russia. In Russia

it was initiated by the Crimean Tatar Ismail Bey Gasprinskii (Gaspraly, 1851–

1914), who developed ideas of contemporary Muslim reformers from abroad, in

particular those of the famous scholar and writer Jamal al-Din al-Afgani (1839–

97). Russia’s reformers also drew on the works of two prominent nineteenth-

century scholars from the Volga-Ural region, namely Abu-l-Nasr al-Kursavi

(1776/7–1812) and Shihab al-Din al-Marjani (1818–89).

The basic idea of the movement was to liberate Islam from Western domi-

nation by ‘opening the door of interpretation’ (ijtihad) closed in Islam by the

eleventh century. This would make it possible to study modern sciences and

languages, and to spread a new system of education among the Muslim youth

(the Arab term jadid means ‘new, modern’). The means of the campaign was

the press and the schools. Gasprinsky’s weekly newspaper Tercuman (Inter-

preter), founded in 1883, reached all parts of the empire. It was written in a

literary Turkish that was clear to numerous Turkic-speaking peoples of Russia,

and used the Arab alphabet.

Gasprinskii and his followers set up a network of reformed (novometodnye)

schools, the ﬁrst of which was opened in the town of Bakhchisarai in 1884. They

competed both with traditional mosque schools as well as with the network

of Russo-Tatar schools of the Il’minskii’s model. On the primary (maktab)

level of the jadid schools, a phonetic method of teaching the Arabic language

was introduced. Teaching of Russian and modern European languages was

initiated in the higher classes. Some secular subjects such as mathematics and

geography, as well as Tatar history, were brought into the madrasa curriculum.

Jadid schools became widespread in the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century.

There were 5,000 reformed schools in the empire as a whole by 1916. Most

were in the towns of Crimea and the Volga-Ural region.

The importance of jadidism and its role in creating the foundations of a

Tatar national identity is often overestimated. A lot of traditionally Muslim

regions like Transcaucasia remained out of the movement. Recent thorough

studies of the movement, in particular an account by Adeeb Khalid on Central

Asia,

have shown that it comprised actually a tiny intellectual stratum and

had not touched the majority of the ‘ulama’. Never very numerous, the Jadids

28 A. Khaleed, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1998).

219

Non-Russian nationalities

constituted not so much a group as a broad trend among schoolmasters, Suﬁs,

lawyers and publicists. The driving force behind the jadid movement remained

the ‘ulama’ in the town centres of Crimea and the Volga-Ural region. The Tatar

incomers played a crucial role in establishing jadid schools and a local Islamic

press in Central Asia.

Paradoxically, Russian conservatives and Muslim reformers shared the

Orientalist critique of isolated and inward-looking Muslim communities in

Russia.

Both sides insisted on improving the Muslim administration to make

the empire more homogeneous. In reality, they proposed to transform the

empire into a nation-state. But the background of such a state was sought in

different ‘national traditions’ – either among the Turkic Muslims or among

the Orthodox Great Russians. A new scenario of imperial power elaborated

under the rules of Alexander III and Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) projected the

government as a unitary Russian master subjecting lesser peoples and promot-

ing the spread of Russian Orthodox culture among non-Russian populations

(obrusenie).

The outbreak of the 1905–7 Revolution gave Islam a new political dimen-

sion. Muslims were permitted to organise public gatherings and form political

movements. Muslim elites were involved in the political struggle concerning

elections to the Parliament (Duma) and the emergence of new political par-

ties. The jadid movement was translated into a number of political bodies. In

August 1905 in the town of Nizhnii Novgorod, the First All-Russian Muslim

Congress set up Ittifaq al-Muslimin (Muslim Union), the ﬁrst Muslim political

party in Russia. This organisation was in the hands of Tatars and was close

to the Russian Constitutional Democrats (Kadety). In April 1906 the party’s

leaders were elected to the Duma, where they formed a joint Muslim faction

that worked in all the four successive Dumas until February 1917. Both Ittifaq

al-Muslimin and the Muslim faction remained under the strong inﬂuence of

jadidism, mostly of Volga-Ural origin. Some of their members came from the

ofﬁcial clergy and Muslim elites of Crimea, Central Asia, the Caucasus and

the Steppe governor-generalship. Politically, they continued to side with the

liberal opposition headed by the Kadets, while some Muslim deputies belong-

ing to the Muslim Labour Group and Labourists were drawn to the Socialist

Revolutionary Party.

29 As Gasprinsky put it, traditional Muslim communities ‘vegetate in the narrow, stiﬂing

realm of their old ideas and prejudices, as if isolated from the rest of humanity’. See

Ismail Bei Gasprinsky, Russkoe musul’manstvo: mysli, zametki i nabliudeniia musul’manina,

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 29.

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Islam in the Russian Empire

Gradually the party programme and organisation were designed in the

second and third Muslim Congresses held in St Petersburg and Nizhnii Nov-

gorod in January and August 1906. At the same time, the party submitted to

the government a wide programme of religious reforms for the Russian Mus-

lims. A new religious legislative body was drafted aiming to turn Russia into

a modern secular state without an ofﬁcial religion. To minimise state control

in administering Muslim communities, supervision over Islamic institutions

would be moved from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to a new All-Russian

Muslim Ministry whose manager (called ra’is al-‘ulama’) would report directly

to the emperor. A network of muftiates would become an elected hierarchy

responsible for all religious, cultural and economic matters of the Muslims

including mosque schools and waqf foundations. The Muslim faction in the

Duma continued re-drafting this programme. Its new version was elaborated

in the next Muslim Congress held in St Petersburg on the eve of the First

World War, in June 1914. They claimed to broaden the rights of ofﬁcial Muslim

administration and increase the state funding of Muslim clergy.

The defeat of the revolution prevented the carrying out of this ambitious

programme. The government was dominated by Russian conservatives and

P. A. Stolypin, the inﬂuential minister of internal affairs (1906–11), was more

unfavourable towards Islam than Count S. Iu. Witte, the minister of ﬁnance

(1892–1903) and later the chairman of the Council of Ministers (1905–6). Actu-

ally the authorities did not want to co-operate even with a legal political

opposition based in the Duma. They were also alarmed by the international

troubles that followed shortly after the ﬁrst Russian Revolution, namely the

Iranian revolution of 1907–11 and the Young-Turk revolution of 1908–9. Rus-

sian Muslims were regarded as possible supporters of anti-Russian religious

movements from abroad. Islamophobia much increased. In 1910–11 the Spe-

cial Conference of the Ministry of Internal Affairs elaborated a programme of

measures designed to ‘oppose Pan-Islamist and Pan-Turkist inﬂuence on the

Muslim populations’. Reformed Muslim schools were to be brought under

strict state control, exchanges between the Russian and Ottoman Muslims

were to be hampered and Orthodox missionary activities received increasing

support from the state.

Nevertheless, administrative measures failed to stop the politicisation of

Islam. Some Muslim political leaders emigrated to revolutionary Iran and

Turkey, while others began to draw nearer to socialists and nationalists. In the

1910s new Muslim parties emerged, some of which later headed the nationalist

movements which emerged in the borderlands after the collapse of the tsarist

regime in 1917. Among these were the Musavat (Equality) party in Azerbaijan

221