1 The Religious Environment: Worldview, Ritual, and Communal Status Islam and Conversion The process of conversion to Islam remains on the whole poorly studied in either its social and historical, or affective and personal/psychologi- cal, aspects. Despite the relatively recent and signal contributions of Nehemiah Levtzion I and Richard Bulliet 2 who have advanced inno- va tive classificatory, methodological, and analytical strategies in the framework of comparative and more localized approaches toward Islamization, the complex of problems associated with conversion to Islam still has not drawn sufficient attention from specialists on all "fronts" of Islamization to allow a synthetic treatment of conversion to Islam from either a theoretical or historical perspective. 3 If old notions of forced conversion and the choice of "Islam or the sword" have been abandoned, at least in scholarly literature, little serious analytical work I. See above all the volume Conversion to Islam, ed. Nehemia Levtzion (New YorklLondon: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), and Levtzion's contributions therein, "Toward a Com- parative Study of Islamization" (pp. 1-23) and "Patterns of Islamization in West Africa" (pp. 207-216), as well as his bibliography (pp. 247-265), in which Central and Inner Asia are pre- dictably poorly represented; cf. also his "Conversion under Muslim Domination: A Comparative Study," in Religious Change and Cultural Domination, ed. D. N. Lorenzen (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1981), pp. 19-38. 2. See his seminal work, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), and more recently his "Process and Status in Conversion and Continuity," introducing Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), pp. 1-12, and his "Conversion Stories in Early Islam" in the same volume (pp. 123-133). 3. For important theoretical considerations on conversion to Islam in historical surveys see, for example, Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, vol. 2 (The Expansion of Islam in the 18 Islamization and Native Religion has been done as a means of replacing older models and assumptions of how Islam was adopted and appropriated in specific contexts; nor, in general, have primary sources been tapped or reevaluated with an eye to the particular issue of Islamization. In the case of Inner Asia we are remarkably ill-served with regard to studies of conversion to Islam; specialists on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa and on South Asian Islam4 for instance, have recognized the importance of conversion as a historical and religious issue in their respective regions, and their studies are often models for approaches to Islamization in Central and Inner Asia. But to date the study of conver.

1. 1
The Religious Environment: Worldview,
Ritual, and Communal Status
Islam and Conversion
The process of conversion to Islam remains on the whole poorly
studied
in either its social and historical, or affective and
personal/psychologi-
cal, aspects. Despite the relatively recent and signal
contributions of
Nehemiah Levtzion I and Richard Bulliet 2 who have advanced
inno-
va tive classificatory, methodological, and analytical strategies
in the
framework of comparative and more localized approaches
toward
Islamization, the complex of problems associated with
conversion to
Islam still has not drawn sufficient attention from specialists on
all
"fronts" of Islamization to allow a synthetic treatment of
conversion to
Islam from either a theoretical or historical perspective. 3 If old
notions
of forced conversion and the choice of "Islam or the sword"
have been
abandoned, at least in scholarly literature, little serious
analytical work

2. I. See above all the volume Conversion to Islam, ed. Nehemia
Levtzion (New YorklLondon:
Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), and Levtzion's contributions
therein, "Toward a Com-
parative Study of Islamization" (pp. 1-23) and "Patterns of
Islamization in West Africa" (pp.
207-216), as well as his bibliography (pp. 247-265), in which
Central and Inner Asia are pre-
dictably poorly represented; cf. also his "Conversion under
Muslim Domination: A Comparative
Study," in Religious Change and Cultural Domination, ed. D. N.
Lorenzen (Mexico City: El
Colegio de Mexico, 1981), pp. 19-38.
2. See his seminal work, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval
Period: An Essay in Quantitative
History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), and more
recently his "Process and Status
in Conversion and Continuity," introducing Conversion and
Continuity: Indigenous Christian
Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries,
ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi
Jibran Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 1990), pp. 1-12, and his
"Conversion Stories in Early Islam" in the same volume (pp.
123-133).
3. For important theoretical considerations on conversion to
Islam in historical surveys see,
for example, Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, vol. 2
(The Expansion of Islam in the
18 Islamization and Native Religion

3. has been done as a means of replacing older models and
assumptions of
how Islam was adopted and appropriated in specific contexts;
nor, in
general, have primary sources been tapped or reevaluated with
an eye to
the particular issue of Islamization.
In the case of Inner Asia we are remarkably ill-served with
regard to
studies of conversion to Islam; specialists on Islam in sub-
Saharan Africa
and on South Asian Islam4 for instance, have recognized the
importance
of conversion as a historical and religious issue in their
respective
regions, and their studies are often models for approaches to
Islamization
in Central and Inner Asia. But to date the study of conversion to
Islam in
the Inner Asian world has hardly begun, either from a historical
or his-
toricist perspective, or from the perspective of Islam's religious
and social
interaction with indigenous traditions.
The primitive state of studies of Islamization in Inner Asia is
suggested
already by the meager bibliographical talley; the small quantity
alone is
revealing, not to mention quality. To this day the only extended
narrative
account of Islam's spread in the Inner Asian world is found in
the quite
dated work of T. W. Arnold 5 and there remains no
comprehensive survey

4. Middle Periods) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
esp. pp. 532-574 (with a distinc-
tive slighting of Inner Asian Islam, however), and Ira M.
Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 242-252
(as well as his more extensive
treatment of Inner Asia, with attention to conversion issues, pp.
413-436). See also the study of
John Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and
Composition of Islamic Salvation History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and the insightful
remarks of R. Stephen Humphreys,
Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (revised ed.,
Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), pp. 273-283.
4. For Islamization in Africa see Levtzion's bibliography noted
above. On Islamization in
South Asia, see especially Bruce B. Lawrence, "Early Indo-
Muslim Saints and Conversion," in
Islam in Asia, vol. I, South Asia, ed. Yohanan Friedmann
(Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,
1984), pp. 109-145, and his "Islam in India: The Function of
Institutional Sufism in the
Islamization of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kashmir," in Islam in
Local Contexts, ed. Richard C.
Martin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982; Contributions to Asian
Studies, vol. 17), pp. 27-43; cf. also
Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics
at a South Asian Sufi Center
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), esp. pp.
155-168; Richard M. Eaton,
"Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India," in
Approaches to Islam in Religious
Studies, ed. Richard C. Martin (Tucson: University of Arizona

5. Press, 1985), pp. 106-123, and
his "Sufi Folk Literature and the Expansion of Indian Islam,"
History of Religions, 14/2
(November 1974), pp. 117-127; P. Hardy, "Modern European
and Muslim Explanations of
Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A Preliminary Survey of the
Literature," in Conversion to
Islam, ed. Levtzion (1979), pp. 68-99; Zawwar Hussain Zaidi,
"Conversion to Islam in South
Asia: Problems in Analysis," American Tournai of Islamic
Social Sciences, 6/1 (1989), pp. 93-117;
and, closer to our region, Georg Buddrus, "Spiegelungen der
Islamisierung Kafiristans in der
miindlichen Oberlieferung," in Ethnologie und Geschichte:
Festschrift {iir Karl Tettmar, ed. Peter
Snoy (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), pp. 73-88.
5. T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the
Propagation of the Muslim Faith
The Religious Environment 19
of the history of Islamization in Inner Asia. 6 For the
Islamization of
Central Asia proper, general histories of pre-Mongol Central
Asia note
the "fact" of Islamization, but to date most treatments skirt the
real issues
involved in understanding it/ similarly, the historical,
documentary, and
numismatic evidence on the important Islamizing dynasty of the
Qarakhanids
has drawn considerable attention, but its history remains
obscure, as does

6. (Aligarh, 1896; repr. Lahore: Shirkat-i-Qualam, 1956); chapters
7 and 8 (pp. Z06-Z53) treat
Islam's spread in Central Asia and "among the Mongols and
Tatars." Thoroughly obsolete on
nearly all counts, Arnold's work is still the only extended
discussion of Islamization in Inner Asia
as a religious phenomenon; its date is indicative of the
deplorable inattention to this issue in
twentieth century scholarship.
6. In lieu of such a study, brief overviews are available in
general historical surveys, such as
Lapidus's work cited above, and in a few other works: cf.
Clifford Edmund Bosworth, "Islamic
frontiers in Africa and Asia: (B) Central Asia," in The Legacy
of Islam, ed. Joseph Schacht and
C. E. Bosworth (Znd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1974), pp. 116-130; Alexandre
Bennigsen and Fanny E. Bryan, "Islam in the Caucasus and the
Middle Volga," and "Islam in
Central Asia," Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade
(New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol.
7, pp. 357-377 ; Valeria Fiorani Piacentini, Turchizzazione ed
islamizzazione dell'Asia Centrale
(VI-XVI secolo d. Cr.) (Milan: Societii Editrice Dante
Alighieri, 1974), which gives primarily a
political and ethnic history of Central Asia rather than a study
of Islamization as such; and M. F.
KoprUlU, L'Influence du chamanisme turco-mongole sur les
ordres mystiques musulmans
(Istanbul, 1929). Additional studies of aspects of Islamization
in particular periods or regions are
cited below; here may be noted my preliminary analysis of a
conversion narrative from Central
Asia, "Yasavian Legends on the Islamization of Turkistan," in

7. Aspects of Altaic Civilization II
(= PIAC XXX), ed. Denis Sinor (Bloomington: Indiana
University, Research Institute for Inner
Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 1-19, which briefly treats some of the
conceptual issues treated also in
the present study.
7. For reliable historical surveys, see Bartol'd, Turkestan Down
to the Mongol Invasion, tr. V.
and T. Minorsky, ed. C. E. Bosworth (4th ed., London: Luzac &
Co., 1977), but see also the
important work ofWilferd Madelung, "The spread of Maturidism
and the Turks," in Actas do IV
Congresso des Estudos Arabes et Islamicos, Coimbra-Lisboa
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), pp.
109-68; reprinted in the author's Religious Schools and Sects in
Medieval Islam (London:
Variorum Reprints, 1985), No. II. Madelung's study, with its
prosopographical approach to the
problem of early Islam in Central Asia and among the Turks,
draws attention to important issues
too often clouded by assumptions derived from studies of Islam
among the Turks of Anatolia,
uncritically transferred to Central Asia. The overemphasis on a
supposed ShI(ite and "hetero-
dox" role in Central Asian Islam, dealt with for the pre-Mongol
Islamization of the Turks by
Madelung, is the focus of an excellent, reasoned discussion by
R. D. McChesney for the
Timuricl era (and after) in his Waqf in Central Asia: Four
Hundred Years in the History of a
Muslim Shrine, 1480-1889 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991), pp. 33-36. See also
Yuri Bregel, "The Role of Central Asia in the History of the
Muslim East," Afghanistan Council
Occasional Paper #20 (February 1980); R. N. Frye,

8. "Comparative Observations on Conversion
to Islam in Iran and Central Asia," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic
and Islam, 4 (1984), pp. 81-88;
C. E. Bosworth, "Barbarian Incursions: The Coming of the
Turks into the Islamic World," in
Islamic Civilisation 950-1150, ed. D. S. Richards (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973), pp.
1-16; Bernard Lewis, "The Mongols, the Turks and the Muslim
Polity," Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 18 (1968), pp. 49-68; M.
A. Usmanov, "Rasprostranenie isla-
ma i ego roJ' v istorii Srednei Azii," in Iz istorii
obshchestvenno-filosofskoi mysli i vol'nodumiia v
Srednei Azii, ed. M. M. Khairullaev (Tashkent: Fan, 1991), pp.
10-26.
20 Islamization and Native Religion
the course of its Islamization. s Still less is known of the actual
condition
of Islam among the Bulghars, a question taken up at least
briefly below.
Beyond these examples from the "classical" age of Islamic
expansion,
moreover, the situation is worse still. The process of
Islamization in East
Turkistan remains poorly studied and poorly known,9 while
even the
establishment of Islam in the three western successor states of
the much-
studied Mongol empire has drawn scant attention; the "re-
Islamization"
of Central Asia in the late Mongol and early Timurid era
remains essen-

9. tially unstudied, and the spread of Islam into southern Siberia
has been
left virtually untouched as wel1. 1o
Soviet scholarship has added to this picture its own range of
misin-
terpretations, and not only from the standpoint of rigid Soviet
ideology;
"nationalist" scholarship in each of the <;entral Asian republics
has con-
tributed its own slant to the history of Islam in Inner Asia, and
indeed at
8. For the Qarakhanids in particular, see Peter B. Golden, "The
Karakhanids and Early
Islam," in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis
Sinor (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), pp. 343-370; cf. Robert Dankoff's
introduction to his translation of the
Qutadghu Bilig, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig), a
Turko·Islamic Mirror for Princes
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Robert Dankoff,
"Three Turkic Verse Cycles
Relating to Inner Asian Warfare," HUS, 3-4/1 (1979-80), pp.
151-165; Marcel Erdal, "Early
Turkish Names for the Muslim God, and the Title Celebi,"
Asian and African Studies
(Jerusalem), 16 (1982, = PIAC XXIV), pp. 407-416; M. [sic]
Barthold, "The Bughra Khan
Mentioned in the Qudatqu Bilik," BSOS, 3 (1923), pp. 151-158;
and several studies of docu-
mentary material that provides important linguistic and
onomastic evidence to analyze for the
course of Islamization: Marcel Erdal, "The Turkish Yarkand
Documents," BSOAS, 47 (1984),
pp. 260-301; Monika Gronke, "The Arabic Yarkand

10. Documents," BSOAS, 49 (1986), pp.
454-507; Sinasi Tekin, "A Qarabanid Document of A.D. 1I21
(A.H. 515) from Yarkand," HUS,
3-4 (1979-80), pp. 868-883; plus older studies of CI. Huart,
"Trois actes notaries de Yarkend,"
lA, 1914,4, pp. 607-627, and Mohamed Khadr and Claude
Cahen, "Deux actes de waqf d'un
Qarabanide d'Asie Centrale," lA, 255 (1967), pp. 305-334 (and
see the remarks by C. E.
Bosworth, lA, 256 (1968), pp. 449-453). See also the historical
studies of Omeljan Pritsak, "Die
Karachaniden," Oer Islam, 31 (1953-54), pp. 17-68;
"Karachanidische Streitfragen, 1-4,"
Oriens, 3 (1950), pp. 209-228; "Von den Karluk zu den
Karachaniden," ZOMG, 101 (1951),
pp. 270-300.
9. For the distinctive, though still obscure, patterns of
Islamization and cultural interaction
in East Turkistan, from Qarakhanid times down to the post-
Mongol era, cf. Haneda Akira,
"Introduction (ch. I, Problems of the Turkicization; ch. 2,
Problems of the Islamization)," Acta
Asiatica, 34 (1978) [Special Issue: Historical Studies on Central
Asia in Japan], pp. 1-21; Mano
Eiji, "Mogholistan," and Oda Juten, "Uighuristan," in the same
volume, pp. 46-60 and pp.
22-45, respectively; William Samolin, East Turkistan to the
Twelfth Century: A Brief Political
Survey (The Hague: Mouton, 1964); and N. N. Pantusov,
"Gorod Almalyk i Mazar Tugluk-
Timur-khana" and "Legenda 0 Tugluk-Timur-khane," in
Kaufmanskii sbomik, izdannyi v pami-
at' 25 let, istekshikh so dnia smerti pokoritelia i ustroitelia
Turkestanskogo kraia, general-ad'iu-
tanta K. P. fon-Kaufmana (Moscow, 1910), pp. 161-202.

11. 10. The Mongol era is discussed more fully below; for the
general issue of "re-Islamization"
in the Mongol era, the "onomastic" approach suggested by
Bulliet's work has been taken up
The Religious Environment 21
least two generations of the educated and modernized Central
Asian elite
have ignored or dismissed or underestimated the Islamic
component of
their "national" culture in an effort to highlight the specifically
"Turkic"
or, for example, Q'irgh'iz, component of the civilization of
which they are
the current bearers.11 It is thus uncertain whether our
explorations in
the centrality of Islam and conversion to communal self-
consciousness
in pre-modern times may still "speak" to the contemporary
"heirs" of the
Golden Horde. But in any case, we find in narratives such as
those ex-
amined in this study an opportunity to approach these issues
from the
indigenous perspective, and from one established prior to the
Soviet-era
Communist and/or nationalist transformation of (or constraints
upon) the
communal lenses through which Islamization is viewed.
In any case, most treatments of conversion to Islam, both in
general and

12. in Inner Asia in particular, have been concerned with "how it
happened"
and with imagining the conditions for and implications of
extensive
Islamization, as historical questions. Far fewer are studies that
approach
the question of Islamization from perspectives similar to that
adopted for
briefly for the Chaghatay ulus in John E. Woods, "The Timurid
Dynasty," Papers on Inner Asia,
No. 14 (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 9-12. For the spread of Islam
in Siberia in the post-Mongol
era, cf. Abdlilkadir inan, "Sibirya'da islamiyetin in Necati Lugal
Annaganz (Ankara:
TUrk Tarih Kurumu Baslmevi, 1968), pp. 331-338; and the
interesting legendary material dis-
cussed by N. F. Katanov, "0 religioznykh voinakh uchenikov
sheikha Bagauddina protiv
inorodtsev Zapadnoi Sibiri," Ezhegodnik Tobol'skogo
Gubemskogo Muzeia, 14 (1904), pp. 3-28,
and "Predaniia tobol'skikh tatar 0 pribytii v 1572 g.
mukhammedanskikh propovednikov v g.
Isker," in the same Ezhegodnik, 7 (1897), pp. 51-61.
II. This process began much earlier in some cases, with the
fascination for things Russian
and European and "modern" found among westernized
intellectuals in pre-Soviet Central Asia
under Russian rule. For an extreme example of a Europeanized
Qazaq opponent of Islam, see
the short tract by the celebrated ethnographer Chokan
Chingisovich Valikhanov (d. 1865) enti-
tled "0 musul 'manstve v stepi" (published in his Sobranie
sochinenii v piati tomakh, I [Alma-
Ata: Izd-vo AN KazSSR, 1961], pp. 524-529); Valikhanov's

13. hostility toward Islam (and its
"fanaticism") is accompanied by an insistence (or perhaps wish)
that Islam was never strong
among the steppe nomads, but he is at least open in his hope
that Russian education will pre-
vent the emergence of a Shamil (the leader of anti-Russian
Muslim resistance in the North
Caucasus down to 1859) among the Qazaqs, and he speaks
admiringly of the American ex-
ample, where, he says, the Indian wars had virtually ended
"since the government of the United
States began to civilize the Iroquois, Creeks, Choctaws, and
other redskins." For contemporary
reflections of similar attitudes, but with the nationalist and anti-
Russian element highlighted
and adopted by a western observer, cf. Guy Imart, "The Islamic
Impact on Traditional Kirghiz
Ethnicity," Nationalities Papers, 14/1-2 (Spring-Fall 1986), pp.
65-88; by contrast, for an
appreciation of traditional Islamic adaptations, d. Edward
Lazzerini, "The Revival of Islamic
Culture in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Or, Why a Prosopography
of the Tatar Ulema?" in Passe
turco·tatar, present sovietique: (.;tudes orrertes a Alexandre
Bennigsen, ed. Ch. Lemercier-
Quelquejay, C. Veinstein, and S. E. Wimbush (Louvain/Paris:
Editions Peeters/Editions de
I'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, 1986), pp 367-372.
22 Islamization and Native Religion
the present study:12 our theme is not "how it happened," but
"how it was
understood to have happened" among the peoples most directly

14. affected.
In the end, of course, our objectives do not depart so much from
those
that have informed most earlier studies of conversion to Islam,
insofar as
we hope finally to add what may be learned from listening to
"how the
story was told" to our understanding of conversion as a
historical phenome-
non; first, however, we must pay attention to the story rather
than the
"history," as this latter term tends to be used by specialists
today.
To this end it may be worthwhile to consider some more
theoretical
aspects of Islam that inform religious practice and religious
narrative and
are important for the issue of conversion. This is hardly the
place for a sur-
vey of "ideal" Islamic notions of conversion or of the proper
relations
between Muslims and the unconverted; neither can we take up
the theo-
retical or historical referents of the terminology of dacwah (the
"summons"
to adopt Islam) or tawbah ("repentance," "metanoia," and hence
"conver-
sion" in the personal sense of turning from evil to good).
Rather, we will
note several points of special relevance for conversion
narratives and for
conversion in Inner Asia, informed by other narratives not
presented here.
First, the "terminology" of Islamization in Inner Asian

15. conversion narra-
tives is relatively limited. The term tawbah is virtually never
used, while
dacwah (with its Turkic equivalent in the verb ilnde-, "to
summon"), a term
that has come to mean active missionary-style proselytization in
the modern
world, plays primarily a formal and structural role in the
conversion narra-
tives. That is, the narratives record the "call" to adopt Islam
issued by the fig-
ure who brings Islam, but the call itself is rarely the focus of
discursive elabo-
ration, while the "bearer" of Islam is not first and foremost a
dacI; the
summons is issued more as a narrative device to set up the
decisive conver-
sion contest or struggle than as a significant addition to the
story's content.
Similarly, in many conversion narratives the motivating factor
that brings
a "bearer" of Islam to an infidel land or community is not
dacwah in the
sense of "missionary propaganda" (although the summons is
still issued,
formulaically), but a desire to "open" territories to Islam; here
the sig-
nificant term is the Arabic fataba, with its connotations ranging
from
12. Among these may be noted two studies in the volume edited
by Levtzion referred to
above, namely Russell Jones's "Ten Conversion Myths from
Indonesia" (pp. 129-158) and, less
directly (though in line with our concern for understanding the

16. interplay of indigenous and
Islamic religious concerns), Humphrey J. Fisher's "Dreams and
Conversion in Black Africa"
(pp. 217-235); cf. also David Owusu-Ansah, "Islamization
Reconsidered: An Examination of
Asante Responses to Muslim Influence in the Nineteenth
Century," Asian and African Studies
(Jerusalem), 21 (1987), pp. 145-163.
The Religious Environment 23
"conquest" to "revelation." The term is mirrored in Turkic
contexts by
the lise of the verb ac-, "to open," as in the phrase "islam aca
keldiler,"
"they came to 'spread' Islam."
More commonly, the terms used to refer to conversion to Islam
reflect the meaning of "islam" itself: a person or community
will simply
be said to have "submitted" (aslama), or to have "become
Muslim" (in
Persian or Turkic accounts), or to have "been ennobled with the
accep-
tance of Islam" (using a derivative of sharufa), or, finally, to
"have
entered the faith of Islam." In the narrative of Otemish HajjI,
for instance,
the motivation of the bearers of Islam is both to "summon"
Ozbek Khan
to Islam, and, more pointedly, to make him a Muslim. What
must be
noted here in connection with this terminology is what is
implied in all

17. these cases: it is not a change of heart, as might be conveyed by
the use
of tawbah or its derivatives, or of mind, as in the "intellectual"
process
implied by dacwah or its derivatives, but a change of status.
This change
in status is evident even in the use of the Arabic aslama, insofar
as it
conveys an act of will and implies the well-known distinction
between
"faith" ("fman) and "submission" to the divine will (islam),
thereby sig-
naling a change of an individual's status before God; it is still
clearer in
the terminology, which involves "becoming" something
different or
"acquiring" a status that is deemed ennobling.
Most telling are the frequent instances in which conversion is
spoken
of as an "entering" into the religion (dIn) of Islam, using both
the Arabic-
based terminology with derivatives of dakhala, and Turkic kir-;
this
"entering" is clearly understood as referring to the central
socioreligious
concept of Islam, the ummah, "community." This leads us to our
second
point regarding the Islamic understanding of conversion to
Islam, namely,
the inherent links between religious identity and communal
identity.
The Islamic ummah defines itself, and other communities, on
religious
grounds, and hence the adherents of other adyan constitute
distinct so-

18. cial groupings or communities (as is further evident from the
social and re-
ligious meanings of millah, for instance). Conversely, this often
means that
distinctive communal groups are expected to be marked by a
particular
religious orientation; to change one's religion is to change one's
com-
munal identity, and vice versa.
In this understanding of "conversion" are two important
implications
for our subject of Islamization in Inner Asia. First, Islamic
ideals of com-
munity in effect sanction the intimate bonds between religious
and
communal identity that in turn make "communal" conversion
not only
24 Islamization and Native Religion
acceptable, but in some cases normative. Second, in its
emphasis upon
the religious basis of communal identity, and conversely the
communal
basis of religious identity, the Islamic tradition is paralleled
quite closely,
and with important consequences, by attitudes toward
community and
religious life prevalent in Inner Asian tradition, as we will
discuss shortly.
In the Islamic context, the normative character of such
communal

19. conversion should not be overstated, of course, but it is present
nonethe-
less. If the Qur)an idealizes "prophets without honor" in their
own com-
munities and individuals (e.g. Ibrahim) who break with family,
even, in
devotion to God's will, both the social and theoretical
development of
the Islamic ummah reinforce the equation of religious and
communal
identities in such a way as to widen the expectation that people
will
come to Islam not as individuals, but as communities. This is
especially
pronounced in dealing with peoples well beyond the borders of
the Dar
aI-Islam at a given time: if Muslim religious and political
policy toward
non-Islamic communities within Muslim-ruled territory aimed at
frag-
mentation of communal bonds through "piecemeal" conversion
to Islam,
hopes and expectations with regard to peoples beyond the
frontiers of
Islam tended to envision their conversion en masse and as
communities.
There is also a specifically Islamic paradigm for such
"communal con-
version" in the "conversion-to-community" of the first century
of Islam's
spread, whereby adoption of the "religion" of Islam amounted to
joining
the "community" not of Muslims, but of Arabs, specifically in
acquiring
"client" status in affiliation with a particular Arab tribe. While

20. both the
understanding of Islam implied by such a practice, and the
practice itself,
seem to have disappeared quite early (in part, no doubt, to
resentment
among the growing block of "converts" toward their subordinate
status in
the community), the paradigm remained as an understanding of
conver-
sion with important latent potential.
Indeed, in Inner Asia itself (and in Inner Asian conversion
narratives)
we often find a complementary divergence between paradigms
of con-
version stressing Islamization of territory, on the one hand, and
Islam-
ization of communities, on the other. In the first case we find
that the
vocabulary of "opening" the land to Islam is employed, while
the termi-
nology conveying a change of status predominates in the latter.
The "ter-
ritorial" model, of course, as evident in the division of the
world into
Dar ai-Islam and Dar al-Harb, is more familiar to students of
the Islamic
world, but is at once less "sociologically" sophisticated, and
less practi-
cally relevant in the Inner Asian context; and for this reason the
"com-
The Religious Environment 25

21. munal" model is worth emphasizing here.
It is particularly noteworthy that a variety of "mechanisms"
emerged in
popular and learned Islamic religious thought to explain and
articulate
such "communal" conversion among distant or simply alien
peoples, the
Turks of Inner Asia among them; most of these mechanisms
would appear
to be outgrowths of Islamic discourse itself, but were quickly
appropriated
by the Islamizing community concerned as part and parcel of
their
Islamization. Links with Islamized genealogies provided one
obvious
mechanism, as in the case of the discovery of "Turk b. Yafith";
another
was the "seeding" of particular holy people through the world
(as in the
discovery of cA.dites in distant places, or in stories of the
Prophet's com-
panions appearing in various localities), while more mystically
oriented
strategies include stories placing particularly prominent
converts among
the Prophet's interlocutors during his miCraj, or the theory of
"UvaysI"
Sufis (who could provide not only conversion, but mystical
initiation, for
noteworthy converts). Occasionally, indigenous models of
sanctification
are adapted with a thin veneer of Islamization, as in stories of a
"convert"
supernaturally conceived or of an infant who refuses his infidel
mother's

22. breast; but still more often the "mechanism" used to explain
communal
conversion is the one with which we are most directly
concerned here:
legendary and hagiographical conversion narratives evoking
both Islamic
paradigms and indigenous religious themes.
A final and fundamental feature of the Islamic understanding of
conver-
sion is suggested already by both the communal paradigm of
conversion,
and by the change of status (rather than change …
1
A CHURCH FOR ISLAM
In 1802 Fayz Khan (Fay! KhÁn al-KabÉlÅ) was laid torest in a
shrine at a mosque complex in Kabul. With
the passing of this Muslim scholar, an era came to a close. A
guide
on the path of Islamic mysticism, he had inherited the wisdom
of a
lengthy chain of Sufi masters. Fayz Khan himself transmitted
the
teachings of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, who had formulated a
critique
of Islam in his native India of the late sixteenth and early
seven-
teenth centuries. Celebrated by his followers as the “Renewer of
the
Second Millennium,” Sirhindi argued that “unlawful
innovations”
had corrupted Islam. He taught that the pursuit of Sufi

23. knowledge,
paired with rigorous devotion to the essence of the divine path,
the
shari‘a, showed the way to renewing the faith. Sirhindi’s vision
in-
spired the emergence of a new community. Drawn from
members
of the Naqshbandiyya, a Sufi brotherhood established in the
four-
teenth century, his devotees formed an offshoot, the Mujaddidi
or-
der, which lost one of its most authoritative figures with Fayz
Khan’s
death in Kabul.1
Mourning for this holy man spread beyond the local faithful, for
Kabul and Fayz Khan’s circle had drawn Muslims from
throughout
Eurasia. In the second half of the eighteenth century, hundreds
of
men traveled to Kabul from as far away as the Volga and Kama
River
valley, a region claimed by the Russians since the mid-sixteenth
cen-
tury. After some initial study with local mullahs, these young
men
set out across the steppe, retracing ancient caravan routes, to
cen-
ters of Islamic learning and piety in Transoxiana. The madrasas
of
Bukhara and Samarkand were revered throughout the world and
of-
fered training in the holy law and other religious sciences.

24. Many of
these students then traveled on to Kabul. Through Fayz Khan,
they
earned induction into the brotherhood that linked them to
Shaykh
Sirhindi and the wider Islamic networks of the subcontinent.
These
scholars then returned home to the Russian empire to pass on
this
learning in their own communities.2
It was not the death of Fayz Khan alone, however, that brought
about a reorientation of this pattern of pilgrimage and study.
Recent
developments in the north also played a role. Under Catherine
the
Great, the Russian government had begun to reshape the
horizons
of its Muslim subjects. By the early nineteenth century,
Muslims
had recourse to an expanding network of domestic institutions
de-
voted to cultivating Muslim piety and learning within Russia.
Mus-
lims still traveled widely to seek religious blessings and
wisdom. But
now Muslims could construct mosques and madrasas, with
govern-
ment permission, in their own villages and town quarters.
Moreover,
Russia’s Muslims could look to their own authorities in the
form of
an Islamic establishment empowered by the government to
resolve
difficult religious questions, oversee appointments to mosques
and

25. schools, review disputes based on Islamic law, and issue legal
opin-
ions (fatwas) about them.
Catherine had not merely established a legal basis for the exis-
tence of these institutions in Russia. She had instead
transformed
the imperial regime into a patron of Islam. The empress pursued
a
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
3 2
program of religious toleration in the spirit of the “well-ordered
po-
lice state” imagined by the jurists of Central Europe. Because
toler-
ated faiths were regulated by the police ordinances of the
empire,
they held out the promise of reinforcing autocratic power,
particu-
larly in restive areas where Muslims had repeatedly risen up
against
state authorities or joined the rebellions led by their non-
Muslim
neighbors. The empress hoped to ease tensions among Muslims
and
Orthodox missionaries, officials, and settlers in the eastern
provinces
bordering the steppe, but she also viewed Islam through the lens
of
imperial expansion. Accommodation became a means to win
over

26. Muslim intermediaries who might assist the regime in securing
this
frontier and projecting Russian power into the steppe, and
toward
the deserts and oases of Central Asia.
Having adopted the role of benefactor, a fundamental question
re-
mained: How would the empire discipline a faith whose every
be-
liever, in theory, might look to whomever he or she regarded as
an
authoritative guide to God’s will? This chapter examines the
Russian
state’s answer to this dilemma. Tsarist elites reasoned that
Islam, like
other faiths, would be useful to the empire when it conformed to
a
strict hierarchy and submitted to a domestic chain of command
linked to St. Petersburg. For the multiconfessional architects of
tsar-
ist policy, Orthodox Christian and Protestant alike, the
structures of
the dominant church seemed to offer a model for such
organization.
Moreover, in looking abroad to the Ottoman empire, these
officials
concluded that Islam under the sultan conformed to such a hier-
archy.
To domesticate Islam in the empire, and to turn Muslims away
from alternative sources of authority in Kabul, Istanbul, and
else-
where, Catherine and her officials opted to introduce a
churchlike
organization among a population that had previously known no

27. such institutions. The process was far from smooth. The state
could
not simply impose its will from above without the mediation of
both
A Church for Islam
3 3
Muslim elites and laypeople. In constructing this church for
Islam,
moreover, the regime found that its proper functioning
depended on
a close union between the mosque and the throne. Rather than
merely subordinating Muslims to the empire, this institution
created
interdependence. These new structures of Islamic authority
rested
on tsarist police power.
Discovering the Turkish Creed
The Catherinian search for an organizational structure for
Russia’s
Muslim communities was a product of Russia’s engagement
with the
Enlightenment. Beginning in the late seventeenth century,
Russia’s
pursuit of European learning furnished a fresh lens on Islam
that
compelled Muscovites to forget much of what they already
knew
about that faith. Like the Spaniards before them, Russians
turned
their backs on a lengthy period of shared experiences.3 With

28. Euro-
peanization, Russian elites turned abroad to understand their
Mus-
lim subjects at home.
For enlightened Europeans, Islam was not a “world religion” but
“the religion of the Turks.” Indeed, to them conversion to Islam
meant “to become a Turk.”4 Even Spanish writers treated the
faith as
a foreign novelty, apprehended only by studying the Ottomans.
The
biography of the Prophet, like the practice of polygamy,
featured
prominently in Italian, French, and Polish treatments of the
faith.
By the time Muscovites discovered these accounts, European
writers
had gone beyond mere religious polemic. Focusing on the life of
Muhammad and the rites and customs of “the Turks,” Christian
scholars had begun to systematize knowledge about Islam by
focus-
ing on the institutions of their geopolitical rival, the Ottoman
state
(see Figure 1).
In 1692 Andrei Lyzlov reworked many of these European ideas
in
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
3 4
a Russian context. His Scythian History claimed to relate the
past

29. and present condition of the peoples on the eastern and southern
frontiers of Muscovy, including the Ottomans and their vassals,
the
Crimean Tatars. Though Lyzlov had gained firsthand experience
during military campaigns against the Crimean khans, he relied
chiefly on foreign texts. Closely following these sources, he
labeled
Muhammad a “cursed charmer” and the “diabolical” son of a
Jewish
A Church for Islam
3 5
Figure 1 A print depicting a ceremony at which Ottoman forces
surrendered the for-
tress of Kars to the tsarist army during the Crimean War. E.
Iakov, Sdacha goroda i
kreposti Karsa 16 noiabria 1855–go goda (1868). Print
Collection, Miriam and Ira D.
Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York
Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
mother. The origins of the faith could be traced, Lyzlov
claimed, to
“Muhammad’s charm” and his devious imagination. Islam was
thus
“lawlessness” (bezzakonie), the antithesis of a true creed

30. (zakon).5
At the same time, European scholars judged Islam against a set
of
categories that seemed to define religion among all peoples.
Chris-
tian theology, though, shaped their expectations of other faiths.
In
this vein, Lyzlov described Muhammad’s legacy as a system of
ten
injunctions:
1. on frequent ablutions; 2. on the number of prayers; 3. on
respect for parents; 4. on the observation of matrimony; 5.
on circumcision; 6. on the assistance of the dead; 7. on war;
8. on charity; 9. on respect for chapels [mosques]; 10. on
profession of one God.
Muhammad’s devotees, then, had a structure of rites and rules
that
were intelligible to Christians. Their religion ordered marriage
and
commanded filial respect. They professed monotheism, even ac-
cording “Our Lord Jesus Christ” and “the Virgin Mary” a place
in
their sacred history.6 Thus observers like Lyzlov sketched a
disjointed
image of a religion marked by base deceit and disorder, but also
re-
sembling the structure of Christian theology.
Besides such scholarly treatises, Europe gave Russia a literary
genre devoted to the adventures of Christians, like the writer
Cer-
vantes, who found themselves the captives of Muslim pirates
and

31. slave-traders. In the southern steppe, Russia had its own
Barbary
Coast. As Russian power stretched toward the Black Sea in the
late
seventeenth century, contacts with Muslims—Ottomans,
Crimean
Tatars, and Nogays—also intensified. Raiding and battle yielded
Christian slaves for Muslim merchants. Those who managed to
es-
cape retained valuable information about their captors. One of
the
earliest Russian descriptions of the Ottomans came from the pen
of
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
3 6
F. F. Dorokhin, who returned to his native land in 1674 after
twelve
years of captivity.7
Aided by such informants, Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) drew
on
other European sources. While leading troops toward Astrakhan
and
the Caspian Sea, he commissioned a Russian translation of the
Qur’an. Based on a mid-seventeenth-century French edition, it
ap-
peared in 1716 as The Al-Koran on Muhammad, or the Turkish
Creed.
The emperor also imported expertise supplied by numerous
Chris-
tian émigrés from the Ottoman empire, who knew a great deal

32. not
only about Islam but about the Ottomans’ treatment of the
Chris-
tian populations of their empire. In 1711, Dmitrii Cantemir, a
for-
mer governor of Ottoman Moldavia, defected to Russia. At
Peter’s
request, he composed A Book of Rules, or The Condition of the
Muhammadan Religion, published in 1722. With the
establishment
of diplomatic representation in Istanbul, not only escaped
captives,
adventurers, and renegades, but Russian diplomats began to
supply
information about the “Turkish faith.” The essential window
onto
this religion came not from the neighboring Persians or the
distant
peoples of Arabia or India, but from the Ottomans. Like the
Europe-
ans before them, Russian writers applied the adjectives Turkish
and
Muhammadan interchangeably in describing Ottoman
institutions
and rites.8
Peter the Great’s plans to modernize the empire also included
changes in the status of Russia’s Muslims. In a departure from
Mus-
covite practice, conversion to Christianity became a prerequisite
for
membership in the landowning service elite. Tatar nobles who
re-
fused to abandon Islam found their estates and Orthodox serfs
con-
fiscated by the state and found themselves demoted to the ranks

33. of
the peasantry or laborers for the admiralty. Peter subordinated
the
Church to the interests of secular government and declared
tolera-
tion for Protestants in a bid to attract foreign specialists. But
the em-
ulation of Europe also translated into state backing for figures
within
A Church for Islam
3 7
the Church and civil bureaucracy who advocated introducing
Chris-
tianity among non-Christians. Violence accompanied
proselytiza-
tion. In 1743 alone, state officials and churchmen may have de-
stroyed 418 of the 536 mosques in the town and district of
Kazan.9
The protection of Orthodox Christians, in the empire and in
neighboring states alike, was a central priority of tsarist policy.
Chris-
tian converts from among Turkic and Finnic language groups
ap-
peared vulnerable to Islamic influence in areas where Muslims
lived
alongside them. The empress Anna (r. 1730–1740) tried to
assert con-
trol over Muslim men of religious learning among the Bashkirs,
or-
dering them to swear oaths that they would not “introduce
anyone

34. of other faiths to their religion and not circumcise [them].”
Eliza-
beth (r. 1741–1761) repeated this warning against Muslim
proselytiz-
ing among “Russians, as well as Kalmyks, Mordvinians,
Cheremis,
Chuvash and other people of every rank.”
Elizabeth’s concern with protecting the Orthodox prompted the
regulation of mosque construction. She forbade the building of
mosques in villages with Orthodox Christian inhabitants and set
a
minimum population requirement of two hundred males for the
ex-
istence of a mosque. Even though the empress prohibited
mosques
in mixed settlements, she opposed the destruction of mosques in
other locales. And like her Muscovite predecessors, she
recognized
the importance of mosques as places where “Tatars of the
Muham-
madan faith living in Russia are brought to swear oaths [to the
state]
according to their [own religious] laws.”
On this issue, too, Elizabeth focused on the welfare of the
Ortho-
dox community as a whole. She pointed to the Ottoman empire
and
the potential repercussions for Ottoman Christians of tsarist
policy.
Explaining that the Tatars regarded attacks on their mosques as
an “insult,” Elizabeth noted the danger that their grievances
could
reach “those places” where “people of the Greek [Orthodox]
confes-

35. f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
3 8
sion live in other States, among Muhammadans.” She noted the
risk
of Muslim “oppression” of their churches in retaliation.10
Though Elizabeth reiterated earlier bans on forcible conver-
sion to Orthodoxy, Christian proselytizing and the destruction
of
mosques provoked unrest among Muslims. Moreover, state
expan-
sion to the east of the Volga River toward the Ural Mountains
led to
armed confrontations with local Muslims, the Bashkirs. The
influx
of Russians and Muslim Tatars to areas of Bashkir migration
and set-
tlement increased competition for land and other resources on
this
steppe frontier. Russian officials blocked the pursuit of
Orthodox
proselytization and mosque destruction there; all the same,
several
decades of armed conflict culminated in 1755 in a revolt among
the
Bashkirs under the leadership of a Muslim leader, Mullah
Batyrshah
(BÁîïrshÁh). In the following year, St. Petersburg was
compelled to
reaffirm the right of Muslims in a number of Volga provinces to
re-

36. store or construct mosques in villages where no Christians were
pres-
ent. This measure afforded new security to mosques such as the
one
at Sterlibashevo (Istärlibash), built in 1722, and another
established
in 1745 in Kargala (Seitovskii Posad or Qarghalï), a Muslim
mer-
chant settlement outside of Orenburg; both quickly emerged as
in-
fluential hubs of scholarship and piety.11
After seizing the throne in 1762, Catherine tried to restore
stability
to these restive frontiers. In keeping with her self-
representation as
an enlightened ruler whose maternal wisdom would bring
renova-
tion, harmony, and justice to the empire, the empress
inaugurated a
new paradigm for the treatment of her Muslim subjects.12
Redefin-
ing the goals of the state, Catherine blocked the bishops’ efforts
to
find new converts among the non-Orthodox. In 1764 she closed
the
office of the militant proselytizers who had antagonized
Muslims
and animists in the Volga and Kama River and Urals regions. In
1767
Catherine composed a treatise to demonstrate to both a domestic
A Church for Islam
3 9

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

38. with regard to different faiths and forms of religious expression.
She
would not extend toleration to those whom the Church labeled
heretics, freethinkers, or atheists. Nor did this conception
preclude
conversion to Orthodoxy at some future time. “There is no other
Method,” Catherine advised, “than a wise Toleration of such
other
Religions as are not repugnant to our own Orthodox Faith and
Pol-
icy, by which all these wandering Sheep may be reconducted to
the
true Flock of the Faithful.”13
Cameralists theorized that proper state direction enhanced the
contribution of religion to public order and the general welfare
by
instilling practical morality and providing ethical training.
Johann
Heinrich Gottlob von Justi maintained that “faith definitely
belongs
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
4 0
to the number of elements fortifying a state,” even though rulers
should not regard it “as the single or most important basis of
civil
societies.” States had the obligation, moreover, to place definite
bounds on the forms of religion that were to enjoy toleration.
Justi
cautioned the “Christian sovereign” against permitting the
spread of

39. “dangerous teachings” that might threaten the “tranquility and
pros-
perity of a state.” Citing the “dreadful Mexican faith” and the
reli-
gions of other non-European societies, he argued that “faith
may
contribute very much to bringing civil arrangements into perfec-
tion” but advised that religious excess could lead to “various
wild be-
haviors and absurdities contrary to good morality.” He similarly
con-
demned religion that distracted people from work or
procreation, or
otherwise interfered with the economic priorities of the state.
Justi
warned that unbounded zeal “may also not only corrupt the
morals
of state inhabitants but also in various other ways do harm to
the
general good.”14
The cameralists had the toleration of Christian confessions fore-
most in mind, but their lessons on the uses of religion as an
instru-
ment of state policy could apply to other faiths as well. Joseph
von
Sonnenfels recommended that each citizen in a state have a
religion
that “makes him love his duties.” The Viennese cameralist noted
ap-
provingly that “wherever the eye of the lawgiver and thus also
the
punishment of the judge cannot reach,” there would be the
“exalted
principle of God’s omnipresence as a witness and judge of all,
even

40. the most secret misdeeds” as the “single means to put a stop to
evil
undertakings.” He thus recognized the utility of any religion
“that
recognizes the judgeship of divinity.” Sonnenfels concluded
that ev-
ery religion that promised future “reward for righteousness and
vir-
tue” and the “punishment of vice” merited a place in the law of
the
land. Similarly, Immanuel Kant warned rulers not to mix
matters of
state and religion except insofar as religion contributes to the
forma-
tion of “useful citizens, good soldiers, and loyal subjects.”15
A Church for Islam
4 1
Guided by her own definition of the utility of religion,
Catherine
carried through the ecclesiastical reform begun by Peter and im-
posed further limits on the power of the Orthodox Church.
Under
state direction, Church leaders assimilated the lessons of
cameral-
ist thought; they placed new emphasis on education and the
value
of religion both for personal salvation and the general good.
Ortho-
dox elites also had to reconcile themselves to religious
pluralism.
Catherine’s plans for increasing the population of the empire in-
cluded attracting foreign Catholic and Protestant colonists and

41. an-
nexing neighboring lands.16 Thus the partitions of Poland
absorbed
Catholics, Protestants, Uniates, and Jews; and the annexation of
the
Crimean Peninsula increased the number of Muslims.
Because her Instruction was more an abstract statement of
philo-
sophical principles than binding legislation, Catherine issued no
general statement of toleration. Instead she made ad hoc
announce-
ments in various treaties and decrees pledging noninterference
or re-
spect for the status quo. This approach was not to be confused
with
individual freedom of conscience, however; and as even the
Ortho-
dox had learned, religious communities would exist only within
a
framework of hierarchical state regulation.
Valued as a comprehensive system of discipline, toleration be-
came the responsibility of the policing institutions of the
regime.
Each subject, in turn, was obliged to profess a religion. Backed
by
the police, the laws governing each religion were binding on the
confessional community as a whole, subordinating individual
mem-
bers to communal leaders appointed and supervised by the gov-
ernment. Cameralist theories assigned the state broad
discretionary
powers in determining which questions of ritual and dogma
merited
state intervention. Catherine’s restructuring of ecclesiastical

42. organi-
zation and her claims about which issues belonged to the realm
of
religion and which to the regime compromised her pledges of
non-
interference with respect to each of the tolerated faiths.17
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
4 2
At the same time, this mode of toleration served as a dynamic
means to project imperial power across Russia’s frontiers,
affording
Russia opportunities to gain leverage in neighboring states.
From
Polish, Ottoman, and Persian lands, dissident Orthodox
Christians
(and even Polish Protestants) appealed to the empress for
protection
against religious persecution. A form of policing at home,
toleration
justified tsarist interventions abroad. Catherine’s enthusiasm for
tol-
eration in Poland provoked war with the Turks. In July 1768,
Ortho-
dox Cossacks, emboldened by tsarist involvement in Polish
affairs,
took up arms against their religious foes. Their offensive led
them
onto the territory of the khan of the Crimea, where they
massacred
local Jews. Despite the protests of the Porte, the Russians
refused to

43. break off their operations against Polish forces along the Dnestr
River. In October the Ottomans, backed by the French, declared
war on Russia.18
A number of figures around the empress argued for the seizure
not only of the Crimean Peninsula but of Constantinople itself.
Cast
variously as the liberation of fellow Orthodox Christians, or
Russia’s
reclamation of its classical Greek heritage, the war inspired
calls for
the expulsion of the Turks from Europe. In a letter to Catherine
of
November 1771, Voltaire expressed hope that other powers
would
join her to “exterminate, under your auspices, the two great
scourges
of the earth—the plague and the Turks.” Upon learning that the
sultan had hanged a Greek bishop, the philosophe advised her to
“do the same to the muphti [mufti, a Muslim cleric] at the first
opportunity.” Similarly, an ode celebrating the birth of the
grand
prince Konstantin Pavlovich praised him as the “Defender of the
faith, glory of the Rus, / Terror and horror of the turban-
wearers.”
Others commemorated the annexation of the Crimea as “the first
step toward cleansing Europe of Muhammadans and the
conquest
of Stambul.”19
This struggle with the Ottomans made their faith the subject of
A Church for Islam
4 3

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

45. mind the Divine grace and wonder,” he complained. When an
imam instructed him to take a second wife, a notion that
increased
his “disdain toward the Muhammadan religion,” Baranshchikov
fi-
nally resolved to flee “Tsargrad” for “his fatherland Russia.”20
The anti-Muslim rhetoric of this sailor’s adventure tale and
other
texts like it did not, however, prompt a shift in how the regime
man-
aged the imperial confessional order. Indeed, in the midst of the
first
Russo-Turkish war (1768–1774) of her reign, Catherine
broadened
the legal basis for toleration. In June 1773 she qualified the
rules pro-
hibiting mosques in mixed settlements for the town of Kazan,
where
the Orthodox episcopate had protested the existence of two
stone
mosques in the old Tatar quarter. Catherine supported a gover-
nor who had cited her Instruction in permitting the construction
of
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
4 4
the mosques in the presence of churches and Orthodox converts.
Though her decree mentioned the “toleration of all
confessions,” it
directly affected only these two mosques and the relations
between

46. local Church and state officials. As an explanation for her
decree,
the empress observed that “since Almighty God tolerates all
faiths,
languages, and confessions,” she would act in accordance with
“His
Divine will,” “wanting only, that among the subjects of Her
Majesty
love and harmony always reign.”21
Her caution was well founded. Muslim deputies to the
Legislative
Commission of 1767–1768 had voiced dissatisfaction with local
ad-
ministration; and a rebellion in the fall of 1773 in the eastern
prov-
inces demonstrated its scope. Alongside Orthodox dissenters
(“Old
Believers”), some Muslims joined the revolt under the banner of
the
Cossack Emelian Pugachev. Forced to shift her troops from
fighting
the Ottomans to suppressing Pugachev, Catherine concluded the
Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774. The pact opened up the
Black
Sea to the Russian navy, strengthened tsarist influence in the
Cri-
mea, and made St. Petersburg the guardian of Orthodox
communi-
ties under Ottoman rule. But in the long term the treaty’s
ambigu-
ous language clouded Russia’s gains by seemingly granting the
Porte
a say in Muslim affairs beyond its borders. Although fear of
Ottoman
intervention on behalf of Muslims was not new, Russian

47. expansion
had brought these two states into closer contact and increased
the
number of Russia’s Muslims. Anti-Muslim critics such as Prince
Mikhail Shcherbatov would warn that all Muslims remained
“born
enemies of the Christian” who harbored memories of the time
when
they ruled “over Russia.” Tied by faith “with the Turks,” they
waited
for the outbreak of “war between Russia and the Ottoman Porte,
at
which time these peoples will openly show their loyalty to
them.”22
The empress nonetheless overrode objections from …
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

48. 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

49. 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?

50. 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
Nomads into Muslims
1 9 3
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—

51. heightened
competition for access to grazing lands. Kazakhs struggled to
survive
these harsh conditions; many of them were forced to give up
herding
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
1 9 4
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

52. 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

53. 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
Nomads into Muslims
1 9 5
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

54. 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

55. position
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
1 9 6
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-

56. 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-
Nomads into Muslims

57. 1 9 7
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

58. 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
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
1 9 8
centers of Islamic learning and piety, such as Semipalatinsk and
Petropavlovsk, or to madrasas in Kargala, Astrakhan, and

59. 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-

60. 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-
Nomads into Muslims
1 9 9
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

61. 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-

62. 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
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
2 0 0
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

63. 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

64. keep-
ing of fasts. The khan ordered these official mullahs to lead the
peo-
Nomads into Muslims
2 0 1
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

65. 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
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
2 0 2

66. 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

67. 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-
Nomads into Muslims
2 0 3
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

68. 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

69. 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,
f o r p r o p h e t a n d t s a r
2 0 4
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

70. 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.

71. 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
Nomads into Muslims
2 0 5
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

72. 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: …
"Official" Islam in the
Soviet Union
ALEXANDRE BENNIGSEN
and
CHANTAL LEMERCIER-QUELQUEJAY
In a former article* we analysed the development of
conservative, under-
ground trends in Soviet Islam. The present article is devoted to
the official
Muslim establishment in the Soviet Union.

73. The official Muslim administration was created during the war
on the
initiative of the Mufti of Ufa, Abdurrahman Rasulaev, who
approached
Stalin at the end of 1942 with a project for "normalizing"
relations be-
tween Islam and the Soviet government. Rasulaev was one of
the few
Muslim clerics who had survived the fearful persecution in the
Muslim
territories during the period 1932-1938, when Muslim clerics
were hunted
down as "counter-revolutionaries", "saboteurs", and "agents" of
German,
Japanese or British intelligence. His aim was a relatively
modest one: to
stop pressure against Islam, to obtain legal recognition for it as
well as
some limited advantages- a situation comparable, on a more
modest scale,
to the "concordat" which Metropolitan Sergi managed to obtain
for the
Russian Orthodox Church ..
Stalin accepted Rasulaev's proposal for different reasons. There
waS
the obvious incentive of propaganda: such a move would win
approval
from the Allies and from the Muslim world abroad; ·but above
all, it
would be of advantage at ·home. In 1942, trouble broke out in
the
Cau~asus and a million Muslim mountain-dwellers as well as
the entire
Crimean Tatar community were deported and subjected to

74. reprisals
which amounted to genocide. Therefore, a "concordat" with the
MUfti
Rasulaev was needed to help counterbalance the disastrous
impression
made by the deportations. But more important was the need to
establish
a central Muslim organization which would be loyal and
submissive, and
through which the Soviet government could e~ercise complete
control
over its Muslim subjects.
The Muslim administration created under the above
circumstances has
no parallel in any other Muslim country. Sunni Islam is a
decentralized
religion which has no "clergy" and therefore does not need an
"ecclesi-
* "Muslim Religious Conservatism and Dissent in the USSR",
NeL Vo!. 6, No. 3,
I978, pp. 153-61. Bd.
"Official" Islam in the Soviet Union 149
astical establishment". Nevertheless, the administration in
question fol-
lowed closely the tradition of Imperial Russia: in 1783,
Catherine II
organized a similar control system - the Central Spiritual
Muslim
Directorate (Upravlenie) for European Russia and Siberia in
Orenburg

75. (later in Ufa).
This official Islamic establishment has no central organization,
apart
from a coordinating centre in Moscow with limited competence:
the
Department of Foreign Relations, created in 1962, is in charge
of relations
between the four Spiritual Directorates and Muslim countries
abroad.
The establishment is divided geographically between four
Spiritual
Directorates (Dukhovnye Upravleniya). Three of them are
Sunni, the
fourth is mixed - Sunni-Shia.
I. Spiritual Directorate of Central Asia and Kazakhstan
Sunni of Hanafi rite.
Founded at the first congress of the Muslims of Central Asia
and
Kazakhstan which was convened in Tashkent on 20 October
1943.
Seat: Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Chairman: Mufti Zia ud-Din Babakhanov.
Vice-Chairman: Sheik Yusufkhan Shakhirov (1979).
Language: Uzbek.
The Directorate is represented in each of the five Turkestani
republics
by a Kaziyat (delegation).
2. Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of European Russia and
Siberia
Sunni of Hanafi rite.
Seat: Ufa, Bashkir ASSR.

76. Chairman: Mufti Abd al-Bary Issaev (since 1976).
Vice-Chairman: Faiz ur-Rahman Sattar.
Language: Volga Tatar.
3. Spiritual Directorate of the North Caucasus and Dagestan
~ Sunni of Shafe'i rite.
Seat: Makhach-Kala (before 1974, Buinaksk), Dagestan ASSR.
Chairman: Mufti al-Haflz Omarov (since 1976).
Language: Arabic. .
The authority of this Directorate covers all the autonomous re-
publics of the North Caucasus(except Abkhaziya, which belongs
to
the Directorate of Baku) and the territories (krais) of Stavropol
and
Krasnodar. :'. ,
4. Spiritual Directorate oUhe TranscaucasiaMuslims
Mixed: Shia (of' Ja'fari rite or Ithna-Asharia: the "Twelvers'V
and
Sunni ofHanafi rite.
Seat: Baku, Azerbaidzhan.
"Official" Islam in the Soviet Union
Chairman: the Shia Sheikh ul-Islam. The former chairman,
Sheikh
ul-Islam Ali Aga Suleyman, died in 1978 at the age of 93.
Vice-Chairman: the Sunni Mufti Ismail Ahmedov (1976).
Language: Azeri Turkic.
The authority of this Directorate covers all the Shia (Ja'fari)

77. com-
munities of the Soviet Union and extends to the Sunni
communities
of Transcaucasia, Sunni Azeris (30 per cent of the total
population),
Abkhaziyans, Kurds, Ajars and Ingilois (Georgian Muslims -
100,000?), Hemshins (Armenian Muslims - 5,000?); Meskhetian
Turks (less than 100,000?). Other Muslim religious groups -
Ismailis,
Bahais, Ali-Illahis - have no officially-recognized spiritual
authority.2
Because of the importance of Central Asia, where 75 per cent of
the
Soviet Union's Muslims live, and because of the personality of
its Chair-
man, the Mufti Zia ud-D~n Babakhanov, the Directorate of
Tashkent is
exceptionally important. It is the only one to publish a religious
period-
ical, and the only two official medressehs are on its territory.
Nevertheless,
each Directorate is autonomous, not only as regards
administration but
also as regards canonical matters. There are great differences
between the
Directorates, especially between the more advanced, modernist
Direc-
torates of Tashkent and Ufa and the conservative Caucasians.
Until recently the leaders of the Spiritual Directorate of the
North
Caucasus and Dagestan kept aloof from the Spiritual Directorate
of
Tashkent, considering that the latter was betraying the spirit of
Islam .

78. . . . The Mufti Kurbanov, Chairman of the Buinaksk Directorate,
when
asked for his opinion on the Tashkent fetwas, said: "I think that
Zia
ud-Din Babakanov's fetwas do not correspond to Islam .... Close
ties
between the two Muftiats were only established at the Muslim
con-
ference of Tashkent in 1970".8 [fetwa = official Muslim
pronouncement.]
The four Spiritual Directorates are empowered by the Soviet
govern-
ment to control the religious life of Muslim believers. All the
"working"
mosques, medressehs and religious publications are placed
under their
strict supervision. Any religious activity outside the "working"
mosques
is forbidden by Soviet Jaw. All Muslim clerics must be
"registered" with
the Directorates and paid and nominated by them.
"Unregistered" clerics
who perform various religious rites are branded as "parasites"
and hunted
down. The Directorates and' their registered "clerics" alone are
entitled
to represent Islam vis-a.-vis the Soviet authorities, and only
members of
the Directorates may act abroad on behalf of Soviet Islam.
The small group of "registered" clerics (certainly less than
2,000) is
composed of the executives of the four Directorates and their
delegates in
the republics and regions, and also the staff' of the "working"

79. mosques:
"Official" Islam in the Soviet Union
imam-khatibs and their assistants, mutevvalis, muezzins, kadis,
mudarris,
designated by the general name of mullahs or akhunds (among
the Shias).
We may accept the average number of four to five "registered"
clerics for
every "working" mosque.
This group is heterogeneous. We find a few old survivors of
Stalin's
purges, trained in the pre-revolutionary Turkestani or Tatar
medressehs,
and also young ulemas, graduates of the two Central Asian
medressehs,
who, in some cases, finished their education abroad, in Egypt,
Morocco,
Syria Or Libya. Members of this last group may be subdivided
into two
categories: former Soviet intellectuals, who, before joining the
Muslim
establishment, completed their studies in regular Soviet schools
and even
in universities, and sons of ulemas for whom clerical careers
were heredi-
tary (this is especially true of the Caucasus and of Central
Asia). The
intellectual and cultural level of the young ulemas is excellent,
often
outstanding. In the case of Central Asia, their "professional
standard" is

80. certainly higher than that of their pre-revolutionary
predecessors.5
Administrative Activity of the Spiritual Directorates
• Only a few of the 25,000 mosques that existed before the
Revolution are
still "working". The massive destruction of Muslim prayer-
houses in
Russia started in 1928 and lasted until the Second World War
when some
of them were reopened. Soviet War News boasted in 1943 that
1,200
mosques existed in the USSR. This figure is acceptable and, it
seems, the
number slowly increased until Stalin's death. In 1959 when
Khrushchev
launched the second campaign against Islam, the number of
mosques was
estimated at 1,500. This short but violent campaign lasted until
19646 and
during this period most of the mosques - in particular almost all
village
mosques - disappeared. Their number remained stationary until
1978,
when a modest revival of official Islam was marked by the
opening of a
few mosques.
It is impossible to ascertain the number of "working" mosques
today.
The executives of the Directorates are very cautious in
answering in-
discreet questions, and the data published by Soviet sources is
incomplete
and unreliable. However, the figure of 450 "working" mosques

81. seems
plausible.
In 1976 executives of the Spiritual Directorate of Tashkent
acknowl-
edged the existence of 143 "working" mosques in Central Asia
and
Kazakhstan. All major cities have one or sever~l mosques.
Tashkent has
12 "cathedrals" (Juma mo'sques) and several smaller ones
(mahalla
mosques);7 in Bukhara there are at least four'; and Namangan,
Dushanbe,
Ashkhabad are said to have "several".
It is harder to establish the number of "working" mosques in the
European part of the USSR. We know that they exist in every
important
town of the Tatar and Bashkir republics, as well as in all the
major cities
"Official" Islam in the Soviet Union
of Russia and Siberia with a Tatar colony - Leningrad,
Astrakhan, Mos~
cow, Gorki, l>enza, Irkutsk, Omsk, Saratov. We may estimate
their total
number at 200 at the most.9
We have more precise information about the North Caucasus.
Ac-
cording to recent Soviet data, there are 27 "working" mosques
in the
Dagestan ASSR10 and only two in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR

82. (both opened
in 1978).11 There are no "working" mosques in the Karachai-
Cherkess
autonomous region since the deportation of the Karachais in
1943.12 In
the cities of central and western North Caucasus, Nalchik,
Ordzhonikidze,
Maikop, the number of mosques may be estimated at ten. Thus
the total
number of "working" mosques controlled by the Makhach-Kala
Direc-
torate is probably no more than 45. Except in Dagestan, almost
all the
mosques are in cities.
In Transcaucasia the situation is even worse. In 1976 only 16
"working"
mosques remained in Azerbaidzhan: two in Baku and one in
each im-
portant city such as Nukha, Zakataly, Sheki, Kuba, Khachmas,
Gokchay,
Nakhichevan, Lenkoran. Mosques are in general mixed (Shia-
Sunni) and
the same ceremony is often conducted by two imams, and
attended by
believers of both rites.12 Some mosques exist in Georgia and
Armenia in
the cities of Yerevan, Tbilisi, and Batumi.
This article was finished when new figures for "working"
mosques
were provided by the Mufti Zia ud-Din Babakhanov in a
Moscow Radio
broadcast in Arabic (I April 1979, 15.30 hrs. GMT). The figures
given by
the Mufti for Central Asia seem reasonable, at least as regards