Journal of the Economic and

Social History of the Orient 59 (2016) 166-192

brill.com/jesh

Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia:

A Manufactured Crisis

Allen J. Frank
Takoma Park, Maryland
afrank7129@yahoo.com

Abstract

Since the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Islamic history of the Volga-
Ural region has been based, for the most part, on a modernist narrative in which the
dominant frame of reference for understanding these Muslim communities has been
an ethno-national framework, focused, above all, on the role of the Tatar bourgeoisie in
promoting Islamic reformism and Islamic modernism. The main sources for this frame-
work have been the political writings of the Jadids, Islamic reformists and modernists
who later became engaged the mass-movement politics, beginning in 1905 and continu-
ing through the Russian civil war and the first decade of Soviet power. A central feature
of the Jadid narrative, which has carried over into the historiography, has been that
Muslim society, particularly in Russia’s Volga-Ural region, was facing a crisis brought
about by the supposed failure of its traditional Islamic institutions in the face of a mod-
ernizing Russia. An examination of non-Jadid Islamic sources from this era, however,
brings the “crisis” narrative into question.

Keywords

Jadidism – Russia – Tatars – Historiography – Education – Volga-Ural region –

Kazakhstan – Kazakhs

* An earlier version of this article was given as the Yuri Bregel Lecture on 12 November 2014, at
Indiana University, Bloomington.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi 10.1163/15685209-12341396

Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 167

Introduction

In the intellectual history of the modern Islamic world, it is obvious that the
study of reformism holds a privileged position. In recent times, the prevalent
issue in the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Islamic world has
been how Muslim thinkers addressed the political, social, and economic chal-
lenges that the West—or, put another way, “modernity”—posed to their soci-
eties. Thus, we see historians paying extraordinary attention to figures such as
the Arab modernist Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849-1905), religious reformers such
as the Deobandis in India, and nationalist and reformist intellectuals in the
Ottoman Empire, among others. A widespread assumption, shared by various
Muslim reformers and European observers of Muslim societies in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries is that Muslim societies were themselves in
decline, or decadent. One implication of such an assumption is that historians
have tended to discount existing, or “traditional,” intellectual institutions and
modes of thought. This is, admittedly, a broad-brush assessment and does not
deny the existence of much thoughtful research that challenges the dominant
narrative.1 Nevertheless, the modernist narrative remains dominant in cultural
and intellectual histories of the Muslim world. A common explanation for
the apparent rise of reformism and modernism in the Islamic world is that, in
seeking to modernize their societies, Muslims were reacting to a sense of com-
munal inferiority and social decline vis-à-vis European societies.
Such an assessment applies equally to the study of Muslims in imperial
Russia. As a rule, the study of Muslim cultural history in the Russian context,
and in Inner Asia as a whole, lags far behind the better-studied regions of the
Islamic world, such as South Asia, the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East,
Southeast Asia, and North and sub-Saharan Africa. Among the many possible
reasons for the neglect of Russia’s Muslims in Islamic studies as a whole is
that, despite the almost requisite emphasis on “empire” in imperial Russian
history, the colonialism-focused scholarly tropes and constructs that can be
applied to Muslim communities in the European colonies become more prob-
lematic in the Russian context. Muslims were integrated into the Muscovite
and Russian state beginning in the fourteenth century CE, and substantial
Muslim communities came under Russian rule in the sixteenth century, fol-
lowing the Russian conquests of the Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberian khan-
ates. The Russian integration of these communities well before the advent of

1  Nile Green for example provides important correctives for South Asia and the Indian Ocean
region; see his Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

168 Frank

nineteenth-century colonialist ideology did not necessarily follow the classical

European colonial experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that
has been so well studied. Although it can be argued that the annexation of the
Caucasus, Kazakh Steppe, and Central Asia did largely follow these models,
imperial Russia, in administering these communities, often brought to bear a
different set of historical assumptions and experiences than did the European
imperial powers with their colonies. More importantly for our purposes,
Muslims in Russia, particularly those in the Volga-Ural region and Siberia, had
a longer relationship with direct European rule than virtually any other com-
munity in the Islamic world, and the extent and complexity of this relation-
ship is evident in their intellectual and cultural history. The purpose of this
article is to question the argument that the Russian Muslim communities in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood, 1) that their societ-
ies were in a state of decline as subjects of an expanding European power, and
2) that they required modernist and reformist prescriptions to negotiate the
social, political, and economic changes that they faced. It appears that such
arguments have been based on a narrow selection of historical sources, and a
broader reading of the source material—addressing religious reform, gender
issues, educational reform, and intellectual history as a whole—in fact refutes
these assumptions. In other words, the supposed “crisis of modernity” among
Russia’s Muslim communities has essentially been manufactured.

1 The Problem of Jadid Sources

Much of the scholarship in the field of Muslim cultural and intellectual his-
tory in Russia retains the same fixation on modernism and reform that we see
in Muslim cultural historiography, with a particular emphasis on “Jadids,” a
broad term that includes various modernists, religious reformers, and nation-
alists. Much of the scholarship produced in the West that has observed and
explained Muslim Inner Asian societies through the lens of Islamic modernist
(Jadid) sources is deeply flawed and in need of serious revision. We have seen,
over the past fifty years, in cultural histories of Russia’s Muslims on modern-
ism, a sustained fixation on Islamic reformism, and above all, on Muslim mod-
ernist intellectuals, better known as Jadids. The most effective proponents of
this Jadid fixation were Alexander Bennigsen, his students, and his admirers.2

2  The more widely cited among these works include A. Bennigsen and C. Quelquejay, Les
Mouvements nationaux chez les Musulmans de Russie: le “Sultangalievisme” au Tatarstan.
(Paris: Mouton, 1960); A.A. Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resistance,

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 169

The Bennigsen school has continued to exert considerable influence among

political scientists and historians, both in the West and in the countries of
the former Soviet Union. It has been particularly evident in the emergence
of what Devin DeWeese has termed “Sovietological Islamology.”3 This narra-
tive, it should be added, was also forcefully expressed in Turkish historiogra-
phy, in which it was neatly congruent with the Kemalist narrative of Turkey’s
own modernization.4
While the influence of Bennigsen’s writings has faded over the past few
decades, certain aspects of the his school’s methodology survive, and even
flourish, in scholarly works, even those that would challenge certain aspects
of his conclusions. Many scholars continue to rely exclusively and uncritically
on the writings of Islamic modernists for their sources and their analytical
framework and have accepted uncritically the suggestion that Muslim societ-
ies and cultural institutions were in a state of crisis brought on by the advent
of “modernity” and that the Jadids were the historical agents through which
this cultural crisis was addressed. These historians have, for the most part,
retold a political narrative focused on the late imperial period, basically from
1880 to 1917, which depicted a Muslim community at once oppressed and resil-
ient under Russian cultural pressure to assimilate. The heroes of the narrative
were the Jadids, particularly the Crimean Tatar modernist Ismail Gasprinskii
(1851-1914), who argued that Russian Muslims were facing an existential cul-
tural crisis, characterized above all by stagnation.5 According to Gasprinskii’s

(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1986); E.J. Lazzerini. “Beyond Renewal: The Jadid Response
to Pressure for Change.” In Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change,
ed. Jo-Ann Gross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992): 163-4; A. Bennigsen and
C. Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultangaliev: Père de la Revolution Tiers-Mondiste (Paris: Fayard,
1986).
3  D. DeWeese, “Islam and the Legacy of Sovietology: A Review Essay on Yaacov Ro’i’s Islam
in the Soviet Union.” Journal of Islamic Studies 13/3 (2002): 298-330. In addition to discuss-
ing Ro’i’s book, DeWeese also provides an extensive bibliographical overview of the works
inspired by Bennigsen.
4  For example, the works of N. Devlet, including his Rusya Türklerinin milli mücadele tarihi
(1905-1917) (Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu, 1985). A Tatar translation was published in Kazan in
1998 as Rusiya Törkilereneng milli köresh tarikhi.
5  The theme of stagnation is prominent in Ismail Gasprinskii’s early journalistic manifes-
tos, from the 1880s. See, e.g., his “Russkoe musul’manstvo: mysli, zametki i nabliudeniia
musul’manina.” In Rossia i Vostok, ed. M.A. Usmanov (Kazan: Tatarskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo,
1993): 22; the theme was maintained in the politicized Jadid writings of the post-1905 period;
see N. Dumavi, Probuzhdenie russkikh tatar i ikh literatura (Kazan: Iman, 1999). Dumavi’s arti-
cle was originally published in 1911 in Maxim Gorky’s journal Sobesednik. Both Gasprinskii’s
and Dumavi’s articles were written in Russian for Russian audiences.

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

170 Frank

argument, the Russian state’s desire to Christianize and assimilate it threatened

Muslim society with cultural annihilation. A passive population and an obscu-
rantist and reactionary religious elite was said to be exacerbating this crisis.
Only the adoption of a series of religious and educational reforms (involving
the adoption religious rationalism and secular education) and launching fully
into Russian political life, particularly after 1905, could avert this crisis of stag-
nation. The villains in this narrative were those associated with “traditional”
Islamic education: sclerotic, irrelevant, and obscurantist, and linked with the
reactionary mullahs of Bukhara, especially the critics of Jadidism itself, who
were the reactionary “qadimists.” (a jadid catch-all term to denote supposed
opponents of reform)6 Finally, in this narrative, the Jadids emerge as the vic-
tors, at some point between 1905 and 1917.7 Rationalism held the field, and the
Tatar people become the vectors of enlightenment for the other benighted
Muslim peoples of the Russian empire and beyond. It is explained that, as a
result of their historical experience, Tatars emerge as a people defined some-
how by rationalism and modernism and therefore very different from their
Central Asian neighbors. Such a narrative is feasible only if it stems from an
exclusive reliance on Jadid sources.
A similar narrative emerges for the Kazakhs and the Alash movement, (the
Kazakh nationalist movement that included a large proportion of Jadids) based
on an even slimmer scantier body of sources, with an emphasis on the Kazakhs
as a fundamentally “un-Islamic” or “shamanistic people” and hence more open
to European rationalism, for some unexplained reason.8 In the case of Central
Asia, Adeeb Khalid provides some important qualifications to the approach
of Bennigsen school but nevertheless places the Jadids as the central actors
in Muslim society’s cultural negotiation of “modernity,” discounting or even

6  For an informed discussion of some of the problems surrounding “qadimism” as an ana-

lytic category, see S. Dudoignon, “Qu’est-ce que la ‘qadimiya?” Elements pour une sociolo-
gie du traditionalisme musulman en Islam de Russie et en Transoxiane (au tournant des
XIXe et XX siècles).” In L’Islam de Russie: Conscience communautaire et autonomie politique
chez les Tatars de la Volga et de l’Oural depuis le XVIIIe siècle, ed. S. Dudoignon et al. (Paris:
Maisonneuve et Larose, 1997): 207-25.
7  James Meyer, for example, remarks on how, in 1906, delegates to the Third Muslim Congress
in Nizhnii Novgorod already declared Jadidism victorious; see J.H. Meyer, “The Economics
of Muslim Cultural Reform: Money, Power, and Muslim Communities in Late Imperial
Russia.” In Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts, ed. T. Uyama
(Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2012): 259.
8  Typical in this respect are: M. Brill Olcott, The Kazakhs, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Hoover
Institution, 1995); S. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1967).

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 171

­ ischaracterizing the sorts of ideas and institutions that Jadids attempted to

m
challenge, particularly the educational system, where he cites heavily preju-
diced, and inaccurate, depictions of Central Asian Islamic education as the
basis for evaluating Jadid educational reform proposals.9
There are many flaws in such a unitary focus on the Jadids and their oppo-
nents, but critical is the mischaracterization of the Jadid sources. The mod-
ernist narrative is itself based on Jadid polemical works produced in imperial
Russia and in the Soviet Union of the 1920s, and by Tatar and Bashkir exiles
who had themselves been Jadids.10 These original works continue to be
accepted uncritically among students of Jadidism. Such polemical works were
intended, above all, to establish political contrasts. They were also intended to
direct, focus, and encourage their followers in a political struggle. These jour-
nals, newspapers, and pamphlets are important historical sources, to be sure,
but they cannot be used to the exclusion of a far broader body of sources,
which is precisely what is done in much historical writing on the topic.

2 Non-Jadid Sources

Jadid journalism and polemics, in fact, constitute a narrow body of writing, in

terms of format, content, and compositional genre. We possess a much wider
variety of non-Jadid Muslim narrative sources from the Volga-Ural region, vir-
tually all of which were produced during the great Islamic revival in Russia,
beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, a time not of stagnation
but of sustained cultural, religious, and literary dynamism, which developed in
a parallel fashion in the Kazakh Steppe and particularly in Central Asia. These
include local histories, sacred histories, shrine catalogs, genealogies, genealogi-
cal charters, and biographical dictionaries, and occur in both verse and prose.

9  A. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998): 33.
10  Such works include especially journalism in the imperial era, beginning with the works of
Ismail Gasprinskii and continuing to the works of Mirsaid Sultangaliev in the early Soviet
period. There are also several important monographs that had a particular influence on
the Bennigsen school, such as: Dzh. Validov, Ocherki istorii obrazovannosti i literatury
tatar (do revoliutsii 1917 g.) (Moscow and Petrograd: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1924);
G. Iskhaki, Idel-Ural (Paris: n.p., 1933); A. Battal, Kazan Türkleri (Istanbul: Amdi Matbuası,
1926); G.S. Gubaidullin, “Iz proshlogo tatar.” Materialy po izucheniiu Tatarstana 2 (1925):
71-111; and A. Zeki Velidi Togan, Bügünkü türkili Türkistan ve yakin tarihi, 2nd ed. (Istanbul:
Enderun Kitabevi, 1981). For Central Asia, the works of Sadriddin Aĭnī have been particu-
larly influential; see his Bukhara, vols. 1-2 (Dushanbe: Irfon, 1980-1).

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

172 Frank

Some of these genres, such as village histories and biographical dictionaries,

are unique from an intellectual milieu said to be in a state of stagnation.11 They
should be viewed as compositionally and methodologically original genres of
historiography, both in the Islamic tradition and more broadly. Of particular
importance are Islamic manuscripts, the production of which was in no way
displaced by the advent of print but was supplemented by it; some of our most
important manuscripts are from the twentieth century. The composition of
Islamic manuscripts continued well into the Soviet era, through the Second
World War, and even into the Brezhnev era (1964-1982).12 Notable examples
include important narrative histories, such as Muḥammad-Fātiḥ al-Īlmīnī’s
Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā (1910) and, particularly, Aḥmad al-Barāngawī’s Tārīkh-i
Barāngawī (1914). These works are especially important works for characteriz-
ing Muslim communities and their literary and religious institutions in Russia,

11  On Tatar biographical dictionaries, see N.G. Garaeva, “Traditsii tatarskoi istoriografii XIX
v. i ‘Talfik al-akhbar.” In Problema preemstvennosti v tatarskoi obshchestvennoi mysli, ed.
Ia. Abdullin and R. Mukhametshin (Kazan: Akademiia Nauk SSSR, Kazanskii Filial, 1985):
84-96; L. Baibulatova, “Asar” Rizy Fakhreddina (Kazan: Tatarskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo,
2006); M. Usmanov, “Istochniki knigi Sh. Mardzhani ‘Mustafad al-akhbar fi akhvali Kazan
va Bulgar’ ch. 1, Kazan’ 1885.” Ocherki istorii Povolzh’ia i Priural’ia 2-3 (1967): 144-53. On
the village-history genre, see R. Shaikhiev, Tatarskaia narodno-kraevedcheskaia litera-
tura XIX-XX vv. (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo Kazanskogo Universiteta, 1990) and A. Frank, Muslim
Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the
Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001): 21-36.
12  For surveys of manuscripts and the manuscript tradition among Tatars and Bashkirs,
see M. Gosmanov, Qaurïy qaläm ezennän, 2nd ed. (Kazan: Tatar Kitap Näshriyatï, 1994);
A. Fätkhi, N.I. Lobachevskii isemdägi fänni kitapkhanä qulyazmalarïnïng taswirlamasï 10/2
(Kazan: N.I. Lobachevskii Isemdägi Fänni Kitapkhanä, 1962); Iu. E. Bregel’, “Vostochnye
rukopisi Kazani.” Pis’mennye pamiatniki Vostoka 1969 (1970): 255-73; some recently pub-
lished catalogs include: A.B. Vil’danova, “Rukopisi iz fonda IVAN Respubliki Uzbekistan,
sozdannye vykhodtsami iz Bulgara.” In Iazyki, dukhovnaia kul’tura i istoriia tiurkov: tra-
ditsii i sovremennost’, pt. 2 (Moscow: Insan, 1997): 97-9; M. Akhmetzianov, Tatarskaia
arkheografiia I, vol. 1 (Kazan: Akademiia Nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, 2010); R. Bulgakov
and I. Galiautdinov, Opisanie vostochnykh rukopisei instituta istorii, iazyka i literatury,
ch. 1 Tiurkskie rukopisi (Ufa: Rossiiskii Islamskii Universitet, 2009); A. Arslanova, Opisanie
rukopisei na persidskom iazyke Nauchnoi biblioteki im. N.I. Lobachevskogo Kazanskogo
gosudarstvennogo universiteta vypusk 1 (Moscow and Kazan: Kazanskii Gosudarstvennyi
Universitet, 2005); for important studies of the sacred dimensions of manuscripts
among Muslims in Russia, see A. Bustanov, “Rukopis’ v kontekste Sibirskogo islama,” in
A. Seleznev et al., Kul’t sviatykh v sibirskom islame: spetsifika universal’nogo (Moscow:
Izdatel’skii Dom Mardzhani, 2009): 156-92, and id., Knizhnaia kul’tura Sibirskikh musul’man
(Moscow: Izdatel’skii Dom Mardzhani, 2013).

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 173

and they offer a corrective to the reformist vision.13 They are by no means the
only sources. There are also major manuscript biographical dictionaries, such
as those by Qurbān-ʿAlī Khālidī (1846-1913), from the beginning of the twenti-
eth century,14 and by the Kazakh theologian Sadwaqas Ghïlmani (1890-1972),
which was compiled in the 1960s.15 Many, if not most, of the important printed
works from this era also fall well outside the Jadid canon, as well. In Russia and
Kazakhstan, print was by no means the monopoly of the Jadids. These printed
works included major historical works, such as Qurbān-ʿAlī Khālidī’s Tawārikh-i
khamsa-yi sharqī (Kazan, 1910), Sufi chains of initiation, sermons, and a truly
an enormous array of Kazakh works, primarily in verse, addressing on a large
range of communal and religious themes.16 There were many Tatar and Bashkir
local and regional narrative histories printed in the period from 1880 to 1914. In
short, we are talking about an entire constellation of written sources from a
literate and self-aware Muslim society, of which the Jadids and their writings
formed a relatively small—and arguably, overemphasized—part.
Assuming that the non-jadid literary heritage shows that this society was
culturally dynamic, articulate, self-aware, and comfortable with the use of print
media, what does this say about the argument that, without Jadid reforms—
requiring, for example, engagement in Russian political life, secularization of
education, and emancipation of women—a politically and culturally passive
Muslim society in Russia would stagnate? In other words, what evidence is
there that there was no significant political engagement among Muslims in
Russia before the advent of Jadidism? We know little about Muslim society
in the Volga-Ural region before the Russian conquest in 1552, although no one
can deny it is certain that Muslims in the successor states of the Golden Horde
were involved in a tumultuous and dramatic political life. Yet the idea persists
that Muslim society was unable to adapt to Russian rule until it embraced
Jadid reforms. In illustrating the historical roots of the supposed cultural crisis

13  On these works, see A.J. Frank, Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education and
the Paradox of Islamic Prestige (Leiden: Brill, 2012); id., Muslim Religious Institutions; id.,
“A Chronicle of Islamic Communities on the Imperial Russian Frontier: The ‘Tavarix-i Alti
Ata’ of Muhammad Fatih al-Ilmini.” In Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia, vol. 3,
Arabic, Persian and Turkic Manuscripts (15th-20th Centuries), ed. A. von Kügelgen et al.
(Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2000): 429-518.
14  Qurbān-ʿAlī Khālidī, An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe,
1770-1912, ed. A. Frank and M. Usmanov (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
15  S. Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars of Our Times, ed. A. Muminov and
A. Frank (Almaty: Daik Press, 2015).
16  For an annotated bibliography of pre-revolutionary Kazakh publishing, see
Ü. Subkhanberdieva and D. Seyfullina, Qazaq kitabïnïng shezhiresi (Almaty: Rawan, 1996).

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

174 Frank

affecting Muslim society, Bennigsen and Quelquejay in particular mischarac-

terize the religious policies of the Russian state, describing, for example, forced
Christianization as a national-level priority, which it never was.17 During the
eighteenth century, the implementation of Christianization policies typically
varied widely at the provincial level, for example, with some provinces sub-
jected to Church-sponsored Christianization initiatives, and others exempted
from them. There were also divisions between the Russian ecclesiastical and
military authorities over Christianization policies. Muslims found a myriad
of ways to resist these policies bureaucratically, which the Bennigsen school,
among others, depicts as a form of national resistance but which could just as
well be seen as evidence that Muslims were able to negotiate successfully the
administrative system itself.18

3 Muslim Society and Political Life

Few scholars of Islamic modernism in Russia seem aware that until 1917, Volga-
Ural, Siberian, and Kazakh Muslims enjoyed a communal and fiscal status
on average far more privileged than that of the Russian Orthodox peasantry.
This status was not a gift but resulted from a state of constant negotiation
between Muslims and the Russian state, from before the Russian conquests
of the Volga-Ural region and Siberia, and it was expanded and defended right
up to the end of the monarchy.19 Bennigsen himself and many others ­identify

17  Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les Mouvements nationaux: 24-6.

18  On the Christianization policies affecting Muslims in the Volga-Ural region and Siberia,
see A.J. Frank, Islamic Historiography and Bulghar Identity among the Tatars and
Bashkirs of Russia (Leiden: Brill, 1998): 28-30. See also A. Grigor’ev, “Khristianizatsiia
nerusskikh narodnostei kak odin iz metodov natsional’noi-kolonial’noi politiki tsarizma
v Tatarii.” In Materialy po istorii Tatarii (Kazan : Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1948): 1:226-83;
G. Faizrakhmanov, “Nekotorye aspekty nasil’stvennoi khristianizatsii tatar vo vtoroi
polovine XVI-XVII vv.” In Islamo-khristianskoe pogranich’e : itogi i perspektivy izucheniia
(Kazan : Institut Iazyka, Literatury i Istorii Imeni G. Ibragimova, 1994): 108-16.
19  The issue of estate (soslovie) status among Muslims in Russia remains to be addressed
systematically; for discussions of the legal aspects of estate status among Muslims, see
A. Nogmanov, Samoderzhavie i tatary (Kazan: Tatarskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 2005);
D. Iskhakov, Etnograficheskie gruppy tatar Volgo-Ural’skogo regiona (Kazan: Akademiia
Nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, 1993) and his Istoricheskaia demografiia tatarskogo naroda
(XVIII-nachalo XX vv.) (Kazan: Akademiia Nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, 1993); see also
R. Gumerov, Zakony Rossiiskoi imperii o bashkirakh, mishariakh, teptiariakh i bobyliakh
(Ufa: Kitap, 1999). For a discussion of the communal aspects of estate status among

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 175

1905 as the “the beginnings of Muslim political life,” demonstrating a nar-

row concept of what can be considered political life and certainly one that
must be just as applicable to Russians as to Muslims in the context of the tsar-
ist system.20 To be sure, scholars such as Khalid and Meyer have presented
much more nuanced and informed evaluations of Muslim political life in this
period, but even in their studies the focus is on Jadid discourse, especially fol-
lowing the 1905 revolution. Of course, Muslims had been directly involved in
Russian political life since their incorporation into Muscovy. Muslims joined
or opposed various Russian peasant rebellions but also compiled genealogical
charters establishing landowning rights that were recognized by Russia as legal
­documents.21 They cooperated in the formation of a state-sponsored muftiate
and wrote sacred histories and shrine catalogs, creating a sacred geographic
map of the communities under the jurisdiction of the muftiate and conforming
to its boundaries.22 During the Pugachev uprising, Tatar and Bashkir mullahs
translated and circulated Turkic translations of Pugachev’s (d. 1775) appeals in
the name of Peter III (r. 1762), while other mullahs wrote treatises denouncing
the rebels. The Batyrshah rebellion of 1755, which ushered in the establishment
of the muftiate, took place after the Russian authorities’ abrogation of Muslim
privileges, in this case regarding salt collection.23 When Kazakh and Kyrgyz
nomads rebelled in 1916, it was not in the name of Turco-Tatar nationalism but
because they felt that the tsar had abrogated the nomads’ historical exemption
from military service, by drafting Kazakhs and Kyrgyz into the army.24 Political

Muslims in Russia, see A.J. Frank, “Imperial Russian Estate Status in Muslim Religious and
Historical Narratives.” In Central Eurasia in the Middle Ages. Studies in Honor of Peter B.
Golden, ed. Istvan Zimonyi and Osman Karatay, forthcoming.
20  Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les Mouvements nationaux: 42-57.
21  On Bashkir genealogies as landowning estate charters, see R.G. Kuzeev, Bashkirskie she-
zhere (Ufa: Bashkirskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1960).
22  A.J. Frank, “Islamic Shrine Catalogues and Communal Geography in the Volga-Ural
Region: 1788-1917.” Journal of Islamic Studies 7/2 (1996): 265-86.
23  For publications of Turkic documents produced among Muslims both supporting and
opposing the Pugachev uprising (1773-4), see M. Usmanov, Vozzvaniia i perepiska vozha-
kov Pugachevskogo dvizheniia v Povolzh’e i Priural’e (Kazan: Izdatel’stvo Kazanskogo
Universiteta, 1988); M. Gosmanov, “Pugachev yavï turïnda istälek.” In Ütkännän-
kilächäkkä, ed. Ghalimjan Ghïylmanov (Kazan: Tatar Kitap Näshriyatï, 1990): 140-3; on
the Batïrshah uprising, see Batïrsha, Gharïznamä, ed. Mäsgüt Ghaynetdin (Kazan: Iman,
2004) and A. Chuloshnikov, Vosstanie 1755 g. v Bashkirii (Moscow and Leningrad:
Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1940).
24  Ghilmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars: 391-2; see also S. Asfendiarov, Natsional’no-
osvoboditel’noe vosstanie 1916 goda v Kazakhstane (Alma-Ata and Moscow: Kazakhstanskoe

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

176 Frank

life is well documented in the Muslim community, with Islamic scholars debat-
ing the status in Islamic law of their communities under a non-Muslim sover-
eign and the political implications of a range of theological debates that the
German scholar Michael Kemper has termed “Islamic Discourse.”25
Similar discussions took place among Kazakh Islamic scholars as late as the
1920s, involving, for example, the implications of the Kazakh steppe’s status as
part of the dār al-Islām, while Russian enclaves in the steppe were part of the
dār al-ḥarb.26 In other words, political life, even the “mass politics” as quali-
fied by Meyer, did not begin with the creation of the first state Duma, and no
Muslim at the time would have seen it that way. And yet, a Muslim did not
have to be a Jadid, or even support the Jadid program to engage in electoral
politics centered in the Duma. There are examples of Sufis in Astrakhan that
strongly supported Tsar Nicholas’s manifesto authorizing the Duma in 1905, as
well as anti-Jadid scholars in northern Kazakhstan engaged in political activi-
ties linked to the Duma.27
While Muslims in Russia were able to adapt to changing political conditions
in the Russian Empire, to retain privileges, or to encourage changes, they were
equally able to do this in religion and education, which largely stayed outside
of official state control until the abolition of Islamic education in the 1920s.
Muslims were at the center of the expansion of the Russian economy, and,
as living standards grew, they became increasingly integrated into a capital-
ist economy. This resulted in the creation of a particularly wealthy and self-
confident Muslim commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, who are depicted
as the natural constituency for the religious, social, and political reformism
prescribed by the Jadids. This bourgeoisie’s interest in the Jadids’ prescriptions
for reform was, according to the narrative, manifested above all in Islamic edu-
cation. We are told that the Jadid movement was essentially a movement of

Kraevoe Izdatel’stvo, 1936); G.I. Broido, Vosstanie kirgiz v 1916 g. (Moscow: Nauchnaia
Assotsiatsiia Vostokovedeniia pri TsIK. SSSR, 1925): 19.
25  Kemper addresses a wide range of political issues discussed by Muslims in Russia, includ-
ing, among others, the legitimacy of the muftiate, and the legal status of the Muslim com-
munity itself in the context of Russian rule. For a discussion of the Volga-Ural’s standing
as part of the “realm of Islam” (dār al-Islām) or the “realm of war” (dār al-ḥarb), see
M. Kemper, Sufis und Gelehrte in Tatarien und Baschkirien: der islamische Diskurs unter
russischer Herrschaft (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1998): 290-4.
26  Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars: 477-8.
27  See A.J. Frank, “Muslim Sacred History and the 1905 Revolution in a Sufi History of
Astrakhan.” In Studies on Central Asian History in Honor of Yuri Bregel, ed. D. DeWeese
(Bloomington, IN: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 2001): 297-317; Ghïlmani,
Biographie of the Islamic Scholars s, 464-5.

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 177

educational reform that sought, first and foremost, to provide the Tatar bour-
geoisie, and Tatars in general, with a “relevant” education. We are told that
“traditional” education was scholastic, sclerotic, and of no practical benefit to
young Muslim scholars.28 For example, Danielle Ross depicts a generational
conflict among madrasa students who are partisans of reform and the older
generation that supposedly opposed them, but she fails to appreciate that the
proponents of supposedly reactionary Bukharan educational methods were
also themselves consciously invoking reform by bringing Tatar and Bashkir
teaching methods and curricula in line with Bukharan models.29 Following
Gasprinskii, the Jadids, as a political movement, continually sought to create
a false dichotomy in which the Muslim community stood between stagnation
(and hence eradication) and reform.30 For them, the only meaningful political
life was what they defined as the here and now. The only admissible type of
reform was Jadid reform, and all those who opposed it were labeled “tradition-
alists.” Such narratives are common in politics as a rhetorical tactic, but they
can also be mistaken as historical analysis.

4 The Ubiquity of Reform and Islamic Education

How accurate is this depiction of reform? Does it take into account how Islamic
education actually functioned in these communities? The Jadid-inspired
accounts in fact provide little accurate information about how Islamic educa-
tion worked or was understood among the Muslims it served, beyond stereo-
typical straw-man descriptions. If established madrasa education was such an
abject failure and failed to meet the practical needs of the Tatar and Kazakh
bourgeoisie, why did wealthy patrons and believers continue to fund it? Today,

28  This idea is widespread in a variety of Jadid writings intended for primarily Russian audi-
ences, (see Validov, Ocherki istorii obrazovannosti i literatury tatar: 13-32, and Dumavi,
Probuzhdenie russkikh tatar: 7-8) and appears repeatedly in works influenced by the
Bennigsen school, as well as in Soviet and post-Soviet Tatar historiography and among
Turkish historians. It reappears in more recent studies of Jadidism as well; see Khalid,
The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 28-34.
29  See D. Ross, “Caught in the Middle: Reform and Youth Rebellion in Russia’s Madrasas,
1900-1910.” Kritika 16/1 (2015): 57-89.
30  A particularly good example of the Jadids’ use of the reform-vs.-stagnation argument
can be seen in the writing of G. Iskhaqi; see D. Ross, “The Nation That Might Not Be:
The Role of Iskhaqi’s ‘Extinction After 200 Years’ in the Popularization of Kazan Tatar
National Identity Among the ʿUlama Sons and Shagirds in the Volga-Ural Region,
1904-1917.” Ab Imperio 3 (2012): 341-69.

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178 Frank

thanks especially to the manuscript sources, we have a far better idea of how
madrasas actually functioned in Russia and the role they played in the large-
scale Islamic revival among the Tatars and Bashkirs.31 We are gaining a bet-
ter understanding of how the Ḥanafī curriculum was used pedagogically and
how students and teachers may have seen it to be advantageous, both peda-
gogically and professionally. We are also gaining a better understanding of the
scholarly links between the Volga-Ural region and other regions of the Islamic
world, including Daghestan and Turkey, and especially Central Asia and the
city of Bukhara. We know that thousands of Tatars and Bashkirs studied in
Bukhara in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; we know that
Bukharan educational methods were transported in large measure to Russia
and the Kazakh steppe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that
Bukharan-style education remained dominant in Russia’s madrasas down to
the Soviet era.32
The Ḥanafī curriculum as a whole and Bukharan educational methods in
particular were important factors in the emergence of the Islamic revival
in both Russia and Central Asia. Tatar sources show that Bukhara’s madrasas
could be engaging places to study and were anything but hidebound and stag-
nant. The Bukharan educational system, like any large educational system,
had its share of poor students, poor instructors, institutional indifference, and
even corruption. But keen students could, at the same time, seek out talented
instructors, satisfy their scholarly curiosity, and obtain an excellent education,
regardless of its supposed usefulness—or lack of it. In Bukhara, students stud-
ied Islamic law, hadith, theology, and other “Islamic sciences,” but also top-
ics such as surveying, geometry, algebra, mathematics, astronomy, geography,
and history. They could, and sometimes did, even study under non-Muslims.
For example, there was at least one Tatar, Ḥāfiẓ ad-Dīn al-Barāngawī, who
studied Torah from a Jewish scholar named ʿAbd al-Raḥīm in Bukhara. This
was probably not an isolated case, since Tatar mudarrises (teachers) brought
Bukharan educational conventions back to Russia. We know, for example, that
one Bukhara-trained mudarris in late-nineteenth-century Petropavlovsk had
his Kazakh students study the Torah and the Gospels. Far from considering
their education stagnant or inferior, some Bukhara-trained Tatar scholars even

31  Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions: 224-55; Id., Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: 120-51.
32  The preeminence of Bukharan-style education in Russia, at least down to the First World
War, is particularly evident in the Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, but that was apparently the case also
in northern Kazakhstan; see Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars, and G. Lotfi,
“Qïshqar mädräsäse.” In Mädräsälärdä kitap kishtäse, ed. R. Mähdiyev (Kazan: Tatarstan
Kitap Näshriyatï, 1992): 150-71.

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 179

proclaimed their education superior to that of Russian universities and under-

stood perfectly the differences between the educational systems. Similarly, we
know from the manuscript sources, particularly the Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, that
not only is the oft-repeated Jadid charge that Bukharan madrasas under the
Manghït dynasty (1753-1920) neglected hadith study false, but also that it was
intensely studied and debated in classes and in public lectures, and that inter-
est in hadith filtered back to Russia.33
As for Jadid primary education, it is clear that the effectiveness, innova-
tion (in the Western sense), and success of Jadid primary schools have been
­overstated.34 It is common in histories of Muslim education in imperial Russia
to find tallies of maktabs and madrasas in various provinces and districts.
This is especially true of Jadid institutions, where the large numbers are meant
to show a groundswell of popularity (in pro-Jadid writings) or a threat to
the Russian state (in Russian missionary works and other tsarist materials).
Recently, some students of Jadidism have begun to view these numbers more
critically,35 and we should question their accuracy for several reasons. First,
the compilers of these statistics—bureaucrats working in an era of heightened
islamophobia and anti-Muslim Kulturkampf—had an ideological and bureau-
cratic interest in inflating them. More importantly, we know that funding for
madrasas and especially for maktabs was chronically unstable, including for
Jadids, and was dependent upon the barest of agricultural surplus in rural
areas, where most Muslims lived.36 Moreover, the definition of a maktab, in
particular, was a fluid one. If a mullah taught boys and his wife taught girls
in the same maḥallah (quarter, neighborhood), was that one or two maktabs?
And what about Tatar students who were employed through more or less infor-
mal arrangements to teach the children of wealthy Kazakhs? How were they
and their pupils counted? Most importantly, the official sources tend to speak
of number of schools that opened and tend not to mention how many schools
closed and under what circumstances they closed.
There are mentions in the manuscript sources of several Jadid schools, and
across the board, whether in Novouzensk District, Baranga, or an urban center
like Semipalatinsk, we see that these same schools invariably close swiftly, due
to the opposition of local figures and, ultimately, to the apathy the Muslim

33  Frank, Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: 124-5, 171-5; Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic
Scholars: 495.
34  Validov, Ocherki istorii obrazovannosti: 46-50, and Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les
Mouvements nationaux: 232-3.
35  Meyer, “The Economics of Muslim Cultural Reform”: 253.
36  Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions: 232-6.

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180 Frank

population.37 More decisively, while the manuscripts are all nearly unanimous
in their evaluations of Jadidism, they are also more restrictive in their defini-
tion of it. Rather than seeing it as a broad manifestation of rationalist enlight-
enment, two imam-historians, Aḥmad al-Barāngawī and Muḥammad-Fātiḥ
al-Īlmīnī, understand Jadidism to be, above all, an educational method charac-
terized by teaching through a syllabic method. Al-Īlmīnī describes this method
as neither particularly new nor particularly effective, and he notes, archly, that
his own pedagogical methodology was superior to that of the Jadids, on the
basis of how quickly he was able to teach literacy.38 Clearly, one did not have
to be a Jadid to care about effective teaching methods. Sadwaqas Ghïlmani,
himself sympathetic to Jadidism after 1919, confesses to the intense hostility to
Jadidism among Kazakh nomads into the 1920s.39 Al-Barāngawī also empha-
sized the popular hostility to the Jadid method among villagers in Baranga
because it differs from the practices of the ancestors and, in their view, violated
the shariʿa. At the same time, Aḥmad al-Barāngawī, certainly no Jadid him-
self, was the author of a work on Tatar alphabet reform, a subject commonly
described as a Jadid monopoly.40
Moreover, whether it was in the provinces of Samara or Viatka Province,
in Semipalatinsk, or in Xinjiang Province, in China, Jadid schools are con-
sistently described in these sources as failures, closing because of a lack of
public support. More importantly, their failure is attributed to the fact that
traditional maktabs were successfully educating children using proven and
successful teaching methodologiespedagogy. Even so, scholars could adopt
certain aspects of Jadid pedagogy, without signing up for the entire program
(certainly a far cry from the absolute Jadid victory described in Jadid writings).
Aḥmad al-Barāngawī recorded how a Kazakh teacher, in his nomadic maktab
in the Emirate of Bukhara in 1904, used some elements of Jadid pedagogy and
rejected others.41 It is evident that non-Jadid scholars were sufficiently confi-
dent in their own pedagogy to reform it on their own terms. Rather than seeing

37  Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, fol. 4ab; Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 248; A. Frank and
M. Usmanov, Materials for the Islamic History of Semipalatinsk: Two Manuscripts by
Aḥmad-Walī al-Qazānī and Qurbān-ʿAlī Khālidī (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2001): 82.
38  Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions: 248-9.
39  Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars: 387, 400-1.
40  Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, fols. 4ab, 121a, 138b-139a; A. Fätkhiev, Tatar ädipläre häm ghalim-
näreneng qulyazmalarï (Kazan: Qazan Universitetï Näshriyatï, 1986): 54-7.
41  A. Frank, “A Month among the Qazaqs in the Emirate of Bukhara: Observation on Islamic
Knowledge in a Nomadic Environment.” In Explorations in the Social History of Modern
Central Asia (19th-Early 20th Century), ed. P. Sartori (Leiden: Brill, 2013): 258-9.

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 181

Jadid methods as any sort of threat, they described them in passing as some-
thing briefly fashionable but ultimately impractical.

5 Women and Education

Many scholars have also been also quick to give exclusive credit to Jadids for
advancing girls’ education.42 Women’s education is frequently discussed in
the manuscript materials, typically carried out by the wives of imams, known
as abïstays. Agnes Kefeli has recently demonstrated the crucial role of wom-
en’s education in diffusing Islamic knowledge among Tatar Muslims, as well
as among non-Muslims in Kazan Province.43 We also know from the Tārīkh-i
Barāngawī that some women, primarily from the prominent ulama families
in Kazan and Viatka provinces, gained renown in several Islamic sciences,
including Qurʾan recitation and Persian language. These include Fakhr-i Jamāl-
abïstay bint ʿAbd al-Nāṣir, whom Aḥmad al-Barāngawī represented in the fol-
lowing terms:

[Fakhr-i Jamāl-abïstay] possessed learning, and she loved the orphans

and the poor, and she helped them according to her strength and ability.
She was constantly engaged in all of the rituals, litanies, and devotions,
and she gave delivered sermons to the women. In the region of Baranga
she was the first famous abïstay. She would teach girls with great dedica-
tion. According to the custom of the time, there were girls who could read
Arabic and Persian books such as Gulistān, Tuḥfat al-fuqahā, and Darr
al-majālis. She fulfilled perfectly the position of khwāja-āna44 because
she was trustworthy in her memorization of the ostazbika meter.45 This
was because, just as her dealing with women was good and fine, she was
firm, staid, and strong in her inner aspects. That is why God Almighty, as

42  See, e.g., A. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute, 1978): 101-2.
The equation of Jadidism with women’s education is particularly pronounced in Tatar
historiography; see, e.g., A. Makhmütova, Millät analarï (Kazan: Jïyïn Näshriyatï, 2012)
and T. Biktimirova, Tatar khatïn-qïzlarï mäghrifät yulïnda (Kazan: Tatarstan Respublikasï
Fännär Akademiyäseneng Tarikh Institutï, 2001).
43  Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions: 224-6; A. Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia:
Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014): 148-60.
44  Evidently an honorific for a respected female scholar.
45  Ustazbikälek maqamï in the text. Evidently a meter specifically used by women in Qurʾan
recitation.

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182 Frank

the one who makes exceptions, provided, in her time, male and female
scholars.46

Aḥmad al-Barāngawī mentions another female scholar in Baranga, ʿĀʾisha bint

Jalāl al-Dīn, the daughter of a deputy imam in Baranga, who married an imam
in the nearby village of Yanga Awïl known today as Toshtoial, located in the
Mari Republic. Concerning her, Aḥmad writes:

All three of [Jalāl al-Dīn’s] daughters were short of stature and sharp
of speech. The smartest and most beautiful of them was ʿĀʾisha. When
she was a girl, she was hard-working and would teach all of the girls in
Baranga. She also knew Arabic and Persian books well. She learned much
from my father [Ḥāfiẓ al-Dīn] in the shadow of his zeal and wisdom, and
she would not miss a single daily prayer.47

A third accomplished abïstay mentioned by Aḥmad was Badr-i Jahān bint

Naṣrallāh (d. 1896), who was married to Ṣibghatallāh ibn ʿAbd al-Qādir
al-Sharīfī (d. 1871), a prominent scholar in the village of Orï, in Kazan Province.
Concerning her, Aḥmad writes:

Badr-i Jahān-abïstay was very mild-natured and kind-hearted and

refrained to a great extent from useless words and from sins such as
slander. Every day of every week she would perform supplemental
prayers and Qurʾan recitation and occupy herself [in reciting] the Dalāʾil
al-Khayrat, the Qāsida-yi Burda, the Ḥizb al-Baḥr,48 and the Holy Qurʾan.
In addition, she taught the girls zealously.49

Although they might be dismissed as isolated cases, these women were active
in a single district among many districts inhabited by Muslims. In any case,
they are certainly no more isolated than prominent Jadid women such as
Mökhlisä Bubïy, Mahruy Mozaffariya, and others.

46  Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, fol. 28b.

47  Ibid.: 92b-93a.
48  These are litanies; Aḥmad al-Barāngawī’s father, for example, obtained licenses in these
specific litanies in Kashgaria.
49  Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, fol. 76ab.

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 183

6 Tatar Religious Practices

One more aspect of the Jadid narrative, seized upon by students of Jadidism,
and especially by Tatar scholars collectively, is the idea that the Tatar bourgeoi-
sie became the standard bearers of reformism after 1905 and that the Tatars
became effectively a “reformist nation,” mediating modernity for the more
benighted Muslim peoples of the steppe and Central Asia.50 Nowhere was this
more evident than in Islamic theology and religious practice. Islamic reform-
ism came to be seen as the most important fruit of the Tatar Islamic revival,
and Tatars busied themselves bringing rationalism and monotheism, as well
as “modernity,” to the peoples of the steppes and Central Asia.51 Whatever
the claims of Jadids (and later, communists), the religious practices of Tatars,
Bashkirs, and Kazakhs, collectively, did not, on the whole, differ substantially,
and it was precisely among Kazakhs that we see more intense debates on issues
of heterodoxy and orthodoxy in ritual practice. A case in point is the däwir
prayer, which was a significant topic of debate among Kazakh scholars in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The däwir prayer was a part of the funeral
ritual in which the relatives of the deceased paid a mullah to take the sins of
the deceased upon themselves, thereby allowing the soul of the deceased to
avoid the Torment of the Grave. Reformists generally considered the practice
ḥarām (forbidden by law), but it also had its defenders. Tatars in particular
cited the practice as an example of un-Islamic behavior among the Kazakhs,52
although the practice was by no means restricted to nomads. The Uzbeks
had a similar practice, called davir, which has been described as a sacrifice
offered in penance, in exchange for forgiveness.53 It was also practiced among

50  Bennigsen and Quelquejay accept uncritically the notion of the Tatars as a “vanguard
nation” in their studies of the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultangaliev, who applied this
principle to implementing anti-religious propaganda among Kazakhs and Central Asian
Muslims; see Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les Mouvements nationaux: 321-35; Bennigsen
and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultangaliev: Père de la revolution tiers-mondiste. This idea is
especially developed among Tatar scholars; see especially D. Iskhakov, Fenomen ­tatarskogo
dzhadizma: vvedenie k sotsiokul’turnomu osmysleniiu (Kazan: Iman, 1997) and R. Salikhov,
Tatarskaia burzhuaziia Kazan i natsional’nye reformy vtoroi polobiny XIX-nachala XX v.
(Kazan: Master-Lain, 2001).
51  For a discussion of this sort of literature, see Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions: 247.
52  It is first mentioned in a Tatar verse work, published originally in 1849, that ridicules
Kazakh cultural practices; see Ūshbū qiṣṣa qazāqning aḥwāllarūn bayānīdir (Kazan: n.p.,
1879): 10-11.
53  J. Mamatov et al., Comprehensive Uzbek-English Dictionary (Springfield, VA: Dunwoody
Press, 2011): 1:231.

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

184 Frank

Tatar communities in the Ural region in the late twentieth century54 and was
even defended by Tatar scholars in Semipalatinsk in the nineteenth century.55
In light of the intensive debates taking place among Kazakh scholars in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries regarding the legality of the däwir prayer,
the defense of the practice by Tatar scholars and its continued practice in the
Volga-Ural region suggests that it was, in fact, the Tatars who had internalized
the allegedly un-Islamic practice and the Kazakhs who resisted it.
Similarly, while Kazakhs, Tatars, and Bashkirs all celebrated memorial feasts
on the third, seventh, and fortieth days after someone’s death, Tatars and
Bashkirs often added an extra repast feast on the fifty-first day.56 This ritual is
still practiced today among Tatars and numerous communities in the North
Caucasus.57 The point is not to suggest that practitioners of the fifty-first-day
memorial feast were are “less” Islamic but to demonstrate that the selective
identification by ethnographers and others of specific practices in order to
establish such a hierarchy is both methodologically flawed and open to con-
tradiction by other evidence. We also have evidence of Tatar Muslims visiting
the tombs of Finno-Ugrian Mari and Udmurt saints in the nineteenth century,
and other traditions, which, while universally considered Islamic by their
practitioners and even defended as such down to the present day, were selec-
tively identified or ignored by Jadid observers to create a political narrative of
“cultural” hierarchy between ethnic groups.58 This idea has found its way into
the Tatar nationalist narratives and can be seen in Tatar histories of Jadidism,
where reformism becomes part of the Tatar national genius, and in histories of
the Tatars in Central Asia and Xinjiang. This idea that Tatars are “more Muslim”
than their neighbors, while widespread, is analytically flawed and nonsensical,

54  F. Bayazitova, Urta Ural (Sverdlovsk ölkäse) tatarlarï (Kazan: Fiker, 2002): 260.
55  For a detailed description of the däwir prayer, see Qurbān-ʿAlī Khālidī, An Islamic
Biographical Dictionary: fol. 70b.
56  I. Vorob’ev and G. Khisamutdinov, Tatary Srednego Povolzh’ia i Priural’ia (Kazan: Nauka,
1967): 349; N.V. Bikbulatov and F.F. Fatykhova, Semeinyi byt Bashkir XIX-XX vv. (Moscow:
Nauka, 1991): 134; for a modern defense of this practice among Tatar Muslims, see
R. Zakirova, Ärvakhlarïbïznï shatlandïrïyq! (Kazan: Iman, 2002): 18-20.
57  In the North Caucasus, the fifty-first-day (or, in some cases, the fifty-second-day) memo-
rial feasts have become increasingly popular over the past several decades; see S. Akkieva,
Islam v Kabardino-Balkarskoi Respublike (Moscow: Logos, 2009): 31, and R. Zel’nitskaia
(Shlarba), “Vliianie transformatsii abkhzskogo obshchestva v XX v. na izmeneniia v
pokhoronno-pominal’noi obriadnosti v sovremennoi Abkhazii.” Religiovedenie 4 (2013):
159-60.
58  A.J. Frank, “The Veneration of Muslim Saints among the Maris of Russia.” Eurasian Studies
Yearbook, 52 (1998): 79-84.

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 185

and, as we have seen, the idea that Tatar religious practices differed substan-
tially from those of their nomadic neighbors is repeatedly contradicted in the
sources.59 That idea was also, of course, widespread among imperial Russian
officials and authors, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.60
All of this begs the questions: Beyond its political program how unique were
Jadidism’s prescriptions and solutions, and can we credit Jadidism with being
a driving force and intellectual embodiment of the reformist current? The evi-
dence suggests it was simply one branch of a broader current rooted in estab-
lished and evolving religious institutions that we see reflected especially in the
manuscript material.

Conclusion

It is clear from non-Jadid sources that, in the late nineteenth century, Russia’s
Muslims were adapting to changing political and economic conditions in
Russia, just as they had been doing since before the sixteenth century, and
beforehand. There is no evidence that cultural crisis forced Muslim commu-
nities suddenly to become aware of the need for reform, as much as social,

59  The depiction of Tatars as the heralds of reason and progressivism is particularly evident
in studies of Tatar diasporas in Central Asia and the Kazakh Steppe; see M. Chanishif,
Junggo tatar ma’arip tarikhi (Urumchi: Shinjang Khalq Nashriyati, 2001); id., Tatarlarning
qïsqacha tarikhi (Urumchi: Shinjang Khalq Nashriyati, 1988); G. Shakhmukhammad kyzy
Karmysheva, K istorii tatarskoi intelligentsii 1890-1930-e gody (Moscow: Nauka, 2004);
Kh. Gazizov, Tatary v istorii Kirgizii: proshloe i sovremennost’ (Bishkek: Izdatel’stvo KRSU,
2010); G. Khairullin and A. Khamidullin, Tatary (stranitsy istorii i segodniashnii den’)
(Almaty: Bilim, 1998); S. Turdyev, “Sredneaziatskie tatary: rol’ i znachenie v kul’turnoi i
politecheskoi zhizni Turkestana pervoi chertverti XX v.” In Islam v tatarskom mire, ed.
Stéphane A. Dudoignon, D.M. Iskhakov, and R.M. Mukhametshin (Kazan: Panorama-
Forum, 1997): 169-90. Such a view was also embraced by Central Asian Jadids; see S. ʿAynī,
Bukhārā inqilābīning ta‌ʾrīkhī, ed. S. Shimada and S. Tosheva (Tokyo: NIHU Program
Islamic Area Studies, 2010): 67-70. For a more nuanced approach to the role of Tatars
and Bashkirs on the Kazakh steppe, see G.S. Sultangalieva, Zapadnyi Kazakhstan v sis-
teme etnokul’turnykh kontaktov (XVIII-nachalo XX vv.) (Ufa: RIO RUNMTs Goskomnauki
RB, 2001); ead., “The Russian Empire and the Intermediary Role of Tatars in Kazakhstan:
The Politics of Cooperation and Rejection.” In Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional
and International Contexts, ed. T. Uyama (London and New York: Routledge, 2012): 52-79.
60  See R. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006): 222-7; a good example of this extensive
literature is M. Mashanova, Sovremennoe sostoianie tatar-mukhammedan i ikh otnoshenie
k drugim inovertsam (Kazan: Iman, 2002).

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186 Frank

religious, and cultural change constituted a constant reality. Muslims had been
managing social and political evolution before Jadidism, and the manuscript
and printed sources from outside the Jadid current demonstrates that they
were fully aware that they did not need specifically Jadid prescriptions in order
to adapt to change in the late imperial period. These non-Jadid sources would
have to include the works of Islamic reformism, which had a long pedigree
in the Volga-Ural region, including those of Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī, who was
retroactively recruited in twentieth-century Jadid historiography to become
the forefathers of Jadidism.61 While the two movements shared a common
rationalist and ultimately Salafist outlook, including hostility to Sufism, the
movements were initially separate, if overlapping, phenomena, as in Central
Asia, where Samarqandi reformists exerted a strong influence on Marjānī.62
But, more importantly, Islamic reformism itself by no means dominated
the field and remains contested outside of official religious bodies in Russia
and independent Kazakhstan. The Naqshbandi shaykh Zaynallāh Rasulev is
thought to have been an ally of Jadid educationists (and, in a narrow sense, he
was). Yet he also penned wrote a strong refutation of Ibn Taymiyya and of the
reformists who endorsed him.63 As we have seen, Aḥmad al-Barāngawī’s father,
Ḥāfiẓ al-Dīn, who was initially a supporter of Marjānī, later in life became a
critic of Marjānī’s reformism64 and was the author of a treatise denouncing
Jadidism, simultaneously being an opponent of the “qadimist” theologian
Īshmī Īshān.65 There were other defenders of Sufism, in addition to Rasulev,
such as the Bashkir historian and poet Muḥammad ʿAlī Chōqorī. But the Jadids’
and reformists’ objections to Sufism elicited reactions from people we can call
Sufi reformists. The Astrakhan Sufi, imam, and historian Jahānshāh ibn ʿAbd
al-Jabbār al-Nīzhghārūṭī wrote a history of Astrakhan in which he defended

61  For critical evaluations of the relationship between Islamic reformism and Jadidism in
the Volga-Ural region, see Kemper, Sufis und Gelehrte: 429-65.
62  Bakhtiyar Babadzhanov has demonstrated, the emergence of Salafist ideas in the Jadid
press in Tashkent in the early 1920s; see B. Babadzhanov, Zhurnal “Haqiqat” kak zerkalo
religioznogo aspekta v ideologii dzhadidov, TIAS Central Eurasian Research Series No. 1
(Tokyo: NIHU Program Islamic Area Studies, 2007).
63  See the pamphlet Sheikh Zainulla Rasulev ob Ibn Taimii (Kazan: Iman, 2005).
64  Ḥāfiẓ al-Dīn’s treatise, titled Radd al-iʿtizāl, refuting Marjānī was written in 1894-5;
see Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, fols. 119b-120a.
65  The Arabic-language treatise, titled Risāla-yi hajā, denouncing the Jadidist educational
method was written in 1897-8. The work was translated into Turkic by a certain Bahāʾ
al-Dīn Qūpāyī, who died before the work could be published; see Tārīkh-i Barāngawī,
fol. 121ab. On Ḥāfiẓ al-Dīn’s relationship with Īshmī Īshān, see Tārīkh-i Barāngawī, fols.
138b-139a.

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Muslim Cultural Decline in Imperial Russia 187

Astrakhan pilgrimage and shrine veneration, while praising the 1905 revolu-
tion. At the same time, he critiques Polish Muslims, a group lionized by the
jadids, for their assimilation into European culture.66 Remarkably, Muḥammad
Ḥarrās Āydārof, an imam and Sufi from near Orenburg, published in 1911 an
appeal calling on Sufis to return to the origins of Sufism, specifically invoking
Abū Hāshim al-Ṣūfī, a figure said to have lived during the Abbasid period. This
suggests the emergence of a sort of Sufi Salafism, at least in terms of delineat-
ing moral authority. His treatise, titled Īshānlargha khitāb!, is also an appeal
for moral reform among Sufis, particularly among the Bashkirs and Kazakhs,
in which he invokes the examples of the earliest Sufis, as well as the moral
authority of later ones, such as Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband.
The examination of printed and, especially, manuscript sources outside
of those produced by Jadids demonstrates that the “decline” paradigm as it
is applied to Muslims in imperial Russia seriously needs revision. During
the period when Muslims supposedly were at a crossroads, forced to choose
between Jadid prescriptions on the one hand and cultural annihilation, due to
the intellectual decline of their own societies, on the other, an examination of
a broader range of sources shows us a society that was culturally vibrant and in
a state of intellectual ferment. Adeeb Khalid has identified the advent of print
in Central Asia as a key aspect of the Jadids’ program for cultural change, but
Islamic texts had been printed in Russia since the late eighteenth century, and
Jadid imprints accounted for a small proportion of the hundreds of thousands
of copies of editions coming from Muslim presses in Russia. Print was used
widely by the opponents of Jadidism and, even more, by those who ignored
Jadidism altogether.
Reform, defined in varying ways, was widely sought by Muslims in Russia,
but the dynamics of reform were by no means monopolized by the Jadids,
nor were Jadid prescriptions necessarily accepted as either/or propositions
by Muslim scholars. This should bring into question “traditionalism” itself as
an analytical category that is increasingly problematic in understanding the
intellectual history of the Volga-Ural region and Kazakhstan under Russian
rule. The sources, both manuscript and printed, reveal a society that was self-­
confident, adaptable, flexible, and certainly capable of self-criticism. The his-
tory of Muslim society in Russia has always been one of adaptation under
a variety of circumstances. It is only by expanding the types of sources we
examine and looking at them more critically that we will begin to gain a fuller

66  
Jahānshāh ibn ʿAbd al-Jabbār al-Nīzhghārūṭī al-Ḥājjī Tarkhānī, Tārīkh-i Astarkhān
(Astrakhan: n.p., 1907).

jesho 59 (2016) 166-192

188 Frank

understanding, and more importantly, a fuller appreciation of Muslim com-

munities in imperial Russia.

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