Customer Reviews

For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Robert Crews' pathbreaking book forces us to rethink Imperial Russia's relationship with its Muslim populations. Elegantly written, and drawing on sources in numerous languages from largely untapped archives, Crews' work is balanced and insightful. It is sure to become a classic.

Crew's research found `systematic investment in particularism had managed to accommodate diversity while strengthening the regime's hold on these population;' on the other hand, `the state remained the weakest where it was least entangled with the affairs of Islam and where Muslims could not utilize its power on behalf of religion.' During Catherine the Great's reign, the establishment of a state-back Islamic hierarchy in Ufa extended the state's power throughout Ural and Volga regions. Her successors' attempt at marginalizing state-sponsored Islamic involvement in Kazakh steppe and Turkestan `deprived themselves of a mechanism for controlling Muslim intermediaries' and thus `full integration of the populations of the steppe and Tukestan was inhibited by the state's failure to establish more extensive ties to Muslim institutions and collaborators.'

By grounding `imperial authority in religion,' `the tsarist state became an essential forum for the resolution of disputes among Muslims, who learned to associate the state with the mediation of family conflicts as state reached deep into the mosque communities.' By turning her regime into a patron of Islam, Catherine the Great's religious toleration per her `Instruction' was a `pragmatic means to avert confrontation' and `accommodation becomes a means to win over Muslim intermediaries who might assist the regime in securing eastern provinces and projecting Russian power into the steppe.' In Ufa, she supported the creation of `an Islamic establishment under imperial direction' - the Orenburg `Ecclesiastical Assembly' under the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education until 1832 and the Ministry of Internal Affairs - which became `a center of doctrinal authority' and `a framework of bureaucratic supervision' by licensing clerical duties.

Heading the Assembly, the first mufti Kusainov and his successors were `willing to employ their interpretation of Islamic writ to legitimize tsarist law.' These helpful intermediaries also alleviated tensions and contradictions between Muslim beliefs and state laws. In the dispute over the timing of burying the deceased, they `evaded enforcement rather than assumed an wholly oppositional stance that would have led to the momentous undertaking of emigration or rebellion.' The compromise of the `Muslim traditional interests and tsarist administrative demands' also manifested itself under `common religious idiom focused on sin.' Such `improvisation of moral language' could be found in the case of venereal disease prevention: Governor Obruchev amended Mufti Suleimanov's religious exhortation to `omit references to Imperial law' and assert that `the regime disciplined not for its own sake but for Islam.'

The anti-clericalism of Catherine's successors elevated the state to become a `critical tool for ulans and lay people alike' and `redefined orthodoxy and amplified the reach of the state into previously inaccessible locales.' Conflicts arose as lay people were given new venues in the Assembly and the imperial legal traditions to air grievances against the clerics over the `parishioners' own understanding of the sharia.' Accusations over mullah's neglect of duties, competition between rival mullahs and intrafamilial conflict all reinforced the state's role as the arbitrator. Hence, many unpredictable outcomes resulted since even the `guardians of law did not always gain state backing for the efforts to extirpate a false teaching.'

Officials at the time also interpreted the state's intervention in family matters as `Muslim submission to the paternal authority of the state.' The chief feature of the tsar's justice was to `define guardianship of the sharia.' On property division and rights of female heir, the state `indirectly sanctioned polygamy' by enforcing sharia norm. Woman's rights in many cases advanced `following textual tradition of Islam': `Disputing practices afforded women novel opportunities as volumes of demands for divorce enabled women to end/renegotiate unhappy marriages.' In the case of Mar'iam Zubairova and Zuleikha Akhtiamova, the `Assembly overrode parental wills and upheld the right of these women to marry men of their choices.' State sponsorship of Islam furnished many rigorous debates within the Muslim communities and provided opportunities to challenge the status quo.

`Treating the Kazakhs as a special case and distinguishing them from both Muslims in Orenburg,' `governors there undermined the general statues of toleration with administrative decrees that closed mosques and schools and in doing so, deprived themselves of the regulatory apparatus that accompanied toleration throughout the rest of the empire.' By preferring customary law over an Islamic one, the court of biys was `absence of formality and all official routine' and as Kazakh informant Valikhanov contended that `its informality precluded various kinds of intrigue.' The state became less involved in familial life as shown by the low appeal rates and Kazakhs' efforts to appeal to the Orenburg Assembly for direction were institutionally forbidden. The Ibragimov report `forced lawmakers to rethink their strategy of leaving Kazakh religion without hierarchical regulations,' while N.A. Dingel'shtedt in a 1892 publication of the Journal of Civil and Criminal Law found `officials' tendency to idealize the patriarchal charms of the customary court, whose main element is represented by arbitrariness.' Ironically, nearly half a century before, Kazem-Bek rallied against `the disarray and the arbitrariness that marred the legal reasoning of Muslim scholars.'

In Turkestan, `Russian rule was made conditional upon the new authorities' support for the preservation of the moral injunctions and rights granted by sharia.' The state found itself allied with a cast of unsupportive intermediaries in existing religious notables and conferred upon them tax exemptions and other perquisites. The result was chaos and manipulation. For example, the Namargan kazis seized the power to make jurisconsultant and legal appointments by taking advantage of imperial policies - the district chief was tricked. On the burial law, the kazi judges ruled against the state instead of working with it and regulators contended that such `decision provoked disturbances.'

Crew concluded that `the particularistic order of confessional politics remained the foundation of the empire' and the `empire was a product of imagination, not just of elites but of heterogeneous groups of subjects. He also refuted many Muslim reformers and Islamic scholars' contention of stagnation under the establishment of the mufti because they `downplayed the dynamism and vitality of religious debate that contact with tsarist institutions had unleashed and ignored the initiative of Muslim laypeople who challenged the authority of the `ulama by adapting imperial law and bureaucratic procedure to Islamic controversies.''

The subject and the author's relentless energy in addressing matters of such inquiries, "turning nomads into Muslims" never before taken seriously, is the most engaging aspect of this book. As we see America today invest in the Muslim World to promulgate a more moderate form of Islam, for its own imperial projects, the same has actually occurred in the Russian context a century (even longer!) before. History repeats itself. (although the interaction then was a little bit more sophisticated than it is now.) This book should be read by all those who read "What Went Wrongs". I highly recommend it.

Most difficult to read. A heavy subject made all the heavier by the author's approach of writing this book as 1) a two-semester course on the subject delivered by a graduate student delivering prepared text and/or 2) a doctoral disertation not edited for reading; but rather to be used as footnotes in someone else's disertation on a similar subject.

Almost unbearable.