Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia

Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia PDF

Author: Allen J. Frank

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9789004119758

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In this detailed study, Russia's rural Muslim religious institutions in the Volga-Ural region and the Kazakh steppe, during the imperial period, are examined. It is based on the Turkic manuscript history Tavarikh-i Alti Ata.

Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia

Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia PDF

Author: Allen Frank

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-01

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 9004492321

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Russia's Muslim religious institutions on the steppe frontier, during the imperial period, are examined in detail in this book. This study is based on a Turkic manuscript history entitled the Tavarikh-i Alti Ata, compiled in 1910. It examines the mosques, madrasas, imams, mu'adhdhins, and Sufis of a single district and in adjoining regions of the Kazakh steppe, areas that were inhabited by several Muslim communities, including Tatar peasants and merchants, Bashkir and Kazakh nomads, and Muslim Cossacks. The study compares the information from the manuscript with published sources on Islamic institutions in the Volga-Ural region, using it as a case study to draw conclusions for Russia as a whole. Special emphasis is placed on the social and communal functions of these institutions for the Muslim minorities inhabiting rural Russia.

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia PDF

Author: Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 080145476X

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In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier's mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples. The immediate catalyst of the events that Agnes Nilufer Kefeli chronicles in Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region's Krashens, the Muslim and animist Tatars who converted to Russian Orthodoxy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.The traditional view holds that the apostates had really been Muslim all along or that their conversions had been forced by the state or undertaken voluntarily as a matter of convenience. In Kefeli’s view, this argument vastly oversimplifies the complexity of a region where many participated in the religious cultures of both Islam and Orthodox Christianity and where a vibrant Krashen community has survived to the present. By analyzing Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, Kefeli shows how traditional education, with Sufi mystical components, helped to Islamize Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples in the Kama-Volga countryside and set the stage for the development of modernist Islam in Russia.Of particular interest is Kefeli’s emphasis on the role that Tatar women (both Krashen and Muslim) played as holders and transmitters of Sufi knowledge. Today, she notes, intellectuals and mullahs in Tatarstan seek to revive both Sufi and modernist traditions to counteract new expressions of Islam and promote a purely Tatar Islam aware of its specificity in a post-Christian and secular environment.

Imperial Russia's Muslims

Imperial Russia's Muslims PDF

Author: Mustafa Tuna

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-06-04

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 131638103X

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Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.

Of Religion and Empire

Of Religion and Empire PDF

Author: Robert P. Geraci

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780801433276

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This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building, with geographic coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska.

For Prophet and Tsar

For Prophet and Tsar PDF

Author: Robert D. Crews

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-05-31

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 0674262859

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Russia occupies a unique position in the Muslim world. Unlike any other non-Islamic state, it has ruled Muslim populations for over five hundred years. Though Russia today is plagued by its unrelenting war in Chechnya, Russia’s approach toward Islam once yielded stability. In stark contrast to the popular “clash of civilizations” theory that sees Islam inevitably in conflict with the West, Robert D. Crews reveals the remarkable ways in which Russia constructed an empire with broad Muslim support. In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great inaugurated a policy of religious toleration that made Islam an essential pillar of Orthodox Russia. For ensuing generations, tsars and their police forces supported official Muslim authorities willing to submit to imperial directions in exchange for defense against brands of Islam they deemed heretical and destabilizing. As a result, Russian officials assumed the powerful but often awkward role of arbitrator in disputes between Muslims. And just as the state became a presence in the local mosque, Muslims became inextricably integrated into the empire and shaped tsarist will in Muslim communities stretching from the Volga River to Central Asia. For Prophet and Tsar draws on police and court records, and Muslim petitions, denunciations, and clerical writings—not accessible prior to 1991—to unearth the fascinating relationship between an empire and its subjects. As America and Western Europe debate how best to secure the allegiances of their Muslim populations, Crews offers a unique and critical historical vantage point.

The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance

The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance PDF

Author: Elena I. Campbell

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2015-01-26

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0253014549

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“A major contribution to the history of nationality, religious identity, and governance in late imperial Russia.” —William G. Rosenberg, coauthor of Processing the Past From the time of the Crimean War through the fall of the Tsar, the question of what to do about the Russian empire’s large Muslim population was a highly contested issue among educated Russians both inside and outside the government. As formulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Muslim Question comprised a complex set of ideas and concerns that centered on the problems of reimagining and governing the tremendously diverse Russian empire in the face of the challenges presented by the modernizing world. Basing her analysis on extensive research in archival and primary sources, Elena I. Campbell reconstructs the issues, debates, and personalities that shaped the development of Russian policies toward the empire’s Muslims and the impact of the Muslim Question on the modernizing path that Russia would follow. “Readable, original, and endlessly interesting, Campbell’s book deserves the very highest praise.” —Journal of Islamic Studies “Campbell’s book shows how profound official Islamophobia paradoxically led to the preservation of earlier confessional structures, grudging non-interference with the spiritual and social life of most Muslim communities, a restraining hand on the actions (if not the rhetoric) of Orthodox missionaries, and a certain uneasy toleration.” —Slavonic and East European Review “A major contribution to the understanding of Russia’s ‘Muslim Question’—past and present . . . Recommended.” —Choice

ShariE a in the Russian Empire

ShariE a in the Russian Empire PDF

Author: Paolo Sartori

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1474444318

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This book looks at how Islamic law was practiced in Russia from the conquest of the empire's first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire's Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and 'customary' law. Based upon difficult to access sources written in a variety of languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), it offers scholars of Russian history, Islamic history and colonial history an account of Islamic law in Russia of the same quality and detail as the scholarship currently available on Islam in the British and French colonial empires.

Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia

Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia PDF

Author: Allen J. Frank

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2012-09-14

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9004232885

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In Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia Allen Frank examines the relationship between Muslims in Russia and the city of Bukhara, examining paradoxes emerging the city’s Sufism-based Islamic prestige, and the emergence of Islamic reformism in Russia.

Of Religion and Empire

Of Religion and Empire PDF

Author: Robert Geraci

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1501724304

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Russia's ever-expanding imperial boundaries encompassed diverse peoples and religions. Yet Russian Orthodoxy remained inseparable from the identity of the Russian empire-state, which at different times launched conversion campaigns not only to "save the souls" of animists and bring deviant Orthodox groups into the mainstream, but also to convert the empire's numerous Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Catholics, and Uniates. This book is the first to investigate the role of religious conversion in the long history of Russian state building. How successful were the Church and the state in proselytizing among religious minorities? How were the concepts of Orthodoxy and Russian nationality shaped by the religious diversity of the empire? What was the impact of Orthodox missionary efforts on the non-Russian peoples, and how did these peoples react to religious pressure? In chapters that explore these and other questions, this book provides geographical coverage from Poland and European Russia to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska. The editors' introduction and conclusion place the twelve original essays in broad historical context and suggest patterns in Russian attitudes toward religion that range from attempts to forge a homogeneous identity to tolerance of complexity and diversity.