Tatar Empire

Danielle Ross

Description

In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual cuture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Empire that Tatars Built

1. The Age of the Settler Ulamā

2. The Art of Accruing Scholarly Prestige

3. Colonial Trade and Religious Revival

4. A Shaykhly Rural Gentry

5. Knowledge, History-Writing, and Becoming Colonial

6. Muslim Cultural Reform and Kazan Tatar Cultural Imperialism

7. Fundamentalism, Nationalism, and Social Conflict

8. At War with the Tatar Kingdom

9. An Empire without Russians

Conclusion

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Religión
• Scholarly method
• Reform
• Ural Mountains
• Siberia
• History of Asia
• History of religions
• History of Europe
• Central Asia
• Islam
• Expansion
• Asia
• Kazakh

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253045720
• Langue: English

Extrait

TATAR EMPIRE
TATAR EMPIRE
Kazan s Muslims and
the Making of Imperial Russia
Danielle Ross
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Danielle Ross
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04570-6 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04571-3 (pbk.)
1 2 3 4 5 25 24 23 22 21 20
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Empire That Tatars Built
1 The Age of the Settler Ulam
2 The Art of Accruing Scholarly Prestige
3 Colonial Trade and Religious Revival
4 A Shaykhly Rural Gentry
5 Knowledge, History Writing, and Becoming Colonial
6 Muslim Cultural Reform and Kazan Tatar Cultural Imperialism
7 Fundamentalism, Nationalism, and Social Conflict
8 At War with the Tatar Kingdom
9 An Empire without Russians
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE WITHOUT the support of many along the way. First, I am eternally grateful to David McDonald, who took me in at the beginning of my MA-PhD program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became my mentor and guardian angel. His deep knowledge of Russian history never ceased to amaze me and set for me the standard of what a historian should be. I must also express my gratitude to Francine Hirsch, who was both an impeccable guide through the field of Soviet history and a source of emotional support throughout my time in graduate school, and to Michael Chamberlain, who pushed me to think in new ways about social conflict in Islamic history.
I would like to extend my gratitude to Utah State University, Nazarbayev University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and IREX. This book would not have been possible without their financial and institutional support.
The research that went into this book would not have been possible without considerable assistance on the ground in Russia. Many thanks to Daniya Zagidullina and Gawhar Khasanova at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Kazan, who have always gone above and beyond to help me secure invitations and travel documents. I also extend thanks to Ildus Zagidullin at the Institute of History for his extensive knowledge of Tatar history and unfailing hospitality. Many thanks to the staff of the Institute of Language, Literature, and Art and especially to Ilham Gumerov, Marsel Akhmatjanov, Alsu Khasavnekh, and Nurida Nasibullina, who welcomed me with many cups of tea and took time away from their own research to assist me with mine. Thank you as well to the staff of the Kazan Federal University s Lobachevskii Library, who directed me to sources I would never have thought of consulting. Gratitude is also due to Airat Zagidullin, who assisted me with my work in the Rare Book Collection at the Tatarstan National Library, and to Fluera Daminova and Ramziya Abzallina, who helped me locate materials in the Tatarstan National Museum collections. Nor should I neglect the Ufa Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Words cannot express my gratitude to Ramil Bulgakov, who lent me his encyclopedic knowledge, his good humor, and his camera when I showed up unannounced at his office door. Thank you as well to Igor Kuchumov and Ildar Gabdrafikov, who welcomed me to Ufa and helped me navigate the city. I am also grateful to the late Gul farida Abubakirova, founder of the museum at Suleimaniya Mosque in Orenburg, who so generously guided me through the mosque s books and manuscripts collection.
Many thanks to my colleagues from NU, especially Alima Bissenova, Beatrice Penati, Zbigniew Wojnowski, Alexander Morrison, Samuel Hirst, Gabriel McGuire, Meiramgul Kussainova, Stephen Wheatcroft, and Michael Kelly, for their feedback and friendship. Thank you likewise to Susan Cogan, Lawrence Culver, Karen Senaga, Eliza Rosenberg, Kyle Bulthius, Ahmet Izmirlioglu, James Sanders, and Christopher Conte for their support and their insight since I arrived to USU. Finally, thank you to Paolo Sartori, who has never hesitated to challenge me but has also emboldened me to take my research in new directions and has made me a stronger scholar as a result.
Special acknowledgement must go to Stephen Batalden, who recruited me into Arizona State University s Critical Languages Institute so many years ago, and to Agnes Kefeli and Gul jihan Kashaeva, my first Tatar language teachers, who introduced me to Tatar history and culture.
Nothing in this book would have been possible without the support of my mother-in-law, Liliya Bashirova, who welcomed me into her home and family so many years ago, kindly opened her late husband s papers and personal library to me, and became a second mother, confidant, and friend. Finally, special thanks are due to my husband, Iskander, and our daughter, Maryam, who have followed me back and forth across the Atlantic and relived the history of Kazan s theologians, writers, and revolutionaries together with me. This book is for them.
TATAR EMPIRE
INTRODUCTION
The Empire That Tatars Built
The people came from Semipalatinsk
From the Irtysh Valley in China [. . .]
They came from Karkarinsk Oblast ,
From the Urals, and from Turgai.
Good fortune rests with [Shaykh] Zaynull h.
-Arginb y, Arginb y Is q jj ila ajjge Uska ul n n Troitsk Ish n Zaynull h Kha ratka ch ghargh n madkhiyalar
S O A RGINB Y WROTE LOVINGLY OF HIS S UFI MASTER in 1911. That master was Zaynull h Ish n Ras lev, a Naqshband -Khal d shaykh from the South Urals who had established a madrasa and Sufi lodge ( khanaqah ) in Troitsk in what is now Cheliabinsk oblast near the Russia-Kazakhstani border. Arginb y describes how thousands of Kazakh, Bashkir, and Tatar disciples came to Zaynull h bringing charitable donations and asking for healings. They gathered to hear of the Muslim victory at the Battle of Badr, of the pre-Islamic time of ignorance ( al-j hiliyya ), of the miracles of the Prophet Mu ammad, of the rewards of paradise and the punishments of hell. 1 They sought the knowledge ( ma rifa ) that would enable them to directly experience God s love. 2
In 1913, another Cheliabinsk Muslim took up a different kind of mission. Socialist Revolutionary alilull h Yenikeyev returned from Kazan to Kiev and was detained by the police. Determined not to be tried and exiled, Yenikeyev fled Kiev with a hundred rubles and a letter of introduction from a fellow Muslim revolutionary in his pocket. His flight took him to Moscow, Odessa, and then out of Russia, across Austria, and into Romania. He climbed mountains, slept in barns, and bribed and begged his way past border guards and train conductors. In December, he reached Istanbul. He wrote a desperate letter to his colleagues back in Russia, asking for more money. He admitted that, if their money failed to arrive, he could take the job he had already been offered: cooking pilaf in the cafeteria of one of the city s madrasas. Despite his difficult financial condition, he was not ready to return home because, as he put it, There is a whole sea of revolutionary work to be done here. 3
Ideologically, Ras lev the Sufi shaykh and Yenikeyev the revolutionary could hardly have been further apart. Yet, as members of the Kazan-based Muslim scholarly networks of inner Russia, both readily took on the role of enlightener and savior of their coreligionists, even when those coreligionists lived hundreds or thousands of miles away from Kazan. This impulse toward instructing, leading, and mediating was not acquired through exposure to Marxism, ethno-nationalism, the modern periodical press, trains, telegraphs, or fundamentalist trends in Islamic thought. Rather, it was rooted in the peculiar historical relationship between the Russian government and its first Muslim subjects: the Muslims of Kazan.
From the 1680s to the 1910s, imams, teachers, students, shaykhs, and merchants from the heartland of the conquered Kazan khanate left their native region to settle in new towns, fortresses, trading posts, and villages in the Urals, western Siberia, the Kazakh steppe, and the Russian-Chinese borderlands. In their capacity as interpreters, messengers, mediators, cultural specialists, and businessmen, they served in the vanguard of Russia s colonial expansion. But as they moved east and south, they also brought with them their own intellectual life, literature, religion, and hierarchies, transplanting their culture and their vision of community identity to new territories. Through these activities, Kazan s Muslims became a distinctive colonizing force within the larger Russian expansion. In the earlier phases of that expansion, Russian officials found these Muslims to be useful allies. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Russian officials visions of empire changed, and their opinion of Islam worsened, they came to see Kazan s Muslims as rivals for influence among the non-Russians of the empire s south and east, and as an obstacle to the creation of a stable imperial state.
The title of this chapter has two meanings. First, it highlights the fact that