Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education, and the Paradox of Islamic PrestigeBy Allen J. Frank

Abstract

In the mid-nineteenth century, Allen Frank tells us, in his richly detailed study of the relationship between Russian Muslims and the city of Bukhara, Siberian Tatar women used to observe the Transoxianan fashion of blackening their teeth and painting their fingernails yellow and red; among their menfolk, it was the custom to shave one’s head with a Bukharan razor. Whether as a trendsetter in grooming styles or a revered centre of piety and learning, Bukhara has long enjoyed a prominent standing in Russian Muslim life. In Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia, Frank ably evokes for us the shifting contours of Bukhara’s prestige among Tatars and Bashkirs over the last few centuries: and if the book ultimately ends up raising more questions than it answers, it thereby does the invaluable service of helping to stimulate our thinking about the dynamics of status and the popular imagination. As Frank observes, early in ch. 2, ‘The Religious and Social Foundations of Bukharan Prestige’ (ch. 1 comprising a discussion of sources), the status which Bukhara came to enjoy among Russian Muslims in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was initially in large part aetiological, reflecting a belief in sacred bonds tying Russian Muslim communities to a Transoxianan point of origin. Such bonds, Frank shows, were embodied in various forms, whether charter narratives ascribing communal descent to a saintly Central Asian ancestor, family genealogies tracing descent from a Central Asian sayyid, or accounts of communal conversion at the hands of Central Asian saintly missionaries. Increasingly from the early eighteenth century onwards, meanwhile, Bukhara acquired a more worldly significance in the life of Russian Muslims, as Central Asian mercantile groups implanted themselves in such cities as Astrakhan, Orenburg, Petropavlovsk and Semipalatinsk, lured by lucrative Russian tax exemptions aimed at stimulating long-distance trade across the Volga–Ural region and western Siberia. Their legal and fiscal immunities contributing in no small part to their success, these Central Asian merchant communities were a highly visible element in Russian Muslim life, their native tastes—amongst other things, in distinctively Central Asian fabrics, eyeliner, and plov—becoming signifiers of privilege amongst the wider Muslim population.