Campbell, Elena I. The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 371 in light of the intricate interweaving of these religious communities’ history and their often uncomfortable, but constantly present, coexistence in the Russian Empire. One might also wish to see similar sources for Judaism, Islam and Buddhism in the Russian Empire, but one cannot really fault Coleman for excluding them from the scope of her volume. Indeed, I can find very little to criticize in this excellent volume. It is extremely rare for a book to be accessible and of use to undergraduates, graduate students, outsiders to the field and specialists in the field, but I believe this book pulls it off. It belongs on the shelf of anyone with any degree of interest in everyday life or religion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia. University of South Florida Christopher Stroop Campbell, Elena I. The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance. Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 2015. xv + 298 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $60.00. This book covers its clearly-defined subject well. Elena Campbell explains at the outset that ‘this study is an enquiry into Russian thinking about what was historically known as the “Muslim Question”’, and she makes it clear that she does not aspire to studying broader intellectual and social movements amongst the Russian empire’s Muslims during the period she covers (roughly 1830–1917, but with a focus on the post-Crimean War period), or even all aspects of the Muslim relationship with the Russian imperial state. Campbell’s aim is to examine a particular set of official attitudes to Islam and how they changed over time — no more, no less — and she achieves this with admirable thoroughness. Starting with the general soul-searching that followed Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, in which the question of the loyalty of Crimean Tatars to the Russian state had become a live issue, in the first half of the book Campbell examines the mass apostasies of baptized Tatars in the Volga-Ural region from the 1860s to the early 1900s; the attempts by the state and the Orthodox Church to mobilize an educational response (in part through missionary activity, but also by means of the well-known ‘Ilminskii system’ of proselytizing and educating non-Russian peoples in their own language); what she describes as the ‘civilizing mission’ in Russia’s new Central Asian territories, whose conquest from the 1840s–80s almost doubled the number of Muslims living under Russian rule; and the management of Muslim religious institutions by the state from the 1860s onwards. The second half of the book, entitled ‘The SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 372 Muslim Question during the era of Mass Politics’, focuses on the new debates that arose after the 1905 revolution and the creation of the Duma, where initially there was a significant Muslim bloc (though one that had shrunk to almost nothing by 1910, with the imposition of ever more restrictive electoral laws), late imperial fears of pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism, and attitudes to Muslims during World War One. Many of these topics have been considered separately and in depth by other scholars — Paul Werth has written on conversion and apostasy in the VolgaUral region, Robert Geraci and David Schimmelpenninck on the evolution of missionary and oriental studies in Kazan´; Geraci and Isabelle Kreindler on the Ilminskii system; Bakhtiyar Babajanov on the state and Islam in Turkestan; Vera Tolz on the St Petersburg school of Oriental Studies; Adeeb Khalid and Stéphane Dudoignon on Muslim reformism; Norihiro Naganawa and Dilyara Usmanova on Muslims and Duma politics, while Mark Batunsky and Dmitrii Arapov have both attempted to provide overviews of the Russian state’s relationship with Islam through publications of primary sources and prosopography. Thus for those who are familiar with the field, some of Campbell’s material and conclusions, and the characters who populate her pages (Gasprinskii, Ilminskii, Ostroumov, Miropiev, Barthold) will already be well-known. However, Campbell is the first to link these debates together over such a long period, and to seek to understand what we might call the Russian ‘official mind’ as a whole when confronted with what was increasingly seen not...