For prophet and tsar: Islam and empire in Russia and Central Asia

Abstract

FOR PROPHET AND TSAR: ISLAM AND EMPIRE IN RUSSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA, Robert D. Crews, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 463 pages, $29.95. Stanford historian Robert D. Crews examines the relationship between the Russian empire and its Muslim constituents from the reign of Catherine the Great to the Revolution of 1917. In particular, Crews advances two intertwined propositions. The first is that administering the population by dividing it into communities of faith, a governing strategy referred to as confessionalization that Crews attributes to Catherine, did much to maintain calm and order within the empire. second, he asserts that this approach allowed the state to govern with less violence and with a greater degree of consensus than historians have previously imagined. In effect, the author contends that a kind of symbiosis evolved between the state and Islam. Crews develops these assertions over a daunting historical expanse of time (two centuries) and territory (the Caucasus to Central Asia). Basing his extensive research on court, police, and other official records, he effectively dispels perceptions that the state was simply an instrument for the repression of Islamic cultures or that those cultures, in turn, were seething with animosity toward the Russian Empire. By implication, a clash of civilizations was neither a permanent nor inevitable feature of Russo-Muslim relations. Rather, the Tsar's regime sought to forge a relationship that in significant ways paralleled the one it enjoyed with the Orthodox Church. In constructing this relationship, the state found opportunity in the demographic diversity and dispersal of the Islamic communities it encountered. Because Islam in Russia and Central Asia did not have an elaborately developed hierarchical organization for managing the populace, the state stepped in to help establish one. A sterling example was the Orenburg Ecclesiastical Assembly, which was roughly analogous to the Orthodox Holy Synod, whose membership was approved by the state. Established by Peter the Great, the Holy Synod became an ideological pillar of the regime, binding spiritual authority to temporal in the person of the Tsar in a manner that accorded nicely with emerging Enlightenment political theory in the West. In turn, the assembly regulated Muslim affairs in a manner that was at least tolerable both to the Tsar and the community of faith it served. In the resultant concordance, aie call of Muslims to worship in the empire normally included a prayer for the preservation of the Romanov dynasty. The Islamic hierarchy benefited substantially, as state support afforded governmentapproved senior clerics a level of legally enforceable authority they had not previously possessed. Ultimately, one of Crews' key findings is his rejection of the traditional explanation of Russian historians that imperial arrangements in the administration of its Muslim population were in large measure a reflection of undergovernment, a simple lack of administrative reach into distant portions of the empire that in turn necessitated limited reliance on native institutions. …