Muslims and Modernity in the Russian Empire

Abstract

Slavonic and East European Review, 94, 4, 2016 REVIEW ESSAY Muslims and Modernity in the Russian Empire ALEXANDER MORRISON Tuna, Mustafa. Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788–1914. Critical Perspectives on Empire. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2015. xiii + 276 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £64.99: $99.99. Ten years ago you could still count the number of English-language monographs on the Muslims of the Russian empire on the fingers of one hand: Adeeb Khalid’s pioneering work on the jadid reformers of Central Asia, Virginia Martin’s book on the Kazakhs of the Middle Horde, Allen Frank’s detailed study of the Tatars and Kazakhs of the Novouzensk district, Jeff Sahadeo’s study of Colonial Tashkent and Robert Crews’s attempt at a comprehensive survey of Muslim relations with the tsarist state were more or less the only book-length studies of the subject.1 Today the field, if not yet overpopulated, can certainly be described as mature, with a depth and sophistication of scholarship which at last begins to bear comparison with the history of Muslims under British or French imperial rule. We are now starting to see the fruit of what we might call the second generation of American PhD dissertations on the subject, with works by Elena Campbell, Ian Campbell, Rozaliya Garipova, Eileen Kane, James Alexander Morrison is Professor of History at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. 1 Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Berkeley, CA, 1997; Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780–1910, Leiden, 2001; Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century, Richmond, 2001; Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Cambridge, MA, 2006; J. F. Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1865–1923, Bloomington, IN, 2007. ALEXANDER MORRISON 716 Meyer, James Pickett and Danielle Ross all either published or imminent,2 as well as important new work from relative veterans such as Agnès Nilüfer-Kefely, Charles Steinwedel and Paolo Sartori.3 Mustafa Tuna’s thought-provoking book is part of this latest wave, and like much prior scholarship focuses primarily on the Muslim encounter with ‘modernity’, and in particular those who took a ‘reformist’ or ‘jadid’ educational and religious path. In a recent article which cites Tuna’s book, Devin DeWeese has fiercely criticized what he calls this ‘Jadidocentric’ tendency, arguing that ‘modernity’ is a highly problematic analytical category, which in this context always includes a spoken or unspoken assumption that Muslim society and belief were ‘backward’, ‘stagnant’ or ‘unchanging’ until the ‘modernizers’ appeared and brought enlightenment and reform in the nineteenth century. DeWeese writes that this overlooks earlier patterns and cycles of change, ignores the beliefs and practices of the majority of Muslims who were uninterested in and unaffected by these ideas, and involves a series of unconscious value judgements in favour of the reformers, prompted by a feeling that they are somehow closer to the historian in their beliefs and values. DeWeese instead would cast them as proto-fundamentalists, because of their narrow adherence to what they considered authentic scriptural authority, their disdain for centuries 2 Elena Campbell, The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance, Bloomington, IN, 2015; Ian Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731–1917, Ithaca, NY, 2017; Rozaliya Garipova, ‘The Transformation of the Ulama and the Shari’a in the Volga-Ural Muslim Community under Russian Imperial Rule’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2013; Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Ithaca, NY, 2015; James Meyer, Turks Across Empires: Marketing Muslim Identity in the RussianOttoman Borderlands, 1856–1914, Oxford, 2014; James Pickett, ‘The Persianate Sphere during the Age of Empires: Islamic Scholars and Networks of Exchange in Central Asia, 1747–1917’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 2015; Danielle Ross, ‘From the Minbar to the Barricades: The Transformation of the Volga-Ural ‘Ulama into a Revolutionary Intelligentsia (1864–1918)’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2012, and ead...