Best regards, Andrew Stewart
Begin forwarded message: > From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <[email protected]> > Date: March 29, 2021 at 6:15:23 AM EDT > To: [email protected] > Cc: H-Net Staff <[email protected]> > Subject: H-Net Review [H-Russia]: Kefeli on Ross, 'Tatar Empire: Kazan's > Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia' > Reply-To: [email protected] > > Danielle Ross. Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of > Imperial Russia. Bloomington Indiana University Press, 2020. 288 > pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-04571-3. > > Reviewed by Agnes Kefeli (Arizona State University) > Published on H-Russia (March, 2021) > Commissioned by Eva M. Stolberg > > In _Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia_, > Danielle Ross makes a major contribution to both the history of the > Russian empire and to the history of its ethnic and religious > minorities. She skillfully argues that the Kazan Tatars were both > colonized and colonizers, suffering the consequences of their initial > defeat at the hands of Ivan the Terrible in 1552 but also > participating actively in Russia's colonial expansion as > interpreters, ambassadors, mediators, traders, and settlers. Most > important, Ross does not portray them as mere puppets of Russian > officials but as allies and, most interesting, as a colonizing force, > creating its own spheres of religious and economic influence, its own > geography, and its own hierarchies of subjected people. Drawing from > a large array of Russian and Turkic-language sources familiar to > experts in the field--imperial archives, biographical dictionaries, > villages histories, letters, Sufi genealogies, theological works, and > literary production--Ross focuses on one group, the Kazan Tatar > ulama, and its material-intellectual history from the seventeenth > century until the revolutions of 1917. Because seventeenth-century > Russian decrees targeted Tatar nobility, Kazan's ulama came to play a > bigger role in local Muslim politics, and in the eighteenth century, > they allied themselves with Russians in their illegal grab of Bashkir > pasture lands in the South Urals. Kazan mullahs and their descendants > founded new villages at the expense of the Bashkirs, and Russians > preferred to rely on these newcomers for establishing their authority > instead of the Urals' indigenous imams. When Bashkirs joined Emel'ian > Pugachev's rebellion, the Kazan ulama remained faithful to the crown, > and Catherine II rewarded them with the creation of the Orenburg > Muslim Spiritual Assembly. There, Ross, challenging Robert Crews's > contention that the Russian state shaped Islamic discourse through > this institution, argues convincingly that the Kazan ulama took > initiative in the making of the assembly. For instance, its first > appointed head, Mukhamedzhan Khusainov, whose uncle, a legal scholar, > helped Russians suppress the 1730s Bashkir rebellion, asked for the > title of mufti to increase his prestige among the Kazakhs. Ross also > successfully shows that the Muslim Spiritual Assembly had limited > powers, which allowed Islam to develop freely outside Russian > imperial state control, and that its politics, largely dependent on > local personal relationships, was marred by interethnic conflicts > within the Muslim community. By the beginning of the nineteenth > century, Turkic-Bulghar histories integrated the South Urals as part > of the Volga region sacred Islamic geography. There was no mention of > Kazan Tatar migration to the Urals nor of the Russian state > facilitating this migration. Ross could have added that this map also > included Eastern Orthodox Tatar villages that Tatars considered > Muslim (or Muslim-to-be). > > One prestigious network of Kazan Tatar ulama and their merchant > patrons that originated from the village of Machkara near the town of > Malmyzh played a central role in the consolidation of that geography. > Mainly interested in fathers and sons, Ross delves into their life > stories and explores the question of modernity. When did these > scholars of Islam become modern? she asks. For Ross, the process of > modernization did not start in the 1880s with the emergence of the > jadid reformed school system in the Crimean Peninsula, as expounded > by the pioneer of Eurasian studies Alexander Bennigsen. Instead, it > began at the turn of the nineteenth century, thanks to wider access > to Islamic knowledge due to the increased circulation of paper and > the establishment of the Asiatic printing press. Calls for reform > emerged neither as a response to economic decline nor as a product of > proximity to Western thought. In fact, the Kazan Tatar economy > flourished, assuring the prosperity and multiplication of mosques, > schools, factories, and shops. Scholars of the Machkaran network > became more concerned about risks of scriptural misinterpretation. > They drew stricter parameters for legal interpretations of > scriptures, and they imagined new ways of imparting knowledge to > serve the needs of their communities. > > Popularization of knowledge is one of the criteria of modernity, but > as Ross successfully argues, this trend had already started well > before Ismail Gasprinskii created a faster method of imparting basic > literacy. Traditional madrasa education and its scholastic debates > imparted skills that could easily be applied in the world (for > instance the calculation of inheritance). Ross's argument regarding > the dynamism of Tatar Islamic literacy before the 1880s is > corroborated by the expansion of Islam among animist and baptized > Turkic and Finno-Ugric peoples of the Middle Volga and the Urals in > the nineteenth century. Partly thanks to the same Machkaran network > of scholars she describes, some Orthodox Christian villages and > individuals converted to Islam and asked for official recognition of > their Islamic identity. Astutely, Ross also argues that these imams > planted the seeds of their own demise, and that the student strikes > in their madrasa were less the result of external influences--the > students having access to Russian subversive political > literature--than they were the product of their teachers' > popularization of knowledge, initiated in the late eighteenth > century. With wider access to Islamic knowledge, students challenged > their former teachers' authority, which was based on kinship, > spiritual lineages, and communal recognition. > > Conceptually, Ross's book is pulled between two poles, one centered > on the expansion of the so-called Tatar empire within the Russian > empire, and the other, on the nature of modernity in Eurasia. In > fact, each pole could have been the subject of a separate monograph. > The introduction and the book cover summary mention that the Kazan > Tatars were at the forefront of the Russian expansion into western > Siberia, the South Urals, and the Kazakh steppes. However, the book > focuses only on the South Urals and its borderlands; it does not > include the northern Tatar Mishar communities of Nizhnii Novgorod, > St. Petersburg, and Finland or the Tatar settlements in Siberia and > on the Chinese borderlands, which also have played a role in the > expansion of the Tatar empire. By confining herself to one ulama > network, she gives the impression that only the Kazan Tatars were at > the forefront of the Tatar empire expansion. True, Ross mentions that > there is more than just one network, but she does not provide the > names of those other scholarly lineages. The sources for the > Machkaran network, which have also been analyzed by Allen Frank, > Michael Kemper, and Nathan Spannaus, are more readily available. It > could be argued, though, that the Mishar Tatar scholars' network of > Nizhnii Novgorod, whose history awaits to be written, could have > played an earlier and equal part in the expansion of the Tatar > empire. Ross mentions the Mishars, fighting along with the Bashkirs > against Russian encroachment, but without giving much explanation for > their presence on the South Urals frontier. > > Ross masterfully shows how Tatar modernists inherited earlier > constructs of sacred topography and invented a hierarchy of Turkic > nations with themselves at the top. In this colonial hierarchy, the > civilizing heroes, enlighteners, and leaders of the Bashkir, Kazakh, > and Turkestani Orient were no less than the Kazan Tatars. In short, > Orientalism is not only a projection of Western power. Muslim Tatars > also "orientalized" "the Other" in the creation of their own empire. > Ross's book challenges Alexander Bennigsen's and modern Tatar > nationalists' reading that Russians were responsible for dividing > Tatar lands into two separate autonomous republics. Bashkirs, > Kazakhs, and other Turkic peoples of Central Asia rejected Kazan > Tatar claims of oversight, and they chose their own path to > sovereignty after the revolution. > > Besides the making of a Tatar empire within the Russian empire, Ross > also explores the question of modernity in the Middle Volga and the > South Urals. Following Allen Frank and Devin DeWeese, Ross criticizes > earlier scholars for their excessive focus on jadidism (Tatar > modernism). Still, Ross, partly because of her heavy reliance on > modernist authors, fails to fully explore those imams who did not > share the jadid vision. In particular, the more conservative > "traditionalist" imams (the subject of Rozaliya Garipova's research) > and the radically separationist and "rejectionist" Vaisov movement > deserve a more extensive treatment than the passing mention that Ross > devotes to them. The result is that jadids still remain a dominant > (and familiar) voice in the last chapters of her narrative. In > general, in my view, Ross's novelty resides more in her questioning > of the European modernity paradigm, and in her framing of modernity > as a product of indigenous religious thought, than in her claim that > scholars of the so-called secularization and desacralization camps > did not recognize that Islam remained central to Tatar identity and > public life before the Soviet experiment. Her strength lies in > showing that the jadid discourse was an extension of the Machkaran > imperial discourse. In this, she joins the ranks of Alfrid Bustanov, > who has revisited jadidism as an ideology preoccupied with its own > imperial project. > > Ross argues that the secularization of Tatar thought occurred only > after the Bolshevik Revolution, even though some intellectuals seem > to have embraced a desacralized politics well before the overthrow of > the Provisional Government. For instance, as a madrasa student in the > years after the 1905 revolution, the future Bolshevik revolutionary > Galimdzhan Ibragimov, son of an imam, defied Muslim orthodoxy and > questioned the divine origin of the Qur'an. I learned this > interesting fact from Ross's dissertation, but she does not mention > it in her monograph. Ross does note that jadid madrasa students were > exposed to socialist rhetoric. She masterfully shows that their > teachers took a Salafi literalist position, packaged theology in an > easily explicable format, and called for a controlled _ijtihad_ > (independent legal interpretation). Many students, however, dreamed > of becoming something better than a village mullah, and strove for a > more egalitarian society. It also seems that the students may have > had a more radical view of the power of ijtihad, perhaps under the > influence of socialist rhetoric, than their teachers. Unfortunately, > the last chapters are peppered with many names of prominent Tatar > intellectuals or future revolutionaries without proper introduction > or discussion of their understanding of the Islamic "domain." > Finally, the book could have been better edited: Pierre Bourdieu's > "habitus" appears three times as "habitas" on the same page. > > Despite its Kazan-Tatar-centrism, Ross's book is significant. By > positioning Tatar history as a colonizing force within the Russian > empire, she invites scholars to explore further other ulama-merchant > networks among Bashkirs, Mishars, and Siberian Tatars. It is also my > hope that Ross will write the history of the wives and daughters of > the Machkaran network, whose voices remain surprisingly absent in > _Tatar Empire_. These women, however, played a role in matchmaking, > imagining their children's future, choosing their school, and > educating them. They proselytized among Eastern Orthodox and "pagan" > minorities, interpreted the sharia, copied manuscripts, wrote their > own poetry, and carried the memory of Islamic rituals, songs, and > poetry throughout the Soviet period. In conclusion, the remarkable > significance of Ross's monograph lies in her contesting the image of > Tatar modernity as a late nineteenth-century product of decline and > Western influence. Tatar modernity expressed itself in Islamic terms, > and, it started much earlier, in the late eighteenth century, as a > response to increased material wealth brought by colonizing new lands > and advancing the Russian empire (and its own). The history of the > expansion of Islam within Turkic and Finno-Ugric communities from > late eighteenth century to the revolution, and even beyond, confirms > Ross's findings. > > Citation: Agnes Kefeli. Review of Ross, Danielle, _Tatar Empire: > Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia_. H-Russia, H-Net > Reviews. March, 2021. > URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56424 > > This work is licensed under a Creative Commons > Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States > License. > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#7599): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7599 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81697788/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
