The system of membranes and capsules. The Empire and the Muslim community
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At the beginning of the 20th century, Mamlakat was perceived as a religious space, the homeland of Russian Muslims... The mental boundaries of this space coincided with the borders of the Russian Empire, but at the same time, it was not a concept imposed from above. An interesting...effect of the assimilation of imperial practice.
STUDIO: Imperial practice turns out to be a frequent topic of our conversation. To what extent did the empire seek to govern, and what was left to the discretion of local, regional, or even national self-government. This is the podcast "From Now on, We'll Manage It Ourselves." My name is Andrey Allahverdov. Hello.
In our podcast, when we discussed the Caucasus and Central Asia, our experts already discussed how governance and self-government were organized in regions where people of Islamic culture lived and still live. Today, we'll continue this conversation, but our conversation with historian and PhD Alfrid Bustanov will take a slightly different approach.
ALFRID BUSTANOV: I wanted to point out from the outset that raising the question of governance and self-government is inherently a rather hierarchical topic, one that prioritizes the language of empire. It's the language of colonial incorporation of the Muslim population into some external structure that organizes, prescribes the rules of the game, a legal framework within which one must engage. And here, it seems, there's a certain contradiction with the implied hopes for self-government. That if, for example, we're dissatisfied with some kind of centralized governance, then its positive antithesis is self-government. That, supposedly, they, the subjects of the empire, have some forms of self-organization that can be supported, to which we can return, which can be elegantly described and argued to be better than some centralized forms of governance. In reality, governance and self-government are both essentially the same vocabulary; they are registers of the imagination of imperial space, which, strictly speaking, have little in common with the repertoire of Islamic space.
To be more specific, the forms of interaction with specific local Muslim communities in the North Caucasus and in the interior regions of the Russian Empire were built on the principle that some kind of intermediary was needed between the imperial authorities and the local community. It was desirable that these people, at best, understand Russian, and at a minimum, be able to formulate their own lives in their local languages, whether Turkic or Arabic, and thus, report and document in forms familiar and understandable to the imperial office machinery. Let me give you an example, perhaps a bit trivial. How were births, deaths, marriages, and divorces recorded in Orthodox communities, and not only Orthodox? They were kept using parish registers, right? So, starting in the second quarter of the 19th century, these very same registers, filled out by the local imam, were also introduced for Muslims in the interior regions of the Russian Empire.
From a letter from Vice-Governor N. Khanykov to the Orenburg Provincial Government, February 26, 1827 When examining cases before the Court of Conscience involving minors who have committed crimes, the need for birth certificates of such defendants is often encountered. Recruits are also often required for admission [...] When similar circumstances arise in Muslim cases, their true age can never be accurately determined, for the birth times of Muslim infants are not recorded anywhere or by anyone, leaving all doubts unresolved. To partially address this, I find it imperative to mandate that the Orenburg Spiritual Muslim Assembly establish and distribute to all Muslim mullahs and other clergy the same corded books or birth certificates for recording newborns as those kept by Christian priests, so that after a year these books will be returned to the aforementioned Assembly [...], and copies will be kept at mosques.
ALFRID BUSTANOVIf we think about what these spiritual administrations were, which accumulated this complex of documentation that was compiled locally, it's the same attempt to create some kind of body, an institution within the Russian Empire, that would be understandable to the bureaucratic apparatus and would serve as a kind of membrane between the imperial administrative apparatus on the one hand and local communities on the other. Even here, there are more membranes. One membrane is, in fact, the spiritual administration itself, the Muslims, the Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly, and on the other hand, the imams, who often played the role of local people who, not so much implemented self-government, but managed the collection of documentation. Many documents of this kind in the imperial space are, in one way or another, dictated by the requirements, format, and form of what one might even call Russian imperial documentation. Therefore, it is impossible to talk here about an authentic, specifically Muslim format of self-organization. All the self-government that existed with regard to Russian Muslims boiled down to the state's attempts to make Islam understandable. And then, for example, institutions of local elders emerged, who dealt with the imperial administration. If you dig a little deeper, this, of course, becomes a nuance. For example, these elders, for example, in Siberia, in the Tobolsk region, were the Kulmametyevs, and at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, they concentrated power in their hands, recognized by the imperial administration.
STUDIO: Avazbakey Kulmametyev, as historians have discovered from documents, came to Tobolsk from the Bukhara Khanate and at the end of the 17th century. He was given authority over the service and yasak-paying Siberian Tatar population, and his son, Sabanak, the only representative of the nobility governing the Siberian Tatars, was elevated to the rank of nobility and became known as murza. His descendants managed to hold the position of head of the Tobolsk irregular light Cossack army for 150 years, a position that became effectively hereditary.
ALFRID BUSTANOV: They were seen as moderators and intermediaries between the empire and the local community. But they were a two-faced Janus. On the one hand, one side of them was oriented toward the imperial administration, understanding how to act and what kind of documentation to provide. On the other hand, they had clear authority and clear sources of power for the Muslim community, since such people owned land and were often connected to trade, concentrating certain resources and capital in their hands. At the same time, they themselves were religious figures, thereby gaining spiritual legitimacy. Such sources of power and authority could often be linked to kinship with the family of the Prophet Muhammad—the so-called saids, sharifs, khojas, and certain families of saints who traced their ancestry either to the Prophet Muhammad or to locally respected saints. These families and individuals formed a group responsible for the community's activities. This is the part that was directed, in fact, towards the people, towards the community; it spoke a different language, had some other sources of power and other sources of legitimation, often not connected in any way with the imperial language.
In the Volga region, for example, in the first half of the 19th century, we know of the institution of akhunds in rural areas. Akhunds were also regional religious figures who resolved family law issues based on Islamic tradition and classical Islamic sources. There were certain discussions and debates on this issue in Islamic languages, which might or might not have been connected to the imperial language. On the other hand, since status dictated this, it wasn't simply the position of a Muslim scholar expressing his theological opinions out of context. These positions were, after all, administrative, one might say, bureaucratic. For example, there was Fathullah al-Urawi in Kazan province, who combined a love for traditional Islamic scholarship with a desire to take full advantage of the privileges of the imperial administrative context. There were other similar cases, but I'm not sure they can be called self-government.
In the North Caucasus, particularly in Dagestan, during the imperial period—the late 19th and early 20th centuries—there was the institution of qazi courts, which also handled cases concerning family law and inheritance law. My colleagues are studying the documentation produced by the courts and have noted that by the early 20th century, we were dealing with a hybrid. On the one hand, these courts were required to report and send documentation to certain secular imperial institutions. On the other hand, there were documents that they filed in their own collections, and these documents were not intended for any kind of transfer to imperial institutions. In other words, there was an autonomous intellectual and psychological space within the qazi courts—or, to put it simply, a space of Sharia law, including in an institutionalized form, in which knowledge about oneself was archived. We know little about this, primarily because the primary focus of research remains imperial. Islam in the history of the Russian Empire becomes interesting primarily when the state is involved, when there is some administrative interest, when the empire regulates, enacts laws, perhaps even repressions, creates new institutions, and develops a new language for understanding Islam. This is a deeply orientalist system, in which Islamic cultures, meanings, and repertoires seem meaningless in themselves, until an outside observer's eye rests upon these phenomena. We have little understanding of forms of self-government or how to name such phenomena. Perhaps we don't even have an adequate language that would clearly capture this kind of situation. What's lacking is research that approaches the subject more creatively, that is, by examining documents and situations that fall outside the imperial perspective.
STUDIO: You mentioned these membranes, meaning one world is connected to another by intermediaries. So, the empire, in principle, is trying, if I understand correctly, to unify everything. To make the world it doesn't understand understandable and manageable. But how is the world inside the membrane managed? We have an idea, right?
ALFRID BUSTANOV: More or less. Imagine a situation involving, for example, some inheritance matter. Property is being divided, a large sum of money. It's generally accepted, for example, to resolve this issue by appealing to a Muslim scholar, so that he can spell out everything, determine everything, and so on, according to tradition. But if powerful actors in this matter see that they are being shortchanged and want the matter resolved differently, they can appeal to the imperial administration and resolve the matter in their favor, for example, if such a matter is possible, through a bribe, by understanding the discrepancy between Sharia opinion and the letter of imperial law. Therefore, the metaphor of a membrane, or perhaps a gray area between these worlds, is not accidental. Because this duality, or multiplicity, hybridity, has always provided various actors—both external and internal—with the opportunity to manipulate the rules of the game, to profit from the opportunities available in a given sphere. If it's not working out well in Shir'i, then it can be done in Imperial, and vice versa. A good argument, so to speak, can always be made by saying, "Well, you see, it's not working out so well in State." Let's look at the concepts.
STUDIO: Well, Sharia is not based on concepts.
ALFRID BUSTANOVI'm using a different metaphor, so to speak, but it might be understandable to a modern person. I won't draw any contemporary parallels, but in the modern world, it works roughly the same way. An actor can reach out to different levels and appeal to them in their favor. And who were these actors within, returning to your question? Let's say it was the merchant class, which had the capital to influence decisions. You could say that the community—the mahalla—is also an actor. We often see documents listing people who act as community members, negotiating with neighbors about land leases. These documents don't directly refer to an empire; they don't even refer to Sharia. It's a horizontal story, where two communities negotiate with each other. There are groups, strata, even international or regional networks of Muslim scholars, Sufis, and other groups that, also relying on Muslim tradition and authority, were also important actors in certain types of decisions. And the fourth group were service people who met with the imperial administration—elders who served as intermediaries between the state and the community. Clearly, this division into four groups is very arbitrary, because the same person could hold several statuses simultaneously: merchant status could overlap with religious status, and these same people could serve as elders there, yes, at the regional and local levels.
STUDIO: But in the empire, in principle, could it be different or is this the only way?
ALFRID BUSTANOV: Hybridity as the norm. This complexity, this play with different registers, this cunning, this ability to operate with different languages and discourses—this is precisely what characterizes an empire. On the one hand, it seems like everyone is sorted into these capsules—ethnographic, classificatory, with Muslim regions, Christian regions, and others. But upon closer inspection, these classifications don't just collapse; it turns out to be wishful thinking, that there are some insurmountable boundaries between these groups. Take, for example, the phenomenon of those baptized in the Volga region converting to Islam in the mid-19th century. Entire groups of Chuvash and Udmurts converted to Islam. And among them, Arabic script literacy was present. This demonstrates a hybrid world in which identities were multilayered, and the boundaries between these communities, with their own structures, were very permeable, diffuse. And in principle, as you say, this is not an exception to the rule. The multiplicity, hybridity and variability of various types of governance and self-government options, inclusion in the imperial game, and exclusion, is an absolutely normal thing for imperial situations.
STUDIO: There's another empire nearby—the Ottoman Empire—where the majority was Muslim. Was everything organized differently there?
ALFRID BUSTANOV: No, in many ways it's very close. Clearly, the positioning was such that it was a caliphate, an Islamic state, and so on. But there are many other aspects here, too. The turn toward modernization and Europeanization in the 19th century in the Ottoman Empire made it in many ways close to the Russian Empire in certain technical parameters, including administrative and managerial ones, in terms of how a modern state was structured. The Ottoman Empire was perceived differently by Russian Muslims at different times, but interestingly, it served as an example not so much for the Muslims themselves, perhaps, as for the Russian imperial administration. It was how interaction with different population groups was organized within the Ottoman Empire, because there were Greeks, Armenians, and many others, different faiths, different peoples, different languages. And even in the 18th century, the Russian imperial administration was naturally interested in how this diversity could be managed. There's a well-founded opinion that the very emergence of the Muftiate, a spiritual assembly of Muslims in Orenburg and then Ufa, in Russia at the end of the 18th century was inspired by the Ottoman example. The Russian administration may not have fully grasped the complexities of these actors, all intermingling at the local community level, and the rivalry between them—in short, this incomprehensible world. Let's create, as in the neighboring empire, a ministry for Muslims, through which we can direct our requests for information and shape a discourse that makes Islam and Muslims in the empire understandable to the administration.
From the Decree of Catherine II on the establishment of the position of the Ufa Mufti and the Muslim Spiritual Assembly to the Governor-General Baron Igelstrom Having accepted as good your submission that the mullahs and other spiritual ranks of the Mohammedan law [...] should be determined in no other way than after they have undergone the appropriate testing and with the approval of the viceroyal government, we command you to put this into effect, and as a result to establish in Ufa a spiritual assembly of the Mohammedan law [...] the first akhun, Mukhamet Jan Gusein, whom we most graciously grant the title of mufti, shall preside over the aforementioned spiritual assembly, with a salary of 1500 rubles per year being paid to him, and two or three mullahs from the Kazan Tatars, who have been tested in loyalty to us and integrity, shall sit with him.
STUDIO: To what extent did the Islamic world participate in the life of the empire? Are we saying that these were isolated regions with their own lives, which the empire simply controlled? Or was it a fully-fledged part of the empire's life?
ALFRID BUSTANOV: Here, too, depends on different approaches. There are researchers and anthropologists who argue that all cultures in the world are unique, and, accordingly, the task of researchers is to demonstrate this uniqueness, to examine how these cultures are valuable in themselves. Another viewpoint prioritizes the imperial component, which emphasizes participation in imperial institutions, in the imperial language of organization, administrative procedures, and so on. And anything beyond the focus on the state seems to become unimportant or perhaps even dangerous. The conversation about Islam is like this: either you're loyal, or you're some kind of weirdo, most likely a Wahhabi. It seems there are no other options on earth. And between these two poles, variations emerge in how the same historical actors both participated and were included, perhaps in some episodes and situations, in the imperial game, while in other situations they preferred to adhere to their own ideological principles or defined them themselves. For example, the fact that all the imams in the interior regions of the Russian Empire were required to fill out these registers of births suggests that they simply participated in the formation of the empire's archival body, in one way or another, even if it was in Islamic languages. On the other hand, these same people wrote poetry, created cultural works, participated in occult practices, and, in general, did something every day besides filling out state papers. This isn't even a mosaic, but an interweaving.
How can one describe such a situation? As schizophrenia, where a person simultaneously struggles and succumbs? That doesn't happen. It's still a complex worldview that developed over centuries, when Russia was truly perceived as a religious space for Muslims, and a special term was even coined for it—mamlakat. Mamlakat, as the homeland of Muslims, which, in principle, more or less coincided with the borders of the Russian Empire. Which, incidentally, is largely at odds with Soviet concepts of space, which already divided into national borders, republics, and other national identities. But by the early 20th century, such a shared space—mamlakat—had already been established, at least intellectually. This isn't some imperial concept imposed from above. It's something that was developed from within. The effect of assimilating imperial practice can be interesting.
At the beginning of the 20th century, mamlakat was perceived as a religious space, a homeland for Russian Muslims, where all these institutions were located, with its own history, including architectural, architectural, and written. This isn't an administrative concept, but rather an emotional, cultural, and religious one—a philosophical perception of space. I wouldn't even say it was political, because it lacked that kind of pathos. It was certainly emotional, especially among the muhajirs, the immigrants from the Russian Empire to the Ottoman Empire, returning again to the Ottomans. In their poems, when they wrote about their longing for their native land, mamlakat is present in full force. Or when Riza Fakhretdinov, one of the leading historians and theologians of Russian Muslims, writes the history of this space, he speaks of it as mamlakat.
STUDIO: Can we use this experience in some way?
ALFRID BUSTANOVWell, first of all, I would immediately cut off any romantic memories of anything that happened in the past, be it imperial or national formations. We need to imagine the world anew every day, and create new ideas, new languages that will be useful tomorrow. What's there to worry about empire? It existed, we will study it in history, but that's no reason to copy-paste institutions from the past. It all happened, and it's neither good nor bad; it happened. So, what should we take with us into the future? The main thing is, in many ways, the intrinsic value of diversity, multivariance, multilayeredness. And one of the things I often tell students is that it's okay to be confused about something. When you go to an exhibition dedicated to an unfamiliar culture, you shouldn't understand everything there, and it's very strange if everything is recognizable. This is the value of misunderstanding, the value of the learning process versus recognition. So, recognition is when you see familiar features in an object. And I'm talking about the process of learning, when you look at an object and consider why it is so, what it means, what it meant before, what the evolution of its functionality is, without imposing your own emotional context, interpretation, classification, and so on. It's probably impossible to completely eliminate this imposition; the repertoire of, so to speak, intellectual violence against everything that exists on Earth is too rich, but it's worth trying. time- to get to know this world, to make it once again incomprehensible, unclear, asking questions rather than providing familiar answers. This cultural and philosophical thing lies at the core, it has always been at the core of the space we're talking about. I think it will objectively continue to exist on a horizontal level, at the street level, at the level of relationships between people.
STUDIO: I thank historian and philosopher Alfrid Bustanov for a very interesting conversation. It was the podcast "We'll Do It Ourselves From Now On." Listen to us and comment. Your opinion is very important to us. See you there..
