A Working Relationship. The Muslim experience in tsarist Russia is often described as a cycle of repression, Russification and conflict. A new book by scholar Robert D. Crews tells a different story.
In her wisdom, the Empress Catherine II ordered that all religious faiths be tolerated in Russia. Herself a convert from Protestantism to Orthodoxy, Catherine, who earned the title "the Great" from her military victories and the expansion of her empire, was a true woman of the Enlightenment as well as a shrewd pragmatist. Through tolerance, she bound Russia's Muslims to her regime, guaranteed their loyalty and established her own governmental institutions as the courts of appeal for disputes within the Muslim communities. From the late 18th century to the end of the Romanov dynasty, a precarious but surprisingly successful benign symbiosis developed between the tsars and their Muslim subjects.
Historians have usually depicted tsarist Russia's treatment of its Islamic peoples as a story of repression, Russification and constant conflict between Christian rulers and their tens of millions of Muslim subordinates. That indelible image continued to color the analysis of Soviet rule of the Central Asian peoples, and conflicts like the war in Chechnya only confirm the idea of the eternal clash of Orthodox and Islamic civilizations. Stanford professor Robert D. Crews tells quite a different story in "For Prophet and Tsar." He demonstrates how tsars used religion as a foundation for popular loyalty to the autocracy and as a means of disciplining and regulating the heterogeneous population of their vast realm. Religion, rather than language or nationality, was the principal identification of peoples in the empire. The law required every subject to be a member of a confessional community and to obey the clerical authorities of that community. The faiths of Muslims, Jews and Buddhists, as well as the non-Orthodox Christians -- Protestants, Catholics and Armenian Apostolics -- were officially recognized and integrated into the system of local governance. Over time, Muslims and others adapted to the tsarist religious regime "as a potential instrument of God's will," accepted (though not without contestation) the clerics sanctioned by the state and used official institutions to help regulate their own members and settle disputes among them.
Tsarist Russia was an empire in the truest sense -- an enormous state with a stunningly diverse population that was both distinguished officially from the ruling elites and compelled to accept its subordination to an imperial power that ruled by right of conquest and divine sanction. The Romanovs compared themselves favorably to other great empires -- they believed they treated their Muslims better than did the British in India or the French in Africa, and they were disdainful of how the disintegrating Ottoman Empire dealt with its minorities. For Russia, Islam was never simply a domestic problem but had international ramifications. The regime worked hard to secure the loyalty of peoples living in its borderlands while competing with the British in the "Great Game" in Central Asia and with Persia and the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus. Its policy of tolerance paid off handsomely as Russia's Muslims accepted the empire as the "House of Islam" (dar al-Islam), a country in which they were able to fulfill their religious obligations. The Ottomans tried, but generally failed, to convince Muslims in Russia that their primary loyalty should be to the Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul and not to Russia, the infidel "House of War" (dar al-Harb).
Tsarism not only recognized heterogeneity but sought to integrate the elites of diverse peoples into a collaborative relationship with the autocratic state. At times this meant the recognition and acceptance of local traditions. But St. Petersburg also had a modernizing agenda, and imposed conformity with Russian norms through bureaucratic regulation. Just as the Orthodox Church had a clerical hierarchy appointed by the tsar, so should the Muslims have a clergy separate from the laity. No matter that their customary religious practices had been much more informal. "To domesticate Islam in the empire," Crews writes, tsarist officials "opted to introduce a churchlike organization among a population that had previously known no such institutions."
Eventually the Orenburg Muhammad Ecclesiastical Assembly, with its mufti appointed by the emperor, became the principal authority over the Muslims of the Volga and Urals regions. As the empire expanded into the Caucasus and Central Asia, the state appointed other clerical authorities. Yet the close connection between the official clergy and government meant that other Muslim clerics, pious lay figures or Islamic scholars were outside the fold. In the consequent disputes among different claimants to the true faith or proper ritual, those who were able appealed to the state to resolve their differences, and were not above calling in the police. By examining court records, Crews paints a rich picture of how the state and its clerical allies penetrated into communities and even the home to regulate the most intimate of relations. Marriage and divorce, the proper disciplining of children and squabbles over property and inheritance all came to the attention of clerics and the courts. Integrated into the tsarist system as they were, Muslims seldom resorted to open conflict with the regime.