Author Topic: For Prophet and Tsar by Robert D. Crews  (Read 1756 times)

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David_Pritchard

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For Prophet and Tsar by Robert D. Crews
« on: June 17, 2006, 03:25:16 AM »
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.

David_Pritchard

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Re: For Prophet and Tsar by Robert D. Crews
« Reply #1 on: June 17, 2006, 03:29:28 AM »
Review of the book, For Prophet and Tsar : Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, by Prof. Ronald Grigor Suny continues:

The Catherinian system seemed to work. Yet the series of Russian-Ottoman wars, particularly the Crimean War (1854-1856) and the War of 1877-1878, as well as a growing nationalism among Poles and other subject peoples, gave rise to Russian anxieties about the loyalty of the empire's Muslims. Conservative Russian nationalists like Mikhail Katkov and Fyodor Dostoevsky questioned the policy of tolerance. As Russian Pan-Slav writers fantasized about the unity of all Slavic peoples, other observers imagined that parallel ideologies -- Pan-Turkism or Pan-Islam -- might seduce Muslims within Russia to support the Ottomans. While the policy of tolerance continued until the end of the empire, powerful voices proclaimed that Russia should follow the lead of European nation-states and strive toward greater homogenization of its population. Yet even in the revolution of 1905 and the period of constitutional monarchy from 1905 to 1917, Muslims continued to work within the system, electing representatives to the state dumas and petitioning for civil rights and equal treatment.

Crews provides an important corrective to the usual understanding of Russia's imperial rule over its Muslim peoples, though his generous estimation of the tolerance and mutual benefits of tsarist rule plays down some of the more brutal confrontations between Muslims and the tsars. There is mention of the 1916 protests in Central Asia over conscription of Muslims but very little on the endless wars between the mountain dwellers of the Caucasus and the tsarist armies, the emigration of the so-called Circassians from the western Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, the population transfers after the Russo-Persian wars of the early 19th century and the long-simmering quarrels over landholdings in Central Asia that would erupt ferociously during the Revolution.

Yet Crews' case for Muslim adaptation to a Christian empire is carefully and impressively drawn, and explains more than any previous history why Muslims, who have lived with Russians for 500 years, were not especially confrontational or antagonistic toward the "ruling nationality." Of all the Soviet republics, the Muslim states were the least anxious to leave the Soviet Union and were basically left adrift when the three Slavic presidents dissolved the union in December 1991 without consulting them. In our own time, when leaders of the Great Powers allege that the Green Menace has replaced the Red Menace as the major global threat, and prominent theorists make facile predictions about an approaching civilizational Armageddon, Crews does what historians do best: He demonstrates how different the past is from how we prefer to imagine it. Rather than clashes and conflict, there was also accommodation and acceptance of difference. With this rich and subtle book, Crews forces us to rethink our current Manichean division of the world into us and them.

Ronald Grigor Suny is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan and editor of the forthcoming "Cambridge History of Russia, Volume III: The Twentieth Century."