Islam and Tsarist Russia: The Imperial Logic behind Confrontation and Cultivation

Of all the European empires, the Russian has had the oldest and most extensive relations with Islam and Muslim subjects. The Tsars ruled over Muslim populations from Muscovy’s annexation of Kazan in 1556 up until the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Historians have devoted much attention to how the logic of empire led Russia to violently conquer and suppress Muslims. This was particularly true in the North Caucasus, which in the nineteenth century was one of the bloodiest sites of conflict between a European empire and Muslims. Scholars have largely overlooked, however, the ways in which the logic of empire led Russia’s imperial institutions to foster the emergence of a class of liberal Muslim activists at the beginning of the twentieth century. From the rubble of the Russian empire these activists, among other things, built the first liberal democratic republic in the Muslim world, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Russian Muslims from Tatarstan, the Caucasus, and elsewhere were prominent in reformist political and religious movements inside the Russian empire and outside, particularly in the neighboring Ottoman lands. The Bolsheviks, however, snuffed out this class politically and even physically, while the Russian Revolution and the development of Communism overshadowed research on the politics of Russia’s Muslims at the turn of the century. This presentation will consider the ways in which the logic of empire in Russia both drove the violent suppression of Muslim communities and paradoxically facilitated the cultivation of a class of liberal and reformist pioneers in the Muslim world. It will pay attention to the interaction between Russian imperial techniques of rule and broader theological, cultural, and political trends in the Muslim world beyond the Russian empire.