**2. Background**

### *2.1. The New Intellectual Life of the 1880s–1890s*

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth-century, the Muslim community of Russia's Volga-Ural region underwent what has been termed an Islamic revival (Frank 2012; Sartori 2016c). From the 1780s to the 1880s, mosques and madrasas proliferated. The establishment of Arabic-script presses—first the government-run Asiatic Press, founded in St. Petersburg in 1785 and relocated to Kazan in 1801, and later, various private, commercial presses—facilitated the circulation of mass-printed Qur'ans, Islamic ¯ law books, and popular devotional and mystical texts (Karimullin 1992; Rezvan 2004).The expansion of educational institutions and printed books contributed to an increase in literacy. By the 1860s, some observers estimated the literacy rate for women in Volga-Ural Muslim communities to be as high as 60% (Fäezkhanov 2006).

This rise in literacy had complex e ffects on religious practice and intellectual life in the Volga-Ural Muslim community. For common believers, the late-eighteenth-century and the nineteenth-century were characterized by very public displays of popular religiosity and an increasingly entexted popular religious culture (Fuks 2005; Kefeli 2011, 2014). For the local scholarly elite, this period was one of unprecedented intellectual activity, with more scholars and students having access to a wider range of theological, legal, and literary texts than ever before. Such abundance fueled new trends in theological and legal thought, but also engendered intellectual conflicts within educated society and anxiety over the proliferation of what some scholars considered unorthodox or incorrect views on Islamic law and doctrine (Kemper 2015; äl-Bolgari 1996a, 2007; Spannaus 2019).

In response to this intellectual environment, madrasa-educated legal scholars and theologians positioned themselves as interpreters, curators, and disseminators of sacred knowledge. They became compilers of books of "correct" Islamic knowledge, especially collections of hadith ('Abdarra h.¯ım Utiz- ¯ ¯ Iman¯ ¯ı al-Bulghar¯ ¯ı na.; al-Qur¯ s.aw¯ ¯ı 1903; Amirkhanov 1883; Aqmulla 1892; Tüntäri 2003). They penned primers and translations for non-madrasa-educated Muslims, and by the 1860s, they increasingly promoted vernacular-language religious instruction in the madrasas (Bayazitov 1880). Those scholars who were Sufi shaykhs spread knowledge of basic Islamic doctrine and rituals among the rural population through public gatherings and the compilation of handbooks for their disciples (al-Uriw ¯ ¯ı na.). Within their own ranks, Volga-Ural Muslim scholars used public debates (muna¯z. ara) of theology to build their reputations and promote particular theological interpretations (Bigiev 1991b; Validov 1998).

The intellectual and cultural world of the Volga-Ural Muslim community from the 1780s to the 1880s was dynamic, but also rigidly hierarchical. Meritocracy existed insofar as men from humble origins who distinguished themselves as especially intelligent and who gained powerful patrons could join the ranks of the madrasa-educated, and perhaps, even aspire to a career as a Sufi shaykh or Muslim jurist. However, multi-generational scholarly families tended to dominate educated society. The educated, to the extent they were able, mediated the transmission and interpretation of Islamic knowledge. This arrangemen<sup>t</sup> created social relationships that were strictly hierarchical: master–disciple, teacher–student, and imam–parishioner. These hierarchies of religious knowledge and authority were reinforced by socio-economic hierarchies; in the absence of any state or governmental mechanism for collecting and deploying Muslim charity (zakat, sadaqa), Islamic scholars, especially Sufi shaykhs, ¯ became the recipients and redistributors of community wealth (S. Dudoignon 2001; Ross 2017).

The Islamic revival and the class of scholarly rural gentlemen that dominated Muslim community life for much of the nineteenth-century were the results of an emerging global colonial order. The Volga-Ural Muslims' merchant wealth that financed the expansion of mosques and madrasa was earned importing Chinese tea and British calicos (Khrulev na.; Anonymity 1862; Devjatykh 2005; Fäkhreddin 2010c; Iskhakyi 2011b). The Russian conquest of the Kazakh Steppe and Central Asia allowed Volga-Ural Muslim traders and industrialists to increase their activities in these regions and opened the way for Volga-Ural Muslim peasants to migrate into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh Steppe (Denisov 2006; Zubov 1996). (These Muslim settlers would serve as precursors of the much larger Slavic migration into Siberia and the steppe in the 1870s–1910s (Cameron 2018a, 2018b).) However, Volga-Ural Muslims did not experience the most negative aspects of colonialism and do not appear to have drawn a connection between their society's prosperity and other Muslim societies' misfortunes.

This situation began to change in the 1870s. Several factors spurred this change. The Russian conquest of Bukhara, an important center of Islamic culture and education for the Volga-Ural Muslim population, in the late 1860s led some Islamic scholars to re-assess the value and relevance of Bukharan education and to begin to seek alternatives, either by developing local madrasas or looking to education centers in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Travels to the Arab world (especially Mecca, Madina, Damascus, and Cairo) for pilgrimage and education (and, to a lesser extent, to India) brought Volga-Ural Muslim scholars into contact with Muslims under British colonial rule and political exiles from the Ottoman Empire (Gabderashit Ibrahimov 2001; Khayrutdinov 2005). Finally, closer to home, the Russian ministries of Education and Internal Affairs took measures to impose greater state control over the Volga-Ural madrasas, including requirements that they offer Russian-language courses and submit to state inspection (Tuna 2016).

By the 1880s, all these developments fueled an internal critique of Volga-Ural Muslim society. Volga-Ural Muslim scholars had previously critiqued the clannishness, arrogance, and questionable moral behavior of their colleagues (äl-Bolgari 1996a, 1996b). However, the critics of the 1880s and 1890s lent new urgency to these complaints by arguing that scholars' self-interested claims to sole authority over Islamic knowledge had set Volga-Ural Muslim society on the path to destruction. From Zahir Bigiev's novel, *Great Sins* (*Gonah-i kaba' ¯ ¯ır*), in which a young madrasa student descends into a life of crime and depravity, to Aya¯d. Ish. aq¯ ¯ı's *Extinction after 200 Years* (*Ike yoz yildan song inqira¯d.* ), in which a Muslim community that failed to embrace science and proper morality was annihilated by infectious diseases and economic depression, 1885–1905 witnessed the rise of a generation of young writers who were educated within the most prominent madrasas in the Volga-Ural region, but turned against the scholarly networks within which they had come of age (Bigiev 1991a; al-Ish. aq¯ ¯ı 1904). These writers, who began their careers in their teens and early twenties, attacked their older colleagues, targeting their social privilege, exploitation of common Muslims, and refusal to engage with knowledge beyond the confines of Islamic law and doctrine (Ross 2015; Tuna 2016; Kar¯ım¯ı 1898; Maqs.ud¯ ¯ı 1900).

While these writers used prose fiction to critique Muslim society, other madrasa graduates called for a return to the Qur'an and hadiths to construct an Islamic law appropriate to the conditions of ¯ the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the fiction writers called into question the moral fitness of Islamic scholars to lead their community, this new generation of jurists questioned the authority and reliability of the accepted legal canon, which was the culmination of one thousand years of Islamic scholarship (Bub¯ ¯ı 1904–1910, 1902; as-Sulaymaniyya 1907 ¯ ). The literati and their legist colleagues found a common cause in undermining powerful Islamic scholars and creating a system in which personal merit counted for more than age or family connections. The realization of such a system, according to them, was the only sure bulwark against the decline and disappearance of Muslim society in Russia and across the colonial world.

Historical studies of Jadidism, as these late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century movements for legal, cultural, and social reform in Russia's Muslim communities have been dubbed, have portrayed their participants as reacting to the arrival of "modernity" (or "European modernity") in Muslim society (Tuna 2016). However, this treatment modernity as an outside force to which Muslims chose to respond or not blurs the distinction between modernity as a lived condition and modernity as an intellectual construct. It was Volga-Ural Muslim writers and jurists' encountering the latter (through Russian, French, and German writings on nation and empire and through Ottoman and Egyptian writings on cultural and religious reform), that transformed their discourse on nation and faith. The concept of "modernity" as a condition that some societies had reached and others had not, enabled Volga-Ural Muslim intellectuals to forge a historical narrative that presented the European colonization of Muslim societies as the inevitable consequence of Muslim elites' resistance to social and ideological change. Using this narrative, the young writers of the 1880s–1900s claimed the high moral ground and cast all who disagreed with them as the enemies of Islam and Muslims in general (Cooper 2005). To be an advocate of "modernity" was to be with the reformers (is.la¯h. chilar); to oppose them was to make a futile stand against historical forces beyond the control of any single human being and to place Muslim society at risk of being crushed by those forces. However, the implementation of "modern" or "European" technologies and ideas alone would not have satisfied those reformers. They sought, rather, the complete overthrow of hierarchy and social privilege.

Three ideologies arrived in the Volga-Ural region in the midst of this social conflict: (1) nationalism, (2) Islamic modernism or "balanced" reform, and (3) socialism. None of these sparked that conflict, but as they arrived, they were drawn into it, nativized, and deployed within it.

### *2.2. The Nationalists*

When D¯ınmu h. mmadov spoke of nationalists (millatchelar), he referred specifically to the ¯ proponents of Tatar nation. The roots of Tatar nationalism have been traced to theologian Shihabadd ¯ ¯ın al-Marjan¯ ¯ı (1818–1889) and his two-volume history of the Volga-Ural Muslim community, *A Book of Elaboration of News on A*ff*airs in Kazan and Bulghar* (*Kitab Mustaf ¯ ad al-Akhb ¯ ar f ¯ ¯ı Ah. wal Qaz ¯ an wa Bulgh ¯ ar¯* ) (Schamiloglu 1990). Marjan¯ ¯ı penned *A*ff*airs in Kazan and Bulghar* not as a declaration of the existence of the Tatar nation, but as a contribution to a dispute among Volga-Ural Muslim scholars of the 1860s–1870s over the sources of legitimate knowledge and the precedence of empirical observation over transmitted and canonical knowledge. (These same themes appear in Marjan¯ ¯ı's legal and theological writings.) Since the early nineteenth century, Volga-Ural Muslim jurists and theologians had embedded opinions on disputed legal and theological questions into texts on regional history, and Marjan¯ ¯ı wrote within this tradition (Frank 1998). However, as European and Russian views on a modern nation reached the Volga-Ural Muslim community by the 1890s and early 1900s, educated Muslims turned to his *A*ff*airs in Kazan and Bulghar* as raw material for creating a Tatar national historical-narrative (Ross 2012). The dualistic character of Marjan¯ ¯ı's work as both history and part of a broader legal-theological argumen<sup>t</sup> meant that, from its beginnings, Tatar nationalism was closely interwoven with a specific set of views on Islamic law and theology.

The peculiar aspect of nationalism as it evolved the Volga-Ural Muslim community was the ability of Muslim intellectuals to agree that they belonged to and acted on behalf of a nation without agreeing on the geographic boundaries and name of that nation. This was, in a part, a function of the di ffuse nature of Volga-Ural Muslim communities, scattered from Finland to China, and in part, a result of the ongoing intellectual exchange among Turkic-speaking peoples in Anatolia, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Volga-Ural region, Siberia, the Kazakh steppe, and Central Asia during the previous centuries. The most limited national visions expressed by Volga-Ural writers were confined to the Muslims of inner Russia (the Volga Basin, the Urals, western Russia, and Siberia). The most expansive included Turkic-speakers across the Eurasian landmass (ar-Ramz ¯ ¯ı 1908; al-'Abash¯ı 1909; A. Z. Wal¯ıd¯ı 1915; Maqs.ud¯ ¯ı 1906; Akchura-ogly 1909; Ibrahimov 1984a). Despite these disagreements, the concept of nation proved highly attractive to young Muslim reformers seeking an alternative to the hierarchical relationships of nineteenth-century Muslim society. Their vision of a Tatar nation was utopian. As one writer to the journal *Consciousness* (*Ang*) put it in 1913, "[The nation] has Tatarness in its past and bright Tatarness in its future; that is to say that I turn my gaze forward. We see troubled times now. But I see strength in the past and light in the future" (H. an¯ıfa 1913). At the same time, they viewed the emergence of nations as a natural part of the evolution of human society, something that was both empirically observable and historically ordained. This latter quality made the emergence of nations unstoppable by individual or governmental resistance (J. Wal¯ıd¯ı 1914; 'Az¯ız 1913a).

Finally, in place of a small group of spiritual authorities who controlled access to arcane knowledge, the nation, as the reformers imagined it, offered the possibility of creating a community in which all members were empowered. Collectively, this community could act as a single, unified force as "the people" or "the nation" ('Az¯ız 1913a, 1913b). Individually, every Volga-Ural Muslim man, woman, and child, having achieved national consciousness (mill¯ı wöjdan), could contribute to this community ¯ by becoming literate in their native language, reading national literature, attending national cultural events, and donating money for the promotion of popular education and the support of the poor. Each of these acts had a predecessor in nineteenth-century Islamic culture, in which Muslims who took part in Sufi gatherings and religious holidays, were encouraged to learn to read in Arabic, pursued Islamic knowledge through reading and recitation, and made charitable donations to support Islamic institutions and impoverished community members. However, in the hands of the reformers, these acts were now positioned toward building a nation of equal citizens rather than establishing and reinforcing a hierarchy between the scholarly and the less learned.

As Rozaliya Garipova has pointed out, a wide range of Muslim scholars and intellectuals, including some of D¯ınmuh. ammadov's colleagues and friends, identified themselves as protectors of the community or nation (millat) ( ¯ Garipova 2016). However, to be identified as a nationalist (millatche) in the Volga-Ural Muslim community was to be associated with a very specific set of ¯ values and activities. As the nationalists' critics saw it, the most notable of these was the willingness to pander to the ignorant masses in return for their support by offering them things forbidden by Islam, such as musical performances, theater, and unrestricted socialization between men and women (Anonymous 1909; Anonymous 1912). Where the Tatar nationalists saw empowerment of common Muslims through these activities, their critics saw encouragemen<sup>t</sup> of un-Islamic behavior.
