**1. Introduction**

Writing in protest of new madrasa curricula in Russia's Volga-Ural region, Ishmu h. ammad D¯ınmu h. ammadov (1842–1919), the director of Tunt ¯ ar Madrasa in the early twentieth century, lamented ¯ that Muslim education was besieged by "socialist-Wahhabi-nationalist revolutionaries" (*sotsialist wahhab¯ ¯ı millatche inqil ¯ abiyun ¯* ) (Dinmuhammadov na.). At first glance, this amalgamation of terms might appear problematic. How could a single individual be a socialist, a theological literalist, a Tatar nationalist, and an agitator for the violent overthrow of the Russian autocracy simultaneously? Could Russian socialism, which is often associated with a materialist, atheist worldview, coexist with fundamentalist Islamic legal reform? (Walicki 1979; Manchester 2008; Roslof 2002; Frede 2011; Michelson 2017). Did not the locally specific aspirations of ethnic nationalism necessarily contradict the transnational identities posited by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism and Islamic reform movements? (Smith 2014; Aydin 2007; Karpat 2001; Meyer 2014). What place did religious law and doctrine have in a project to replace religious identities with secular nationalist ones? (Rorlich 1986; Tuna 2016).

It is tempting to write o ff D¯ınmu h. ammadov's accusation as a flight into hyperbole. Indeed, he was known to ge<sup>t</sup> carried away by his passions when he wrote on his most hated subject: the Volga-Ural region's Muslim cultural reformers and their students (Fäkhreddin 2010b). However, D¯ınmu h. ammadov was a highly educated theologian, who, at the time he penned his complaint, was the former disciple of one of the most powerful Sufi shaykhs of the mid-nineteenth-century Volga Basin, the director of a prestigious madrasa, and connected by marriage and patronage into a power social network of scholars, students, and merchants (Dinmökhämmätov Ishmökhämmät Dinmökhämmät uly 2006; Fäyzullin Säetgäräy Mostafa uly 2006; Zaripov 2002). As a scholar, he was well-versed in debate, speculative theology, jurisprudence, and Arabic grammar (Fäkhreddin 2010a; Tüntäri 2003; Zaripov 2002; Akhmetianov 2011a, 2011b). D¯ınmu h. ammadov dedicated his life to studying words and built a successful career around deploying them. As such, it seems reasonable to sugges<sup>t</sup> that, even as he wrote in anger, he understood the meanings of the words he used, and he chose them for a reason: they were the words that most aptly described the phenomenon he found so objectionable.

This article examines the relationships between Tatar nationalism, Islamic reform, and revolutionary socialism in Russia's Volga-Ural region from the 1880s to 1917. It will argue that it was this fusion of ideologies (rather than promotion of education reform and "modernity") that distinguished the most politically radical factions in Volga-Ural Muslim society. For these factions, the formation of a national community, the modernist/balanced reform of Islamic law and theology, and the violent overthrow of economic and political oppressors were mutually reinforcing goals. The marriage of various aspects of these ideologies can be found in the writings of early twentieth-century Volga-Ural Muslim writers, jurists, and national leaders, figures often categorized as Jadid modernist reformers. Likewise, this fusion is reflected in the writings of these intellectuals' critics (jurists and teachers such as the much-maligned D¯ınmuh . ammadov) who reproduced this entanglement of nationalism, Islamic reformism, and socialism in their own writings even as they denounced it.

Within the field of Russian Muslim history, this essay seeks to complicate the *Jadid* versus *Qadim* (reformer versus conservative/traditionalist) dichotomy that has long dominated the study of Muslim cultural andintellectual historyin the Volga-Ural region and Central Asia. Within that narrative, theMuslim populations experienced a period of national awakening and secularization from the 1880s to the 1910s as a result of the arrival of "European modernity" and/or Russian conquest (Rorlich 1986; Zenkovsky 1960; d'Encausse 1988; Wheeler 1964; Bennigsen 1964; Lemercier-Quelquejay and Chantal 1967). The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent opening of the libraries and archives of post-Soviet states to scholars generated a counternarrative that turned away from national and/or secularizing elites to focus on continuities in Islamic legal, culture, and popular religiosity (Frank 1998, 2001, 2012; Kemper 1998; Kefeli 2014). Most recently, historians of Islamic reform in Central Asia have examined participation in discourses on Islamic legal theory by historical figures previously identified as nationalist and secular; and the Salafist aspects of early-twentieth-century Muslim cultural reform (Eden Jeff and DeWees 2016; Sartori 2016b; DeWeese 2016; Sartori and Eden 2016a). These new turns have introduced welcome complexity into our understanding of the evolution of Islamic culture under Russian rule and underscore the point that Islam in Russia belongs to the global history of Islamic legal and theological movements. However, in the process of returning the Islamic element to Russian Muslim history, the subjects of nation and nationalism are often pushed to the margins. Likewise, at least in the case of the Volga-Ural region, scholarly examinations of ethno-nationalism, national intelligentsias, and the role of Muslims in Russian civil society tend to de-emphasize Islam. They often set jurists/religious-legal scholars ('ulama'¯ /Qadimists) and nationalists/modernists/education reformers (Jadids) in ideological opposition to one another and present nationalists' engagemen<sup>t</sup> with Islam as the adoption of "Islamic ethics," morality, and/or cultural practices intended to bolster a secular national identity (Tuna 2017; Naganawa 2012; Garipova 2016). This division between religious and non-religious actors gives the impression that cultural reform and nationalism in the Volga-Ural region unfolded more or less the same way as in the Ottoman Empire, where "progressive," secularizing elites clashed with and eventually displaced "traditional" or "conservative" religious authorities in the legal field, education, and cultural production.

I will argue that none of these approaches accurately captures the trajectory of Volga-Ural Muslims' intellectual debates in the early-twentieth-century. The use of the term 'ulama' to designate a particular ¯ faction of legal scholars (rather than the madrasa-educated population as a whole) obscures the fact that nearly all participants in the debates over Tatar nation, faith, and revolution had madrasa educations, came from legal/scholarly families and/or held posts as imams, qa¯d.¯ıs, or madrasa teachers at some point in their careers. Unlike the case of Russian Orthodox priests' sons (popovitchy), there was no significant migration to atheism among Volga-Ural madrasa students (Manchester 2008). Even as madrasa-educated individuals left imam postings for careers in journalism, publishing, or politics, they continued to take part in discourses on the practice and future of Islam, albeit, they embraced strains of Islamic legal and theological interpretation that suited their views on Russian imperial rule, colonial politics, and socio-economic relations. Their commitment to a particular kind of Islam was a defining

aspect of their vision of the Tatar nation. So too, was their understanding of historical progress and class conflict, which they borrowed freely from Russian socialist discourses.

Outside the field of Russian history, drawing attention to Volga-Ural Muslims' interweaving of Islam, nationalism, and revolutionary socialism contributes to wider scholarly discussions of Islam in colonial and post-colonial contexts. The Volga-Ural Muslims' vision of both Islam and nation as egalitarian communities complicates Wael Hallaq's argumen<sup>t</sup> that Islamic law, with its inclusive, grassroots nature, is fundamentally incompatible with the vertical power relationships imposed by the modern nation-state (Hallaq 2013). Also, Volga-Ural Muslim nationalists' understanding of Islam and socialism as complementary forces for socio-economic equality presents an alternative to the antagonistic relationship between proponents of shar¯ı'a-based governance and socialism seen in the better-studied societies of the Middle East and South Asia (Kuran 2004; An-Na'im 2010). Finally, examining the fusing of Islam and nation in the Volga-Ural region contributes to the study of how minority groups turned to Islam to express self-identity, separateness, and resistance to the potentially hostile societies within which they found themselves (Curtis 2012).
