For Prophet and TSAR: Islam and Empire In Russia and Central Asia

Military Review, Nov-Dec, 2006 by Robert Baumann

FOR PROPHET AND TSAR: ISLAM AND EMPIRE IN RUSSIA AND CENTRAL ASIA, Robert D. Crews, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 463 pages, $29.95.

Stanford historian Robert D. Crews examines the relationship between the Russian empire and its Muslim constituents from the reign of Catherine the Great to the Revolution of 1917. In particular, Crews advances two intertwined propositions. The first is that administering the population by dividing it into communities of faith, a governing strategy referred to as "confessionalization" that Crews attributes to Catherine, did much to maintain calm and order within the empire. Second, he asserts that this approach "allowed the state to govern with less violence and with a greater degree of consensus than historians have previously imagined." In effect, the author contends that a kind of symbiosis evolved between the state and Islam.

Crews develops these assertions over a daunting historical expanse of time (two centuries) and territory (the Caucasus to Central Asia). Basing his extensive research on court, police, and other official records, he effectively dispels perceptions that the state was simply an instrument for the repression of Islamic cultures or that those cultures, in turn, were seething with animosity toward the Russian Empire. By implication, a "clash of civilizations" was neither a permanent nor inevitable feature of Russo-Muslim relations. Rather, the Tsar's regime sought to forge a relationship that in significant ways paralleled the one it enjoyed with the Orthodox Church.

In constructing this relationship, the state found opportunity in the demographic diversity and dispersal of the Islamic communities it encountered. Because Islam in Russia and Central Asia did not have an elaborately developed hierarchical organization for managing the populace, the state stepped in to help establish one. A sterling example was the Orenburg Ecclesiastical Assembly, which was roughly analogous to the Orthodox Holy Synod, whose membership was approved by the state. Established by Peter the Great, the Holy Synod became an ideological pillar of the regime, binding spiritual authority to temporal in the person of the Tsar in a manner that accorded nicely with emerging Enlightenment political theory in the West. In turn, the assembly regulated Muslim affairs in a manner that was at least tolerable both to the Tsar and the community of faith it served. In the resultant concordance, the call of Muslims to worship in the empire normally included a prayer for the preservation of the Romanov dynasty. The Islamic hierarchy benefited substantially, as state support afforded government-approved senior clerics a level of legally enforceable authority they had not previously possessed.

Ultimately, one of Crews' key findings is his rejection of the traditional explanation of Russian historians that imperial arrangements in the administration of its Muslim population were in large measure a reflection of "undergovernment," a simple lack of administrative reach into distant portions of the empire that in turn necessitated limited reliance on native institutions. On the contrary, Crews contends that new forms of societal interactions in Muslim areas were in reality a product of governmental influence. The state sanctioned an official clerical estate and in exchange shaped interpretations of the shar 'ia to its occasional advantage. The author documents this assertion throughout the book, noting innumerable instances in which Muslims appealed to state authority to resolve disputes.

Although persuasive, this line of reasoning does not fully sustain the author's intent to discredit the thesis of "undergovernment." The effective, as opposed to theoretical, power of the state was in fact extremely limited, if only by virtue of the treasury's inability to cover the cost of maintaining the requisite network of bureaucratic offices and civil servants. An equally valid indication of the true state of assimilation into the imperial system was the status of most Muslims in regard to military service. Even the Bashkirs and Crimean Tatars, Muslim peoples long subject to Russian authority, were exempted from a new law on universal conscription in 1874. In general, St. Petersburg regarded its Muslim subjects warily, while the Muslims acceded to the legitimacy of Tsarist rule only within implicit limits. Russia's disastrous attempt to conscript Central Asians in 1916, even for military service in noncombatant capacities, was a vivid instance of the state's attempting to exceed those limits.

In fact, Crews' demonstration of a certain symbiotic arrangement between government and Islam is not incompatible with the older thesis of a weak state presence in the borderlands. Indeed, Crews' own observation that reliance on Islam was crucial to imperial administration can easily be construed as indicative of the precarious foundation of the Tsar's authority. To be sure, the carefully nurtured relationship with Islam afforded the government two considerable advantages. It certainly mitigated the threat of native hostility to Russian rule based on a popular sense of religious persecution. For example, the affirmation by many indigenous clerics that the empire enjoyed status as dar al-Islam (a House of Islam) was of inestimable value. Then, too, official support for a cooperative domestic spiritual authority constrained the influence of potentially troublesome foreign Muslims within Russia's borders.