Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious
Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia

ROBERT CREWS

The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman World, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
	Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776).

 

At the end of the nineteenth century , a "Muslim question" confronted the tsarist regime. Islam provoked intense anxieties among Russian elites about political loyalty and social integration. Many conservatives identified a diverse population of some 20 million Muslim subjects—a total exceeding the number of Muslims under the rule of the Ottoman sultan—as a particular threat to the domestic order. Spread throughout the Volga River and Ural Mountains regions, the Crimea, Siberia, the Caucasus, the north Caspian steppe, and Transoxiana, Muslims appeared to present a danger to the stability and integrity of this vast empire. 1 Echoing earlier charges directed at Jews, critics such as E. N. Voronets claimed in 1891 that Muslims acted as a "state within a state." 2 Moreover, they maintained ties to millions of co-religionists in states adjoining Russia's southern borderlands. In an era when the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II asserted himself as the caliph of all Muslims, the Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg warned local Russian police to monitor Muslim subjects for signs of sympathy with the "idea of a world-wide Muslim kingdom with the sultan at the head" and for evidence that they "pray for the former, and not for the Sovereign Emperor." 3	1
Muslim intellectuals such as Ismail Bei Gasprinskii rejected charges of disloyalty but shared Russian conservatives' critique of an ostensibly isolated and inward-looking Muslim community, claiming that it "vegetates in the narrow, stifling realm of its old ideas and prejudices, as if isolated from the rest of humanity." 4 Appropriating the language of "reform" and "progress," Gasprinskii condemned his opponents as obscurantists and self-appointed guardians of Islam who rejected participation in the social and institutional life of the empire. The reformers set out to transform Islamic education and legal interpretation and looked to the state to advance science and the Russian language among Muslims. However, the regime remained suspicious of their overtures and continued to regard them as part of a broader scheme sponsored by foreign powers to weaken the Russian state in its Muslim regions.	2
The categories of these late nineteenth-century actors have largely determined how historians have approached the study of Islam in modern Russia. Reading these conflicts back into the distant past, scholars have tended to replicate the image of a conflict defined, on the one hand, by Muslim struggles against the regime and, on the other, by an internal tension between Muslim "reformers" and Muslim "traditionalists." Whereas internalist histories view the faith as an impregnable barrier against external threats to community and tradition, mainstream Russian historiography maintains that even Muslims who did not openly embrace jihad against the Russians nonetheless stood against, or apart from, the state. In most accounts, only the appearance of Muslim "modernist reformers" (Jadids) in the 1880s disrupts this story of cultural preservation and continuity. 5	3
Such interpretations capture an important aspect of the controversies facing imperial and Muslim elites at the fin de siècle but obscure more complex patterns of interaction between Muslim communities and the tsarist regime in the long nineteenth century. From the reign of Catherine the Great, Muslims sometimes resisted or fled Russian military expansion under the banner of Islam. Many actors on both sides represented these clashes as essentially religious in nature. Yet resistance and flight to a neighboring Muslim land (the hijra) were not the only responses available to Muslims. Nor was the regime exclusively concerned with expelling or converting its Muslim subjects. 6 Even amid the brutal war waged for over a quarter century by tsarist forces against the mountain peoples of the north Caucasus, Russian administrators and Muslims frequently found themselves united against common foes. 7 Developed first, and most intensively, in the eastern provinces stretching from the Volga River and Ural Mountains into the steppe, these tactical alliances bound Muslims to tsarist institutions by offering protection to the defenders of "true religion" against "schismatics," "heretics," and others whose errors and innovations might corrupt the faithful. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the regime extended this patronage of Islamic orthodoxy to each newly conquered territory.	4
Figure 1 : A mosque in the Bashkir village of Ekh'ia. Courtesy of the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection of the Library of Congress.
The tsarist regime achieved relative stability in managing these large Muslim populations on its southeastern frontiers not by repressing or ignoring Islam but by assuming responsibility for its policing. This article draws on court records, petitions, and denunciations from central and regional state archives as well as local Muslim accounts to show how the Russian state governed as patron and guardian of the faith of its Muslim subjects. Recent interpretations of the empire highlight the tensions between Russia's imperial and national identities, principally by exploring tsarist policy and educated Russians' images of non-Russians. 8 This article seeks to shift attention from questions of administration and representation to state-mediated conflicts among Muslims and other groups. The first part of this essay traces Russia's path to a confessional state committed to backing the construction and implementation of "orthodoxy" within each recognized religious community. Comparisons among Muslims, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, and other groups suggest a broader pattern of interdependence between religious and state authorities. From the late eighteenth century, despite the close association between the Romanov dynasty and the Orthodox Church, these ties cut across confessional lines and endured into the early twentieth century, when they provided a crucial—but long overlooked—source of cohesion for a diverse polity confronted by divisive secular ideologies. The second part examines these developments more closely with respect to the Muslims of European and southeastern Russia, especially in the provinces straddling the Volga River and Ural Mountains. 9 It tells the story of how adherents of one religious tradition attempted to deploy the power of the state against their co-religionists to redefine the understanding of community and the content of religious orthodoxy. My aim is to illustrate how various actors understood—and competed to define—true religion and community in dynamic exchanges with the state, not prior to, or apart from, the imperial context but firmly within it.	5
Muslims seeking endorsement for their own views of religious orthodoxy found supporters in secular officials who valued Islam as a monotheistic source, albeit inferior to Orthodox Christianity, of stability, discipline, and order. Like the Muscovite litigation of honor disputes, the pursuit of religious struggles here forged a dynamic relationship between local communities and the judicial and policing institutions of the state. 10 But in the late eighteenth century, the state mediation of confessional differences formed a new instrumentality of imperial rule, not only over Muslims but over nearly all other non-Orthodox subjects.	6
While nationalist teleologies have tended to reduce imperial politics to a struggle between empire and the "nation," a closer examination of religious politics reveals a realm of imperial consciousness and state practice obscured by national frameworks and an anachronistic focus on "minorities." Diverse actors deployed police power to refashion non-Orthodox faiths as imperial traditions. Where non-Russians may have on occasion resisted tsarist taxation and conscription, the struggle for true religion established common interests between pious activists and the police. The faithful remade their communities by advancing new visions of religious orthodoxy and by deepening their integration in, and subordination to, the expanding institutions of the empire. Thus Muslims did not inhabit the static and isolated world depicted by Russian critics and reformers like Gasprinskii. Nor did they live within the confines of an unchanging Muslim tradition represented by clerics defending the faith against unlawful "innovation" (bida). The intense controversies that raged among Muslims over religious interpretation and identity extended beyond the elite circles that are so commonly the domain of Islamic history; indeed, as I will show, these conflicts not only engaged laypeople but also drew representatives of the tsarist regime into mediation of disputes over the meaning of Islamic tradition. The adjudication of intracommunal conflicts became a singularly important vehicle for the extension of state power into local life. Neither Islam nor any other religious tradition remained isolated or escaped entanglement with the regime, notwithstanding later nationalist claims that ethnicity served as a refuge against the incursions of the Russian government.	7
Tsarist religious politics took shape in the competitive international context of empire-building. Religious identities took on new meanings where states pursued imperial expansion as the extension of protection to co-religionists. Both the Orthodox tsar and Muslim sultan devised novel ways to accommodate subjects who shared the faith of their neighbors and European rivals. Ottoman attempts to counter European encroachment brought dramatic reforms in 1839 and 1856 designed to establish legal equality for Muslims and non-Muslims and to cultivate a supraconfessional loyalty to "Ottomanness" (Osmanllk). 11 New European approaches to the utility of religion for state-building proved no less far-ranging in metropole and colony alike. Drawing on contemporary anthropology, many European elites shared the view that "religion" represented a universal determinant of human experience, which imposed certain moral constraints, to varying degrees, on its adherents everywhere. In the view of many late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century European officials, states could look to religious elites of diverse faiths as extensions of state authority, to instill moral behavior, social discipline, and submission to the general laws. 12	8
Official backing for particular religious norms appeared to guarantee public order and personal morality, even while "superstitious" elements might simultaneously be selected for "reform." British Evangelicals sought out converts and the extirpation of "heathen" creeds in diverse imperial settings; however, many colonial administrators in India preferred to act as patrons of local shrines and mosques and undertook the scholarly study and codification of Hindu and Muslim legal traditions as the basis for personal status law. 13 Elsewhere, state recognition and incorporation of Jewish and Protestant consistories in France, the Jewish community in Habsburg Trieste, and the "four millets" in the Ottoman Empire provided these regimes with intermediary bodies that facilitated the expansion of centralizing regimes into local life and their colonization of the disciplinary functions of religious institutions. 14 Although the local configuration of these arrangements varied from state to state in the nineteenth century, the official institutionalization of religious difference frequently formed a useful modality of both imperial rule and nation-state formation. In turn, elites within these communities looked to the state to acquire new means to police communal boundaries and compel conformity. Where such overtures achieved official intervention, new conceptions of religious identity advanced with the expansion of the state. 15 In place of the romantic ideals of communal preservation and solidarity that historians tend to impose on their subjects, emerging notions of orthodoxy frequently forged ties between pious activists and the state and redrew the boundaries of community.	9
Figure 2 : A scene depicting the environs of the town of Kazan on the Volga River, with a mosque and Orthodox Christian cathedrals in the background. Karl von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen, Les peuples de la Russie, vol. 1 (Paris, 1812). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
In Russia, these strategies inspired official sponsorship of an Islamic hierarchy. Drawing on the model of both the Orthodox Church and the Islamic establishment in the Ottoman Empire, Russian officials envisioned a domestic organizational structure for Islam that would lend religious authority to imperial policy and break Muslim ties to co-religionists abroad. 16 In 1788, Catherine founded the Orenburg Muhammadan Ecclesiastical Assembly, headed by a mufti (Islamic jurisconsult), in Ufa to assume responsibility for the administration of mosque communities throughout the Volga and Urals regions, Siberia, the capitals, and the steppe. 17 Muslim marriage, divorce, inheritance, clerical appointments, and other matters relating to Islamic law became objects of bureaucratic regulation. The regime looked to the Orenburg Assembly to bind Muslims through their faith to the Russian fatherland and Romanov dynasty but soon discovered that this hierarchy exercised authority over other Muslims only with the support of the state.	10
The formalization of these arrangements under Nicholas I yielded unintended consequences for Muslims and tsarist officials alike. Provisional alliances frequently rested on the imaginative translation of religious concepts from one tradition to another. Russians could see in Islam a familiar, if imperfect, faith that recognized "eight commandments" and the "Seven Deadly Sins," while Muslim petitioners could appeal to an image of a state that had offered them "protection" for 300 years and had always afforded them "freedom of religion, without the slightest constraint." 18 Muslim calls for state intervention in intracommunal disputes yielded a crucial mechanism for state expansion but also made Russian officials responsible for backing Islamic doctrine and propping up Muslim authorities whom they often mistrusted. Crossing confessional lines on behalf of true religion, Muslim activists drew the state deeper into local life. These exchanges among elites, laypeople, and state officials undermined and reconfigured the boundaries between state and society. Muslim subjects created novel forms of community not against but with the state. On occasion, Muslim villagers and townspeople warned that their Christian rulers threatened the survival of the faith by supporting Orthodox missions. 19 But more frequently, the threat to true religion came from within the camp of the believers themselves. Rather than disrupt imperial rule, the pursuit of Islamic orthodoxy formed an essential foundation of tsarist state-building on the southeastern frontiers of the empire.	11
Formal protections for Islam and other non-Orthodox faiths came only under Catherine II, who introduced a new paradigm of toleration designed to make religious discipline useful to the empire and to project imperial power on its frontiers. But this mode of toleration did not mean official indifference or neutrality toward non-Orthodox religious affairs. In the tradition of the "well-ordered police state" (Polizeistaat), the regime became directly involved in the regulation of central aspects of religious life in nearly every community. 20 For Catherine and her successors, the treatment of each faith depended on its utility to the state; its contribution to the maintenance of empire defined the scope of toleration. The tsars increasingly relied on Orthodoxy as a symbol of the national character of the monarchy, and some bureaucrats shared the church's view that conversion to the tsar's religion represented a testament of loyalty to the state. 21 But in the wake of revolutionary events in Europe, the regime looked to compulsory submission to state-regulated religious institutions, even in non-Orthodox forms, as a safeguard against revolution in Russia, viewing religious conformity as the cornerstone of morality and public order and as a measure of its subjects' political attitudes. 22 Unlike elsewhere in Europe, tsarist law never permitted its subjects to renounce confessional allegiance and declare themselves "without a confession" (konfessionslos). Obligatory enrollment in a religious community brought nearly all subjects under the bureaucratic supervision of an official hierarchy. 23 The policing of morality thus remained the responsibility both of officially recognized ecclesiastical authorities and of the state. As Mikhail Speranskii, the influential adviser to Alexander I, noted in 1803, in ancient Rome, and "everywhere in well-ordered states," "preventive police" concerned themselves with censorship, public decorum, the suppression of "rumors and interpretations harmful to the government," and "the safeguarding of the rites of religion and the curbing of schisms." 24	12
Under Nicholas I, new legal codes declared Orthodox Christianity the "preeminent and predominant" faith of the empire but also systematically backed other religions on the premise that "all peoples inhabiting Russia praise Almighty God in different languages according to the creed and confession of their forefathers, blessing the reign of the Russian Monarchs, and praying to the Creator of the universe for the increase of the prosperity and strengthening of the power of the Empire." 25 Court records, petitions, and denunciations reveal how, in largely secret proceedings, the state became deeply enmeshed in intraconfessional disputes as the guardian and patron of religious "orthodoxy" for the tolerated faiths of Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Buddhism, and both branches of Armenian Christianity. 26 As Laura Engelstein has shown, Nicholas's government here acted as "the defender of absolute values in a world of revolutionary change." Like the regime's new efforts aimed at "disciplining the boundaries of true belief" among the Orthodox, its adoption of regulatory measures to ensure conformity in other communities made up another dimension of the tsarist "project of administrative modernization." 27	13
Officials endorsed other faiths' capacity to order the family, instill morality, and guarantee the overlap of religious and worldly sanction for transgressions against temporal authority. 28 Confessional communities that subjected followers to divine as well as monarchical judgment provided useful forms of social discipline to complement the will of the sovereign. Despite rebellion in 1830–1831 in Poland, for example, F. F. Berg, the governor-general of the Kingdom of Poland and a Protestant, continued to regard Catholicism as "sometimes very useful for the government, because it helps it keep the people in check." 29 The Digest of Laws made this connection between religious orthodoxy and political loyalty clear in its instruction to rabbis "to explain to Jews their law . . . and make them understand . . . [its] true meaning" and to "direct Jews to observe moral obligations [and] to obey the general state laws and established authorities." 30 Moreover, the state appointed mullahs, priests, pastors, and rabbis to attend to the spiritual needs (and obligations) of non-Orthodox soldiers, sailors, and prisoners.	14
In extending toleration, Russian bureaucrats nonetheless retained the authority to intervene in areas that they claimed in the name of the state, including questions of dogma, ritual, and ecclesiastical organization. Polizeistaat toleration supported religion only in its canonical and, where appropriate, "enlightened" forms. The law excluded sectarians, atheists, and "free-thinkers," as well as those who exceeded the boundaries of "moderation" in their piety. 31 The architects of the first Islamic hierarchy assigned it the task of monitoring the "Muhammadan law" so that "superstition and other abuses, which cannot be tolerated, do not creep into" its affairs. 32 The criminal code protected official non-Orthodox rites from interference, but religion that strayed beyond clerical direction and the approved canon of texts, prayers, and songs threatened the moral and social order. 33 Who determined the content of "orthodoxy" within each tradition and who figured as a "heretic" became a matter of critical importance for imperial officials, religious authorities, and laypeople.	15
Such policies of toleration figure prominently in analyses that attempt to account for the durability and relative strength of the empire. Andreas Kappeler argues that, from the Muscovite period well into the nineteenth century, the tsars maintained a pragmatic regard for the status quo by coopting indigenous elites into the ruling apparatus and accommodating local customs, beliefs, and laws. 34 Kappeler's influential view of the accommodationist imperial ethos reflects accurately the intentions of Russian authorities. But the perspective of the communities themselves suggests that the institutional and legal architecture for toleration did not simply confer and maintain the autonomy of established elites. Officials sought out for cooptation individuals whom they took to be the leaders of these communities; however, the search for cooperative elites embroiled them in questions of dogmatic, ritual, and legal interpretation. The prospect of support for particular positions initiated intense competition for patronage within these divided communities. Indigenous mediators between community and state who earned official backing often lacked legitimacy within their own communities. The state did not confirm religious notables in traditional roles as much as it created new elites. State backing confirmed some customary prerogatives, but many of the "traditional" rights for which clerics sought support were, in fact, novel. Patronage enabled Muhammadzhan Husainov, the first mufti, Stanislaus Siestrzewcewicz, the Catholic metropolitan, and Iraklii Lisovskii and Joseph Semashko, metropolitans of the Uniate Church, as well as the Armenian primates Eprem and Hovhanns to claim an unprecedented degree of power over their rivals and competing interpretations of their faiths. Confronted with the opposition of other clerics, laypeople, and superiors in Rome, Jerusalem, and elsewhere, the authority of these new elites rested less on clerical or lay consensus than on police power. 35	16
The regime conferred new privileges on each confessional elite while subjecting it to more formal supervision. Following the consistorial model established in Napoleonic France, Russian officials sought to maximize the contribution of religion to morality and respect for authority by incorporating its leadership directly into the state. In 1810, Alexander I created the Main Administration of the Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions. This office (later a department in the Ministry of the Interior) took on the arbitration of controversies within "foreign" faith communities and bolstered the authority of state-approved clerics as the guardians of morality, the presumed foundation of public order. 36 To this end, many members of these new "clergies" received exemption from corporal punishment. The state imposed financial obligations on them but also created new positions of power and cultural control, such as the censorship of religious literature. 37 It enlisted Jewish communal government, the kahal, in the enforcement of laws against the contraband, even permitting the imposition of the rabbinic ban (the herem, formally prohibited in 1804) against smugglers. In 1827, the government capitalized on religious and communal bonds by making the kahal responsible for the selection of recruits because, as Eli Lederhendler observes, the authorities assumed that Jews "could be expected to heed their own rabbis and leaders even when they disregarded the laws of the Christian state." 38 Like the Orthodox clergy, these clerics acted as adjuncts of state authority, discharging bureaucratic duties and performing the "useful" task of preaching submission to Russian law.	17
Under Nicholas I, the state consolidated a multiconfessional elite that shared significant resources and ambitious plans for amplifying the powers of central authorities to discipline religious life through bureaucratic and police controls. The regime acquiesced to the mufti's claim that his judicial opinions (fatwas) bound all Muslims. 39 When the state empowered Jewish lay and rabbinic elites to implement the conscription of Jews, many used their new power to advance the cause of piety, targeting vagrants, poor families, as well as violators of Jewish law for the draft. 40 State-sponsored reorganization tended toward the centralization of ecclesiastical authority, religious opinion, and wealth, paralleling the institutional transformation under way in the Russian Orthodox establishment and in other churches throughout Europe. 41	18
The state benefited from internal contests for religious authority and local initiatives for state patronage against rivals. The regime found Catholics willing to reorganize the church to resemble the French and Habsburg churches, which enjoyed significant independence from the Holy See. 42 Rivalries for supremacy within the Armenian Church involved clerics in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India, and Iran. In supporting candidates to the office of the patriarchate at Etchmiadzin, tsarist diplomats saw an opportunity not only to cultivate notables with pro-Russian sympathies but also to create an institution with authority over Armenians in neighboring states. St. Petersburg backed local claims to represent "the entire Armenian nation" against skeptical subordinates in Russia and competitors in Jerusalem and Istanbul. 43	19
Similarly, the regime assembled the varied Protestant churches in the empire under an "Evangelical Church," although it favored the Lutheranism of the Baltic German nobles. The statute of 1832 created a general consistorial regime but only intensified local doctrinal and social conflicts. Its endorsement of Lutheran dogma sparked controversy in mixed Lutheran and Reformed communities on the Volga and in southern Russia, dividing congregations over the form of altars, crosses, and the singing of prayers. 44 Against this consistorial system and the standardizing texts and liturgy of the 1832 statute, charismatic preachers inspired movements that broke away in anticipation of Christ's imminent second coming and the end of the world. To counter these "separatists" and "superstitious sects," Nicholas backed the Protestant "orthodoxy" defined by the general consistory. 45	20
And while the state supported Orthodox missions to dissenters, Muslims, and "pagans" from the late 1820s, conversionary efforts principally targeted apostates from Orthodoxy. 46 Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews who engaged in religious disputes with their co-religionists continued to seek—and receive—support for their views within the bureaucracy. In the case of Buddhism, alliances between officials searching for loyal authorities approximating a "church" and monastic elites seeking state backing transformed local hierarchies. In 1853, Nicholas I approved a centralized apparatus in Eastern Siberia to oversee these temples and their "clergy." 47	21
The implications of such measures proved most dramatic for traditions that did not depend on an internally established hierarchical organization. For the Ministry of the Interior, determining what constituted "orthodox" opinion proved even more difficult when its officials could not look to an institution resembling a church structure. Judaism and Islam presented the state with very similar dilemmas. Officials scrutinized Jewish affairs with an eye to cultivating a form of Judaism that would be "useful" to both the Jews and the state. The Nicholaevan regime thus took steps to educate and institute an enlightened rabbinate. Reared in state institutions, "learned Jews" (uchenye evrei) and crown rabbis would supply officials with authoritative knowledge about Jewish law and perform some of the same disciplinary tasks as Muslim clerics. A Rabbinical Commission established in 1848 acted, like the Orenburg Assembly, as the highest authority on the religious law. In Muslim communities, legislation inspired by Orthodox ecclesiology set apart an ecclesiastical elite from lay society and extended the power of the former over the latter. In each "parish" (prikhod), the regime aimed at consolidating a formal "Muhammadan clergy" (dukhovenstvo) from among a group of men previously distinguished only by their learning and their standing in the eyes of local communities. 48 The state assigned monopolies over the performance of marriage and divorce, the rites of burial, and the administration of oaths for state service, legal transactions, and witness testimony. Prohibitions against involvement in trade and other activities formalized and professionalized the clerical status of mullahs and rabbis. Some of these newly appointed clerics evaded attempts to limit their livelihoods, while others welcomed assistance against laypeople (and lower clerics) who performed marriages, burials, or other duties outside of their legal purview. 49	22
Non-Orthodox clerics likewise fulfilled a wide range of bureaucratic and social functions that complemented state undertakings in the realm of charity, welfare, and education, overseeing poorhouses, soup kitchens, orphanages, and hospitals. 50 Confessional schools and religious courts played a pivotal role in the imperial educational and judicial systems. Like Islamic courts, the Jewish beth-din dealt with marriage, divorce, inheritance, commerce, and contracts. Such institutions administered oaths to soldiers, witnesses, and litigants, demonstrating that the Orthodox creed was not the only pledge of political loyalty recognized by the state. 51 For criminal offenses, subjects answered to both state and ecclesiastical officials; they were subject not only to secular punishment but to "penitence," "admonition," and other sanctions administered by religious personnel. 52	23
The non-Orthodox faiths played a critical role in disciplining the family. Just as the Orthodox Church regulated marriage to ensure domestic tranquility as a foundation of the political order, the Ministry of the Interior expected non-Orthodox leaders to exert similar controls. 53 Endowed with unprecedented police powers, the new clergies monitored compliance with statutes establishing minimum ages for marriage, as well as questions of legitimacy, fidelity, incest, and the submission of children to parents. Far from autonomous actors, these authorities remained vulnerable to challenges from both the state and the laity. Officials intervened in marriage disputes at the request of dissatisfied litigants and overturned the rulings of these authorities. 54 Through these new instruments and the appellate mechanisms that linked them to central judicial organs, religious and secular authorities expanded their power to regulate family life. At the same time, this mediating role increased their knowledge about, and access to, local communities, enabling them to police many contacts between confessional groups and proscribe most kinds of intermarriage. 55	24
While the administration provided new mechanisms of social control, the law reinforced clerical dependence on secular power by prohibiting existing mechanisms for compelling conformity, such as the rabbinic resort to punishment "by fines, curses, and expulsion from the community." 56 Similarly, the state denied Muslim clerics the use of corporal punishment, abrogating a range of Quranic punishments for theft, adultery, alcohol, and other offenses against religion. 57 Thus a basic tension marked sponsorship of non-Orthodox hierarchies and their disciplinary powers: the law forged interdependence between clerics and state officials by expanding clerical authority in some areas and limiting it in others.	25
While Russian officials thus sought to establish a clear chain of command running from St. Petersburg into the local parish, mosque, or synagogue community, they also remained responsive to challenges from below. Officials looked to lay initiative to keep clerical abuses in check. They proved sympathetic to lay reformers who admonished mullahs who drank wine or priests who seduced parishioners. Charges of "false teaching" and the exercise of miraculous powers suggested subversion and prompted police investigations. 58 Despite the many shortcomings of the tsarist legal system and threats from co-religionists ranging from social ostracism to murder, laypeople continued to look to the tsar's justice to overturn religious judgments. Clerical sanction alone remained insufficient to maintain the absolute power of informal religious courts, which relied on state authorities to implement controversial rulings.	26
Successful overtures to Russian officials depended on the litigants' ability to translate internal disputes into tsarist political categories. In constructing their complaints and denunciations, contestants confronted the challenge of casting their opponents' views and actions as "heresy"—and thus beyond the scope of official toleration. Heresy in any community constituted a political issue in tsarist Russia: to the police, religious dissent and heterodoxy almost invariably involved a broader challenge to the existing order. When a new "rationalist" hymnal appeared among reformist Protestants in 1819, the tsar condemned the book, vowing to "protect" the Evangelical Church from "rules deviating from Christian morality." 59 In 1823, the Ministry of the Interior acquiesced to the Catholic hierarchy's request to suppress the champions of heterodox doctrine such as Ignace Lindl (who rejected the pope, the cult of the saints, and the Virgin Mary) by expelling the German mystic. 60 Jews, too, looked to tsarist police to aid them against opponents and often represented religious differences as political crimes. From the late eighteenth century, the Talmudic elite in Lithuania drew Russian police into conflicts between them and the hasidim, adherents of a new pietistic movement. Based on Jewish denunciations, police arrested some prominent Hasidic leaders and placed others under surveillance. 61 Hasidim such as the Jews of Rogachev of Mogilev province responded by warning the minister of the interior that their antagonists, such as the "learned Jew" Moisei Berlin, "not only did not come up to the goals and expectations of the government, but served as an example of depravity and the slackening of the fulfillment of God's law and the dogma of our religion for youth." 62	27
Concern for policing orthodoxy was not limited to the Ministry of the Interior or even to clerical elites. Laypeople also calculated that heresy left unchecked would undermine the community from within. 63 Spokesmen for the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) turned to the regime, seeking patronage for their vision of a religion compatible with "civic responsibilities to the tsar and motherland" as well as "respectable and useful labor in all branches of the crafts, commerce, and agriculture." 64 Like the hasidim and their foes, proponents and critics of the Haskalah did not shy away from denouncing their opponents. 65	28
For Jews and Muslims, toleration circumscribed religious autonomy while linking confessional disputes to state patronage and policing. Despite the conservative aims of officials, support for novel forms of bureaucratic organization and doctrinal emphasis brought change to every community. Ceremonies and liturgies integrated tsar and fatherland, while the rites of marriage, divorce, and death became the business of new hierarchies as well as of the Ministry of the Interior. Religious authorities adopted statistics, archives, examinations, and inspections as measures of internal social control. The recording of marriages, births, divorces, and deaths facilitated a more systematic and uniform application of canon law in Christian confessions, aided in establishing religious norms to govern the inner life of the family and community in others, and assisted the government in the levying of taxes and recruits. Police intervention became a dynamic agent of communal transformation, suppressing particular interpretations of the faith and advancing others. However, this kind of intervention did not emerge as a result of a concerted policy of "divide and rule" or a grand integrative strategy from above. Legislation and institutions governing the non-Orthodox often took shape as ad hoc responses to initiatives from members of these groups. Muslims, Jews, and others themselves shaped this process by initiating and placing limits on contacts with tsarist authorities.	29
A closer examination of the expansion of the state into the lives of Muslim men and women on the southeastern frontier reveals how the interdependence of Muslim communities and the regime grew out of the practice of Polizeistaat toleration and the collective pursuit of religious orthodoxy. From the fifteenth century, when Russia first acquired Muslim-populated lands, Muscovite rulers accommodated Muslims informally. In the next century, Russian expansion into the Volga and Urals regions put an end to local Muslim dynasties. Islamic institutions continued to exist beyond the purview of the state but remained subject to periodic assault at the hands of Orthodox militants, who leveled mosques and schools. As in other Muslim societies, learned men and women assumed positions of religious leadership outside the auspices of formal hierarchies. No single authority either defined or enforced a particular interpretation of Islamic orthodoxy, and Muslims engaged in debate largely without recourse to enforcement beyond the pressures of local, close-knit communal life. 66	30
However, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the regime transformed the foundations of Islamic culture in the empire by extending its patronage to Islamic institutions, including generous state subsidies for mosques, the printing of the Quran and other religious texts, and, most important, the creation of a centralized hierarchy. 67 The Orenburg Assembly used its regulatory and investigative authority to oversee religious life in each mosque community by administering clerical examinations, licenses, visitations, and the archival recording of judicial decisions. 68 Through these new instruments, state-appointed Islamic authorities advanced novel understandings of the sharia, which encompassed the norms, obligations, and rights enjoined by God's will for all the faithful. While following the directives of St. Petersburg, the mufti and judges (kadis) of the assembly capitalized on official support to pursue their own agenda. They relied on the police to secure the uniform application of a more narrow and, in their view, more "orthodox" range of opinions of the Hanafi school of law (one of the four established Sunni legal traditions) and Naqshbandi Sufi order. 69 Under Mufti Abdulvakhid Suleimanov, for example, the assembly utilized the Saratov provincial administration to pursue a disputed issue within Sufism about the legality of performing the rite of remembrance of the name of God (zikr) silently or vocally. In 1862, it ordered Muslims in the village of Tatarskie Kanadi to desist from "pronouncing prayers aloud," declaring that those who did not refrain from vocal zikr would be barred from the mosque as "apostates from the sharia" (otstupniki ot Sharigata). 70 Armed with the tools of a modernizing regime, they combated similar departures from Naqshbandi positions and other regional variations in Islamic legal interpretation arising from the varied customs and social conditions of local communities, broad clerical discretion, and the circulation of diverse texts with a plurality of accepted opinions on particular issues.	31
In sponsoring the mufti, the state gained a voice who recognized the empire as the "House of Islam" (dar al-Islam), a territory where Muslims could fulfill their religious duties. 71 Muslim authorities represented such a potentially valuable resource for the government because they claimed guardianship of an array of legal matters that European jurisprudence would elsewhere break up into "civil," "criminal," "ecclesiastical," or "commercial" law. In determining the religious legality of personal behavior, the men of learning and piety (ulama) interpreted a vast body of sources, including the Quran, the sayings and acts of the Prophet, and various legal commentaries. The ulama claimed textual authority in the name of protecting the community against error and irreligion. Prayer-leaders exhorted villagers and townspeople who neglected communal prayer. They reconciled quarreling husbands and wives, educated the youth, and guided Muslims to live pious lives according to the sharia. At the same time, the muftis cooperated with provincial officials who requested fatwas defining the instructions of secular officials as sacred obligations. Fatwas penned by the second mufti, Abdusalam Abdrakhimov, directed Muslims to send their children to Kazan University for medical training in 1831 and, wielding citations from the Quran and other sources, exhorted peasants in 1832 to labor diligently in the fields, sowing and harvesting at the appropriate times, as a defense against poverty and the pleasures of sin. Recognized by the tsar with the award of a gold medal, Abdrakhimov demonstrated his value again in 1836 when he reminded his charges that "each orthodox Muslim is obliged to obey the authorities and the laws" and to avoid sin, which invokes "God's anger and punishment." 72 In sermons, treatises, oaths, and prayers for the imperial family, official ulama enjoined obedience, loyalty, and patriotism. They aided the state in carrying out conscription and other administrative functions and preached the submission of children to their parents—and of Muslims to the regime.	32
Although officials expected the ulama to assist the insertion of the political order into each locale, these Muslim scholars did not necessarily enjoy unbounded authority in their own communities. Even after the introduction of the official hierarchy, their powers still depended on the opinion of the local lay community who elected them and could later petition the state for their removal. Contemporary biographical literature compiled by Muslim scholars celebrated the exemplary lives of those whose reputations for learning and piety empowered them to correct the religion of the people. Notable scholars gained renown for study in cosmopolitan centers of Islamic scholarship such as Bukhara, Kabul, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul, or, closer to home, in the village of Tatarskaia Kargala on the steppe frontier of Orenburg province, and many imams earned (or inherited from their fathers) a name for being "gentle and gracious" in their relations with members of the mosque community. 73 Still others were remembered for their acerbic wit. Gabbas b. Gabderräshid äl-Küshäri once confronted the prayer-leader of the village of Shashï, who had placed the niche marking the direction for prayer on the wrong side of the mosque. When the prayer-leader defended his mistake by citing a text of foreign origin (A Collection of Signs) pointing to Mecca in the West, Küshäri retorted, "Hey, stupid, was A Collection of Signs written in your Shashï?" 74 Clerics like the unfortunate imam of Shashï became increasingly exposed in the nineteenth century to ridicule and other challenges from scholars and laypeople who could now turn to state institutions to "correct" what they held to be unorthodox practices.	33
In turn, the fragile position of Muslim clerics forced them to seek out closer association with officials to back their authority. Village prayer-leaders combating debauchery, the refusal to attend prayers, the celebration of "un-Islamic" holidays, and competition from unlicensed rivals frequently had to resort to denouncing their parishioners not only to the Islamic hierarchy but to local police. As the imam Mukhamet'zhan Kuziakhmetov warned his flock in 1871, "for insubordination and non-fulfillment" of the sharia, "[you] may be punished by God and the civil court." 75 The instruments of the modern state became essential to "orthodox" claims about the fulfillment of God's will.	34
Recent research has pointed to the intense debates among Muslim scholars in Russia about interpretation of the sharia, or divine law. By tracing the contours of these conflicts among Muslim elites, these studies challenge the image of a monolithic and timeless Islam. 76 But the dynamism of these conflicts owed much to the fact that the contest for religious authority extended beyond the elites. Reformist Muslim scholars such as Rizaeddin Fahreddinev wrote numerous treatises defending clerical authority over lay Muslims and the power of men over women who stood to receive a "terrible punishment" in the afterlife for disobeying their husbands. 77 But the licensed keepers of Islamic knowledge were not the only ones committed to correcting those who had ostensibly strayed from the true path. Lay and clerical opponents of the interpretive monopoly of elites relied on a tradition in which interpretation of the sharia potentially produced multiple solutions to a wide array of specific problems, ranging from divorce to commercial transactions. 78 Until the modern era of nation-states and legal codification, Islamic law did not reside in a single text or authority. Indeed, most Muslim scholars regarded fatwas as mere opinions—not binding rulings, except where temporal authorities backed their writ. In a legal tradition that relied on numerous authoritative sources and entertained the possibility of varied outcomes depending on the local social context, determining a single, uniform "orthodoxy" for police enforcement unleashed intense conflicts.	35
Figure 3 : The main mosque and the seat of the Orenburg mufti in the town of Ufa, constructed in 1830. Courtesy of the Prokudin-Gorskii Collection of the Library of Congress.     Figure 4 : A senior Tatar Muslim cleric (akhund). Karl von Rechberg und Rothenlöwen, Les peuples de la Russie, vol. 1 (Paris, 1812). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Official endorsement of orthodoxy meant that, in practice, the police became responsible for enforcing Islamic judicial decisions. In an influential study of Islamic law, Lawrence Rosen has highlighted the role of the Islamic judge as a mediator, a facilitator of "social bargaining," whose aim "is to put people back in the position of being able to negotiate their own permissible relationships without predetermining just what the outcome of those negotiations ought to be." 79 Under the Orenburg Assembly, prayer-leaders and judges assumed this role in formal legal proceedings and informally outside the mosque courtyard. Many of their decisions fitted with "the cultural concepts and social relations to which they were inextricably tied." 80 But, equally important, parties to disputes often eschewed mediation and opted for direct state intervention instead. When litigants turned to the police, debates over the sharia shifted from the local social environment, where neighbors and spouses might bargain and reconcile, toward coercive settlement of intractable differences under state control. Police involvement in returning wives who had fled their husbands, removing children from divorced spouses, or restraining controversial preachers did not facilitate negotiation but brought a bureaucratic finality to contested cases.	36
Lay Muslims thus looked to the institutions of the empire to insist on their own interpretations of God's law. Armed with knowledge acquired in a vast network of Quranic schools as well as through poetry, pilgrimage, sermons, and the circulation of printed and manuscript tracts, men and women pointed out the errors of clerics, relatives, and neighbors who avoided the mosque, drank wine, sang prayers, beat their wives, or committed adultery. 81 They even attacked prayer-leaders who failed to perform the rites, such as communal prayer, burial of the dead, and the celebration of holidays, that dramatized the bonds of community. Mediated by translators, scribes, and bilingual informants, calls for state involvement made explicit references to imperial statutes and decrees. Muslims developed novel rhetorical strategies to press their cases, integrating tsarist law codes, decrees, and procedure alongside appeals to the tsar and imperial family, the Quran, the sayings and acts of the Prophet, and other Islamic legal literature. 82 Denunciations that translated local conflicts over spiritual authority and theological interpretation into the vocabulary of tsarist law and the Orthodox Church proved most successful in launching police investigations. The criminal code became a valuable tool in the hands of Muslims who learned to cast their opponents as self-styled "saints," "pretenders," and "schismatics" (raskol'niki) or to connect them with inciting conversion to Islam. 83	37
For the seekers of true religion, like the villagers of Bazitamak in Orenburg province who denounced their imam to Tsar Nicholas in 1849, intervention became a catalyst for strengthening the community and a guarantor of Islamic orthodoxy. They argued that the state, too, benefited from true religion and suffered from its neglect; in the absence of prayers led by the imam, "the Muhammadan people [had] almost begun to forget its faith," and youth strayed toward criminality "without reproach from the imam about fear of God." 84 In Kazan, Muslims tried to solicit police intervention "in accordance with both the sharia and the civil law" against Muslim women who appeared in public with "open faces" and engaged in prostitution. 85	38
When Muslim peasants in Orenburg province addressed a petition to Nicholas I in 1833 to seek his help in ridding the village of their prayer-leader, they were motivated not by feelings of ethnic solidarity but by the conviction that the state would serve the cause of piety by punishing their imam, Sharafutdin Rakhimov. For these peasants, the conflict with Rakhimov represented a struggle to live according to God's law and to remove the polluting influence of an imam who refused to lead the community in worship, tormented the souls of the dead by neglecting their burial, and even beat one of his denouncers to a state of "great ill-health." Acting on their denunciation, the local police removed the imam from his position for "deeds carried out not only against the Muhammadan religion and its rules but also imperial statutes" and thereby affirmed these petitioners' vision of the regime as the disciplinary instrument of a community governed by the sacred law. 86	39
Similarly, in February 1832, peasants in the district of Kazan gathered to condemn their mullah for provoking God's punishment, but they did not confine themselves to the rough justice of the village. The men of the community turned against Mullah Lupman Fatkullin to the township administration, seeking his removal and expulsion from the village. They informed local authorities that Fatkullin violated the sharia by ignoring the five daily prayers, disregarding his obligation to instruct the children, and subjecting especially pious men—and even women—to "foul insults." The villagers echoed many Muslims who complained that the failings of their prayer-leaders had led to the decline of morals and the corruption of youth. Their denunciations drew on established anti-clerical tropes about greedy and self-interested mullahs. But pious concern for the collective obligations of the divine law may also have reflected local adaptation of new forms of Sufi thought transmitted orally by scholars and in manuscripts that circulated throughout the empire. 87 By appealing to authorities outside of their own village, and beyond the Muslim community, these locals effectively challenged the licensed ulama; they looked to the regime to restore "collective prayer" and spare the community from "the shudder of divine punishment," which the villagers saw in "the recent [outbreak of] the dangerous disease of cholera near our village." 88	40
Notwithstanding the ambiguous status of appeal in the Islamic tradition, Muslims embraced the practice in Russia as a means to challenge the outcome of Islamic law court cases and safeguard the rights and obligations that they understood as essential components of the sharia. 89 Laypeople challenged prayer-leaders and judges by looking beyond the village or town mosque community to the police, the Orenburg Assembly, and the minister of the interior, whom a petition from mullahs in Orenburg province in 1863 styled the "Minister of Interior and Muslim Religious Affairs [sic]." 90 Similar appellate mechanisms appeared in other empires, but tsarist officials defended "orthodox" interpretation of the sharia more consistently than their British or French counterparts. Where European judges incorporated considerations of "equity" and Roman legal principles, Russians looked almost exclusively to authoritative interpretation of the Islamic tradition. 91 In the tsarist setting, Muslims had access to two interrelated modes of appeal. In the first, aggrieved parties, as individuals or as kin groups, contested the resolution of divorce, inheritance, and other disputes by asking the Orenburg Assembly to review the case. In the second, litigants petitioned Russian officials ranging from the local bailiff to the emperor to overturn the rulings of local ulama, to compel husbands to refrain from beating their wives, or otherwise commit themselves to live "in accordance with the sharia." In both types of appeal, the process began with the composition of a petition or complaint (usually on the basis of oral testimony) at the offices of the local police; the police investigated claims about the violation of the sharia, gathered evidence, and then oversaw the execution of the final judgment. Litigants might simultaneously pursue both strategies or, after exhausting the first option, turn to the tsar with confidence that the laws of the empire supported God's law.	41
Both state archival records and Muslim historical sources show how contests over religious authority quietly transformed these small, face-to-face communities and their relationship to the state, as men and women adopted the practice of soliciting intervention to contest the outcomes of divorce, inheritance, and other cases involving the sharia. In 1820, Bibi Kiz Bike petitioned the mufti to secure maintenance (nafaqa) from her husband. 92 In the same year, a villager named Sayyid from the Volga province of Simbirsk abrogated a marriage contract with his future son-in-law, Mecid, by refusing to permit his daughter Bibi Habibe to marry her fiancé. Mecid charged Sayyid with violating an agreement sanctioned by the sharia and turned to the district police chief, who organized an investigation and gathered testimony from the villagers. After consulting the Orenburg Assembly, the police instructed local mullahs to assist in determining the legality of the contract on the basis of Islamic law. The mullahs apparently tried to reconcile the families of the betrothed, but, when mediation failed, the mufti Husainov put an end to the case by ruling that Sayyid was obliged to turn his daughter over to Mecid—a judgment to be delivered to the litigants and carried out jointly by the mullahs and the police. By the second quarter of the century, Muslims in over a dozen provinces had learned to act on the social and religious obligation to discipline co-religionists by turning to the regime and its Islamic institutions to restore the communal religious standards and the purity of the faith commanded by God's law.	42
While recourse to tsarist law became an essential tool in the hands of Muslims whose competing visions of the sharia animated clerical rivalries and village feuds, men and women also looked to the state to compel their spouses to live "according to the sharia." As in other Muslim societies, women emerged as particularly active litigants. Often assisted by guardians and kin, they utilized courts and appeals to restrain abusive husbands, defend their honor, and even initiate divorce based on the claim that the sharia accorded them these rights. 93 Women such as Khamida Salikhova, from the village of Novoe-Baltachevo in Orenburg province, turned to Nicholas I to protest the brutality of their husbands, asserting in petitions that physical abuse justified the awarding of a divorce "in accordance with the Muhammadan faith." 94 Invoking the protection of imperial law and officials, appeals from disgruntled wives, disappointed husbands, and frustrated prayer-leaders seeking justice and fulfillment of the divine will made the tsarist police arbiters of the most intimate of religious and familial disputes.	43
At mid-century , the crisis of the Crimean War and fighting against the Ottomans provoked doubt in the minds of provincial officials and many Muslim peasants and townspeople about the continued convergence of interests between Muslims and their Christian rulers. Rumors of forced conversion on the Volga led some Muslim villagers to conclude, according to a local investigation of Muslim attitudes in Samara province, that the war with the Ottomans would endanger toleration, reckoning that, since "Christians suffer oppression in Turkey," then "our government, too, will do the same with the followers of Islam [islamizm]." Increasingly anxious about "fanaticism," provincial officials were also disconcerted by reports that Muslims collected money and offered prayers for the victory of the sultan, in addition to proselytizing among their non-Muslim neighbors and storing gunpowder for a rebellion. 95 But whereas the regime resorted to mass expulsions and encouraged flight from the militarily sensitive borderlands of the Caucasus and the Crimea in the wake of the war, it discouraged emigration from other regions and attempted to dispel rumors that agitated mullahs and Orthodox priests alike. 96 Officials in St. Petersburg remained committed to the common moral language of sin and divine punishment that continued to make Islam useful in administering these provinces, despite warnings of "fanaticism" from local governors and bishops.	44
In the postwar reform era, the central government accommodated these protests by imposing more restrictions on the autonomy of Muslim authorities. The Ministry of the Interior increasingly subjected local appeals to the scrutiny of non-Muslim scholars trained in the newly established disciplines of Oriental studies. The regime took these figures to be not only more trustworthy in their devotion to the state but truer to the "correct" meaning of the Islamic tradition that they derived from their study of texts. Russian officials thus assumed greater responsibility for defining and enforcing Islamic "orthodoxy," even as they registered growing skepticism about the competence and reliability of its traditional spokesmen. 97 In reviewing appeals for the ministry, scholars such as the St. Petersburg University professor Alexander Kazem-Bek frequently called the decisions of the Orenburg Assembly into question. In 1865, the appointment of Selim-Girei Tevkelev to the post of Orenburg mufti bolstered the authority of Orientalist "experts." A retired staff cavalry captain, nobleman, and decorated veteran of campaigns against both the Ottomans and the rebellious Poles, Tevkelev lacked systematic training in the Islamic tradition. Through consultation on specific cases, Orientalists interpreted the sharia in new ways. Removing the process of disputation and discretionary interpretation from the social environment of the mosque community, they established binding precedents and limited the range and flexibility of Islamic interpretation by privileging a handful of legal texts that summarized major opinions of the Hanafi school of law. Scholars built on the "orthodox" agenda of the Orenburg Assembly by narrowing the latitude of Islamic jurisprudence but simultaneously undermined its authority by shifting final control over Islamic law judgments to the upper echelons of the appellate hierarchy in St. Petersburg. Kazem-Bek in particular contributed to the official redefinition of the sharia as a species of positive law, reducing the range of outcomes to a single judgment on a uniform basis. 98	45
While Russian nationalists, Orthodox bishops, and Orientalists threatened the power of the ulama, they did not displace Islamic law from its pivotal position at the nexus of state administration and the life of the local mosque community. Indeed, the rise of Orientalist scholarship gave laypeople new venues—and new languages—for advancing their understandings of the sharia. Despite the change in tone of many provincial officials, laypeople continued to look to the state as a force for salvation. In 1862, the peasant Khasan Ishmukhametev of Kazan province turned to the emperor "Alexander Nikolaevich" for justice. He sought his intervention in a bitter conflict with the local mullah, who refused to confer a na