The historiography of Muslim communities under Russian domination, whether czarist Russian or Soviet Russian, has until now been presented with a strongly modernist and nationalist focus. The social context created by Islamic belief and the institutions to which it gave rise have rarely been studied except as a foil for the promotion of nationalist, Russocentric, or “modernist” ideologies. The present work is therefore an important corrective. It is a richly detailed analysis of several distinct yet connected communities located just to the east of the Volga River. The book focuses on an agricultural region marked by two north–south river basins, about twenty to thirty miles apart, and roughly parallel to the Volga, about 100 miles to the west. In particular, the work focuses on a group of villages along a major tributary (the Altata River) of one of the rivers, the Bol'shoi Uzen. In this area, Muslims were a distinct minority in the period covered by the study. The principal source for the study is a local history of these communities, the Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā, written in 1909 and 1910. Its authors were father and son, Muhammad Fatih and Muhammad al-Ilmini. Ilmin was a village in the township of Osinov Gai (also known as Iske Uzen) where the Altata River emptied into the Bol'shoi Uzen. Although the focus of the Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā is the township and four other villages in it, the al-Ilminis range over the whole watershed of the twin Bol'shoi and Malyi Uzen Rivers, thus including communities in three large administrative districts (uezdy)—Novouzensk, the Ural Cossack Horde, and the Kazakh Inner Horde—in all, an area of about 28,000 square miles located today in far western Kazakhstan.