The number of books that I have copied has reached two hundred twenty three volumes with this one. I started copying books when I was twenty. Now I have reached the age of ninety-five. I never wore glasses. I burned burning sticks and wrote. Indeed, something called “candle” has become available nowadays, but I don't have the money to buy even one night's supply of candles. I have gotten old now; maybe I won't have the power to write after this!Footnote 1
İşmuhammed bin Zâhid was born in 1740 in a Muslim village located midway between the cities of Orenburg and Kazan. He led a vagrant life as a young man. His voice was beautiful. He liked to sing, dance, and drink. He made a name for himself with his singing and dancing at the drinking parties that he frequented, but he remained an inauspicious figure – the Volga-Ural Muslims at best tolerated the habitual drinker and merrymaker that he was.Footnote 2 He married around the age of twenty-two, and one day, shortly after getting married, he walked away from his village without informing anybody. None could have guessed what happened to him until he returned as a learned scholar of Islam twenty-five years later. He had first gone to Mecca and performed the Hajj. Following this, he had studied in the madrasas of Cairo for eight years, and then traveled and studied in various other cities of the Ottoman Empire for several years. Finally, he had decided that it was time to settle down, and here he was, back in his village. We don't know what happened to his first wife. He married a second time after his return and had several children. He earned his living by reciting the Qur'an in religious gatherings and by teaching. He became famous in the Volga-Ural region as an accomplished Islamic scholar and reciter. All of his four sons became scholars following their father's example, and his daughters married either scholars or notable persons. He died in 1840 at the age of one hundred.Footnote 3
İşmuhammed bin Zâhid's remarkable transformation while away from his village catapulted him from the Volga-Ural Muslims’ boundaries of tolerance to a model, ideal figure: an Islamic scholar. When he left for Mecca, he traveled away from the physical space where his community was located, but he moved closer to the center of an extra-spatial medium of exchange, a Muslim domain, where Muslims connected to one another across time and space and negotiated their shared norms and imaginaries. Islamic scholars had a central role in this exchange as its primary negotiators thanks to their skills and privileges in transmitting, interpreting, and authorizing the Islamic traditions and their ability to connect otherwise insulated Muslim communities to other Muslims in distant locations.
The ability of Islamic scholars to connect to a broader Muslim universe had a critical significance for the Volga-Ural Muslims due to the absence or paucity of other agents who could have shared in this role. The Volga-Ural Muslims were the subjects of an Orthodox Christian-ruled empire, their nobility was incapacitated by the Russian occupation, and they had very few big merchants until the late nineteenth century. They predominantly lived in the countryside as agricultural peasants or seasonal nomads until the collectivization campaigns of the early Soviet period,Footnote 4 and they rarely ventured beyond the surrounding area of their villages or market towns.Footnote 5 Islamic scholars, on the other hand, traveled extensively, especially during their years of education as madrasa students. Mobility and the long years of camaraderie in madrasa hostels enabled them to forge lasting connections with each other. They weaved these connections into scholarly networks through kinship ties, letters, Sufi associations, and debates over the controversial issues of religion. And they tapped into a broader, transregional network of Islamic scholars that extended primarily to Transoxiana but also to Daghestan, Afghanistan, India, and, increasingly in the late nineteenth century, to the Ottoman territories and Egypt. It was mainly the Islamic scholars who reached beyond local Muslim communities in the Volga-Ural region, and the extent of their reach played a decisive role in shaping the way Volga-Ural Muslims interpreted and responded to the larger world until the Soviet regime liquidated Islamic scholars in the 1930s.Footnote 6 Hence, tracing the stories of these scholars can open windows into the experience and imaginaries of Volga-Ural Muslims, and thankfully, we have a number of biographical dictionaries, ṭabaqāt books as they are commonly known in the Islamic literature, that provide us those stories.Footnote 7
A remarkably comprehensive biographical dictionary written in the Volga-Ural region is the work of Rızâeddin bin Fahreddin.Footnote 8 With a profound interest in history, Fahreddin had organized the archive and library of the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly while working there as a high-ranking official (qadi) in the 1890s. The works and official records of thousands of scholars that had accumulated at the building of this institution in Ufa since its foundation in the late eighteenth century provided Fahreddin with the initial material he needed to start working on a biographical dictionary. In 1900, he prepared a short fascicule with thirty entries and published it under the title Ɣsar, meaning “traces.” Shortly after this fascicule appeared in the bookstores and market stalls of the Volga-Ural region, he started receiving letters from Muslims in various parts of the Russian empire with further information and documents about other scholars to be included in the following fascicules of the dictionary. As a result, what started as Fahreddin's personal project turned into a collective effort among Volga-Ural Muslims to document the lives of their past scholars and, occasionally, a few prominent lay persons. Fahreddin painstakingly compiled and published his fascicules for eight years. He organized the entries according to the death dates of the scholars. By 1908, he had published 565 entries and reached the 1870s. Many of his entries included copies of personal letters, notes, or legal opinions (fatwas) written by various scholars, in addition to biographical information about their genealogies, marriages, children, teachers, students, and places of study or residence.Footnote 9 What follows in this chapter is an outline of some of the central exchange relations that shaped the Volga-Ural Muslims’ world from the mid eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries as those relations emerge primarily from this extraordinary compilation of biographies. It cannot do justice to the individual experiences of millions of Muslims who lived and died in that world, but it provides a look, albeit a telescopic one, into the contours of their collective experience.Footnote 10
The geography of studying
As among most other Muslim peoples, Muslims of the Volga-Ural region had a widespread system of elementary religious education. Mosque imams, or “mullahs” in Volga-Ural Turkic, taught the boys in their neighborhood while their wives taught the girls. If the children were young enough, either the mullah or his wife could teach both sexes too. Sometimes, the parents constructed a separate building for instruction, but in many cases, the mosque or the mullah's house served that purpose. Almost all Muslim children studied subjects such as the basics of Islam and Qur'anic recitation for a few years in these classes known as maktabs. Then, a small number of male students who wanted to acquire a degree of knowledge that would entitle them to be recognized as scholars continued their studies in higher educational institutions, called madrasas, for approximately fifteen to twenty years.Footnote 11
Madrasas of the Volga-Ural region were often small, poor, and short-lived. In Muslim-ruled countries, such as the Ottoman Empire or the Bukharan Emirate, charitable endowments protected by law, called waqfs, provided stable income and organizational continuity to the madrasas.Footnote 12 The Russian administration, however, destroyed the Volga-Ural Muslims’ waqfs following the invasion of Kazan in 1552.Footnote 13 One could still endow the building of a village mosque, a few shops, some land, or even books, but these small endowments were not protected by law, and they did not compare with the large, income-producing waqfs of the Muslim-ruled countries.Footnote 14 Only in the nineteenth century did the registering of waqfs officially become possible in the Volga-Ural region and, paralleling the improvements in the Muslim population's economic conditions, only in the last decades of the imperial regime did wealthy Muslims start to create large endowments.Footnote 15 Until then, a madrasa in the Volga-Ural region was usually comprised of a scholar who offered regular instruction at the madrasa level and, perhaps, some boarding arrangements for the students. Only rarely did the continuing support of a village congregation or wealthy family provide some sort of organizational continuity to the Volga-Ural madrasas.Footnote 16
Madrasas of the Volga-Ural region followed a curriculum that was commonly used by the scholars of the Hanafi legal school.Footnote 17 While the institutionalized madrasas in Muslim-ruled countries could employ several instructors and offer advanced courses for the entire Hanafi curriculum, or at least for a majority of its subjects, most of the madrasas in the Volga-Ural region had only one instructor. No matter how erudite this single scholar was, it was practically impossible for him to provide training in all fields of Islamic scholarship. Each scholar specialized in teaching one or a few subjects and, sometimes, just a single book.Footnote 18 Some scholars did not hold classes at all. They assigned books to their students, the students read these books on their own or with other students, and the scholar reviewed the progress of each student on the assigned book from time to time.Footnote 19 An ambitious student who wanted to excel in one of the fields not offered at the advanced level at his current madrasa would have to find the specialist of that field and move on to his madrasa.
The need to seek different instructors in order to cover all fields of study required students to move from one madrasa to another as they advanced in their studies. Cârullah bin Bikmuhammed (1796–1869), for instance, changed locations seven times before he finished studying and found a job as a village mullah.Footnote 20 Sometimes, a student could finish his studies without changing madrasas so frequently, especially if he entered the madrasa of a relatively more knowledgeable scholar early in his educational career. Rızâeddin bin Fahreddin, for instance, never switched madrasas,Footnote 21 but in general, students traveled as they studied. While most of them circulated among Volga-Ural madrasas, a small group of students who could afford long-distance travel went to major centers of Islamic scholarship outside of the Russian empire too.
The Bukharan Emirate in Transoxiana was the most familiar and preferred destination for students from the Volga-Ural region until the late nineteenth century. They went to other Transoxianian cities like Samarqand and Khiva too, but Bukhara was a more prominent and revered center of scholarship, and Russia's Muslims used its name to refer to the Transoxianian scholarly traditions in general.Footnote 22 The descendants of a seventeenth-century scholar, Yûnus bin İvanay (b. 1636), claimed that their ancestor was the first scholar from the Volga-Ural region who had studied in Bukhara. Since the Russian invasions following the fall of Kazan in 1552 seem to have interrupted the transmission of knowledge among the Volga-Ural ulama, it is possible for scholars like Yûnus bin İvanay to have revived Islamic scholarship in the region after an interlude, and the madrasas, libraries, and traditions of Bukhara are likely to have guided them in this restoration.Footnote 23
Yet, going to Bukhara was a demanding enterprise. One had to cross the Qizilqum Desert. Every year, merchants organized caravans between Bukhara and major cities in eastern Russia, such as Petropavl, Troitsk, and Orenburg. Nizhny Novgorod's large trade fair, located about 250 miles to the east of Moscow, was also connected to Bukhara through caravans.Footnote 24 Students from the Volga-Ural region had to wait for the travel season and join a caravan in order to go to Bukhara or return from it. The journey from Orenburg to Bukhara took one to two months. Therefore, depending on where a student started his journey, he would have to travel up to several months in order to reach Bukhara. This was an expensive trip. One had to save money for the road and the expenses in Bukhara or else find support from a benefactor. Many of the scholars who studied in Bukhara initially worked as village mullahs and saved some money before they could take the long journey.Footnote 25
Once in Bukhara, students needed to find connections and settle in one of the madrasas of this town. Many of them earned their livelihood by working at ad hoc jobs as they studied. Additionally, local rulers and notables offered scholarships and charity money, and from the late eighteenth century on, the cells that students could rent or purchase in Bukharan madrasas entitled them to a share of the institution's waqf income.Footnote 26 Yet, finding a cell was not easy, even if one had the money to rent or purchase it. Typically, students who traveled to Bukhara from Russia would first need to find an acquaintance who had come earlier. This acquaintance would then help them locate a cell and join the classes of a madrasa instructor.Footnote 27
Since Islamic scholarship in the Volga-Ural region was modeled after Bukharan scholarship, education in the madrasas of Bukhara was not too different from that of the Volga-Ural madrasas. The books used in Islamic education were predominantly in Arabic, both in Russia and in Transoxiana, and the Turkic dialects spoken in both places were mutually intelligible to their speakers although not identical. Students in Transoxiana had to familiarize themselves with Persian too since this was the predominant language in the urban centers of the region. Some madrasa instructors gave regular lectures, that is, one of the students read from a book, and the instructor commented as he deemed necessary or supervised a discussion of the topic by the students. Other instructors did not give lectures but only assigned books to the students and coached them as they read through those books. Students progressed at their own pace. Attendance was not required, and students could attend the lectures of any instructor who accepted them to his class, often in return for a small gift.Footnote 28
However, Bukhara also offered opportunities that were not available in the Volga-Ural region such as the agglomeration of several madrasas and instructors in a single city and the availability of a large collection of books in the libraries, private collections, and markets of the emirate for reading, copying, and purchasing. The gathering of several instructors and a high number of students in the same location created an environment of scholarship that encouraged the students to study intensively and also allowed them to follow the lectures of different instructors without having to move from one place to another. The availability of a variety of books was also crucial for the scholarly development of a student at a time when copying by hand was the only way to reproduce books. Obtaining books attracted both students and older scholars to Bukhara.Footnote 29 Books printed in Egyptian and Ottoman print houses as well as in Kazan and St. Petersburg became increasingly more available in the Russian empire throughout the nineteenth century and changed the intellectual range of its Muslims, but copying by hand never lost its scholarly importance.Footnote 30
Afghanistan and India were also within the geographical scope of the Volga-Ural Muslims. A significant number of students either studied in Kabul or spent some time there while studying in Bukhara. It seems that the Sufi circles of Afghanistan, especially the famous Naqshbandi Sheikh Fayḍhan bin Hiḍrkhan of Kabul (d. 1802), attracted Muslims from the Russian empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 31 The relations between Bukharan and Indian Muslims were crucial in connecting the Islamic scholars of the Volga-Ural region to India. Indian Muslim students came to Bukhara to study, as caravans regularly traveled between India and Transoxiana, and Russian Muslims also organized caravans to trade with India.Footnote 32 Some students who went to Bukhara from the Russian empire in order to study continued on to India mostly to seek Sufi guidance or to travel further to Hijaz via the sea.Footnote 33 The number of students from the Volga-Ural region that are recorded in Âsar as having studied in India is low.Footnote 34 But even though a small number of Islamic scholars from the Volga-Ural region seem to have maintained direct contact with India in the nineteenth century, the influence of Indian Muslims on the Muslims of the Volga-Ural region can hardly be exaggerated, considering the prominent role of the Indian-origin Mujaddidi branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in the Volga-Ural region.Footnote 35
Daghestan was another well-known center of scholarship for Islamic scholars from the Volga-Ural region. At least one Daghestani scholar, Muhammed bin ‘Ali el-Daghestani (d. 1795), settled in Orenburg in the early nineteenth century and taught in what Fahreddin calls the “Daghestani way.”Footnote 36 Fahreddin also records five Volga-Ural scholars who had traveled to Daghestan in the early nineteenth century to study. Interestingly, four of them continued further after Daghestan to the Ottoman territories.Footnote 37 The Daghestani scholar Nadhīr al-Durgilī (1891–1935) mentions three more scholars from the Volga-Ural region in his biographical dictionary of Daghestan, and he explains that students from the Volga-Ural region went to Daghestan especially to improve their Arabic-language skills.Footnote 38 Finally, the Russian state exiled a number of Daghestani Sufi sheikhs to the Volga-Ural region in the late nineteenth century, which also fostered connections between the Islamic scholars of the Volga-Ural region and Daghestan.Footnote 39
The Ottoman territories were also a part of the Volga-Ural Muslims’ geographical imagination. Hijaz was definitely their most important destination in the Ottoman Empire. Muslims from all over the world, including Russia, went to Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula to perform the Hajj in Mecca and visit the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina.Footnote 40 Many scholars whose biographies are recorded in Fahreddin's Âsar also took this journey.Footnote 41 However, before at least the second half of the nineteenth century the Hajj journey or going to the Ottoman territories to study were even more arduous and expensive enterprises than traveling to Bukhara. As scholars and lay Muslims who performed the Hajj related their experience back in Russia, Ottoman madrasas entered within the range of options for Muslim students from the Volga-Ural region, but few students actually traveled there to study until the late nineteenth century.
By the late 1800s, steamboats carrying passengers between the Russian port cities and Istanbul or even Jeddah made traveling to the Ottoman territories significantly easier for Russia's Muslims. This increased the number of students and Hajj travelers from the Volga-Ural region who traveled to the Ottoman Empire so much that special hostels were opened for them in Istanbul, Mecca, and Medina. While going to Medina in 1879, as a young and poor student, Ğabdurreşîd İbrâhîm (1857–1944), who would later become a prominent political activist among Russia's Muslims, stayed in one of these hostels for about fifty days. He did not have to pay for his room. The caretaker of the hostel, Muhammed Efendi from Kazan, even provided him with food and clothing.Footnote 42 When Ğabdurreşîd İbrâhîm arrived in Medina, there were four hostels for Russian Muslims in the city, and İbrâhîm wrote that there were hostels located in Mecca as well. The hostels in Medina filled during the Hajj season, but when the Hajj travelers left, only four married Russian Muslims and fourteen single students, including Ğabdurreşîd İbrâhîm, remained behind.Footnote 43
Students coming from the Russian empire could study in a variety of places in the Ottoman territories. One early example, Ğabdulhâlıq bin Ğabdulkerîm (1771–1844) from the Ufa Gubernia, went to Istanbul in 1798 with the apparent intention of performing the Hajj. He indeed wanted to perform the Hajj, but his real plan was to study in a Muslim-ruled country. From Istanbul, he wrote to his relatives that he considered the options for a long time and decided to go to the famous Hâdim Madrasa in Konya to study with the city's mufti, Muhammed Emin Hâdimî. After studying there for six years and also receiving initiation into the Naqshbandi Sufi order, he went to Mecca to perform the Hajj. He did not leave Mecca right away but remained there for a while to study. Following this, he traveled to Medina, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Damascus, studying with the scholars of these cities too. Finally, he returned to Ufa in 1808 and opened his own madrasa.Footnote 44 The cities that Ğabdulhâlıq bin Ğabdulkerîm visited, as well as some others like Diyarbakır and Baghdad, in the Ottoman territories, were all common destinations for Muslim students from the Volga-Ural region.Footnote 45
Ulama as network
Traveling was only one of the ways in which Islamic scholars covered a wide geography and connected their fellow Muslims to the larger world. Once students finished studying and settled in particular locations as scholars, they traveled significantly less, and some of them did not travel at all. But they still remained connected beyond their local communities through kinship ties, letters, Sufi associations, and debates over the controversial issues of religion both within Volga-Ural scholarly networks and beyond, extending to a broader area that paralleled the students’ geographical range of study.Footnote 46 While the mobility of scholars, especially in their student years, was crucial in determining the scope of their geographic reach, their participation in scholarly networks gave permanence to their connectivity.
When a madrasa student finished his studies, he would typically start looking for a position as the mullah of a mosque. Graduates of Bukhara and other prominent centers of Islamic scholarship often found good jobs in mosques with wealthy congregations. Those with better qualifications could open madrasas and start training students in addition to serving as mullahs, and those with the best credentials could even forego the position of mullah and focus on teaching alone.Footnote 47 Those who left their education at a relatively early stage could still take up positions as adhan callers.Footnote 48 And finally, since the region had more madrasa graduates than needed, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some students could never find religious positions upon finishing their studies.Footnote 49 They would continue their lives as clerks, peasants, merchants, or something else that the possibilities of the region allowed.Footnote 50
Regardless of the position that a madrasa graduate took, the knowledge that he accumulated provided him with a distinctive and respected status in the Muslim community.Footnote 51 He became an ʿālim, or “scholar” as it is often translated, which literally means, in its Arabic origin “one who knows.” “Ulama (ʿUlamāʾ)” is the plural of “ʿālim,” but it implies more than “scholars” in the plural. It is a collective name for the network that the Islamic scholars constituted – not only at a given time and place, through personal connections, as we shall see below, but also across time and space, through the transmission of knowledge. Thus, by becoming an Islamic scholar, the madrasa graduates would acquire the authority of both the knowledge that they had accumulated and of the “ulama” as an influential and respected segment of the Muslim Ummah.
Several factors forged the aggregate of individual Islamic scholars into a cohesive network in the Russian empire. The mobility of madrasa students helped them meet many other students and scholars. When they switched to a more stable way of life upon finishing their studies, they continued to communicate with some of their acquaintances through occasional visits and letters. For instance, İbrâhîm bin Hocaş (d. 1825) had studied in Daghestan and Anatolia before settling in Bugulma. As a scholar, he continued to communicate with other scholars in these two regions and asked their opinions about controversial issues of religion, such as the performance of night prayers in northern territories where the sun did not set during summer nights.Footnote 52 In a society where functional literacy was a rarity, the ability to read and, more importantly, to write was a distinguishing quality. It helped members of the ulama to keep in touch with the wider world, especially with other scholars in distant locations, through letters.Footnote 53
Until the end of the nineteenth century most of these scholars relied on the services of occasional travelers rather than the imperial postal system to convey their letters.Footnote 54 It seems that there were enough travelers among Russia's Muslims to enable the emergence of reliable communication patterns as early as the beginnings of the eighteenth century. The letters that a scholar from Kazan, Seyfeddin bin Ebubekir, exchanged during his Hajj journey in 1824 with Ercümend Kirmanî of Ufa are revealing in this respect. According to the arrangement between Seyfeddin and Kirmanî, Kirmanî would move to Kazan and maintain Seyfeddin's madrasa during the latter's Hajj journey. Seyfeddin started his journey from the city of Kazan. When he arrived in Astrakhan, he received a letter from Kirmanî. Seyfeddin did not have an address in Astrakhan, but apparently a contact person in this city received letters and parcels coming from other parts of the Volga-Ural region, and travelers went to this person in order to check if there was anything sent in their name. Seyfeddin responded to Kirmanî's letter from Astrakhan and instructed him to send his next letter to Anapa with other Hajj travelers. It seems that these patterns were so reliable that Seyfeddin could comfortably expect to receive in another city on his route a letter that Kirmanî would give to Hajj travelers from Ufa or Kazan.Footnote 55 Similarly, hostels that Volga-Ural Muslims maintained in Istanbul, as well as a few individual Volga-Ural Muslims who resided in this city, facilitated communication for travelers. For instance a certain Muhammed Kerîm from Kazan, who had settled in Istanbul in the 1850s, served as the contact person for the Volga-Ural Muslims who traveled to Istanbul in the 1860s.Footnote 56
Kinship was another factor that contributed to the existence of an ulama network. The sons of scholars often adopted the profession of their fathers.Footnote 57 This was such a common practice that the inability of a scholar's son to become a scholar as well or his choice not to become one would trouble the father.Footnote 58 Moreover, many scholars arranged marriages between their daughters and promising students.Footnote 59 While these kinship connections did not grow into a caste system and scholarship remained open to all who were willing and able to acquire knowledge, they did create an environment where a scholar was very likely to have other scholars among his relatives. As a result, the familial relations of these scholar relatives simultaneously intensified interactions among the ulama.
Sufism also played a significant role in weaving scholarly networks in the Volga-Ural region. The practice of Sufism, by nature, connects individuals through submission to a sheikh and membership in a brotherhood. Until the utilization of printed and audiovisual mass media in the twentieth century,Footnote 60 personal training for initiation into an order and visits thereafter were the essential forms of relations between Sufi sheikhs and their followers.Footnote 61 Not all scholars were Sufis, but many were, and they kept traveling to visit their sheikhs. Sufism connected scholars of the same Sufi order (ṭarīqah) closely to one another as well as to the lay affiliates of that order since lay Muslims could also partake in the Sufi practice.
The Naqshbandi Sufi order had an especially noticeable presence among the scholars of the Volga-Ural region in the nineteenth century. It is difficult to estimate when and how this order entered the region, but Fahreddin records several Volga-Ural scholars as having received initiation into the Mujaddidi branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order from Fayḍhan bin Hiḍrkhan of Kabul or Sheikh Niyazqul el-Türkmânî of Bukhara (d. 1820) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This, it seems, was key in the evolution of the Volga-Ural region's Sufi networks in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 62 Then, a new branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, the Khalidiyya, also entered the region in the second part of the nineteenth century. The first Khalidis came from Daghestan, but it was the disciples of Ahmed Ziyaüddin Gümüşhânevî from Istanbul (1819–99) who really made a significant impact.Footnote 63 One of Gümüşhânevî's disciples in particular, Sheikh Zeynullah Rasûlî of Troitsk (1835–1917), gathered a huge following; three thousand of his disciples were reported to have assembled in Troitsk to see him in one event. Fearing the size of his following, imperial authorities exiled Rasûlî to Siberia in 1873. But when he ultimately returned to Troitsk in the 1880s, the number of his disciples grew still higher, and he became one of the most popular Sufi sheikhs in the region.Footnote 64
Finally, debates over controversial religious questions, especially theological problems, also helped coalesce Russia's Islamic scholars – both as allies and opponents. Some issues of controversy were the necessity of performing night prayers during the short summer nights, the relation of God's attributes to God's self, the possibility of considering the Russian empire as “land of Islam” (dār al-Islām), and related to this last question, the conditions of performing the congregational Friday prayers.Footnote 65 Some scholars, such as Ebunnasr Ğabdunnasîr el-Qursâvî (1776–1812) and Ğabdurrahîm bin Ğusman Utız İmenî (1754–1835), were so forceful in their treatment of these issues that whether a scholar supported or opposed their views came to clarify that scholar's position among the ulama of the Volga-Ural region.Footnote 66 Qursâvî especially, who criticized the theologians of Bukhara and wrote a number of thought-provoking treatises, inspired many scholars among Volga-Ural Muslims. His ideas would have a strong influence on the proponents of renovation in religious thinking in the latter part of the nineteenth century too.Footnote 67 Utız İmenî was also proficient at writing and distributing short but compelling pamphlets about controversial subjects.Footnote 68 Throughout the nineteenth century many other scholars wrote pamphlets (risâles) on these issues. Their works circulated in the region mostly in handwritten manuscripts and helped the members of the ulama to engage in a regional debate.Footnote 69
Conclusion
In his memoirs, Ğabdürreşîd İbrâhîm narrates how in his youth he saw a camel for the first time while traveling south in the snow-covered Kazakh Steppe on a moony night and how he was awed thinking that this was a genie. Then, he comments that had he had access to books with pictures, he could have recognized the camel.Footnote 70 Maps, pictures, photographs, and journalistic descriptions of different phenomena from around the globe became available in mass print to the Volga-Ural Muslims at the turn of the twentieth century, and the popularization of this material continued into the Soviet period. Until then, the region's Muslims imagined the larger world based on the oral traditions of past generations, the narratives of those who traveled and actually saw far-away places, and occasionally, on a limited number of mostly religious texts. Typically, Muslim communities in the Volga-Ural region turned to Islamic scholars for the transmission and interpretation of those narrations and texts. The Islamic scholars were literate, they had the skills and privilege to authorize Islamic traditions, and they were actually connected beyond their local Muslim communities.Footnote 71 All of these distinctions located Islamic scholars at the center of an exchange of ideas and influence among Volga-Ural Muslims as well as between the Volga-Ural Muslims and the larger world. From that exchange emerged a transregional Muslim domain: a metaspace belonging primarily to Muslims: a world where Muslims felt familiar and comfortable.
One can find parallels to the above-explained patterns of travel, communication, and interconnectivity among many other Muslim communities, and therefore these patterns indicate the involvement of Volga-Ural Muslims in a characteristically Muslim domain that did not owe its existence to the Russian empire. However, it would still be misleading to assume that the ulama or the Muslim communities of the Volga-Ural region existed in isolation from the Russian state. At least since the late sixteenth century, the mosques in which the Islamic scholars of the Volga-Ural region served as mullahs existed under the jurisdiction of Russian imperial laws or they were destroyed as a result of the decisions of Russian imperial authorities.Footnote 72 Imperial authorities did not establish or control Sufi networks, but they still influenced them by measures such as exiling Daghestani Sufi sheikhs to the Volga-Ural region. It was the Russian state that destroyed income-producing waqfs in the Volga-Ural region. The steamboats that carried Hajj travelers and students from Russian Black Sea ports to Istanbul and Jeddah belonged to companies that were incorporated according to Russian imperial laws.Footnote 73 And finally, aside from these limited and indirect sources of influence, imperial authorities directly contacted and tried to regulate Islamic scholars in the Russian empire with the purpose of benefiting from their services in the administration of the empire's Muslim communities.Footnote 74 Indeed, as we shall see in the next chapter, a process that Catherine II initiated in the 1780s created an institutionalized bond between Volga-Ural Muslims and the Russian state by incorporating the region's Islamic scholars into the imperial state apparatus.
