Home > Transcaucasia’s Muslim Religious Boards in The Russian Empire During the 19th Century and Beginning of the 20th

Transcaucasia’s Muslim Religious Boards in The Russian Empire During the 19th Century and Beginning of the 20th

Introduction by Anastasia Ganich

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The written sources that make up this thematic unit reflect the process of Islam’s evolution in the Russian Empire, in particular its institutionalization in the Transcaucasian provinces. The documents are of various types: from legislative drafts to ritual texts. Among the myriad documents discovered, the ones that were selected were those that can show most vividly the two parallel worlds of Transcaucasia during the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. They were, on the one hand, the world of the Russian civilian and military bureaucracy and the lawmakers who determined and designed Islamic reality in the political space of the empire. On the other, the realm of religious sacrament, experience, tradition and daily life, which was represented by the followers of the religion of Islam themselves. Two completely dissimilar realities that were little known to each other and that through a confluence of historical fates confronted the necessity of interacting and developing together. The alienation between the worlds was the primary reason for the ineffectiveness of the legislative activity aimed at regulating the religious life of the empire’s Muslims, which inevitably resulted in a permanent growth of a lack of understanding and rejection by the local populace of the government’s legislative initiatives.

The southward expansion of the borders of the Russian Empire and its gradual incorporation, beginning at the end of the 18th century, of territories with a predominant Muslim population entailed a whole host of government measures aimed at organizing public administration in the new provinces. Many initiatives were implemented, while a portion remained on paper, both for objective reasons and because they did not fit in with the tactical goals of various bureaucratic elites. The phased entry of the Transcaucasian territories resulted in a major transformation of the traditional political institutions and forms of regulation of religious life that had previously existed there. The process of formation of models and concepts of governance of the outlying nationality-based regions of the empire ran on for many decades, notable for its instability and back-and-forth swings. During the initial stage the Russian government tried to adapt the administrative models it was introducing to local conditions in order to maintain social-political stability in the region. However, the lack of enough military and civilian experts on Islam and the Caucasus resulted in a superficial understanding of the crux of the “Muslim question” and often prevented the Russian administration from dealing with the issues confronting it in a timely and effective manner.

The administration of the Muslim communities (Shia and Sunni) of Transcaucasia was coordinated with the overall system of state control of the communities of other faiths that was established back during the reign of Catherine II.[1] The process of including Muslims in various classes with the distribution of the relevant rights and duties, as well as in administrative bodies, the formation of a hierarchy of clergy and providing them with incentives in imperial service were part of the Russian state’s nationality-based and religious policy. The definition of “hierarchical gradualism of religious titles” in Islam caused difficulties among officials of the tsarist administration. The lack of a concept of “church,” “clergy” and “monks” made it necessary for the formulators of plans for governing Muslim clerics to compare Islamic realities with the experience of organizing the Russian Orthodox Church. It should be noted that at an early stage the tsarist government held an emphatically protective position toward Islamic religious officials, intending to recruit them to carry out imperial policy.

The main government institution that regulated the activities of Muslim institutions in Russia was the Ministry of Internal Affairs, specifically one of its sections – the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Religions (DSAFR; operated from 1810 to 1917), established under Alexander I. It had jurisdiction over a fairly extensive range of matters, among which were: the organization of the administration of Muslim spiritual affairs; the formation of Muslim parishes; the construction and opening of mosques; the Muslim press; the work of Muslim educational institutions; the property of Muslim clergy; the military obligation of Muslims; and many others. In order to collect the necessary information, the department coordinated with other central and local agencies and institutions in the empire. The “Charter of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Religions,” prepared already under Nicholas I, was adopted in 1857, during the reign of Alexander II, and one of its sections dealt with Muslim affairs.

At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th the War Ministry, which was in charge of Turkestan Krai and, to a large degree, the Northern Caucasus, became, to a certain extent, a rival structure. The attention of officials in the Asian Section of the Main Staff was focused on monitoring the connections and contacts of Russian Muslims with foreign religious centers (the Ottoman Empire, Iran, British India, etc.).

The third government body that was working closely with the Muslim question was the Asian Department (beginning in 1897, the First Department) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Therefore, we can already see in the structure of institutions of imperial policy that dealt with the “Muslim question” in their work a blurring of the boundary between the Russian Empire’s domestic and foreign policies. An analysis of the history of the discussion of the various plans for creating Transcaucasian religious boards shows the substantial role of foreign policy and the comparative views of the Russian Empire’s ideologists and bureaucrats in formulating, promoting and postponing a resolution of this issue. These comparative views were necessarily aimed at the Ottoman Empire and Iran, which were territorially and culturally connected to Russian Transcaucasia.

The class-based stratification of Transcaucasian societies that Russian officials encountered at the beginning of the 20th century was perceived by them as a fairly convoluted hierarchical structure. The local elites were represented by princes (tavadi) and noblemen (aznauri) in Georgia; beys, agalars, sayyids, sultans and meliks in Azerbaidzhan and Armenia; and the Muslim (Shia and Sunni) and Christian (Russian Orthodox and Armenian-Georgian) clergy. The poll-tax-paying classes consisted of the peasantry (state peasants, serfs, church peasants). A separate group comprised merchants and artisans with various degrees of dependency.

The tsarist administration in the Muslim provinces did not legally certify the class-based privileges of the local feudal lords and their land rights, regarding the nobility not as owners but as officials of the former khan-based civilian administration. The so-called “Statute on Agalars” of 1818, prepared by General of the Infantry A. P. Yermolov, the High Commissioner of Georgia, severely limited their privileges, even to the point of stripping them of official positions and introducing corporal punishment.[2] Under the provisions of the 1840 administrative reform, the local nobility was ousted from administration of the lands that had belonged to them, received monetary compensation and was replaced by Russian officials. However, incessant complaints from the Muslim elite about the infringement of their rights made it necessary to draft “Regulations on the Personal Rights of the Upper Class of the Muslim Provinces” and to find funding for them.[3] The specific issue was that class-based statuses were seldom documented, and to a large extent were regulated by common-law norms, which made it difficult to add them to the imperial registry. In order to ascertain the clans and surnames that belonged to the upper classes and compile the relevant lists, a “special Committee of persons well versed and experienced in this work” was established in 1843 in Tiflis. Based on the results of its work, a tsarist edict dated December 6, 1846, restored the land rights of khans, beys, agalars and meliks, but did not certify their personal privileges. At the end of the 1850s and the early 1860s, during the period of Prince A. I. Bariatinsky’s viceroyalty, the issue was raised again of defining the personal and land rights of the upper Muslim class. In 1865 the creation of bey commissions began in Tiflis, Erivan, Shusha (1869) and Baku (1870), and а slew of reports and memorandums were prepared.

By and large, it should be noted that the policy toward elites changed more than once, since it was directly dependent on St. Petersburg officials, Caucasus viceroys and High Commissioners on the one hand, and on Russia’s overall situation and the reforms under way in the empire on the other.

As for the number of adherents of Islam, according to estimated data at the end of the 1820s and the start of the 1830s, more than half a million Muslim males (Sunni and Shia) were residing in Transcaucasian Krai (Document 32). According to data from the first national census in the Russian Empire in 1897, 1,885,722 adherents of Islam were living in Transcaucasian Krai.[4] In percentage terms, they constituted from 11.12% in Kutaisi Gubernia to 81.38% in Baku Gubernia of the total population.[5]

The necessity of incorporated such a large number of Muslim subjects into the Russian social-cultural and political space required that the government formulate principles of governance and take the appropriate administrative measures. As D. Yu. Arapov has noted, the earliest known legislative act that regulated the religious life of Muslims in Transcaucasian Krai was the “The Roster and Rules of the Muhammadan Clergy of Yelisavetpol Okrug.” They were drawn up by Infantry General Tsitsianov, the High Commissioner of Georgia, in May 1805[6] and, on June 30 of the same year, receive imperial approval from Emperor Alexander I. According to these rules, Muslims (without being divided into Shiites and Sunnis) were guaranteed the right to practice their faith under the guidance of mullahs headed by an akhund, who were appointed by the Russian administration. They were added to the roster with a fixed salary, and in the event of “treason” they were subject to harsh punishment.

The next High Commissioner to determine the government’s strategy of action in this area was A. P. Yermolov. In 1824, in an order to the Cuban commandant K. K. von Krabbe, he recommended setting a precise number of religious officials and their range of duties, so as later to limit their number to those who were loyal to the Russian government and to eliminate sayyids, sheikhs and dervishes from the clergy[7] (this referred to followers of the Sufi orders (Arabic ”tariqa”) Naqshbandi Khalidiya and Qadiriya who proliferated in the Northeast Caucasus at the end of the 18th century and the first third of the 19th). All of these directives, however, were quite localized in nature. A serious and systematic formulation of plans for Muslim religious boards in Transcaucasia began with the establishment It prepared four versions of “Statutes” on governance of the Muslim clergy, which for various reasons were not approved (Document 1). In 1839, due to the preparation of an administrative reform, further progress on this matter was suspended, and was resumed only under the Caucasus viceroy, M. S. Vorontsov.

Major support for implementation of the plan for organizing religious boards in Transcaucasia came from the Caucasus viceroy, the grand duke Mikhail Nikolaevich. To review previous proposals and draw up new ones for the organization of the Transcaucasian Muslim clergy, a special Commission was formed in 1864 under the Council of the Viceroy’s Main Administration in Tiflis. Besides officials of the Administrative Department of the MVD [Ministry of Internal Affairs] and the Caucasus viceroy’s administration, it included members of the Muslim religious elite in the person of the Transcaucasian mufti and sheikh ul-Islam.

After lengthy preparatory work, the statutes on governance of the Sunni and Shia Muslim clergy were officially approved on April 5, 1872, and on January 2, 1873, the relevant religious boards were opened in Tiflis. Their jurisdiction covered Muslims in the Baku, Yelisavetpol, Tiflis and Erivan gubernias. The opening of two Transcaucasian Muhammadan boards supplemented the empire’s national system of Muslim institutions: the Orenburg Muhammadan Religious Assembly (OMRA) in Ufa (1788-1917) and the Taurida Muhammadan Religious Board in Simferopol (1794/1831-1917).

The Transcaucasian Muslim boards (Shia and Sunni) were a means of monitoring “unreliable” religious officials, including those who supported ties with religious centers in Iran and the Ottoman Empire.

The authors of the plan had to align the rights of various religious officials, their activities and authority, as determined by Sharia, with the provisions of Russian laws. According to the rosters that were formed, the Muslim clergy in Transcaucasian Krai was divided into two categories: an upper one and a lower one. The first one comprised the heads of the religious boards – the sheikh ul-Islam and the mufti; the qadi; the Sharia judges, akhunds (for the Shiites) and effendi (for the Sunnis); the imams of the Friday mosques, the imam jumma (for the Shiites) and the imam khatib (for the Sunnis), including professional readers of the Friday sermon (khutbah), the vaizi, as well as madrassa teachers, mudarressi. The second group consisted of mullahs. The imperial bureaucratic lexicon included in this concept all leaders of mosques and houses of prayers. Mullahs were: the imams of mosques who called to prayer (muezzins), washers of bodies of the dead (‘amala-yi-mauta), madrassa teachers (muallims) and performers of mourning for Imam al-Hussein (Marsiya-khany).

The organization of religious boards in Transcaucasian Krai had a three-part structure. In the provinces – at the level of settlements, towns and uezds – the religious affairs of Muslim communities were turned over to the elected mosque clergy – mullahs who conducted services at mosques and mosque societies, performed religious ceremonies and rituals, handled parish schools and academies (maktabs and madrassas) and kept civil registers. Supervision of the activities of mosque clergy, adjudication of family and property disputes according to Sharia and the formalization of marriage contracts were under the purview of judge-qadis. At the two top levels the Muslim clergy was structured on a collective basis. Guberniya majlises (assemblies) were established to monitor Muslim “parishes,” and the religious boards in Tiflis were headed by the Sunni mufti and the Shia sheikh ul-Islam, who, based on the Caucasus viceroy’s submission, were approved in their positions by the emperor. Complaints about mullahs’ actions and appeals of the judgments of qadis were sorted out in the majlises, and the findings of the latter, in turn, could be appealed to religious boards. The majlises and boards also were in charge of wakfs [property endowed for religious or charitable purposes] and other community properties, the religious education system and the holding of examinations to occupy religious positions.

After the establishment of the Transcaucasian Muslim religious boards, a mosque and parish registration of the population was introduced. The mosque clergy was required to keep civil registers, in which the numbers of persons who were born, died, were married and were divorced were recorded. Annual reports on the activities of the religious boards were delivered to the Main Administration of the Caucasus viceroy and contained, besides the progress of current affairs, records of the number of parishes, mosques and religious leaders, as well as the total number of adherents of Islam of both genders who were residing in the Transcaucasian gubernias.

At the end of the 1880s and start of the 1890s, it was proposed that the 1872 “Statutes” be revised. A special commission chaired by N. Pribil, a member of the Council of the High Commissioner for the Civilian Population in the Caucasus, considered the possibility of applying the new “Statutes” to administrative units that previously were not under the jurisdiction of the Transcaucasian Muslim religious boards (Documents 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24). They were the Dagestan and Kars oblasts, Zakatala, Batumi ad Artvin okrugs and Stavropol Gubernia. On the whole, the oblast chiefs, except for Prince N. Z. Chavchavadze, the governor of Dagestan Oblast, saw no obstacles for such a decision. The office of the High Commissioner, however, chose to keep the previous forms of administration and control over the religious life of Muslim subjects.

Nevertheless, the discussion of the possibility of creating a separate muftiate for the Muslims of the North Caucasus continued. By 1889, on the initiative of the High Commissioner for the civilian population in the Caucasus and the troop commander of the Caucasus Military District, Prince A. M. Dondukov-Korsakov, a draft was prepared for a “Statute on Governance of the Sunni Muslim Clergy in Kuban and Terek Oblasts.”[8] After lengthy discussion at the DSAFR of the MVD and at the War Ministry, the document was rejected.

The systemic crisis that engulfed the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 1900s exposed the weakest aspects of the state’s domestic policies. The growth of the revolutionary movement and the exacerbation of the religious and nationality questions prodded the government into rethinking the key tenets of its policies on nationalities and religion. The statute approved by the Cabinet of Ministers “On Strengthening the Principles of Religious Tolerance” (17 April 1905) defined a new stage in the regulation of the religious life of Old Believers, the non-Orthodox Christian population and believers of other faiths. The documents, among other things, declared that it was necessary to revise legal provisions that coordinated the religious customs of adherents of Islam and that special religious administrations would be established for Muslim communities in the North Caucasus, Stavropol Gubernia, the territory of the Steppes and Turkestan.[9] The statements formally made it possible for a number of Islamic public organizations and assemblies (Muslim congresses, Muslim factions in the first through fourth State Dumas) to operate.

During this period the form of administrative discussion of the “Muslim question” consisted of Special Conferences, which gathered to examine the aspects of Muslim problems that were most significant to the government. For example, on 18 May 1905 a Special Conference was formed under the chairmanship of Count A. P. Ignatiev, a member of the State Council. He was tasked with aligning the laws in effect with the signed imperial decree of 17 April 1905, which provided for the revision of legal provisions concerning the major aspects of religious customs of the adherents of Islam. The questions that were to be explored by the special conference were listed in clause X of the Statute of the Committee of Ministers: “In respect of other, non-Christian religions:

1) present to the Special Conference on religious tolerance … on grounds explained in the Committee of Ministers’ journal, explore the following questions and submit without delay draft laws that have been drawn up to the State Council for its consideration, without prior contacts with agencies

a) on the erection of houses of prayer of other religions;

b) on the procedure for electing and appointing officials of the Muhammadan clergy, both parish officials and high-ranking officials;

c) on exempting certain members of the Muhammadan clergy from being called up for active military service from the reserves;

d) on the procedure for opening Muhammadan religious schools – mekteb schools and madrassas.

e) on the establishment of special religious administrations for Kirgiz in Akmolinsk, Semipalatinsk, Uralsk and Turgai oblasts, as well as for Muhammadan communities in the North Caucasus, in Stavropol Gubernia, in Turkestan Krai and Transcaspian Oblast – and

f) on the possibility of allowing the upbringing of abandoned children in the religion of families of other faiths that accept them for upbringing.[10]

It turned out in practice, however, that the tsarist government was not ready for a profound reform of the system of religious governance of Muslim subjects. Support was provided to the traditional religious circles that had proved themselves with long and irreproachable service to the regime. The drafts that were being drawn up by members of the progressive Muslim community and the St. Petersburg official elite were of a diametrically opposite nature. Muslim leaders, recognizing the need for cooperating with the monarchy, sought greater religious centralization, an expansion of the functions and jurisdictions of religious boards and lighter oversight by the MVD and the War Ministry of their activities. The bureaucratic circles of St. Petersburg, in turn, were aiming, on the contrary, for as much decentralization of Muslim religious institutions, with a concomitant reduction in the number of clergy and the retention of full government control over them. The third participant in the discussion of the “Muslim question,” which took a middle position, was the Caucasus administration headed by the viceroy, Count I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov. It was on the latter’s initiative in 1905 that a discussion took place regarding pressing questions for Muslims and a commission was formed to draft a new text for the “Statute” on governance of the Transcaucasian Muslim clergy. However, the draft that was prepared with the participation of members of the Muslim religious and secular elite never went beyond the Caucasus viceroy’s office (Document 26).

A few years later the government was again forced to pay close attention to the lives of the numerous adherents of Islam. In addition to the unresolved domestic problems, the geopolitical factor came to the fore. As early as 1900 Finance Minister S. Yu. Witte, in discussing the consequences of the 1898 Andizhan rebellion, pointed out to his colleagues that “our domestic policy on the Muslim question is an important factor in foreign policy.”[11] The way revolutionary events unfolded in Iran in 1907-1911 and Ottoman Turkey in 1908-1909 caused serious alarm in Russian government circles. The ideological ferment in the Muslim community, especially in the Volga region, became a subject of a detailed discussion in the Special Conference held in January 1910 on the initiative of P. A. Stolypin, chairman of the Council of Ministers. In 1913, in a report by Adjutant-General Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, the viceroy of the Caucasus, while assessing the situation in the Muslim provinces favorably on the whole, cautioned that “if we are to fear separatism from specific peoples in the Caucasus in the future… then it is perhaps on the part of that [Muslim] populace, because of its numbers that predominate over all the other peoples and the possibility of outbursts of religious fanaticism, as well as because of the contiguity of the Caucasus with Muslim states.”[12]

In 1913 the Russian Empire celebrated the tricentennial of the House of Romanovs. The American researcher R. Crews, in his monograph “For Prophet and Tsar. Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia,” noted that official ceremonies symbolizing the unity of the tsar and the people and the ceremonial prayers and sermons that were read at mosques became not only an occasion for Muslim subjects to express their loyalty to the monarchy and their patriotism but above all an opportunity to assert their rights as “citizens” of the state.

In any event, the repeated attempts to reorganize the established order of state oversight of the Muslim religious elite’s activities and, through them, of the lives of ordinary Muslims were not successful. The 1872 “Statutes,” which were already outdated and did not conform with the altered domestic- and foreign-policy realities, continued in effect right up to 1917. During 1917-1918 the religious boards moved to Baku.

The subject of religious governance of the Muslim communities in Transcaucasia during the 19th century and early 20th has been left virtually uncovered in the works of Russian historians and scholars of Islam. Certain topics have been touched on in works on the history of Islam and Muslim communities in the Russian Empire and anthologies of relevant documents. The source framework for such research consists of documents from Russian archives, including those in the North Caucasus. Materials from the archival stocks of the Transcaucasian republics are scarce there. As a result, it is even more important to fill in the existing gaps in the historical reconstruction of multidimensional Islamic reality with documentary sources from the Central Historical Archives of Georgia (TsIAG) and the State Historical Archives of the Republic of Azerbaijan (GIAAR). On the basis of these documents one can trace the evolution of the state’s view of the “Muslim question” and the ways it was addressed.

The examination of this aspect of the history of Russia’s colonial penetration and entrenchment in Transcaucasia affords an opportunity to go beyond political history and the study of specifically administrative issues. It also allows for a consideration of the problem of the Russian Empire’s religious policy in the region by dealing with the issues of state governance of the life of Muslim communities; the differences between the legal status of the Muslim religious and civil elite and the position of the clergy of other religions; the special features of court administration; the activities of Muslim educational institutions; and many other topics.

Archeographic work made it possible to uncover an entire block of documents that deal with various aspects of this subject. The vast majority of the documents on the activities of the religious boards in Transcaucasia during the 19th century and early 20th that were in my possession were in Russian. The exception consisted of the texts of the “Statutes” approved in 1872 and portions of the annual reports on the boards’ activities and the precepts of the muftis and sheikh ul-Islams, which were prepared in Russian and Azerbaidzhani Turkic in the Arabic script.

The most representative collections for meeting these tasks proved to be Collection 2, “The Office of the High Commissioner of Transcaucasian Krai”; Collection 7, “The Department of the Main Office of the Viceroy of the Caucasus”; Collection 12, “The Office of the High Commissioner for the Civilian Population in the Caucasus”; Collection 13, “The Office of the Viceroy in the Caucasus”; and Collection 416, “The Caucasus Archeographic Commission (1864-1917)” of TsIAG. The block of documentary sources on the activities of the Transcaucasian Shia Muslim Board, as well as others, were drawn primarily from collections 290, “The Transcaucasian Shia Religious Board” (1872-1898), and 291, “The Transcaucasian Sunni Religious Board” of GIAAR.

The documentary sources reviewed may be classified according to category. The vast majority are statistical, record-related (political and socio-economic records), administrative (registers, books, decrees, business correspondence) and to a lesser degree narrative sources.

In terms of content, the materials from the historical archives in Tbilisi and Baku may, for our purposes, be grouped into the following thematic units:

1. The activities of the Transcaucasian Sunni and Shia religious boards; the procedure for taking positions in the Muslim clergy; the administration and supervision of wakfs; office administration in Muslim institutions (majlises); the activities of Muslim charities;

2. The personal rights and privileges of the upper classes in the Muslim parts of Transcaucasia; statistical information on the Muslim population of the krai;

3. Muslim schools, questions of administration and guardianship;

4. Codes of Muslim laws and customs; Sharia court administration; Muslim holidays;

5. The problem of proselytism.

The chronological framework of the documents covers the period from 1828 to the beginning of the 1900s, when the “Muslim question” preoccupied the minds of tsarist officials in St. Petersburg and the Caucasus, and intensive work was under way to formulate principles and methods for the governance of Muslim subjects living in Transcaucasia.

This block does not include documents regarding the legal status of local upper classes; covering the activities of religious educational and enlightenment-oriented Muslim institutions, describing Sharia court practices; or touching on Muslim currents and religious movements in Transcaucasian Krai. These and other topics are to be presented in future works.