A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

parts of russia even before Christianity did. Russia’s initial relationship with
Islam developed on the battlefield, as the Russian Empire inexorably expanded
south and east in the gradual conquest and absorption of Muslim Turkic states.
One of the more dramatic events was Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan, the
capital of the Tatar Khanate in 1552. (The siege is vividly narrated in a stirring

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aria by the drunken monk Varlaam in Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov.)
It was actually the Orthodox Church militant that first stimulated these
Russian campaigns of conquest to the East, advocating the spread of Christianity
into the well-established Muslim Kazan Khanate. Immediately after the conquest
the church established a strong institutional presence in the Tatar regions and
planned for the forced conversion of its Muslim population to Orthodox
Christianity. Russia’s conquest of Kazan was a momentous “civilizational
event”—marking a first major step in creating a Russian Empire and the
transformation of the Ruler of Moscow into a Tsar (or Caesar) over new regions
and new populations. The Tsar’s legitimacy and power were seen to emanate
from his role as propagator of the Orthodox faith. The metropolitan of the
church, Makarii, led the campaign:
Under Makarii’s influence, the war against the Khanate was fought as
a religious struggle of the Church Militant. Once military maneuvers
began, he exhorted more virtuous behavior from Ivan’s army stationed in
Sviiazhsk, the Muscovite fort near Kazan’. Makarii promised the army
God’s blessing for their holy work, because the Tatars of Kazan’ had
“shamed the word of God” and “desecrated” the faith. For the Muslims’
impiety, Makarii predicted the “furious wrath of God,” which would bring
victory for the army, fulfilling their new role as holy defenders of
Orthodoxy.
Note how the early Russians, just like the Crusaders, did not think of Muslims as
being adherents of another religion but rather as heretics from Christianity.
Despite its establishment of churches, monasteries, and religious institutions
in the newly conquered regions, the church was to be frustrated in its goal of
imposing Christianity on Muslim turf. While the church saw the conquest and
conversion of Muslim Tatars as a holy mission, the Muscovite state did not. The
campaigns were strictly part of the expansion of state power. If these Tatar areas
had not been Muslim, Moscow would just have readily marched against them.
Thus, for Moscow religious conversion was little more than pious pretext for
imperial expansion.
But Moscow’s Tsars soon grasped the complexity of attempting conversion
of such a large and established population, especially given Islam’s ability to
resist conversion. Geopolitical considerations also entered the picture: the
Ottoman sultan expressed his concerns for the welfare of Muslims in the
Khanate, over whom he exercised a religious responsibility. The Tsar assured

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him he would permit their continued practice of Islam. Practical realities took
precedence over Orthodox religious fervor.
Even though the new relationship was between Christian conqueror over
Muslim conquered, a kind of coexistence emerged. By the end of the eighteenth
century, Empress Catherine the Great actually rebuffed the church’s wish to
drive out Islam and convert all Muslims—a goal that would surely have led to
unending hostility and rebellion within the empire. Instead, in a momentous new
experiment in Russian imperial multiculturalism, Muscovy instead chose to
enlist religion into its structure of empire by directly engaging Islam in forging a
pact for national cohesion and social stability. Catherine adopted a broadminded
and tolerant policy that sought to incorporate existing Islamic religious and
secular structures into the broader imperial polity. Religion would be the
foundation of imperial political and social organization based upon a commonly
shared acceptance of One God and Enlightenment concepts of religious
toleration. Moscow sought to “transform religious authority in each community
into an instrument of imperial rule.”
The Russian imperial plan thus promoted the creation of religious
communities, instead of ethnic groups, as the basic sociopolitical unit of the
empire. (The Ottoman state had earlier pioneered this principle in organizing its
own empire along the lines of religious communities.) Social and political order
in the Russian Empire was best preserved through maintaining religious
conformity within each community, overseen by its state-anointed leaders. Any
form of religious or doctrinal dissent in any religion thus became tantamount to
political dissent—a familiar concept from Byzantine history. The cohesion of
each community depended upon preserving a common body of unchallenged
religious beliefs central to the community’s identity. Muslim communal leaders
in turn would call upon the police powers of the Russian state to enforce their
own decisions, maintain religious orthodoxy, and thus social order.
But how legitimate in Islamic terms was it for Moscow to appoint the
leadership of a Muslim community? The ultimate legitimacy of ‘ulama who
work for a Christian state is eroded by their very appointment and support to the
state. They lose their independence and can readily be accused of being
“puppets.” Indeed, one of the political demands of Muslims at the time of the
Russian Revolution was the right to appoint their own grand muftis.
During the three hundred years of the Romanov Dynasty then, the Russian
state persisted in claiming its ruling authority as “grounded in religion.” The
Romanov state project came to be based on a “shared moral universe.” These
policies largely succeeded. Just as secular rulers in Islam must uphold the
principles of Islamic society and law to claim legitimacy, the non-Muslim

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Romanovs could in principle be accepted as rulers over Muslims, as long as they
permitted Muslims to maintain their Islamic way of life and upheld Islamic
principles within Russian Muslim communities. Muslim subjects were even
encouraged to bring their grievances and disputes to the Tsar for adjudication,
thereby both legitimizing the Tsar and preserving the unity, well-being, and
satisfaction of the Muslim population. The expectation was that over time, the
Muslim population would come to view the Russian monarch as “legitimate”
even if not Muslim, and would come to owe him loyalty. The Russian state had
come to play the role of “defender of the faith,” not just of Orthodoxy, but also
of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and later Protestantism and Catholicism.
The Tsars’ decision to acknowledge religious differences and overlook ethnic
differences ended up strengthening religious bonds of solidarity among Russia’s
Muslims over that of ethnic ties. But Muslim loyalty would be tested as
Moscow’s military expansion brought it into direct conflict with external Muslim
states. This amounted to upward of fifty battles fought over three centuries
between Russia and the Ottomans, and four major wars with Muslim Persia (in
which the British and the French periodically supported the Persians as part of
their anti-Moscow policy). Since Russian Muslims were both predominantly
Turkic and heavily Sunni, they had far more sympathy with the Ottoman Turks
than with the Persians. But their loyalty to the Tsar largely held until the turmoil
of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
This coexistence of Islam and Orthodox Christianity within the Russian
Empire is a significant experience in the history of Islamic peoples. The
Muslims of the empire could extend their loyalty to the Russian state precisely
because they were not being forced to assimilate, or to give up their personal and
communal identity for a Russian Christian one. And, of course, the Muslim
communities of the Russian Empire were not in any case homogeneous; each
evolved through its own distinct historical and cultural experience, as did the
significant Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Buddhist communities in
Russia, who similarly were not pushed into assimilation.

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