Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia

Front matter

I——— — Becoming. Mus IM in

Imperia USSIA

P» AGNES INILÜFER KEFELI

Contents

Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Note on Transliteration xiii Maps xv Introduction 1 1. Apostasy, Conversion, and Literacy at Work 7 2. Popular Knowledge of Islam on the Volga Frontier 60 3. Tailors, Sufis, and Abistays: Agents of Change 117 4. Christian Martyrdom in Bolghar Land 161 5. Desacralization of Islamic Knowledge and National Martyrdom 213 Conclusion and Epilogue 255 Selected Bibliography 265

Index 277

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Apostasy, Conversion, and Literacy at Work n the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Tatar reformists severely criticized the

faith and morale of superstitious mullahs, itinerant dervishes, and Sufi shaykhs who

taught from antiquated books, did not understand the texts that they purported to teach, and discouraged their flock from learning the Russian language and studying the secular sciences. Because of these ignorant teachers of Islam, children failed to learn how to read, write a simple letter, and perform the basic obligations of their faith. These teachers transmitted a superstitious view of Islam that did not correspond with the teachings of the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The Tatar reformists’ critique echoed that of the Russian missionaries, who also believed that Tatar mullahs and shaykhs, unlettered in Arabic, knew little of the Qur’an. At the same time, Russian missionaries recognized the effectiveness of these same men as pedagogues and propagandists who successfully spread elementary knowledge about Islam in Turkic and Finno-Ugric milieus and encouraged Tatar resistance to Russian assimilation. Such mullahs, shaykhs, and their students were largely responsible for preventing the spread of Christianity into the Tatar countryside.

To better elucidate this paradox, this chapter does not focus on a typical description of the traditional curriculum that has been the subject of Western, Soviet, and more contemporary Tatar or Bashkir studies. Such an approach tends to contrast premodern traditional and European-inspired modern education, minimizing the successes of primary traditional learning and its earthly practicality.” Rather, it looks at i. Fatikh Karimi, Jihangir mákhdümneng awil mäktäbendä uqui (Tornali awilining müktübendá) (1898), and Ber shdkert ilà ber student (parakhodta), 1900, reprinted in Tatar mdghriftitchelek ádübiyati (1860-1905) (Kazan, 1979), 230-235 and 246-263; Yosif Aqchura, Damella Ghalimjan ül-Barudi (Kazan, [1907] 1997), 15, 35-36; Fatikh Amirkhan, Moia avtobiografiia (1911), in Izbrannoe (Rasskazy i povesti), trans. G. Khantemirova (Moscow, 1975), 81-84; Ismail Gasprinskii, Mebadi-yi temeddün-i Islamiyan-i Rus, trans. Edward Lazzerini, in *Gadidism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A View from Within,’ Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 16, no. 2 (April-June 1975): 245-277; Zakir Hadi, “Jihansha khazrat? (1908) in Tatar ádábiyatinnan khrestomatiya (Kazan, 1957), 205-251; Majit Ghafuri, “Tarjemai khalem,” in Ásárlär: 4 tomda (Kazan, 1981), vol. 4, 365; Tarjiimdan, no. 10 (18 March 1890). Muslim reformers in Central Asia made similar criticisms of these traditional textbooks; see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, 1998), 24.

2. Dzhamaliutdin Validov, Ocherk istorii obrazovannosti i literatury Tatar do revoliutsii 1917 (Moscow and Petrograd, 1923), 13-32; Tatary Srednego Povolzh'ia i Priural'ia (Moscow, 1967), 378; Z. A. Ishmukhametov, Sotsial'naia rol' i evoliutsiia Islama v Tatarii (Kazan, 1979), 124-128; Saliam Alishev, “Obuchenie i obrazovanie tatarskikh krest'ian v XVIII v.’ in Razvitie kul'tury Tatarii v dooktiabr'skii period (Kazan, 1988), 42-57; Marsil' Farkhshatov, Narodnoe obrazovanie v Bashkirii v poreformennyi period, 60-90 e gody XIX v. (Moscow, 1994), 54-95; Ahmet Kanlidere, Reform within Islam: The tajvid and jadid movement among the Kazan Tatars (1809-1917): Conciliation or Conflict? (Istanbul, 1997), 77-85; Reforma obrazovaniia: Tatary Nizhegorodchiny i musul'manskii mir (Nizhnii Novgorod, 2008).

8 B CHAPTER 1 how peasants used their knowledge—understood here as both religious and secular— to build a community of faith and resist state encroachment when their identity was questioned. The apostasies of the nineteenth century were more than peasant-led legalistic movements triggered by a change of state policies toward its Muslim subjects. Instead, they constituted movements of conversion and revival, a time when villagers of various ethnic and religious backgrounds made the communal choice of participating fully in the faith of Islam.

The Main Actors

The Kráshens: Their Origins and Religious Hybridity

The main participants of the apostasy movement were the baptized Tatars whom Muslim Tatars called either by their indigenous name kerüshen (pl. kerüshennür) or, to express their disapproval, mákruh—an Arabic word meaning “abominable,” “reprehensible, “disliked,” and “not forbidden by God but looked upon with horror by Muslim teachers? Mákruh especially signified those crypto-Muslims who had succumbed to Russian pressures to nominally embrace Christianity. Muslims also called the Christian Tatars murtadd, another Arabic word meaning apostate, which implies that Kráshens had apostatized from Islam and were legally dead. Another favorite appellation was chuqinghannar, which means “baptized,” but which became a profanity, meaning “killed” or “dead? in a number of colorful and humorous expressions still used today in former apostate villages. Literally, the reflexive verb chuqinirgha derived from the verb chuqirgha, “to pick,’ “to knock; or “to tap; and means “to be picked" or "to be hit? For Tatars, the cross resembled a bird beak or a little hammer, thus being baptized was equated to being bitten by a bird or hit by a hammer. Only after 1905 did some Tatar newspapers, more sympathetic to the baptized cause, opt for the term mükreh ("forced to do something") to designate the Turkic-speaking converts from Eastern Orthodoxy to Islam. Significantly, mákruh and mükreh were spelled the same way in Arabic script except for the long “a” of mákrüh, which was dropped in miikreh. In jadid literature, the ridiculed “abominable” apostates from Islam turned into victims, who had been compelled to accept baptism.’

3. "Otchet bakalavra missionerskogo protivomusulmanskogo otdeleniia Kazanskoi dukhovnoi akademii N. I. Il'minskogo o poezdke po tatarskim seleniiam (1856); in Khristianskoe prosveshchenie i religioznye dvizheniia (reislamizatsiia) kreshchenykh tatar v XIX-nachale XX vv.: Sbornik materialov i dokumentov (Kazan, 2011), 155; Nikolai Ostroumov, "Predvaritel'nye zamechaniia o tatarskom iazyke v sviazi s priniatym v slovare alfavitom, in Pervyi opyt slovaria narodno-tatarskogo iazyka po vygovoru kreshchenykh tatar Kazanskoi gubernii (Kazan, 1876), 5; idem, Tatarsko-russkii slovar' (Kazan, 1892), 229 ("chuki), 230 (“chum”); Shihab ad-Din b. Baha ad-Din Marjani, Mustafad al-akhbàr fi ahwal Qazàn wa Bulghar, vol. 1 (Kazan, 1897), 31; Rizaeddin Fákhreddinev, Bolghar wä Qazan Tórekláre (Kazan, 1993), 56; definitions of makruh and mükreh in Redhouse Türkce/Osmanlica-Inglizce sózlük (1997), 749, 817; 'Ayn ad-Din Ahmárof, "Mükrehlàr bàlendàn;' Qazan Mokhbire (Kazanskii Vestnik), no. 78 (May 1906); Otdel rukopisei Instituta iazyka, literatury i istorii Akademii nauk Tatarstana, f. 56, op. 1, ed. khr. 3, l. 165 ob. (because of the negative connotation of the past-present participle chuqinghan for “baptized,” Russian missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century chose to translate “baptized” as chumilghan [immersed]); Paul Werth, “From ‘Pagan Muslims’ to ‘Baptized’ Communists: Religious Conversion and Ethnic Particularity in Russia's Eastern Provinces,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 3 (July 2000): 501.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Muslims who lived near the Krashen villages often despised their neighbors for being neither Muslim nor Christian; yet at the turn of the twentieth century, Krashens—who thanks to new missionary schools had remained Eastern Orthodox—claimed proud distinctiveness from the Tatars and viewed Christianity as their native religion. Krashens requested not to be referred to as Tatars (tatary) or baptized Tatars (kreshchenye tatary) in the Russian press. Unlike the Tatars who were Muslim or the apostates (former baptized Tatars who had joined Islam), they argued, the Kráshens were Eastern Orthodox Christians. Nonetheless, in this book both “baptized Tatars” and “Krashens” are used to designate a legal category of Turkic-speaking people, baptized in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, whose religious affiliation was in the making or in negotiation until the 1920s. The term Tatar—a word that the Turkic peoples of the Volga and Kama rarely used before the twentieth century—is used as a synonym for local Turkic Muslims living in the Volga-Kama region.*

Soviet and contemporary Tatar historiographies (and also the natives of the former apostate, now Muslim Tatar, villages I visited) portray the Russian conversion campaign of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries among the native peoples of the Middle Volga as state-initiated violence? However, Ivan the Terrible (r. 1547-1584), who benefited from the support of part of the Tatar elite, did not make conversion to Christianity a condition for Tatars to enter Russian service and avoided destroying all mosques in Kazan after its conquest. For this reason, and also because vibrant Christian Orthodox communities continue to exist among the native peoples of the Middle Volga, some Western historians have softened the traditional picture of aggressive Christianization.® The origin of the Krashen community, sitting on the fault line between Christianity and Islam that stretched through Eurasia and Central Asia, is indeed quite complex and defies twenty-first-century nationalist paradigms.

Two waves of conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity took place among the Tatars of the Middle Volga. Archbishops Gurii (r. 1555-1563) and German (r. 1564-1567) of Kazan, assisted by the Tatar-speaking abbot of the Transfiguration monastery Varsonofii (ca. 1495-1576), inaugurated the first wave in the sixteenth century. All three were canonized in 1595 by the Kazan metropolitan Germogen

4. Krashen priest D. Grigor'ev, “Zovite nas kreshchenami;' Izvestiia po Kazanskoi Eparkhii (hereafter IKE), nos. 14-15 (8-15 April 1906): 454; on the term Tatar as an ethnonym, see Allen Frank, Islamic Historiography and "Bulghar" Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia (Boston, 1998), 4-9.

5. A.N. Grigorev, "Khristianizatsiia nerusskikh narodnostei, kak odin iz metodov natsional'nokolonial'noi politiki tsarizma v Tatarii (s poloviny XVI v. do fevralia 1917 g.); in Materialy po istorii Tatarii, vol. 1 (Kazan, 1948), 226-285; Faizulkhak Islaev and Iskhak Lotfullin, Dzhikhad tatarskogo naroda: Geroicheskia bor'ba tatar-musul'man s pravoslavnoi inkvizitsiei na primere istorii novokreshchenskoi kontory (Kazan, 1998).

6. Matthew P. Romaniello, “Mission Delayed: The Russian Orthodox Church after the Conquest of Kazan; Church History 76, no. 3 (September 2007): 511-540; Paul Werth, “Coercion and Conversion: Violence and the Mass Baptism of the Volga Peoples, 1740-55; Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4/3 (2003): 543-570; Janet Martin, “Multiethnicity in Muscovy: A Consideration of Christian and Muslim Tatars in the 1550s-1580s;" Journal of Early Modern History 5, no. 1 (2001): 1-23; Allen Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Boston, 2001), 163-167; G. N. Aidarova, “Mecheti i tserkvi Srednego Povolzh'ia vtoroi poloviny XVI-XVII vekov: Protivoborstvo i vzaimovliianiia,” in Islamo-khristianskoe pogranich'e: Itogi i perspektivy izucheniia (Kazan, 1994), 167.

10 BW CHAPTER 1

TABLE 1.1 Number of Old and New Converts in Kazan Province in 1862

District Old Converts New Converts Cheboksary 250 Chistopol 3,292 918 Kazan 1,601 960 Laishevo 8,150 298 Mamadysh 13,942 871 Spassk 161 Sviiazhsk 4,201 Tetiushi 3,979 Tsivil'sk 916 1,055 Total 27,901 12,693

Source: Evfimii Malov, "Statisticheskie svedeniia o kreshchenykh tatarakh v Kazanskoi i nekotorykh drugikh eparkhii, v Volzhskom basseine? Uchenye zapiski Kazanskogo universiteta, vol. 4 (1866): 339.

(ca. 1530-1612) and continue to be revered as saints by both Russians and Kráshens. The Office for the Affairs of New Converts (Kontora Novokreshchenykh del), which opened in 1740 in the city of Sviiazhsk, was responsible for the second wave of conversions. The earlier converts and their descendants came to be known as "old converts" (starokreshchenye). They were mostly located along major rivers and trade routes east of the Volga in the Kazan, Mamadysh, and Laishevo districts of Kazan province, at the intersection of the Kazan and Viatka provinces, and in the Menzelinsk district in Ufa province. Some of these villages claimed baptized military servicemen of Tatar or Finno-Ugric origin among their ancestors. The converts of the second wave, called “new converts" (novokreshchenye), lived mostly south of the Volga and Kama rivers in the Kazan province and on the right bank of the Volga in Simbirsk and Nizhnii Novgorod provinces. A large portion of the novokreshchenye were of Mishar origin— the Mishars being one of the Muslim Turkic-speaking groups that form the Tatar nationality of contemporary Russia. Their ancestors, without having to convert to Christianity, entered the service of Muscovite princes as early as the fifteenth century after the disintegration of the Golden Horde. The Mishar nobility joined Ivan the Terrible in his conquest of Kazan, and provided troops to protect the Russian state's expanding frontier toward the southeast."

For some villages, the appellation of “old” or “new” converts was not fixed; the date of their baptism could not always be determined. In one document, the Russian missionary and Kazan Theological Academy professor Evfimii Malov (1835-1918) firmly designated Elyshevo (Yilish) in Mamadysh district as an “old-convert” village; in another, he suggested that the village could have been baptized later. Nevertheless, if one accepts the official categorization of old and new converts in 1866, the Kazan province included 444,556 Muslim Tatars and 44,000 Kráshens, among them 27,901

7. Flera Baiazitova, Govory Tatar-Kriashen v sravnitel'nom osveshchenii (Moscow, 1986), 15-18, 21, 34-38; on the Mishars as servicemen, see Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions, 59-61.

were starokreshchenye and 16,099 were novokreshchenye. Thus, 9 percent of the Kazan province Tatar population was officially Orthodox or “baptized.”

Although methods of conversion remain scarce, Tatar historiography, popular lore, textbooks, and children’s publications hold that the starokreshchenye were Christianized by force on the lines of defense in the region north of the Volga and the Kama, on the land that Ivan IV had granted to the first archbishop of Kazan and to the Zilantov and Spaso-Preobrazhenskii monasteries.’ Conversely, some Western and Russian historians have challenged the national Tatar narrative of forced conversion, citing state and church instructions sent to local representatives after the conquest of Kazan that recommended peaceful means of Christianization. The same instructions distinguished between immediately pacifying the region militarily and securing the loyalty of the conquered peoples in the long term. In general, pragmatism prevailed among the Muscovite elite. Because the Volga region was still volatile—the Maris and the Tatars repeatedly joined forces to oust their conquerors—the Muscovites refrained from a policy of aggressive conversion and awarded natives who converted to Christianity with gifts of money, clothing, food, and temporary exemption from taxes and military service. Legally, new converts to Christianity enjoyed the same rights as Russians; they could receive land in exchange for service along the major fortress lines and occupy important local administrative positions. However, until Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725) ordered Muslim servicemen to convert to Christianity or forfeit their land and princely rank, service to the czar was not tied to conversion to Christianity. In addition, these harsh measures—often used as an argument by Tatar historians to support the thesis of forced large-scale Christianization—concerned only the landholding Tatar princes, and not the peasant commoners.'?

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many of the starokreshchenye were of animist origin. Many of those who were of Muslim origin had returned to Islam

8. Narodnyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan (hereafter NART), f. 1, op. 3, d. 231, ll. 226-226 ob. In 1836, according to Il'dus Zagidullin's calculations, 11.8 percent Kazan Tatars were baptized in the Kazan province. Il'dus Zagidullin, “K voprosu otpadeniia kreshchenykh tatar Kazanskoi gubernii v musul'manstvo 1866 goda, in Natsional'nyi vopros v Tatarii dooktiabr'skogo perioda (Kazan, 1990), 66.

9. Iskandar Giljazov, “Le róle de l'Islam dans lévolution de la société tatare, de la conquéte de Qazan aux réformes de Catherine II (1552-1788); in L'Islam de Russie: Conscience communautaire et autonomie politique chez les Tatars de la Volga et de l'Oural, depuis le XVIIIe siécle, ed. Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Dàmir Ishaqov et Ráfyq Móhámmátshin (Paris, 1997), 15-25; Ildus Zahidullin, “La conversion à l'Orthodoxie des Tatars de la région Volga-Oural, aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles, et ses causes économiques et sociales,” in ibid, 27-64; Engel’ Tagirov, Na perekrestke tsivilizatsii: Istoriia Tatar v kontekste kul'tury mira (Kazan, 2007), 259; Nurulla Garif, Osvoboditel'naia voina tatarskogo naroda (Kazan, 2007), 35; Mákhmüt Akhmitjanov, "Keráshennár tarikhina ber qarash” (April 2001) in Yamanni yuldash itmá (Mäqalälär, ocherklar, esselar) (Kazan, 2007), 73; Rqail Zaydulla, Tatar Tadzhi (Kazan, 2004); G. M. Dáwlátshin, E Sh. Khujin, and I. L. Izmailov, Tatarstan tarikhinnan khiküyálür 5-6 (Kazan, 1993), 129-130; Akhmad (Dmitrii) Davletshin, “Bor'ba musul'man za svoi prava v tsarskoi Rossii v XVI-XVII vw / Vera, Sovershenstvo, Islam (dukhovnoprosvetitel'skii zhurnal) 15, no. 1 (2007): 19-20.

10. Boris Nolde, La formation de l'Empire russe: Études, notes et documents, t. 1 (Paris, 1952), 63, 115- 120; Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History, trans. Alfred Clayton (Harlow, England, 2001), 24-31; Werth, “Coercion and Conversion,’ 543-70; Dmitrii Liseitsev, “Sluzhilye tatary i novokreshcheny Posol'skogo prikaza v nachale XVII v." Ghasirlar awazi (Ekho vekov), nos. 1-2 (2003), http://www. archive.gov.tatarstan.ru/magazine/go/anonymous/main/?*path'mg:/numbers/2003 1 2/01/01. 4/ (accessed 17 January 2009); A. F. Mozharovskii, “Izlozhenie khoda missionerskogo dela po prosveshcheniiu Kazanskikh inorodtsev s 1552 po 1867;' in Chteniia v imperatorskom obshchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh (March- April 1880), bk. 1, 10-35.

12 @ CHAPTER 1 during the 1570s and 1580s when the Tatars had attempted to retake power in the territory of their former khanate, and then again during the Stenka Razin rebellion (1670-1671)." There is no indication that Russians compelled them to reenter the Orthodox Church during these uprisings. In general, the starokreshchenye were located in areas separate from both the Russians and the Muslim Tatars. The sixteenth-century founders of the village of Apazovo in Kazan district were originally Muslims from neighboring villages and converted to Christianity to escape either justice or military service. Under the pressure of either their former coreligionists or the church, or simply on their own, they left their native villages to create a new community.” Russian religious authorities in general encouraged this type of separation, but scholars have also argued that, for some villages, such isolation could have occurred at the very time of the Russian conquest or even preceded it. Boris Nolde hypothesized that entire villages had accepted baptism collectively to avoid the consequences of war. Baptism in such a context could have been understood by the conquered as a ritual declaration of loyalty. The Tatar linguist Flera Baiazitova went further back in time and suggested that many of the starokreshchenye could have descended from the Turkic Sobekullian, Chelmat, and Temtiuzi peoples cited in twelfth-century Russian chronicles as having led a separate existence well before the Mongol invasion. But neither author adduced much evidence to back up these arguments.”

The establishment of monasteries in Kazan and Sviiazhsk as spiritual, economic, and colonizing centers in the sixteenth century probably encouraged trade and religious interaction between Russians and the non-Russian residents of the Volga Region. The region's monks and nuns had to be accommodating and needed the logistical support of the local population to survive economically. Urban and rural monasteries expanded agriculture to forested lands, which fostered new economic opportunities along major road and river routes. In the seventeenth century, native peoples in state service also participated in the construction of fortresses south of the Kama River, designed to protect cultivated lands from nomadic Kalmyk and Bashkir incursions. Agriculture could have generated new forms of communal solidarities. Baptism in this context would not have been understood as a militaristic ritual of loyalty, but rather as a new form of ecological solidarity."

Although it is impossible to determine with certitude the methods of conversion and the reasons why starokreshchenye adopted Christianity, it is certain that

11. A. N. Grigor'ev, “Khristianizatsiia, 230; D. M. Makarov, "Khristianizatsiia narodov Povolzh'ia vo vtoroi polovine XVI veka,’ in Istoriia khristianizatsii narodov Srednego Povolzh'ia: Kriticheskie suzhdeniia i otsenka (Cheboksary, 1988), 16-18, 20-21.

12. “Materialy dlia statistiki i istorii Kazanskoi eparkhii. I. Istoricheskoe opisanie tserkvei. O sel'skikh tserkvakh i prikhodakh Kazanskoi eparkhii. I. Kazanskii uezd. 2. O sele Apazove i tserkvi vo imia Rozhdestva Bogoroditsy,’ IKE no. 2 (15 January 1880): 56.

13. Nolde, La formation, 1: 118; Baiazitova, Govory Tatar-Kriashen, 16.

14. G. Peretiatkovich, Povolzh'e v XVII i nachale XVIII veka: Ocherki iz istorii kolonizatsii kraia (Odessa, 1882), 95, 100-101, 103-106, 116-117, 129-130, 141, 144, 158; Matthew P. Romaniello, “Controlling the Frontier: Monasteries and Infrastructure in the Volga region, 1552-1682; Central Asian Survey 19, nos. 3-4 (2000): 429-443; Michael Khodarkovsky, Russias Steppe Frontier: The Making of A Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, 2012), 1-6. In their need for local indigenous support, Russian monks on the Middle Volga found themselves in a position similar to that of Catholic missionaries to the Iroquois. Allan Greer, “Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France,’ in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (New York, 2003), 175-198.

1.1: Picture of Nikolai Il'minskii in Tikhvin church on a prayer book stand, Kazan. Photograph by the author.

the external differences between the earliest group of converts to Christianity and Muslim Kazan Tatars puzzled Russian and Tatar scholars of the nineteenth century. The Russian archeologist Mikhail Iuzefovich (1802-1889) likened the Kráshens with Finns, and the Tatar historian and theologian Shihab ad-Din al-Márjani (1818-1889) underlined the differences between Kráshen and Kazan Tatar women's clothing. Kazan Tatar women did not wear the süráká, a hard headdress with four angles that married Kráshen wore, nor the tüshlek, a decorative cloth with rows of coins attached covering their chest, whose value could reach up to seventy rubles (roughly fifty-three U.S. dollars in 1890), a substantial sum for a peasant household. Márjani advanced the conjecture that either Kazan Tatars wore such clothes before their Islamization or that Kráshens could be Tatarified Maris superficially Islamized before the Russian conquest. The orientalist and missionary Nikolai Il'minskii (1822-1891) hypothesized that Kazan Tatars were not fully Islamized in the sixteenth century

15. Marjani, Mustafad, 1: 31; N. Odigitrievskii, Kreshchenye tatary Kazanskoi gubernii: Etnograficheskii ocherk (Moscow, 1895), 7, footnote 2. For discussions of the value of the ruble over time, see Jacob R. Eckfeldt and William E. Dubois, A Manual of Gold and Silver Coins of All Nations Struck within the Past Century (Philadelphia, PA, 1842), 109-12; Thomas C. Owen, “A Standard Ruble of Account for Russian Business History, 1769-1914: A Note,” Journal of Economic History 49, no. 3 (September 1989): 699-706; Boris Nikolaevich Mironov, Blagosostoianie naseleniia i revoliutsii v imperskoi Rossii (Moscow, 2010); idem, The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700-1917 (New York, 2012); Tracy Dennison and Steven Nafziger, “Living Standards in Nineteenth-Century Russia,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 397-441.

(which might explain why this Turkic group joined Christianity, the religion of the conqueror); in addition, Islam took firmer root in the countryside after the Russian conquest and grew stronger during the second half of the eighteenth century.'^

Based on the Kráshens' language, clothing, history, and genealogies, Soviet and post-Soviet scholars reaffirmed Márjani's hypothesis that some starokreshchenye could have Finnic roots and descended from linguistically Tatarified baptized Finno-Ugric or Turkic Chuvash peoples. Kráshen prerevolutionary women’s dress exhibited Mari, Udmurt, Mordvin, Bashkir, or Chuvash characteristics depending on their location. The Kráshens of Urias bash in the Kukmor region, although inclined toward Islam, dressed and lived like their Udmurt neighbors and their language was very much influenced by the Udmurt language." In Elabuga district, Kráshen music also showed great affinities with the music of Udmurts. In other regions, Chuvash influence was more prominent. Although Krashens’ embroidery in the village of Tashkirmen, a village famous for its pre-Islamic sacred site in Laishevo district, did not differ from that of the Mordvins, their language contained many calques from the Chuvash language and some of their fertility rituals were very similar to those of their Chuvash neighbors. Oral traditions in Tashkirmen' confirmed that Chuvash people moved into the area in the eighteenth century, which explained why their dialect differed substantially from other Kráshen dialects and contained Chuvash verbal endings. Another baptized Tatar-speaking village, Dragun Bekhmetevo, was also originally founded by Chuvash people of Cheboksary district who came to work as laborers among rich Muslim Bashkirs.'?

Finally the Nagaibak Kráshens of Orenburg province, in the western part of present-day Republic of Bashkortostan, were a conglomerate of different cultures and peoples of animist and Muslim origin: baptized Nogays, Bashkirs, Kazan Tatars, Udmurts, Ural Cossacks, and even Central Asians. After they remained faithful to the crown during the Bashkir rebellion of 1735, Empress Anna Ivanovna (r. 1730- 1740) appointed them Cossacks on the Bashkir frontier in 1736 to guard the new burgeoning towns near Menzelinsk. Some of them descended from baptized Kazan Tatar nobles, former landholding military servicemen of the czar at the Arsk fortress, but unlike members of the Chingisid dynasty who married into prominent Russian boyar families, they did not merge culturally and linguistically with other Russian landholding servicemen. They kept their language and developed a unique sense of communal identity based on Eastern Orthodoxy separate from their neighbors, both Muslim Bashkir and Russian.”

16. N. Runovskii, "Ocherk istorii khristianskogo prosveshcheniia inorodtsev Volzhsko-Kamskogo kraia v sviazi s istoriei perevodov na ikh iazyki do poloviny XIX st." Simbirskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti, no. 2 (15 January 1901): 56.

17. Nikolai Il'minskii, ed., Kazanskaia tsentral'naia kreshcheno-tatarskaia shkola. Materialy dlia istorii prosveshcheniia kreshchenykh tatar (Kazan, 1887), 162.

18. Tatary Srednego Povolzh'ia i Priural'ia, 51-53; Damir Iskhakov, “Kriasheny (istoriko-etnograficheskii ocherk); in Tatarskaia natsiia: Istoriia i sovremennost' (Kazan, 2002), 108-125; idem, Etnograficheskie gruppy tatar Volgo-Ural'skogo regiona: Printsipy vydeleniia, formirovanie, rasselenie i demografiia (Kazan, 1993), 117-144; Baiazitova, Govory Tatar-Kriashen, 15-48; on Dragun-Bekhmetevo, still Kráshen today, see NART, f. 93, op. 1, d. 128 b, ll. 13-18.

19. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Nagaibaks faithfully kept icons in their houses. Petr Rychkov, Topografiia Orenburgskoi gubernii (Ufa, [1762] 1999), 269-270; Damir Iskhakov, "Etnodemograficheskoe razvitie Nagaibakov do pervoi chetverti XX v. in Nagaibaki: Kompleksnoe issledovanie gruppy kreshchenykh tatar-kazakov, ed. Damir Iskhakov (Kazan, 1995), 4-18.

The population makeup of apostate settlements in the nineteenth century did not differ much from the villages that have remained Christian. Apostate villages were conglomerates of different ethnic groups, whose members voluntarily joined to form new village units in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Apazovo was made up of baptized Muslims and animist Udmurts who shared ancestry with the Nagaibak Kráshens of Menzelinsk. Elyshevo on the Mesha River, listed as an old-convert village in missionary statistics but whose Christianization could have occurred as late as the 1740s, was composed of Tatars and Udmurts who moved to the area in the first half of the eighteenth century. Verkhniaia Nikitkina (Yughari Tubilghitaw) in Chistopol' district included Tatars, Chuvash, and even Russians; two Russian sisters in 1849 asked to return to “the religion of their ancestors,” Islam. Finally, Ianyli in the Kukmor region, founded in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, was originally established by a Russian family and Udmurts from the Mamadysh and Arsk regions, and joined later by baptized Tatars.”°

Baptism came to form a common bond between various ethnic communities partially dislocated by the Russian conquest but still attached to their indigenous beliefs. Even if pressure and material motives could have played a role in the initial process of Christianization of the starokreshchenye, forced conversion alone cannot explain the survival of a vital Christian community to the present day. Dogmatic assertions that sixteenth-century Tatars were so firmly Muslim that they could not have sincerely converted to Christianity fail to consider the very rich animistic religious tradition of the old converts that can be only tentatively reconstructed through Russian and Kráshen missionary prisms. Moreover, in both Christian and Islamic history, conversion through conquest, acculturation, and gradual transformation of sacred space led to the constitution of vibrant communities of faith in Europe and Northern Africa, as well as in Ottoman lands.” The theory of forced conversion in national Tatar histories also gives precedence to the conquering representatives, relegates non-Christians to passive roles, overlooks the way communities develop and interact with one another on a practical daily basis, and denies that communities of the past could be made of mobile and ethnically diverse individuals. More specifically, it does not explain why a community like Apazovo village in Kazan district, made up of baptized Muslims and animist Udmurts, petitioned to keep its church in 1827 but after the 1917 February Revolution asked to construct a two-story mosque in its central market place.? Nor

20. Interviews of elderly people by author, May 2008, Ianyli, Tatarstan; on the complex ethnic origin of Apazovo, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii archiv (hereafter RGIA), f. 821, op. 133, d. 454,1. 6 and Iskhakov, “Etnodemograficheskoe razvitie; 8; on Verkhniaia Nikitkina, "Izvlecheniia iz otcheta bakalavra Kazanskoi dukhovnoi akademii N. I. Il'minskogo o poezdke po tatarskim seleniiam (August-September 1849); in Khristiankoe prosveshchenie, 108.

21. Marc Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (New York, 2008), 17-18; James Muldoon, ed. “Introduction: The Conversion of Europe,’ in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages (Gainesville, 1997), 1-10; John Howe, “Conversion of the Physical World: The Creation of a Christian Landscape,’ in ibid., 63-78; Nehemia Levtzion, “Toward a Comparative Study of Islamization;' in Levtzion, ed., Conversion to Islam (New York-London, 1979), 1-23. Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie tserkvei i prikhodov Kazanskogo uezda. Vypusk III-i (Alaty-Ivanovskoe) (Kazan, 1916), 67-69 (the wooden church suspiciously burned in 1907); Archa tóbüge tarikhi. Istoriia Arskogo kraia (Kazan, 1996), 72; NART, f. 2, op. 7, d. 2393, ll. 2-3.

does it explain why in 1766, the Udmurts and Tatars of Elyshevo petitioned for a chapel in the middle of their village, and a century later asked to be officially Muslim. Nor does it shed light on why the starokreshchenye villages of Apazovo and Elyshevo opted for Islam, while other villages—like Nikiforova (Shiyá-Bash), Mamadysh district, and the village of Iantsovary, Laishevo district—surrounded by Muslims and prestigious mosques, chose Christianity as their communal faith in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It dismisses individual agency and communal volition, and does not recognize the power of Eastern Orthodox proselytism or the resourcefulness and flexibility of traditional Quranic learning that proved extremely effective in shaping the religious and, consequently, the ethnic and political identities of these newly formed baptized communities.

Without minimizing the sufferings apostate baptized Tatars endured in the nineteenth century for the legal recognition of their Muslim identity, the clan history of Taveli village helps unlock this persistent image of fixed communities and compulsory conversion as well as elucidate the role of pre-Christian indigenous beliefs in the forging of these communities. Indeed, most people in Taveli, a Kráshen village in Chistopol' district exposed to animistic, Christian, and Islamic influences, were not indigenous to the area but came initially as migrants and married outside their ethnicity or their original religion. The village's ancestors—Apakov, Utagan, Andrei, Bikman, Dimitri, and Bikbaw—were outsiders. Villagers could not say why their first ancestor Apakov, a landowner, accepted baptism, but at least there was no allusion to his being forcibly baptized. The elders had more knowledge of Ütägän and Bikman’s Christianization. Utagan and his son Yuldiy, originally Muslims, came from Orenburg province and Bikman, also Muslim, originated from Menzelinsk district. They first worked as laborers among the Kráshens of Taveli, liked the place, and accepted baptism in order to marry local Kráshen women. Andrei, another ancestor, was already baptized when he came to the village. His adopted son left to work in the village of Iamashi, married a baptized Mordvin, and their descendants became Russians.” By contrast, the descendants of a Christian ancestor, Dimitri, leaned toward Islam. After one of them worked for a rich Muslim Tatar in the village of Kamenkina, they adopted Turkic names—Bikay, Biktimer, Ishay, Bikkená—in addition to their Russian Orthodox names.” Although these ancient Turkic names were not of Arabic origin, Taveli villagers considered these appellations to be signs of religious otherness. In contrast, the Muslim Bikbaw (also named Kukara), originally from the district of Kazan and an itinerant carpenter, used to build houses and even churches before his conversion to Christianity. After working near Taveli, Bikbaw decided to be baptized. Later he married a Russian while he was working in the