CENTRAL ASIA: For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia

CENTRAL ASIA For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, by Robert D. Crews. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. viii + 370 pages. $29.95. Reviewed by Edward Schatz In the current global climate, one might be forgiven for missing the rapprochement, reconciliation, toleration, and institutional syncretism that has characterized relations between Muslim and non-Muslim populations through much of a complex history. Russia and most of ex-Soviet space defy simplistic notions of civilizational clashes. Though often associated in the popular imagination with Orthodox Christianity and brutality against Muslim Chechens, today's Russia is home to about 25 million autochthonous Muslims, most of whom coexist reasonably well with, and participate in, the Russian state. Robert Crews's For Prophet and Tsar is a work of historical scholarship, but it speaks directly and effectively to today's burning debates. Drawing attention to the ways in which the Tsars simultaneously used and promoted Islam as a tool for coopting and controlling its far-flung Muslim populations, Crews implicitly addresses three crucial issues. First, he provides an example of a state apparatus that deliberately structured relations with religious groups as a way to administer territory. Similar crafting efforts are underway today in Ottawa, Washington, Paris, London, and elsewhere. Second, he demonstrates that Muslims were rarely the passive recipients or victims of state policies; they were active participants in crafting their own fates, often by becoming a part of the state apparatus itself. Third, he shows that, whatever the Russian state attempted, local populations always managed to take advantage of new opportunities provided by changing state policies and evolving local conditions. After an effective introduction, in chapter one Crews details the creation of a state-sanctioned Muslim religious apparatus, modeled after the Ottoman version, in Ufa (today's Bashkortostan). This apparatus served as a further model for relations with other Muslims elsewhere in the expanding empire, such as the rest of the Volga and Ural region (chapter two), and the steppes of today's central and northern Kazakhstan (chapter four). Chapter three addresses the crucial matter of how the Russian empire structured relations within the Muslim family, always through partial accommodation as a way to render Muslims visible to the empire. Chapter five details how earlier forms of accommodation and control were adapted in the rush to conquer the oasis regions of Central Asia. …

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