The Empress and the Printed Qur’an

1787, Saint Petersburg

The previous article ended at a problem that had grown larger. With the annexation of the Crimea in 1783 and the capture of its last khan by Igelström in 1784, Catherine the Great had acquired millions of new Muslim subjects, and in the Crimea the method by which they would be governed had been tested: not to break but to fit in, to leave the mosque standing and to put the imam on a salary. But before Igelström would turn that method into a lasting institution, the empress herself made a gesture that revealed the nature of her tolerance with a clarity no administrative decree could match. She had the Qur’an printed, by imperial command and at the expense of the state, in her own capital.

This is the most essayistic article of this period, and it carries her sharpest thesis. For the printed Qur’an of Saint Petersburg is one of those rare events in which an entire policy contracts into a single image. A Christian empire, ruled by an empress who read the French philosophers and who liked to call herself enlightened, set the sacred text of Islam in lead and rolled off some twelve hundred copies from the press, printed more neatly and more correctly than anywhere else in the world until then, and all of this for subjects whose faith the empire did not share and whose loyalty the empire wished to win. What does such a gesture mean? Is it homage or is it calculation? And can it be both at once? It is the peculiarity of this image that it will not be locked into either one of these categories, and that it is precisely in that refusal that it possesses its revealing power. This article is about that question, for in the answer lies the heart of what this theme calls the false mirror, and here, in Saint Petersburg in 1787, that mirror smiles for the first time.

The Edict of 1773

It did not begin with the printing press but with a decree. In 1773, still before the great expansions in the south, Catherine issued an edict that history knows as the “Toleration of All Faiths.” The decree put an end to the persecution of Islam that the empire had carried on, with interruptions, for two centuries. It permitted the building of mosques. It forbade the Orthodox clergy to interfere in that mosque-building. It compelled, in effect, the Russian Orthodox Church to stop its drive to convert in the Muslim regions, and it thus created, for the first time since the fall of Kazan, a space in which Islam could exist under Russian authority legally and without persecution.

One must not make the significance of this smaller than it was, and this theme is bound by the truth to acknowledge that frankly. For the Muslims of the Volga, whose grandparents had lived through the campaign of Konashevich, whose mosques had been demolished by the hundreds and whose children had been dragged to the baptismal font, the edict of 1773 was a turning point. It meant that one could build a mosque again without fearing that it would be torn down. It meant that the imam could carry out his office without being treated as a criminal. It meant that the tradition of scholarship ﵀, the transmission of knowledge from teacher to pupil that forms the heart of every Muslim community, could breathe in public once more. Mosques were built and lives were spared by this policy, and whoever tells the history honestly must put that first.

And yet honesty must go further than that acknowledgement, for it is not the whole truth. The question this article carries is not whether the edict of 1773 was better than the persecution that preceded it; that it unmistakably was. The question is what it sprang from. Was it born of reverence for the conscience of the Muslim, of the insight that no one may be forced into a faith? Or was it born of the calculation that a persecuted people is a rebellious people and a tolerated religion a governable religion? The answer stands in the deeds that followed the decree, and those deeds point not to reverence but to calculation.

Catherine herself made little mystery of it. She was a pupil of the Enlightenment, but she was above all a ruler, and her tolerance was the tolerance of a stateswoman who had grasped that the old religious coercion was not only cruel but, above all, impractical. Her predecessors had tried to suppress the non-Orthodox faiths, and those attempts had led to violence and had failed time and again; they had made the governing of the empire harder and more costly instead of easier. Catherine drew from this the sober lesson that a good administrator draws: what does not work, one must not repeat. If one cannot exterminate Islam, and one cannot, then one must handle it in another way. One must not combat it but order it, not persecute it but incorporate it into the order of the empire.

Here lies the hinge of this whole period, and it is the hinge on which this theme turns. Tolerance is not one thing. There is a tolerance that springs from reverence, that leaves the other free because it holds his conscience sacred, and that asks nothing in return. And there is a tolerance that springs from calculation, that leaves the other free because the other’s freedom serves the ruler’s government, and that knows very well what it gets in return, namely a quiet, governable, loyal population. From the outside these two tolerances look strikingly alike. Both build mosques instead of demolishing them; both leave the imam in peace. But their hearts are different, and time brings the difference to light. The first tolerance gives the Muslim his freedom and asks nothing back. The second gives the Muslim his mosque and asks his loyalty in return, and reserves the right to close the mosque again if the loyalty fails to appear.

The Sultan as Rival for Souls

To understand why Catherine so urgently desired the loyalty of her Muslims, one must look to the south, beyond the borders of her empire, to Constantinople. There sat the Ottoman sultan, and the sultan was not merely a rival monarch. He was the caliph, the bearer of the highest religious authority in the Sunni world, the protector of Mecca and Medina, the man to whom the Muslims of the whole world, including those within the Russian borders, directed their gaze as to the leader of the community of the believers.

This made the Muslims of Russia a peculiar kind of subject, and a peculiar kind of concern. An Orthodox peasant on the Volga directed his spiritual gaze to the patriarch and, ultimately, to his own empress, for in the Orthodox world throne and altar were intimately bound. But a Muslim Tatar or Bashkir did not direct his spiritual gaze to Saint Petersburg. He directed it, across the borders of the empire, to the caliph in Constantinople, to the holy cities in the Hijaz, to the great community of which he knew himself to be a member. His loyalty had, so to speak, a second address, and that second address lay with the arch-enemy of the empire, the Ottoman sultan with whom Russia waged one war after another.

For a ruler like Catherine this was a problem that cried out for a solution. In times of war with the Ottomans, every Muslim within her borders was a potential sympathizer of the enemy, a man whose faith bound him to the power against which her armies fought. She could tackle this problem in two ways. One way was the old one: to distrust the Muslims, to suppress them, to make Christians of them, to sever their bond with the caliph by force. That way had failed for two centuries. The other way was new and far more refined: not to strip the Muslims of their faith but to draw their faith toward herself, not to sever the bond with the caliph but to replace it with a bond to their own state, to set up the empress as the protector of Islam that the sultan pretended to be.

One sees here how the religious policy of the modern state is born of the logic of rivalry. As long as the Muslim directed his spiritual gaze to a power outside the empire, he was never entirely a subject; there was always a second loyalty, a higher address, that the empress could not reach. The solution that presented itself was not to forbid that second loyalty, for that had been tried and had not worked, but to take it over: to make the empire itself the address of religious loyalty, to set up the empress as the protector of Islam, so that the Muslim would have no more reason to look across the border. If the empire built the mosques and printed the Qur’an and maintained the clergy, why should the Muslim still look to Constantinople? What the sultan offered him from afar, the empress offered him from close by, and with greater means. Thus the religious care of the state became an instrument of statecraft, and thus the modern state began no longer to combat but to absorb the religion of its subjects.

This is the deeper meaning of Catherine’s tolerance, and it explains why that tolerance had to be so generous and so visible. She was running a race for the souls of her Muslim subjects, a race with the Ottoman caliph over the question of who was the true protector of Islam. If she wished to win that race, she could not content herself with leaving the Muslims in peace; she had to win them over actively, to show them that the empire did not merely tolerate their faith but cherished it, that the empress did more for Islam than the sultan had ever done. She had, in other words, to seduce the Muslims. And there is no stronger conceivable gesture of seduction than the printing of their holy book.

A Qur’an from a Petersburg Press

In 1787 there appeared in Saint Petersburg the complete Arabic text of the Qur’an, printed on the press of Johann Karl Schnoor, in an edition of some twelve hundred copies, by imperial command and at the expense of the state. It was the first time in history that the Qur’an was printed by a state, and that state was not Islamic. There had been earlier Arabic printings of the Qur’an, in Italy and in Hamburg, but those were private or scholarly undertakings. This was something else. This was an empire that, with the full weight of its treasury and its authority, had the sacred text of Islam multiplied, and it did so before the Ottoman and Egyptian presses of the Muslim world itself went over to it. It was, in the literal sense, the first Qur’an printed by a state, and the state that printed it was Orthodox Christian.

It is worth pausing for a moment on the meaning of printing itself, for that meaning was long contested in the Muslim world. The transmission of the Qur’an had through the centuries been a matter of the hand and the voice: the text was copied by hand by calligraphers who practiced their art as a form of worship, and it was learned by heart and recited, from teacher to pupil, in a chain of oral transmission that goes back to the Prophet ﷺ himself. Against the mechanical multiplication of the sacred text by a printing press there was in parts of the Muslim world a hesitancy, out of reverence for the text and out of concern that the machine would spread errors that the human hand and the human memory would have noticed. It is one of the curiosities of history that the threshold the Muslim world itself long hesitated to cross was for the first time crossed with state means by a Christian empire, and that the printed Qur’an thus entered the Muslim world, as it were, from outside, out of the printing press of an empress who did not believe the book.

The execution was careful, and that care is telling. The text was not left to some random typesetter but prepared by a Tatar calligrapher and Qur’an expert, Usman Ismail ﵀, a Muslim scholar who knew the sacred text and who watched over its correctness. The result was a printing that was praised for its accuracy by the Muslims who got it into their hands, an edition so good that it saw reprint upon reprint and that paved the way for the later Kazan tradition of mass-printed Qur’ans in the nineteenth century. Today a copy of this edition is preserved in the Russian National Library in Saint Petersburg, the silent testimony of an empress who printed the Qur’an she did not believe. The book lies there like a riddle in printed form, an object in which the homage and the calculation lie so close together that no knife can separate them, and precisely for that reason it is one of the most eloquent witnesses this whole history has left behind.

Let us first do the gesture its full justice, for this theme does not caricature. For the Muslim of the Volga or the steppe, a well-printed, affordable, correct Qur’an was a real blessing. The hand-written copy was costly and rare; the printed edition brought the text within reach of more believers, more schools, more scholars ﵀. That a Muslim scholar such as Usman Ismail ﵀ collaborated on the edition means that the community itself did not experience it as a profanation but as something in which it could take part. The empress had, in the sober sense of the word, done Islam a service, and one would be unjust to deny it.

And yet, and precisely here this article must show its sharpness, the gesture changes in meaning as soon as one asks why it was made. A Muslim ruler who has the Qur’an printed does so because the Qur’an is the word of Allah ﷻ and because to spread it is an act of faith. But Catherine did not believe the Qur’an. For her the sacred text of Islam was no revelation but an instrument, a means to win the loyalty of her Muslim subjects in the race with the sultan. She printed the Qur’an not because she believed what stood in it, but because printing it strengthened her authority over the believers. The holy book became, in her hands, a tool of statecraft, and that is a change that takes nothing away from the text itself but everything from the deed.

Here lies the peculiar, disquieting doubleness of the image. The same printing that was a blessing for the believer was a move on the chessboard of power for the empress. The same pages that the Muslim read reverently as the word of his Lord were, for the empire, the confirmation of its grip on the Muslim. The homage and the instrument coincided in a single object, and one cannot pull them apart, for they sat in the same ink. That is the smiling mirror: not a lie that one can unmask, but a truth and a calculation so intimately entwined that the believer who looks into it does not know whether he is being honored or being played, and the answer is that he is being both at once.

Mosques as Boundary Markers

The printed Qur’an did not stand alone. It was part of a broader policy in which the empire actively promoted Islam in the service of its own interests, and the clearest example of this were the mosques that were built at state expense along the edge of the steppe. In 1785 Catherine approved the subsidizing of new mosques and of new settlements for Muslims, and those mosques arose not at random but with a purpose. They stood at the border between the settled empire and the nomadic steppe, in the region where the Kazakh peoples roamed whom the empire wished to bind to itself.

The thought behind this was as cunning as it was simple. The nomads of the steppe were Muslims, but their Islam was, in the eyes of the empire, loose and unformed, a faith without the fixed institutions of mosque and madrasa and established clergy that the sedentary Muslims of the Volga did possess. The empire reasoned that a nomad bound to a mosque was bound to a place, and that a Muslim with a fixed imam was a Muslim one could reach, could know, could govern. So the empire built mosques for the nomads, not out of piety but as boundary markers, as anchors to which the roaming peoples would fasten themselves, and it sent there, as we shall see in the following articles, licensed Tatar clergy to man those mosques.

There is a deep irony in this politics that one may not let pass. For two centuries the empire had combated Islam as a threat, had demolished mosques and driven Muslims to baptism. Now that same empire built mosques and spread Islam among peoples who still only loosely professed it. What had changed? Not the aim, for the aim was in both cases the same: the control of the Muslim population and its binding to the empire. Only the means had changed. Where the empire had formerly thought to control the Muslim by depriving him of his faith, it now thought to control the Muslim by giving him his faith, provided that faith took the form the empire gave it. The enmity had been replaced by the embrace, but the embrace had the same purpose as the enmity: to incorporate the Muslim into the order of the empire. It is precisely this turn, from hostile to embracing control, that defines the false mirror, and it is most dangerous precisely because it looks most friendly.

Do not convert the nomads to Christianity, so ran the new wisdom, for that would make enemies of them and it had, moreover, never yet succeeded. Convert them rather to an ordered, established, governable Islam, an Islam bound to the empire through the mosque, the imam and the salary. The empire spread Islam in order to control Islam. It made Muslims of the nomads, or rather, it made better, firmer, more institutionalized Muslims of them, so that they would be better, firmer, more governable subjects. It is one of the most revealing facts of this whole history: a Christian empire that promotes Islam, builds mosques and sends out clergy, not despite but precisely because of its wish to control the Muslims.

The Smiling Mirror

Now we can name what we have seen loom up through this article, and it is the core reflection not only of this article but of this whole period. The false mirror has taken other shapes in the earlier periods of this theme. With Snouck it was the mirror of the deceiver, who spied on Islam by passing himself off as one of its believers. With Goldziher it was the mirror of the scholar, who dissected Islam with a love that nevertheless redefined it from the outside. Here, with Catherine and soon with Igelström, it is the mirror of the administrator, and the special thing about this shape is that it smiles. It does not persecute, it does not deceive, it does not dissect. It builds mosques, it prints Qur’ans, it protects the prayer. And precisely in that lies its falseness, for it does all this not because it loves Islam but because it wishes to possess the Muslim.

The deepest question that the image of the printed Qur’an poses touches on the nature of coercion and freedom in faith itself. Islam knows a principle that stands opposed as no other to the calculated tolerance of the empire, and it is good to let that principle speak here in its own words. At the hinge where the homage passes over into the instrument, the Qur’an speaks:

There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the most exalted principles of Islam, and one would think at first sight that Catherine’s policy was in accordance with it, for she forced no one to Christianity and left the Muslim free to believe what he believed. But the verse cuts deeper than the absence of open compulsion. It speaks of the nature of faith itself: that faith is a matter between man and his Lord, that the right way reveals itself to man and that he must walk it of his own free will. Faith is no instrument in the hand of a power; it is a covenant between the servant and Allah ﷻ. And there, precisely there, Catherine’s tolerance fails, however gentle it may be. For it does treat faith as an instrument. It prints the Qur’an not so that man may draw near to his Lord, but so that the subject may draw near to the empire. It turns the covenant between the servant and Allah ﷻ into a covenant between the subject and the crown, and that is a shift that the verse does not forbid in so many words but that stands at odds with its spirit.

This is the difference between the true and the false tolerance, and it is a difference one cannot always see from the outside but that one recognizes by the fruits. True tolerance leaves faith in peace because faith is sacred; it asks the believer nothing in return. False tolerance permits faith because the permitted faith is governable; it asks the believer his loyalty in return, and it reserves the right to withdraw the permission. Under the first tolerance the Muslim is free. Under the second he is cared for, protected, even printed, but not free, for his faith has become an affair of the state, a matter over which not he but the empress has the last word.

And here we must, as this theme requires of us, also face the other side, for the Muslim was not merely the will-less victim of this game. The community that received the printed Qur’an took it and used it for its own purpose, which is the purpose of every believer: to read the word of Allah ﷻ and to pass it on. The calligrapher Usman Ismail ﵀ who worked on the edition did so not to serve the empress but to keep the text correct. The scholars ﵀ who used the printed Qur’ans in their madrasas thereby served not the empire but the transmission of knowledge that had already run for centuries, from breast to breast and from teacher to pupil, long before there was an empress to fund it. The mirror distorted, but the community learned to look into it without losing itself, and it drew from the instrument of the empire the blessing it sought, as if it whispered against the calculation of power that the book remained Allah’s ﷻ after all, whoever printed it.

This doubleness, this capacity of the community to accept the blessing without accepting the grip, is no incidental thing but one of the core truths this theme wishes to preserve. The false mirror is mighty, but it is not almighty. It can print the Qur’an, but it cannot determine what the Qur’an means for the believer. It can build the mosque, but it cannot determine what passes in the heart of the one praying. It can give the scholar ﵀ a salary, but it cannot determine which knowledge he passes on to his pupil, and whether that knowledge serves the empire or the truth. The community that receives its faith from breast to breast, in the chain that goes back to the Prophet ﷺ, possesses something that no imperial printing press and no administrative decree can touch: the inner meaning of the faith, which does not let itself be printed and does not let itself be governed. That is the limit of the mirror’s power, and it is the consolation that must not be lacking at the end of this article.

That is the honest conclusion of this article, and it is double because the reality was double. Catherine’s printed Qur’an was at once a gift and a grip, a homage and an instrument, a blessing for the believer and a move of power. Whoever sees only the gift does not understand the false mirror. Whoever sees only the grip does injustice to the community that knew how to make the gift into something of its own. The truth is that both are true, entwined in the same pages, and that it was the believer’s task, then and later, to accept the blessing without accepting the grip.

It is worth seeing, at the end of this article, the long line that runs out from this one image, for that line is the backbone of the whole theme. The printed Qur’an of 1787 stands at the beginning of a history that has not ceased. The thought that a state best controls Islam by organizing it rather than combating it, that one makes the clergy into civil servants and faith into an affair of the administration, has not disappeared from the world since Catherine. It would, in the following article, take shape in Ufa in a lasting institution; it would, much later, in the hands of the Soviet state become a muftiate that governed Islam from above in the service of a state that called itself atheist; and it would, a century after Ufa and a continent away, resound in the advice that Snouck Hurgronje gave to the colonial administration of Batavia, the advice with which this theme began. Always it is the same thought: protect the private, ritual Islam, and control the rest. Always it wears the face of tolerance, and always it is the tolerance of the power that gives so that it may take.

But the gesture of the printed Qur’an, however revealing, was still only a gesture. It printed a book; it built no institution. The real blueprint of state-directed Islam, the apparatus that would examine and appoint the imams, that would give the prayer a permit and the clergyman a salary, that would replace the isnad of the free chain of scholars with the license of the state, still had to be built. It was built in Ufa, in the year 1788, by the baron who had learned in the Crimea how one fits a people in rather than breaking it. To the Spiritual Assembly of Ufa, the critical peak of this period and the heart of this whole theme, the following article goes.

Sources

• Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Harvard University Press (2006)
• Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II”, Slavic Review 27/4 (1968)
• Adeeb Khalid, “Tolerating Islam”, London Review of Books 29/10 (2007)
• St. Petersburg State University, M. Gorky Scientific Library, onderzoek naar de eerste gedrukte Koran (St.-Petersburg-editie 1787)
• Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an, “Russian Arabic Edition of the Qurʾān, St. Petersburg, 1787”, Brill
• Quran Archive Project, “St. Petersburg 1787” (qrnr.org/1787)