The Spiritual Assembly

In the previous article we saw how an empress who did not believe in Islam brought into being the first Qur’an ever printed by a state, how Catherine II had the revelation of Muhammad ﷺ roll off the Petersburg presses at imperial expense in twelve hundred copies, and how that act was at once a tribute and an instrument: the mirror that smiles. A printed Qur’an, however, is still only a book, and a book governs no one. Whoever truly wishes to hold a faith in his hand must not master the text but the men who expound it, must not forbid the prayer but license the mouth that calls to it. That is precisely the step Russia took in the year 1788, and the man who took it was Baron Iosif Andreyevich Igelström, since 1784 governor-general of Simbirsk and Ufa. What he founded there was neither a mosque nor a school, but something Islamic history had not known until then: an official body that examined imams, appointed them and tested them for loyalty, headed by a mufti appointed by the empress. It was called the Spiritual Assembly of the Muhammadan Law, it had its seat in Ufa, and it is the heart of this entire theme. For here, on the edge of the steppe, a Christian empire built the first apparatus of state Islam, a century before a Leiden scholar in Batavia would pour the same insight into other words.

The Governor-General in Ufa

Igelström did not come to the Muslim question as a stranger. He had served in the Russo-Turkish War, he had annexed the Crimea and taken its last khan prisoner, and there he had learned the craft that turns a general into an administrator: not to destroy but to incorporate, not to demolish the mosque but to put the imam on the payroll. When Grigory Potemkin had recommended him to Catherine and she made him governor-general of Simbirsk and Ufa in 1784, he was given a territory where the problem posed itself in its sharpest form. The Volga-Ural region was not a distant conquered province like the Crimea, but a patchwork of Tatars, Bashkirs and neighbouring Kazakh steppe peoples, Muslims who had survived two centuries of tsarist rule, the forced baptisms, the mosque demolitions, the campaigns of conversion that still lay fresh in memory. They had not been exterminated and they had not been converted; they had remained, and their presence was a permanent question put to the state that governed them. A question that force had proven unable to answer, for two centuries of force had not taken them away.

The governor-general understood, as his empress understood it, that the solution lay not in persecution but in ordering. A Muslim population that you cannot exterminate and will not convert must be rendered harmless to the peace of the realm in another way, and the most durable way is not to obstruct it but to organise it, not to persecute its clergy but to appoint them, not to forbid its law but to recognise it on condition that the state determines who speaks it. What a persecutor never achieves, a patron achieves with ease: the persecuted imam becomes a hero, but the appointed imam becomes an official, and an official owes his bread to whoever appoints him. Igelström saw in the Muslim clergy no enemy to be exterminated, but a stratum of administration that could be incorporated, and that incorporation was so much cheaper, so much more elegant and so much more effective than all the howitzers of the empire put together. In that insight lies the whole civilisation of the false mirror, for it is an insight that at first sight resembles mildness and on closer inspection rests upon control.

There is a sincere side to this story that we must not gloss over, for without it we do not understand the temptation. The Tatars who lived under Russian authority in the eighteenth century had, under Igelström’s policy, more mosques, more schools and more legal security than under the generations before him, and many a Tatar scholar saw in the new ordering not a trap but an opportunity, an end to arbitrary rule, a recognition where for centuries there had been only oppression. Whoever describes the policy merely as a cynical grab does an injustice to the people who entered into it in good faith and sometimes truly benefited from it. And that is precisely the point on which this theme turns, for the false mirror is not false because it does only harm, but because it mingles good and control so intimately that one can no longer separate the one from the other. The governor-general in Ufa truly did things that improved lives, and he did them because a contented, licensed, governable Islam served the empire better than an embittered, free, unpredictable Islam. Both truths are true at once, and whoever sees only one of them has not yet understood the mirror.

The Decree of 1788

On 22 September 1788 Catherine II signed the decree that brought into being the Spiritual Assembly of the Muhammadan Law, established at Ufa and placed under the watchful eye of the governor-general of Orenburg, after whom the body also took its name. Igelström was the architect of this creation; he sponsored the legislation, he designed the structure, he brought together into an institution what until then had been a collection of loose measures. What on paper seemed an administrative formality, the founding of a council with an unwieldy title, was in reality a rupture in the relationship between a modern state and Islam, for the first time a European power took the appointment of the Muslim clergy out of the hands of the community and placed it in the hands of an official college.

The Assembly’s charge was clear and it scarcely concealed its intent. It was to examine and license the mullahs of the realm, and the measure of that examination was twofold. A cleric had to be of good conduct, which in the language of the decree meant: of good conduct towards the state, and he had to be reliable in his loyalty. Let one read those criteria slowly, for they say everything. It does not say that the imam must be pious, learned in fiqh, steadfast in prayer or beloved by his congregation. It says that he must conduct himself well towards the authorities and that one must be able to rely on his fidelity. The religious fitness of the cleric is not the subject of the examination; his political reliability is. The Assembly asked not in the first place whether a man knew the revelation, but whether he was to be trusted, and that shift in the question is the silent revolution that took place in Ufa.

More revealing still is the provision concerning language. The Assembly was obliged to conduct its affairs both in Russian and in the local Tatar, and the reason for it was set down with an almost disarming frankness: so that the governor-general of Orenburg would know precisely what his reliably loyal Muhammadan clergy were up to. The institution was, in other words, at once an appointment bureau and a listening post. Every fatwa, every appointment, every decision of the Muslim clergy henceforth passed through an office that reported in the language of the authorities, so that the state not only determined who was permitted to speak, but also read along with what was spoken. Transparency ran in one direction: the community became transparent to the state, and the state remained opaque to the community. That is the essence of administrative control, and it is seductive because it presents itself as order, as enlightenment against chaos, as the lucid administration of an enlightened age against the dark arbitrariness of former times.

Whoever takes the trouble to consider against what background this happened sees how ingenious the move was. Not half a century earlier the tsarist state had demolished mosques by the hundreds in the Volga region; now that same state offered the Muslim clergy protection, salary and recognition. The reversal seemed a gift, and it was also a gift, but it was a gift with a price tag that became visible only once one accepted it. The price was that the community henceforth received its clergy from the hands of another, that the question of who was a valid scholar was no longer answered within the tradition but at an imperial bureau, and that the imam owed his authority no longer to the chain of knowledge in which he stood but to the paper the state issued him. And precisely because the substitution presented itself as protection, it was so difficult to refuse.

The Licence and the Isnad

To understand what was really displaced in Ufa, we must step away for a moment from the chancellery and towards the heart of the Islamic tradition of knowledge, for there, and not in the text of the decree, lies the true stake. In Islam, authority over religion has never been a matter of appointment but of transmission. A scholar is not an official occupying a post, but a link in a chain, the isnad, the sequence of transmitters that traces a word of the Prophet ﷺ back to his mouth, and the ijaza, the authorisation a teacher gives his pupil when the latter has truly absorbed the knowledge. That authority flows not from above to below, from the ruler to the subject, but from breast to breast, from one generation of scholars to the next, outside of any throne. A caliph could not make a scholar into a scholar and could not, however powerful he was, take his knowledge from him. The great imams of the classical centuries, men such as Abu Hanifa ﵀ and Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀, drew their authority not from an appointment but from their place in the chain, and when a ruler put them under pressure, it was often the scholar who stood firm and the ruler who had to answer for himself. This structure, decentralised, plural, disobedient to any single hand, is no accidental peculiarity of Islamic history; it is the form in which the community preserved its religion without a church, without a clergy, without a pope.

What the Spiritual Assembly did, in the sharpest formulation this theme allows, was to replace the isnad with the licence. The imam’s authority came no longer from the chain but from the examination, no longer from his place in a living tradition but from an imperial certificate. The question shifted from “from whom did you learn” to “who appointed you”, and that shift seems small at the level of the individual cleric, who after all may equally have learned and may be pious, but it is seismic at the level of the structure. For an authority that the state grants, the state can also withdraw. An imam who owes his right to speak to a licence speaks as long as the licence is valid, and it remains valid as long as he is reliably loyal. The chain knew no such mechanism; one could not strike a man from the isnad because he displeased the ruler, for the isnad was no register that the ruler kept. The licence did know it, and therein lies its whole function. The licensed scholar does not lose his learning, but he loses the independence of his authority, and with that independence the community loses its oldest protection against power.

The classical tradition had for precisely this temptation a name and a warning. The scholars who placed their knowledge in the service of the ruler and bent their judgement to what power desired were called the “scholars of authority”, and set against them stood the scholars who preserved their independence even at the cost of their freedom and sometimes of their lives. The Qur’an itself speaks in unambiguous language about what is at stake when one exchanges religion for worldly gain, and it directs those words precisely at a community whose scholars came under the temptation to trade their revelation:

The small price is not always gold. Sometimes it is a salary, a title, an appointment, the ease of a recognised position instead of the burden of an independent voice. The Assembly at Ufa offered that price, and it offered it in the most attractive packaging imaginable, not as bribery but as protection, not as betrayal but as progress. That is precisely why it was so dangerous and why so many sincere people went along with it. One does not sell the signs always because one is greedy; sometimes one sells them because one is weary of the persecution and grateful for the peace, and the mirror knows that about man and counts on it.

There is yet a second loss that the examination brought with it, subtler than the first and for that very reason easier to overlook. As long as the scholar’s authority lay in the chain, it was plural; there were many chains, many schools, many scholars who could disagree with one another without any one of them losing his validity, and that polyphony was no defect but a strength, for it prevented any one opinion, one school or one power-holder from taking possession of the whole tradition. The examination of the Assembly knew no such polyphony, for it had one measure, one office, one signature, and what that one office approved held good, while what it rejected fell outside the law. The state thereby replaced not only the chain with the licence, but also plurality with unity, the living disagreement of a free class of scholars with the smooth uniformity of an official approval. For an administrator uniformity is a blessing, for a community with one recognised head can be surveyed and a community with a hundred independent voices cannot, but for the tradition itself it was an impoverishment, for it drew its resilience precisely from the fact that it had never lain in one hand. Whoever reduces the many chains to a single register makes the community legible to power, and legibility is the first condition of control.

Here we must be honest about the nature of this page, for the danger exists that the foregoing sounds like a conclusive historical verdict while it is in the first place a moral and structural argument. That the Assembly “replaced” the isnad is not a sentence that an archive yields; it is the way this theme reads the meaning of the event. The historical facts are the licensing criteria, the duty to report, the state-appointed mufti; the interpretation that here a chain of knowledge was exchanged for a licence is the thesis, and it deserves to be treated as a thesis, sharp but not as self-evident. For the reality was messier than the argument, and that the community did not simply lose its old manner of transmitting knowledge is shown by what happened afterwards, when the first mufti behaved not as an obedient official but as a man who wished to use the new apparatus for his own ends.

The First Mufti

In 1789 Catherine appointed the akhund Mukhamedzhan Khusainov ﵀ as the first mufti of the realm, the head of the new Spiritual Assembly, and in December of that year the institution was solemnly opened. The choice was not accidental. Khusainov ﵀ was a Tatar scholar of standing among his own people and at the same time a man with whom the state could work, and in that duality lies the whole tension of his office. In his opening address he struck a tone that must have gladdened the imperial designers, for he held out to his co-religionists that thanks to Catherine’s tolerance, her support for Islamic institutions and her readiness to recognise Muslims as nobles, the Muslims could become privileged members of the imperial elite. It was the language of integration, of the Muslim who rises through loyalty, of the community that seeks its salvation within the empire rather than against it, and it fitted seamlessly into the design of the Assembly.

But Khusainov ﵀ was no tool, and that is the unexpected element in his story. The man whom the state had appointed to make the Muslim clergy governable began almost immediately to test the bounds of his cage. He demanded more power than the decree granted him, he travelled repeatedly to Saint Petersburg to speak with the empress in person, and he began to see himself as a figure of political weight in the whole Volga-Ural region, not as a subordinate of the governor but as the representative of a community. His highest claim was the sharpest: he demanded for his office the same status as the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church. One must understand that demand in the light of the design, for the Assembly was deliberately modelled on the Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy, with a mufti at the head as the church had a metropolitan at the head, and Khusainov ﵀ did no more than carry the logic of that design through to its ultimate consequence. If the state makes me a mufti in the image of your metropolitan, so he reasoned in practice, then give me too the dignity and the power of a metropolitan.

His journeys to the capital say as much as his demands. A mufti who repeatedly makes the long road to Saint Petersburg to speak with the empress in person behaves not as a provincial cleric but as an envoy, a man who sees himself as the representative of a nation before its sovereign, and who lays his case not before the governor but over the governor’s head before the throne itself. In that posture lay a conception of the office that the design had never intended, for the Assembly had been conceived as an instrument in the hands of the provincial administration, not as a counter-power that negotiated directly with the crown. Khusainov ﵀ understood, however, that his appointment gave him a unique position, that he alone among the Muslims of the realm possessed an imperial mandate to speak on behalf of all Muslims, and that a sensible man does not keep such a mandate small but builds it out. He was, in other words, a politician as much as a scholar, and he played the game that the apparatus had placed in his hands with a deftness his designers had not foreseen.

Here unfolds the irony that always accompanies the false mirror. The state had imposed upon Islam a hierarchy it did not know, a pyramid with one man at the top where the tradition had known a network of independent scholars, and scarcely did that pyramid stand upright before the man at the top used it to demand power the state had not wished to give away. The apparatus that was meant to tame the clergy gave its first head a platform of unprecedented reach, for never before had one Muslim been able to speak on behalf of all the Muslims of the realm, and precisely by making him mufti the state had made that speaking possible. Khusainov ﵀ was at once the proof of the control and the crack in the control, the appointed cleric who precisely because of his appointment claimed a power that alarmed those who appointed him. Thus it became apparent at once, with the very first occupant of the office, that the mirror could indeed distort the community but could not wholly control it, for even the state-chosen mufti remained a man with a will of his own, a community of his own behind him and an understanding of his own of what was due to him.

The Mufti Against the Governor

The collision that arose from this is documented, and it deserves attention because it shows how little the apparatus troubled itself about its designers. In the years 1790 and 1791 the mufti and the provincial administration of Orenburg stood diametrically opposed to one another. It is here that we must correct a misunderstanding that easily arises, for one would expect the mufti’s antagonist to have been the architect of the Assembly, the governor-general Igelström himself. He was not. Igelström had designed the institution and brought it to life, but when the conflict broke out he was largely absent, for the empire had called him to another front; he fought in the Russo-Swedish War and in 1790 signed on behalf of Russia the Peace of Värälä. The man who fought out the daily struggle with the mufti in Ufa and Orenburg was the governor A. A. von Peutling, and that fact is more than a footnote, for it reveals something essential about what Igelström had built. The apparatus was not dependent on its maker. It went on running without him. The confrontation between power and the mufti was no personal feud between two men but a structural given, baked into the design itself, and it would have occurred whoever the governor had been, for the tension lay not in the persons but in the construction.

What follows is a reconstruction, not a transcript; the documented stake of the conflict is real, but the words in which I cast it are my own, meant to make visible what was at stake when the state-appointed cleric came to stand against the state that had appointed him.

The outcome gave the governor the right on paper and the mufti the right in reality. The provincial administration, alarmed by the reach of the mufti’s claims, turned to the powerful prince Aleksandr Bezborodko and obtained from him permission to curtail the mufti’s influence severely. There came a resolution that described his task precisely: his duty was strictly to attend to religious affairs and not to touch the worldly ones, except when the administration saw fit to use him for that purpose. Let one read that last clause too with attention, for it betrays the whole relationship. The mufti may not concern himself with worldly affairs, unless the state charges him to; he is powerless of himself and powerful only on command; his authority is a tap that the authorities turn on and off as it suits them. On paper the cage was thereby closed once more and the mufti sent back to his place.

And yet, and this is the curious thing, the historical upshot was not as unequivocal as the resolution suggested. From the standpoint of the highest power in Saint Petersburg the mufti was a weightier figure than the provincial governor, for the mufti spoke on behalf of a community and the governor merely on behalf of a bureau, and on the steppe frontier, far from the capital, Khusainov ﵀ enjoyed an independence the decree had never granted him. The curtailment on paper went hand in hand with a weight in practice, and that gap between the letter and the life is precisely the space in which the community breathed. The state had built an apparatus to control Islam, but the apparatus needed a head, and the head proved to be a man with ambitions of his own, standing of his own and a following of his own, so that the control was never complete. The mirror distorted, but it did not capture the image wholly.

Who Governed Whom

Here we come to the question that this article carries and that undermines the simple reading of the events. Who, in fact, governed whom. It seems self-evident that the state governed the community, for the state founded the apparatus, appointed the mufti and established the criteria, and that too is true. But the history of the first years shows that the apparatus had another side as well, for as soon as it existed, the Muslims could use it. The historian who has fathomed this period most deeply has shown that the relationship was no one-way traffic but a symbiosis, in which the state tried to control the community and the community at the same time turned the state’s apparatus to its own ends. Muslims turned to the Assembly to settle disputes, to have mosques recognised, to see marriages and inheritances arranged according to their own law, and so the instrument of control also became an instrument of the community, a counter behind which Islamic law, however much under state supervision, went on functioning.

From this one might draw the comforting conclusion that it was not so bad after all, that the community was clever enough to turn the trap to its own advantage and that the false mirror was therefore not so false. That conclusion would be too hasty, for the symbiosis changed nothing about the underlying relationship. Whoever uses the counter acknowledges the counter; whoever has his marriage registered by a state-appointed cleric accepts that the state determines who is a valid cleric; whoever brings his dispute before the Assembly bows to an institution that reports in the language of the authorities. The community could manoeuvre within the cage, and it did so with great dexterity, but the cage remained the cage, and the bars were strong precisely because one touched them daily and of one’s own accord. That is the subtlest working of the false mirror: not that it crushes the community, but that it gives it a space in which it seems free and in which every movement confirms the confinement. Islam was not forbidden in Catherine’s realm; Islam was permitted, recognised and organised, and precisely in that permission lay the control enclosed.

The institution that Igelström founded in 1788 would far outlive its maker, and that is the true legacy of this article. Igelström would leave the steppe, move on to other posts, fall into disgrace and return, and finally die, but the Spiritual Assembly endured, generation after generation, mufti after mufti, far into the nineteenth and the twentieth century. It outlived the empress who signed it, the governor who designed it, the first mufti who rose against it, and it would even outlive the fall of the empire that had brought it forth. A man builds an apparatus and departs, but the apparatus remains, for it is no person and no policy but a form, and forms are tougher than the men who devise them. What was born in Ufa was not a measure but a model, and models travel. They travel through time, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and they travel through space, from the Russian steppe to places Igelström never saw and where his name was never heard. How that model travelled, how the steppe and the mirror found each other and how the line from Ufa finally arrives at a Leiden scholar in Batavia, is the subject of the last article of this period and of this whole theme.

Sources

• Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• The Imperiia Project (Harvard University), “Establishment of the Spiritual Assembly of Muslim Law in Ufa: 1788”.
• “The Mufti Against the Governor: a Short Confrontation, 1790-1791”, Journal of Frontier Studies.
• Adeeb Khalid, “Tolerating Islam”, London Review of Books 29/10 (2007).
• Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II”, Slavic Review 27/4 (1968).
• Wikipedia, “Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly”; “Iosif Igelström”.