The Steppe and the Mirror

In the previous article we saw how Igelström founded the Spiritual Assembly at Ufa, how a Christian empire for the first time lodged the appointment of the Muslim clergy in an official college, and how that apparatus would outlive its maker. But an assembly in a provincial town is not yet a policy that reaches out across the land, and the full design of the governor-general reached further than the chancellery of Ufa. He wanted not only to order the licensed Islam where it already existed, he wanted to send it out to where it had not yet taken root, onto the steppe, out to meet the nomads, as an instrument for binding to the state people who knew no state. In that final chapter of his Ural governance the logic of the false mirror comes to its purest expression, for here an empire does not push Islam back and does not merely control it, but actively spreads it, not out of piety but out of calculation, because a believing nomad is easier to govern than an unattached one. And from that steppe runs a long, thin line, across more than a century and across half a continent, to a Dutch scholar who in Batavia would set down the same truth in other words. This last page closes not only the period of the administrator; it closes the whole theme of the false mirror.

Mullahs as Border Guards

In September 1785 Catherine addressed a decree to Igelström in which she charged him to build mosques on the Kazakh steppe and to send Tatar imams and mullahs from Kazan out to the nomads. One must let the strangeness of this command sink in properly, for it contains the whole inversion that this theme describes. Here was an Orthodox Christian empress instructing her general to spread Islam, to raise mosques for peoples who as yet had none, and to send teachers of the faith out into the wilderness at state expense. It looks like an act of tolerance carried to the improbable, and on one level it is that too, but the reason the state itself gave leaves no doubt as to the intention. The Tatar mullahs were to confirm Kazakh loyalty to Russia and to wean the nomads from their wandering existence, to sedentarize them, to bind them to a place, to a mosque, to a register, to an authority that resided in the end in Saint Petersburg. Islam was deployed here as a means to civilization in the sense the empire gave that word: the fixing of the fleeting, the making governable of the ungovernable.

The choice of Tatar clergy was no accident but the core of the plan. The Tatars of the Volga region were Muslims, so that the Kazakhs could accept them as fellow believers, and they were at the same time subjects of the empire, licensed by the Assembly of Ufa, embedded in the apparatus the previous article described. They spoke the language of Islam and the language of the state at once, and it was precisely that doubleness that made them ideal agents. A Kazakh nomad who converted to a more devout life under the guidance of such a mullah converted, without knowing it, also to a greater nearness to the Russian order, for the mullah who taught him to pray was a man with an imperial licence in his pocket. Religion and the frontier coincided; the imam was at once a cleric and a border guard, and the mosque that rose on the steppe was at once a house of prayer and a beacon of the empire. What the tiresome overtone of occupation had lacked, the warm sound of the spreading of the faith supplied, and precisely for that reason it worked better than a garrison ever could have done.

The choice of the Tatars in particular had a deep background that makes the move still more refined. The Tatars of Kazan were in the eighteenth century not only fellow believers of the Kazakhs but also their trading partners, a class of merchants and scholars who had travelled the caravan roads of the steppe for generations and who in many a steppe village enjoyed standing. By availing itself of these merchant-scholars, the empire needed to send no stranger; it used a network that already lay there, a layer of Muslims who stood at once in trade, in learning, and now also in the service of the state. The Tatar mullah travelled as a merchant, taught as a scholar, and reported as an agent, and the three roles ran so smoothly into one another that the Kazakh who received him could not possibly know in exactly which capacity the man stood before him. Thus Islam spread across the steppe along the roads of trade and in the guise of learning, while at the same time serving the state that funded it all, and the community that arose in this way was from the very outset interwoven with a power that was not its own. It is a textbook example of how the false mirror is not imposed from without but grows from within, out of one’s own merchants, one’s own teachers, one’s own language of the faith.

Whoever reads this episode today recognizes in it a pattern that outlives the centuries: the state that avails itself of religion not by suppressing it but by steering it, that does not ask whether the people believe but sees to it that they believe in the right way, under the right teachers, with the right licences. There is a devilish elegance in this design, for it turns the most pious impulse of man into a lever of power, and it does so so softly that man does not feel the lever. The Kazakh who sent his child to the new mosque thought he was sending his child to Allah ﷻ, and so he was, but the road there ran through an institution an empire had founded with a purpose that had nothing to do with Allah ﷻ. This is the false mirror in motion, no longer standing still in a Petersburg print shop or a Ufa chancellery, but riding across the steppe, from village to village, in the guise of a scholar with a certificate.

The Khan Dethroned

The religious offensive went hand in hand with a political one, and there too Igelström was the driving force. The Little Horde, the westernmost of the three Kazakh zhuz, was traditionally led by a khan from the line of Genghis Khan, and that khan, Nuraly, had already submitted to Russian influence without fully serving it. In 1786 Igelström devised a reform that sought to cut the khan’s power off at the root. He wanted to dissolve the hereditary rule of the Chinggisid princes and replace it with an administration controlled by Russia, a council, a border commission, a steppe parliament that would render the khan superfluous. In the spring of 1786 Nuraly Khan was driven out of the Little Horde and placed under Russian protection in the fortress of Kalmykov, and in June of that year Catherine formally deposed him. The Orenburg Border Commission that Igelström founded in that same year was henceforth to manage the affairs of the steppe, with a Russian officer at its head and a few Kazakh notables alongside him, a body of power disguised as a body of consultation.

It is tempting to tell this as a smooth success story, the administrator who dethrones the last khan of the Little Horde as he had earlier taken captive the last khan of Crimea, but the reality was more intractable, and the honesty of this theme demands that we tell of the intractability. Catherine rejected the most radical part of Igelström’s proposal, for she thought it unwise to destroy the institution of the khan entirely, and the deposition of Nuraly did not become the clean ending the governor had in mind. The steppe would not so easily be pressed into a border commission. In those same years Syrym Datuly, a leader from the Bayuly clan, led a revolt of the Kazakhs of the Little Horde that turned against the Russian ordering and against the collaborating khan alike, and that revolt, which lasted with interruptions from 1783 to 1797, cut across Igelström’s design at every decisive point. The khan’s power was undermined, but the authority of the state did not take its place without effort, and the khanate of the Little Horde would not be formally abolished until 1824, decades after Igelström’s departure. The administrator had set the structures teetering, but he had not replaced them, and the steppe remained for a long time yet a region where the mirror did not catch the image.

There is a quiet melancholy in the dethroning of the last khans that this theme must not skip over, for behind the administrative dryness of border commissions and popular assemblies lay hidden the end of an order that had endured for centuries. The khans of the Kazakh zhuz descended from Genghis Khan, and their authority, however weakened, carried the memory of the great steppe empires, of a world in which the power of the nomads issued from themselves and not from a distant capital. What Igelström proposed was not merely the replacement of one form of administration by another, but the extinguishing of a sovereignty, the conversion of a people with its own rulers into a people with overseers, and that the steppe resisted this, in the shape of Syrym Datuly and his followers, was no backwardness but the healthy resistance of people who did not wish to vanish into a register. The administrator saw in the khan an obstacle to the ordering; the Kazakh saw in the khan, with all his faults, the last form of an authority that was his own. That the ordering would in the end prevail and that the khanate would disappear in 1824 changes nothing of the dignity of that resistance, for not every defeat is an injustice suffered, and the people who refused to fit themselves into the imperial image without a struggle held up something that the mirror did not catch.

Yet in this unfinished reform lies contained the whole handwriting of Igelström, and it is the same handwriting as at Ufa. Everywhere he acted, his method was the same: not to destroy but to replace, not to break authority but to take it over, to put the existing structures, whether a khanate or a clergy, in the service of the empire instead of rooting them out. The khan dethroned, the mullahs sent out, the Assembly founded, these are three shapes of one insight, the insight that an empire rules more durably by incorporating than by exterminating. And it is precisely that insight, born on the Russian steppe in the eighteenth century, that would surface a century later in a wholly different corner of the world, in the mouth of a man who had never seen the steppe.

Warsaw and the Fall

Before we follow that line, we must see the administrator himself off, for his later life ran not as a steady climb but as a sharp fall and a late return, and there is a certain justice in it that the man who had incorporated so many was in the end himself cast off. After his Ural years Igelström rose higher still. He fought in the Russo-Swedish War and in 1790 signed the Peace of Värälä on behalf of Russia, in 1792 he was raised into the Russian nobility and appointed governor-general of Pskov, and the following year he received the same dignity over Kiev and Chernigov. In 1794 his career reached its highest and at once its most fateful post, when he became ambassador in Warsaw and held the supreme command over all Russian troops in Poland.

There, in occupied Warsaw, it went wrong. In April 1794 the Kościuszko Uprising broke out, and the city rose in one bloody morning against the Russian occupation, the event that has gone down in history as the Warsaw Matins. Igelström, the commander, was taken completely by surprise; his troops were overwhelmed in the streets, his position became untenable, and he had to evacuate the city with heavy losses. For that failure he was demoted, and the man who had incorporated Crimea and reformed the steppe fell into disgrace, pushed aside from the front rank in which he had stood for so long. There is something instructive in this fall, for it shows that the administrator who had with so much refinement ordered the communities of others proved, in the chaos of a real uprising, as helpless as anyone else. The mirror he wielded was sharp against those who let themselves be ordered, but it offered no protection against a people that refused to step into the image, and Warsaw refused. There is a bitter lesson in it that precisely the master of incorporation fell at the place where a community would not let itself be incorporated, for it shows that the method of soft control finds its limit as soon as the people see through it, and that no apparatus, however refined, is a match for a people that decides no longer to recognize itself in the shape offered to it.

Orenburg, the Last Post

The fall was deep, but it was not the end. When Catherine died in 1796 and her son Paul I ascended the throne, the fortune of many a disgraced servant turned, and Igelström was among those whom the new emperor received back into grace. Paul raised him to the rank of general of infantry and appointed him in 1797 governor-general of Orenburg, precisely the region where nearly a decade earlier he had set up his great design. Thus the administrator returned to the place of his creation, to the steppe and the Assembly he had founded, and there he governed his last years before withdrawing from service. He died on 18 February 1823, old and far from the fronts on which he had made his name.

From that return we can survey the whole arc of his life, and the arc is instructive because it is so consistent. Igelström began as a young officer in an empire that for two centuries had treated Islam with violence, with forced baptisms and demolished mosques, and he ended as the architect of a policy that protected, pressed, organized, and sent out Islam. One might call that turnabout a softening, and at the level of the daily suffering of the Muslim subjects it was that too, for under the licensed Islam no one died for their faith as under the conversion campaigns of old. But whoever looks at the arc more closely sees that the end goal had not changed, only the method. The empire wanted in 1552, when it took Kazan, that the Muslims should cease to be an independent power, and it wanted in 1788, when it founded the Assembly, precisely the same, only it now achieved this not by breaking the mosque but by appointing the imam. The persecution and the protection served the same goal; they were two roads to the same destination, and the second road was so much more humane that one almost forgot it led to the same place. That is the ripest form of the false mirror, the form that no longer needs to fall back on violence because it has learned that kindness binds more thoroughly, and Igelström, who had seen both ends of the arc with his own eyes, was the man who had fixed the passage from the one to the other in an institution.

The image of the old general returning to Orenburg has an almost symbolic charge, for it is the maker who comes back to his handiwork and finds the handiwork untouched. The Assembly he had founded in 1788 was still there, with its mufti, its examinations, its licences, its reports in Russian and Tatar. It had survived his absence, his wars, his fall, and it would survive his death too. Igelström saw, if he wished to see it, that a man is perishable and an institution is not, that the administrator passes on and the administration remains, and that what he had built on the steppe was not bound to him but to a form he had merely designed and that now led its own life. He had not performed a deed but created a model, and models do not die with their creators. They wait. They wait until another state, in another century, for another people, meets the same problem and rediscovers the same solution, as though it had never been devised anywhere else.

From Ufa to Batavia

Here we must draw the long line that binds the whole theme together, and we must draw it carefully, for it is tempting and precisely for that reason dangerous. In the first part of this theme we followed Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the Leiden Arabist who in Mecca, under a false name and a feigned conversion, gained access to the heart of Islam, and who in 1889 entered the service of the government of the Dutch East Indies as adviser for native and Arab affairs. From Batavia he wrote, in the decades that followed, nearly fourteen hundred official advisories in which he taught the colonial state how it should treat the Islam of its subjects. His core idea was, in short, that one should leave Islam as a religion in peace and even protect it, in order to break Islam as a political force all the more thoroughly; that one should spare the pious Muslim and isolate the militant one; that one should bind the believer to the colonial order by not disturbing him in his faith but steering him in his organization. That was his Islam policy, and we have seen in the earlier articles how sharp and how harmful it was.

Now set that idea beside what Saint Petersburg had built a century earlier in Ufa, and the kinship leaps to the eye. Both states arrived at the same discovery: that Islam is not to be defeated with violence and not to be converted with compulsion, and that the only durable control runs by way of recognition, protection, and organization.

The deepest correspondence lies in one decisive division that both policymakers drew, for both Ufa and Batavia rested on the pulling apart of Islam as a religion and Islam as a political force. That distinction, which at first sight looks like a mark of respect, is in reality the sharpest instrument of the false mirror, for it cuts from Islam a part that Islam itself does not know. For the believer there is no sharp border between prayer and law, between the worship and the ordering of the community, between what one owes to Allah ﷻ and what one owes to one’s neighbour; they are not two domains but one coherent whole, one din that encompasses the whole of life. The colonial reason, whether it thought in Russian or in Dutch, hacked that whole in two, declared the one half, the ritual, a protected private matter and the other half, the social and political, the terrain of the state, and offered the community freedom in exchange for the surrender of precisely that which made its religion a whole. Igelström did that with a licence that limited the authority of the cleric to the religious, as we saw in the previous article with the decision against the mufti; Snouck did it with an advisory that wished to spare Islam as a faith and to break Islam as a movement. Two languages, two centuries, two continents, but one intervention, and it is that one intervention that makes the false mirror into a single figure across the periods.

Both therefore distinguished the religion, which one could permit, from the political force, which one had to tame. Both sought the loyalty of the clergy, the one by licensing it, the other by sparing and steering it. Both understood that a contented, protected, framed Islam served the state better than a persecuted one, and both cast that insight into policy. What Igelström fixed in a Spiritual Assembly, Snouck formulated in official advisories, and the distance between the steppe and the archipelago, between the akhund with his licence and the teungku under supervision, is smaller than the map would lead one to suspect.

And yet we must put on the brakes here, for the temptation is great to say more than the facts will bear, and this theme loses its worth the moment it strays from the truth. There is no evidence that Snouck took the Ufa Assembly as a model, no demonstrated line of influence running from the Russian steppe to the Leiden study, no quotation in which the adviser of Batavia appeals to the governor of Orenburg. The correspondence between Ufa and Batavia is not that of a copy but that of a kinship, no borrowing but an echo, and the echo comes not because the one learned from the other, but because both struck upon the same colonial reason and independently distilled from it the same answer. That is a subtler and a stronger connection than a direct influence would be, for it shows that the false mirror is not the invention of one man or one empire but a recurring temptation of every state that rules over Muslims without sharing in their faith. The mirror is not passed from hand to hand; it is ground anew each time, by whoever holds the power and does not understand the community, and it shows each time the same distorted image, whether it is ground in Saint Petersburg or in The Hague.

That the line from Ufa did not stop with Igelström and did not stop with Snouck is proved by the century that followed them. The Soviet state, which in principle combated religion, rediscovered in 1943, in the middle of the war, the old wisdom of Catherine and again founded a muftiate seated in Ufa, a spiritual administration with an appointed mufti at its head, which was to oversee the imams of the land and which expressly invoked the pre-revolutionary model. What an Orthodox empress had devised, an atheist state took over, and the muftiates that issued from it exist to this very day. The form proved stronger than every ideology that wielded it, stronger than the Christian empire that created it, stronger than the communist empire that inherited it, and that is the most sobering lesson of this whole period: that the false mirror adheres to no faith and belongs to no century, but to power as such, which picks it up the moment it meets a community it wishes to govern without sharing in it.

The Mirror and the Community

Thus the circle of this theme closes, and we can set side by side the three shapes of the false mirror that we have come to know across the three periods. There was the deceiver, Snouck, who entered Islam under a false face in order to know it from within and break it from without. There was the scholar, Goldziher, who dissected Islam with the instruments of Western science until in his hands it was no longer a living revelation but a collection of human traces. And there was the administrator, Igelström, who did not study Islam and did not deceive it but organized it, made its clergy into officials and furnished its prayer with a licence. The deceiver, the scholar, the administrator, three men, three centuries of Orientalism, three ways of catching a faith in a mirror that the faith is not. And each time the mirror was convincing, each time it showed an image that resembled Islam, and each time the image was false, not because it reflected nothing of the reality, but because it reflected the reality without its soul, the form without the life, the outside without the revelation that carries it.

Over against those three mirrors stands, unchanged through all the centuries, the community that preserved its religion as it received it. For this is what none of the three men understood and what no apparatus could catch: that Islam does not live in the institutions that states erect for it, not in the licences they issue and not in the studies that scholars write about it, but in the living chain of transmission that reaches from the Prophet ﷺ to the believer of today, from breast to breast, from the scholar ﵀ to the pupil, from the one generation to the next, outside every licence. The akhund of Ufa could receive a certificate, but the knowledge he passed on he had not received from the empress; that he had received as Muslims have always received it, from the mouth of a teacher who had it from the mouth of his teacher. The state could build the counter, but the prayer that was prayed behind the counter was the prayer that the Prophet ﷺ had taught, and no decree touched a single letter of it. The mirror caught the outside and thought it possessed the whole, and precisely therein it was false, for the whole had already escaped it before it had drawn the first line.

The Qur’an had for this age-old attempt, to catch the light of revelation in a human vessel and so to extinguish it, a word that gathers the three shapes of this theme into one image:

One does not extinguish the light with a mirror, however artfully it is ground. The deceiver, the scholar, and the administrator have each in their own way tried to catch Islam in an image they could control, and each of them has made an image that convinced, that resembled, that for a time passed for the reality. But the reality remained where it always was, in the hearts that carry the revelation and the mouths that pass it on, far from the chancellery, far from the study, far from the mosque with the imperial licence. We who read this today look back on three centuries in which powerful states and sharp minds sought to catch Islam in their mirror, and we see that the mirrors are still there, in new shapes, with new names, for the temptation does not die. But we see too that the community is still there, that the chain is not broken, that the prayer prayed today is the same prayer the Prophet ﷺ taught, and that is not the proof of an argument but the answer to all mirrors at once. The light will not be extinguished with a mouth, and it will not be caught in a glass. It burns on, from scholar ﵀ to pupil, from heart to heart, until the day on which no mirror will be needed any longer because all will see what is.

Sources

• Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780-1910 (Brill, 2001).
• Danielle Ross, Tatar Empire: Kazan’s Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (Indiana University Press, 2020).
• Alan W. Fisher, “Enlightened Despotism and Islam under Catherine II”, Slavic Review 27/4 (1968).
• Wikipedia, “Iosif Igelström”; “Nuraly Khan”; “Syrym Datuly”; “Warsaw Uprising (1794)”.
• Huygens Instituut, “Ambtelijke adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje 1889-1936”.
• De Valse Spiegel, Periode 1 (Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje), artikelen 10-11.