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Imperiia: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Establishment of the Spiritual Assembly of Muslim Law in Ufa: 1788

Having weathered the storm of the Pugachev Rebellion, Catherine the Great used both sticks and carrots to co-opt Muslim elites in Bashkiria. To this end, her policy shifted towards "active promotion of Islam as a means of achieving influence in the steppe" (Burbank et al, p. 99). Catherine enlisted Baron Osip Igelstrom, the "chief architect" of Russia's incorporation of the Crimean Khanate into Russia's administrative structures after 1774, for the task (Burbank et al, p. 99). Igelstrom sponsored legislation ordering the creation of a "Spiritual Assembly of Muslim Law" in Ufa in 1788, which would license clerics "of good conduct" (vis-à-vis the state) and "reliable in loyalty" (Sunderland, p. 60). Thus began Catherine's experiment with state-sponsored Islam. The Assembly ensured that Islamic schools did not run counter to the state and standardized the promotion of teachers; meanwhile, the Russian state treasury spent money on new mosques and madrassas in Ufa and Orenburg, permits for which had been a prominent demand of Bashkir elites in the run-up to the Pugachev uprising (Shields Kollman, p. 92). The Assembly was required to conduct its affairs in Russian as well as the local Tatar language, "so that the Orenburg general-governor would know exactly what his reliably loyal Muslim 'clerics' were up to" (Sunderland, p. 60). Meanwhile, a salaried mufti was appointed to head the Assembly, and funds were made available for hiring clerics to assist him (Burbank et al, p. 100). With this innovation and the 1775 administrative reforms discussed in the previous section, the Russian state had divided and infiltrated the Bashkir community in Ufa, limiting the probability of a future Pugachev. The institution existed until 1917.

The photo below, taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in 1910, shows Ufa's main mosque and residence of mufti, built by the Assembly in the 1830s:


Source: Library of Congress

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