books in Russian and Tatar translations. It also suspended Orthodox missionary
work against Islam, a policy that lasted into the 1820s.
Catherine was in essence creating an ecclesiastical hierarchy and parish-like
system among her Muslim subjects where it had not existed. Normally, Islam is
not a hierarchical religion; Muslims organize themselves locally and self-sufficiently.
The neighborhood mosque and its imam is the center of community life; mosques
were built and supported by contributions from the community, although the
religious endowment system practiced in the Islamic world (waaqf) was not
common in Russia since it did not have tax-free status until late in the nineteenth
century. A mosque’s imam was selected and supported by the community; imams
(known as a group asulema) did not constitute a social estate parallel to the
Orthodox clergy, but each paid the tax obligations of his social status at birth
(although in this period Muslim religious staff were exempt from military service).
Each mosque as a rule had an elementary school, and most regions also had a
madrasa, or school of higher learning.
Religious knowledge and authority was diffuse in Islamic practice. All Muslims,
even girls, were expected to read and have fundamental knowledge of the Koran;
imams were distinguished from their community only by their piety and depth of
their learning, not by particularly esoteric or advanced training. Teachers in a
madrasaearned great community respect; otherfigures included theakhund,a
specialist in Sharia law who was regionally revered; a community might also have a
mu’adhdhin, like a Christian deacon, who assisted the imam and was also well
educated in Islam. In principle, each community respected the authority and views
of its spiritual leaders; standardization of Islam was never a major goal nor
realistically achievable. Communities were not parishes since each was free-
standing; there was no hierarchy above imams, no bishops or archbishops.
Even among the nomadic Kazakhs, Islamflourished with its own institutions; in
the place of imams,“sacred”clans often played the role of spiritual leadership, and
religious education took place, often with Kazan Tatar teachers, during winter
pasture months. Russia’s Muslim communities maintained what has been called
“Islamic Discourse”by disseminating basic religious education in the community;
they also linked themselves with larger Islam by the veneration of local shrines to
holy men, which dotted the countryside wherever Muslims lived. Wealthy Muslims
even completed the traditional hajj to Mecca and Medina.
Thus, the Russian state worked against the grain when it created the Spiritual
Assemblies in the Crimea and Urals with the goal of establishing an orderly
administrative hierarchy and confession for its Muslims. It inappropriately regarded
theakhundlegal specialists as the equivalents of Orthodox administrative super-
visors in dioceses (theblagochinnye), it endowed the grand mufti with authority to
establish orthodoxy in Islam despite Islam’s more pluralistic theological tradition,
and it tried to identify the Islamic equivalents of clergy in a situation of multiple
foci of religious teaching and authority.
Always somewhat thwarted in its goal of making Islam institutionally“legible,”
the Russian state under Catherine II nevertheless created structures that allowed
Islam toflourish in the Russian empire. By the end of the eighteenth century,
400 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801