by Danielle Ross, Logan, Utah
By now, that collecting, organizing, and creating knowledge was fundamental to the construction of colonial empire in Russia elsewhere is a well-trodden idea. From the geographic expeditions that made unknown landscapes exploitable to studies of ethnography and religion which informed the creation of imperial legal codes and institutions for non-Russian peoples, knowledge, or, at least, perceived knowledge, were a central aspect of Russian imperial rule.[1]
At the same time, as historians have repeatedly pointed out, the imperial knowledge project often fell short of imperial officials’ goals and needs, yielded unreliable, deeply biased information, and undergirded policies that were ultimately deleterious to the empire’s long-term survival.[2]
This brief essay turns to the story of a detainee named Niyāzov to consider the ways in which nineteenth-century imperial bureaucrats could create chaos for average imperial subjects and obscure complex regional histories as said bureaucrats sought to inscribe legible identities onto the individuals under their power. When Russian officials could not make sense of Niyazov’s story of himself, they resorted, after some investigation and argument, to making up a story for him that fit within the environment of the Kazakh steppe as they perceived it. However, when the archival records and indigenous sources are placed side by side, a very different image of Niyāzov and the social world to which he belonged emerges. From the historian’s perspective, Niyāzov’s case makes clear both the opportunities and the stark limits of using the imperial archive to tell the stories of colonized subjects.
The Prisoner Niyāzov
In the archives of the Turgai Oblast’ Chancellery, we first meet Ḥabbī Khwājā Niyāzov in the Troitsk city jail in December of 1869. He had sent a petition to the governor of Turgai asking to be released and permitted to return to the aul of his father-in-law, Mameteka Bii, a Kazakh from Dambarskaya volost’, Kustanai uezd. This petition sparked an investigation into who Niyāzov was, where he had come from, and how he had landed in the Troitsk jail.[3] The staff captain (shtat rotmistr) reported that the Kazakhs claimed not to know anything for certain about Niyāzov’s origins. He had arrived in the volost’ around 1866. At that time, he had presented himself as a Kazakh whose family was from Khujand. The Kazakhs noted that Niyāzov claimed that he was not really from Khujand, but had been born, raised, and educated in Istarlībāsh, a village in the Orenburg gubernia. His father was reportedly a man named Niyāz Khwājā, who had come from Bukhara to Istarlībāsh and married a Tatar woman there. Niyāz Khwājā had died many years ago, leaving behind a son, Ḥabbī Khwājā Niyāzov, who chose to live as his late father had, dedicating his life to study.[4] Niyāzov had lived for many years in Istarlībāsh, undocumented by the Russian state, paying no taxes, and not presenting himself before any border officials. Because he had no Russian documents and paid no Russian taxes, he always introduced himself as the son of a Bukharan “alien,” and not as a subject of the Russian state.[5]
Upon Niyāzov’s arrival in the county (volost’) of Dambarsk, he presented himself as an Islamic scholar. He was soon embraced by Batishah Itaiakov, also known as Mamateka Bii, an elder (starshina) of the aul. Within a year, Mamateka Bii’s circle had taken in Niyāzov of one of their own and even concluded a public agreement with Niyāzov to marry him to Mamateka Bii’s daughter.[6]
However, when the aul sought permission to appoint him as their imam, questions began to arise. Was Niyāzov really a Kazakh? Was he a Tatar? A Bashkir? If the latter, the 1868 “Provisional Statute for the Administration of Ural’sk, Turgai, Akmolinsk, and Semipalatinsk oblasts” had removed the Kazakhs from the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, did away with licensed imams at the level of the aul, and limited imams for the Kazakhs to one per volost’.[7] After 1868, Tatars were no longer permitted to serve as imams to Kazakh congregations. Thus, by 1869, the only position to which Niyāzov could be legally appointed was county imam, and then only if the county of Dambarsk did not already have one. And he could qualify for this position only if he was a Kazakh. The questions about Niyāzov’s identity began to pile up. Was he a fugitive from justice? A deserter from the imperial army? With so many questions and so few answers, the ordinskii nachal’nik intentionallydid not respond to the aul’s petition.
[8] Officials seem to have assumed that the aul would take the hint and not press further to get Niyāzov an appointment.
Faced first with official refusals and silences and then with what was shaping up to be a police investigation, Mamateka Bii began to waver in his support for Niyāzov. He backed out of his agreement to marry his daughter to Niyāzov. After all, it was one thing to have an Istarlībāsh-educated imam with Bukharan roots as a son-in-law and quite another to have a wanted man. Mamateka Bii’s close connection to Niyāzov has already drawn enough unwanted imperial attention to his aul. By January 1870, he appears to have cut ties with Niyāzov and moved on.[9]
Meanwhile, the authorities in Troitsk were still flummoxed. The decision of where to send Niyāzov hinged upon the answer to one question: Who was Niyāzov? Niyāzov himself continued to insist that he should be sent back to the Kazakhs. However, the imperial officials in Troitsk felt that they could only legally comply with his request if he was, indeed, a Kazakh. They had serious doubts that he was. Also, because Mameteka Bii and his aul no longer wanted Niyāzov back, the officials had no concrete destination in Kazakh society to which to send him. Given the growing anxieties about itinerant mullahs spreading Islamic fanaticism among the Kazakhs, officials were not simply going to let Niyāzov loose to wander around the steppe. Some officials in the Turgai oblast’ administration continued to strongly suspect that he was a Tatar or Bashkir, but they had no evidence to support this claim and, again, no specific village, town, or even province to which to deport him.
The most sympathetic reading of Niyāzov’s situation came from Sultan Tleu-Muhammad Seidalin, a Kazakh graduate of the Orenburg Cadet Corps. who was then serving as the senior assistant to the chief (uezdnyi nachal’nik) of Nikolaevskii uezd (which had become Kustanai uezd, Turgai oblast’ with the formation of the steppe oblasts in 1868).[10] After examining the manuscripts that Niyāzov had with him at the time of his arrest, Seidalin concluded that the language of Niyāzov’s poetry resembled that of Khujand and that the regular use of the Kazakh language in the poems suggested that Niyāzov was probably of Khujandi Kazakh descent.[11] But as of March 1870, Seidalin’s expert opinion does not seem to have been enough to sway his ethnic Russian colleagues away from their assumption that Niyāzov was a Tatar or Bashkir fugitive of some sort.[12] Niyāzov remained imprisoned in Troitsk.
The Scholar Niyāzov
If we follow Seidalin’s lead and assume that Niyāzov gave a mostly truthful account of himself, we can use Turkic-language sources to flesh out his story. Tracing his path in reverse from Mamateka Bii’s aul, we find ourselves over 600 kilometers west in the village of Istarlībāsh in Orenburg gubernia in the 1860s, during the last decade Muḥammad Ḥarīth Tūqāyev’s (1810-1870) tenure as shaykh, imam, and head mudarris. Muḥammad Ḥarīth had studied in Bukhara from 1833 to 1841 before receiving his license from the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly and succeeding his late father, Niʿmatullah Īshān, as Istarlībāsh’s shaykh and imam in 1844.[13] The 1860s were the glory days of Istarlībāsh. Under Muḥammad Ḥarīth’s leadership, the village attracted scholars and students from across the Volga-Ural region and the Kazakh steppe. The mosque, madrasa buildings, and waterworks were expanded and improved to accommodate the growing population of scholars and to give the village the appearance of a center of Islamic culture and learning.[14] Istarlībāsh had previously attracted the support of the Bukei khans and it now attracted the sponsorship of the muftis of the Muslim Spiritual Assembly.[15] Orenburg’s Governor-Generals turned to Muḥammad Ḥarīth to use his shaykhly authority to negotiate among conflicting Kazakh factions in the steppe.[16] A place of walled gardens, fountains, reflecting pools, plumbed bathhouses, lively scholarly debates, and legendary parties, Istarlībāsh’s resident scholars, many of them Bukharan-educated, tried to craft their village as a sort of Bukhara-away-from-Bukhara.
Niyāzov would have grown up in this multi-ethnic, erudite, wealthy, consciously cosmopolitan environment. While he was apparently not prominent enough to merit mention in The History of Istarlībāsh, it is still possible to make some conjectures about his family. His father, Niyāz Khwājā, was likely one of the numerous Kazakh scholars who made their way to Muḥammad Ḥarīth’s madrasas, or perhaps, to the madrasas of Niʿmatullah Īshān, possibly in the 1830s or 1840s. He likely became one of the dozens of junior and senior teachers who offered instruction at the village’s madrasas. This would have made Niyāz Khwājā well-educated and, perhaps, well-regarded in his own circle of scholars, but not one of the most powerful ʿulamāʾ of the South Urals.
Niyāzov identifies his mother as a Tatar woman that his father met and married in Istarlībāsh. Once again, the best we can do is extrapolate from the situation in which Niyāzov found himself in 1869. Had his mother come from a prominent South Urals scholarly family, it seems unlikely that Niyāzov would have set out for the county of Dambarsk to jumpstart his scholarly career. A more likely scenario is that she came from either a peasant family, a craftsman’s or minor merchant’s family, or the family of a minor teacher or teaching assistant.
Bringing all these threads together, we can begin to get a better grasp on Niyāzov. His parents belonged to a multi-ethnic world of Sufi erudition that, before 1865, spilled across the Russian border into the steppe and Central Asia. The men who inhabited this world traveled between educational centers, staying for months or years at one before moving on to the next. In their peregrinations, they married women and started families in the places where the stopped to study and teach. They produced offspring who were not bound to one village or aul, but, rather, viewed themselves as citizens of this cosmopolitan Islamic society of letters.
The career of Miftāḥaddīn “Aqmullā” Kamāladdīn-ulı (1831-1895), another Istarlībāsh alumnus, sheds further light on Niyāzov’s aborted career as a steppe scholar. As the son of a Bashkir father and (possibly) a Kazan Tatar mother, and as a poet who sometimes wrote in the Kazakh language, Aqmullā defied easy categorization into an ethnicity or a social estate (soslovie).[17] Like Niyāzov, Aqmullā left home in the 1860s and traveled in Kazakh steppe as a poet and bard (aqyn). He seems to have counted on finding a patron among the Kazakhs. He laments in one of his poems that he “had failed to rise to prominence among the Kazakhs and take a Kazakh wife.”[18] Aqmullā’s lament echoes Niyāzov’s failure to secure a marriage with Mameteka Bii’s daughter and points to a possible professional trajectory for scholars who failed to gain prominence in Istarlībāsh or other well-established intellectual centers.
Aqmullā’s biography echoes Niyāzov’s in yet another way: his imprisonment in the Troitsk jail; Aqmullā was held there from 1867 to 1871. Aqmullā’s poetry gives a sense of what Niyāzov would have experienced: the poor food, the darkness, the lice, fleas, and bedbugs that assailed the inmates, and the general malaise and despair that permeated the prison.[19] Aqmullā’s writings also reveal the dissonance between how the inhabitants of the Sufi scholarly milieu envisioned themselves and how the imperial authorities viewed them. Both Aqmullā and Niyāzov, having come of age in the light and learning of Istarlībāsh, understood themselves to be part of an intellectual-cultural elite. They viewed themselves as erudite, cultured, highly moral men, destined to be advisors to political officials and local leaders. By contrast, the Russian officials looked at these men and saw them as common criminals: Aqmullā as a draft-dodger and Niyāzov as a fugitive or deserter from the army. However, neither of these men passively accepted this new identity that the imperial state placed upon him. Niyāzov fought back with his repeated assertions that he was the son of a Bukharan-educated Khujandi scholar. Aqmullā concluded his poetic lament a similarly defiant note, asserting that “a charger is not diminished by his fetters.”[20]
Conclusion
Taken in isolation, the imperial records on the Ḥabbī Khwājā Niyāzov case reveal the limits of the knowledge possessed by the Russian imperial officials tasked with administering the steppe following the passage of the Stepnoe Polozhenie of 1868. Unable to know definitively who Niyāzov was, they could not fit him into their vision of a well-ordered empire. He wound up in prison not so much because he had broken the law as because officials did not know where else to put him.
However, when Muslim sources are set side-by-side with the colonial records, a more complex picture emerges. Such an approach permits the restoration of humanity to Niyāzov by giving greater insight into his life both before and during his imprisonment. Moreover, it recasts Niyāzov’s encounter with the imperial authorities as part of a larger story of the collision of two worlds: the Russian imperial state and the trans-national society of Central Asian Muslim scholars.
[1] Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca: Cornell Univiersty Press, 2016); Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2012); An Empire of Others: Creating Ethnographic Knowledge in Imperial Russia and the USSR, ed. Roland Cvetkovski and Alexis Hofmeister (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2014); Catherine B. Clay, “Ethnography and Mission: Imperial Russia and Muslim Turkic Peoples on the Caspian Frontier in the 1850s” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 18-2 (Fall 1994): 15–40.
[2] Ian Campbell, Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917 (Ithaca: Cornell, 2017); Alexander Morrison, “Sufism, Pan-Islamism and Information Panic: Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin and the Aftermath of the Andijan Uprising,” Past & Present 214-1 (2012): 255–304; Pavel Shabley and Paolo Sartori, “Tinkering with Codification in the Kazakh Steppe: ʿĀdat and Sharīʿa in the Work of Osmolovskii,” In Sharīʿa in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550–1917, ed. Paolo Sartori and Danielle Ross (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 209–38.
[3] “Zhurnal prisutstviia Turgaiskogo oblastnogo pravleniia po sudnomu otdeleniia—Ianvar’ 1870 (ot 2 ianvar’ia 1870 do 30 ianvar’ia 1870),” Tsentral’nyi Gostudarstvennyi Arkhiv–Respublika Kazakhstan (hereafter TsGA–RK), fond 25, opis 1, delo 16, list 64 ob.
[4] Ibid., list 65.
[5] Ibid., list 68ob.
[6] Ibid., list 70, 70ob.
[7] Uyama, Tomohiko, “A Particularist Empire: The Russian Policies of Christianization and Military Conscription in Central Asia,” In Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, ed. Tomohiko Uyama (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), p. 26
[8] TsGA–RK, fond 25, opis 1, delo 16, list 70.
[9] Ibid., list 70.
[10] Paolo Sartori and Pavel Shablei, Eksperimenty imperii: Adat, shariat i proizvodstvo znanii v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2019), pp. 110–13; Gul’mira S. Sultangalieva, “Kazakhskie chinovniki Rossiiskoi Imperii XIX v.: osobennosti vospriiatiia vlasti,” Cahiers du mondes russe, 56/4 (2015) http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/8214
[11] TsGA RK fond 25, opis 1, delo 18, list 71.
[12] “Zhurnal sudnogo otdeleniia za Mart mesiats 1870 goda,” TsGA–RK, fond 25, opis 1, delo 16, list 36-37.
[13] Muḥammad Shākir Tūqāyev, Tārīkh-i Istarlībāsh (Kazan, 1899), 8.
[14] Ibid., 9.
[15] Ibid., 7.
[16] Ibid., 11.
[17] For an example of Aqmulla’s linguistic and ethnic ambiguity, Āqmenlānıng Shihābaddīn al-Marjānī marthiyası wa bāshqā shıgrlare (Kazan: Elektro-tipografiia “Sharaf,” 1907), 8, in which he proclaims that he has composed his elegy for the Kazan Tatar historian and jurist Shihābaddīn al-Marjānī “in Kazakh.”
[18] Miftāḥaddīn “Aqmullā” Kamāladdīn-ulı, “Mäkianım minem iatkan — atı zindan…”, Akmulla: shigır’lär, ed. Mirkasıim Gosmanov (Kazan: Tatarstan kitap näshriyatı, 1981), 111.
[19] Ibid., 108–13.
[20] Ibid., 126.