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Turks across the empires: marketing Muslim identity in the Russian–Ottoman borderlands, 1856–1914 Lucien J. Frary
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Rider University Published online: 01 May 2015.
Click for updates To cite this article: Lucien J. Frary (2015): Turks across the empires: marketing Muslim identity in the Russian–Ottoman borderlands, 1856–1914, Canadian Slavonic Papers: Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2015.1036588 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2015.1036588
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BOOK REVIEW/COMPTE RENDU
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Turks across the empires: marketing Muslim identity in the Russian–Ottoman borderlands, 1856–1914, by James Meyer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, 224 pp., £60.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-198-72514-5 The Russian Revolution of 1905 sparked an unprecedented upsurge of activity among Russia’s Muslim population, especially Turks and Tatars, which resulted in a call for unity and greater participation in politics. James Meyer, assistant professor of Islamic world history at Montana State University, draws from Turkish, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and Russian archives to bridge the gap between borderlands and peoples in this innovative study of the origins of pan-Turkism. Tautly argued and empirically grounded, the book highlights the diverse nature of identity formulation during the late imperial era, when the forces of modernity presented new challenges to traditional religious communities. The monograph focuses on three Russian-Muslim activists – Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinskii, and Ahmet Ağaoğlu (described as “identity freelancers” and “future panTurkists”) – who took advantage of the changes in political and social life sponsored by the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Young Turk takeover of 1908 to implement their visions of Muslim–Turkic–Tatar solidarity. While exploring the biographies of these key players, the book investigates the experience of ordinary Muslims in central Russia, Crimea, and the southern Caucasus, as well as the pan-Turkic scene of Unionist-era Istanbul. The first chapters reveal the landscape of Muslim cultures in the frontier zones, and how state-driven reforms increased mobility and thereby politicized identity. The central chapters focus on the ways in which pan-Turkists and other Muslims in Russia and the Ottoman Empire marketed their religious and national identity programs through education, journalism, and public supra-ethnic designations (or “naming”, as Mayer puts it in chapter 5). The epilogue provides a reflection on the marketing of Muslim identity during the Cold War era and beyond. Meyer demonstrates that the ability of pan-Turkism’s founding fathers to develop unique attitudes about state policymaking was due to the voluntary and involuntary mobility of people in the southern periphery of the Russian Empire. Although tsarist officials desired to retain Muslim subjects, the practice of preventing Muslims from relinquishing their subjecthood facilitated trans-imperial migration: slipping across the border and obtaining new passports was simple, but return immigration could be advantageous. The Russian-Muslim engagement created opportunities for intellectually gifted individuals who often turned to journalism in a quest to better understand the world around them. Meanwhile, the expansion of state institutions, including local zemstva, municipal dumas, and public schools, required Russian officials to draw on “insider Muslims” to administer Muslim-inhabited lands. Spiritual assemblies and madrasas served as the hub for communications between core and periphery, and as incubators of new types of communal awareness. Centralization also led to more direct and intimate contacts between Muslims and the tsarist civil administration. The result was a spike in petitions and
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Book review/Compte rendu
protests against state expansion. Quarrels over administration and education were transformed into a contest over identity. Providing an original perspective on the impact of the 1905 Revolution on RussianMuslims, Meyer’s account contextualizes the birth of the İttifak (solidarity) movement, which became the largest Muslim-specific political organization in imperial Russia. The post-1905 media revolution led to an explosion of Muslim newspapers that appealed to a new generation of activists (including the Jadids) who were jockeying for community leadership. Muslims across regions split over matters related to both politics and identity. Ottomanism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Turkism emerged as the most prominent identity forms. Even though the tsar’s Muslims identified themselves primarily by their religion, not their ethnicity, pan-Turkism, according to Akçura, Gasprinskii, and Ağaoğlu, was the greater identifier. Thanks, in part, to the porous nature of the Russian–Ottoman borderlands, Russia became a centre of the pan-Turkism movement. Meyer’s analysis demonstrates that being Muslim (in contrast to being Jewish) had certain advantages in late imperial Russia, especially with regards to mobility and participating in local authority. His story is not limited, however, to a tiny group of extraordinary thinkers; it also presents a fascinating portion of the long history of Russian–Muslim interactions. In all, it seems that the Young Turks would have been impressed by Muslim participation in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Meyer has gone a long way in uncovering additional material pertaining to the subject of Muslim selfidentity in tsarist Russia. Lucien J. Frary Rider University
[email protected] © 2015, Lucien J. Frary
