The Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia by Danielle Ross (review)

In this highly original examination of a crucial period in the history of the Tatars settled in the Volga-Ural region within the Russian Empire, Danielle Ross has provided a remarkably cohesive, information-laden, and well-planned discourse. Temporally, her focus ranges from the mid-seventeenth century to the Revolutionary and Civil War years of 1917 to the early 1920s. Most of her time and effort, however, are concentrated on the eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries, within which she lays out a simultaneously expansive yet narrowly constructed model of Tatar developments that emanate from and center on the evolution of the religious elite, principally the ulama, who founded, managed, and defined the character of the higher religious schools, or madrasas, as a tight-knit familial enterprise. The latter was forged not from isolated, individual, and unrelated elements but from the expanding communities of particular madrasa families, teachers, economic purveyors, and intellectuals who came to dominate the full extent of Tatar interests until the latter decades of the empire, when countervailing forces began to undermine and eliminate their impact.

Ross identifies this collective phenomenon as the "Machkaran Network" (P. 97), after the Machkara Madrasa situated in the town of Malmyzh, a little over sixty miles from Kazan. Until the publication of her book, we knew little of the details and specific activities of the personalities involved in this remarkable turn of events, what drove them, how they managed to extend their influence within their own culture and with respect to Russian authority, and what ends they sought from their activities.

In many respects, we have here a text that requires inordinate amounts of attention and quite slow reading so as to maintain control of the details exposed and not lose track of either the multitude of principals filling its pages or the author's arguments. Moreover, the text proposes an impressive number of generalizations and conclusions from beginning to end that relies upon fulfilling its conceptual framework entailing three especially broad elements, each of which involves a lengthy story unto itself: (1) how Russia's expansion southward and eastward allowed emergence of the Tatar ulama as a "coherent regional elite"; (2) how over two centuries that Tatar elite developed its ability to acquire and exercise extraordinary influence over its coreligionists; and (3) how its "engagement in settler migration, long-distance trade, orientalist compilations of data, educational reform, and liberal democratic politics fueled conflicts within their ranks and among those over whom they sought to exercise authority" (P. 12). In the process, the Tatars of the Volga-Ural region, following the collapse of the Kazan Khanate in the mid-sixteenth century, moved from dwelling in divided, discordant, and competing settlements to a flourishing unified community by the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Consequent and necessary to her entire effort, Ross draws up a plan that unfolds from chapter to chapter – nine in all, along with an Introduction and Conclusion. Each provides a theme or set of themes demanding detailed pursuit, leading to short-term conclusions serving to close each chapter while laying some defining groundwork for subsequent ones. What Ross proposes as her novel and dominant theme is the emergence of a vibrant class of madrasa-based individuals whose impact on Tatar society hinged on the families to which they belonged. More important, she defines a trajectory from the eighteenth century that involves these parties in the remaking of the madrasas from complacent, largely out-of-touch institutions, much like early Christian monasteries, to educational, intellectual, and economic centers of a quite different character. Just as those early religious communities to the West evolved during the subsequent Carolingian decades (eighth–ninth centuries), they came to typify a very different, more open and vital kind of institution with their educated, often itinerant scholars traversing sites across Europe, creating libraries by finding, gathering, copying, and...