Sharīʿa in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550-1917

Description

This book looks at how Islamic law was practiced in Russia from the conquest of the empire’s first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire’s Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and ‘customary’ law. Based upon difficult to access sources written in a variety of languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), it offers scholars of Russian history, Islamic history and colonial history an account of Islamic law in Russia of the same quality and detail as the scholarship currently available on Islam in the British and French colonial empires. Contents List of Contributors Introduction- The Reach and Limits of Sharīʿa in the Russian Empire, c.1552–1917 1 Islamic Education for All: Technological Change, Popular Literacy and the Transformation of the Volga-Ural Madrasa, 1650s–1910s 2 Taqlīd and Discontinuity: The Transformation of Islamic Legal Authority in the Volga-Ural Region 3 Debunking the ‘Unfortunate Girl’ Paradigm: Volga-Ural Muslim Women’s Knowledge Culture and its Transformation across the Long Nineteenth Century 4 Between Imperial Law and Islamic Law: Muslim Subjects and the Legality of Remarriage in Nineteenth-Century Russia 5 Islamic Scholars among the Kereys of Northern Kazakhstan, 1680–1850 6 Tinkering with Codification in the Kazakh Steppe- ʿĀdat and Sharīʿa in the work of Efim Osmolovskii 7 Taqlīd and Ijtihād over the Centuries: The Debates on the Islamic Legal Theory in Daghestan, 1700s–1920s 8 Kunta Ḥājjī and the Stolen Horse 9 What We Talk about When We Talk about Taqlīd in Russian Central Asia 10 Take Me to Khiva: Sharīʿa as Governance in the Oasis of Khorezm (Nineteenth Century–Early Twentieth) Index