Writing in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an “Orientalist” was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for “Oriental Learning”—the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the “Anglicists” led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic “Orientalist” judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,”Footnote ² which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.Footnote ³

This vignette shows clearly enough how the meaning of “Orientalist” has changed (and continues to change) over the years. For the purposes of this article I will use the term without inverted commas to indicate a scholar who studies the East, normally the Islamic world and its dominant languages of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic, and with inverted commas when referring to Said's largely pejorative use of it. As the example of Macaulay suggests, sometimes a distinction needs to be made between “Orientalist” attitudes, and the role played by Orientalists and the knowledge they produced in furthering or securing European colonialism. Although this is not a meaning he intended, Lyall's observation also suggests that the link between the acquisition of Oriental knowledge by Europeans and their exercise of power over the Orient is not as clear as is often assumed. I do not wish to engage in a general debate on the nature or merits of Said's ideas in Orientalism: this has been covered exhaustively by scholars much better-qualified than me to evaluate his arguments, particularly at the level of discourse and representation.Footnote ⁴

Said occasionally hinted that the vast epistemological construction which he outlined in Orientalism was capable of producing its own reality, that denigrating and manipulative “Orientalist” stereotypes could be absorbed and internalized by their subjects, rendering them ripe for Western imperial domination. But this question was less important to him than the discursive practices that produced this body of knowledge in the first place.Footnote ⁵ Said also concentrated largely on European writing about Middle Eastern territories which, with the exception of Egypt, had been either independent or under Ottoman Rule during the heyday of nineteenth-century imperial expansion. However, even before Orientalism was published other scholars had begun to argue that academic and literary knowledge of the Orient had an intimate relationship with the extension of European imperial power in the oldest and most extensive European possessions there, namely Algeria and, the preeminent example, British India. It was here that colonial states existed which could use the knowledge produced by Orientalists in creating revenue settlements, drawing up law codes, administering censuses, and formulating policies that might directly affect the lives of millions. As Lyall also wrote in 1872, “There are other cases in which the action of our own law courts, in stereotyping and enforcing invariably customs that were naturally very elastic and varying, tended to check the natural modifications according to circumstances, the sloughing off of decayed forms. …”Footnote ⁶

How “colonial knowledge” once employed by the colonial state on a mass scale could begin to transform colonized societies, was something first explored by the late Bernard Cohn, to a large extent independently of Said, and others have followed his lead.Footnote ⁷ There is now a rich literature covering the transformation of legal systems under colonial rule,Footnote ⁸ the role of ethnographic knowledge in sustaining colonial rule in India,Footnote ⁹ and the “Neo-Orientalisation” of Indian Society in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Perhaps the most innovative use of Said's ideas was by C. A. Bayly in demonstrating how the exploitation of preexisting Indian intelligence and knowledge networks by the East India Company provided it with accurate information that proved crucial to sustaining colonial rule.Footnote ¹¹

Recently there has been a good deal of debate about the application of theories of “Orientalism” and “colonial forms of knowledge” to the Russian Empire.Footnote ¹² Said himself, as Adeeb Khalid has noted, specifically excluded Russia from his analysis of Western “Orientalism,”Footnote ¹³ although ironically Vera Tolz has shown that in some ways the intellectual genealogy of Said's ideas can be traced back to critiques of Western scholarship by Russian Orientalists in the late Tsarist period.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the direct employment of Orientalists and the knowledge they produce by colonial states, together with the actual impact of “Orientalist” attitudes on colonial governance and law—what I call “applied Orientalism”—have received less attention than they deserve in the Russian context,Footnote ¹⁵ and almost none in Central Asia.Footnote ¹⁶ As Elena Campbell has suggested, this is particularly unfortunate since the development of Oriental Studies in Russia in the nineteenth century was often closely linked to the administrative needs of newly conquered borderlands.Footnote ¹⁷ One reason for this gap is that until 1991 the provincial archives of the various republics of the USSR, whose records were essential for serious historical research on Russian imperialism, were closed to foreign scholars. Another reason is that, as Vera Tolz has pointed out,Footnote ¹⁸ despite some valuable contributions in literary studies,Footnote ¹⁹ much of the writing on this subject has tended either to apply Said's ideas rather uncritically to Russia or else to argue that Russia's Sonderweg, her status as a “Eurasian” rather than a European empire, means that Said's ideas are not applicable to Russian imperialism at all.Footnote ²⁰ In this article I wish to look at what I call “Applied Orientalism” in the Russian context—that is, the points at which the study of Oriental languages, religions, and societies and the exercise of imperial power intersected. By comparing the activities of Orientalists within the British and Russian empires, I will explore the vexed issue of whether Russian “Orientalism” was distinctive or even qualitatively different from that in the Western European empires, and clarify the extent to which Orientalists and the knowledge they produced were employed in the structures of Russian imperial governance.

THE “ORIENTAL” AS ORIENTALIST

Said wrote, “The Orientalist is outside the Orient,” and he considered a strict separation between self and other to be characteristic of “Orientalist” Scholarship. One aspect of this was that “Orientals” themselves were not permitted to participate in its production; instead their histories, languages, and cultures were recreated and appropriated by Western authorities for their own ends.Footnote ²¹ Nicholas Dirks and Ronald Inden both remark on this separation and deny the relevance of dialogue and collaboration in the production of knowledge under colonial “hegemony,” whilst Gyan Prakash writes, “Orientalism was a European enterprise from the very beginning. The scholars were European; the audience was European; and the Indians figured as inert objects of knowledge.”Footnote ²²

Confronted with this sort of statement, historians of the Russian Empire often point triumphantly to the figure of Mirza Alexander Kazem-Bek, a Persian from Resht who converted to Christianity and became Professor of Arabic and Islamic law at Kazan University,Footnote ²³ or more famously still, Chokan Valikhanov, the Kazakh nobleman whose works became a touchstone for Russian understanding of the Steppe.Footnote ²⁴ These cases, Nathaniel Knight has argued, show that Russian Orientalism is different from its Western counterpart.Footnote ²⁵ However, in his pioneering examinations of the colonial census and law, Bernard Cohn describes what is clearly a collaborative enterprise of knowledge formation in India, pointing to the importance of Indian census enumerators, and of the Pundits and Maulvies who were the gatekeepers of legal and religious knowledge. Eleven Pundits were responsible for providing Warren Hastings with the Sanskrit text that eventually became Nathaniel Halhed's Code of Gentoo Laws, while others would later work with Sir William Jones and Henry Colebrooke.Footnote ²⁶ James Tod, to take one of the “Orientalists” singled out for particular attention by Ronald Inden, relied upon “a learned Jain” and upon Jati Gyanchandra, the chief pundit at Udaipur, for most of the material that he would later work into that neo-Gothic extravaganza, The Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan.Footnote ²⁷ It is undeniable that British Orientalists subsequently rewrote, distorted, and manipulated the knowledge they received from their Indian interlocutors, partly through simple ignorance and misunderstanding but also to serve particular administrative purposes.Footnote ²⁸ Nevertheless the reasons why, for instance, the Brahminical understanding of Hinduism and the caste system came to predominate amongst the British in India have a great deal to do with the fact that the principal informants for the likes of Jones and Colebrooke were Brahmins with their own agendas.Footnote ²⁹ This process of information transfer from Indians to the British helped the latter to rule more effectively until the 1830s, privileging certain groups within Indian society. When in the 1840s and 1850s a growing sense of racial and cultural superiority led the British to begin to ignore Indian informants and disregard “Oriental Knowledge,” this information failure contributed heavily to the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny.Footnote ³⁰

All such examples are open to the objection that this involvement in the early stages of the production and transfer of knowledge did not make “Orientals” equal partners in the enterprise, let alone gain them any representation or recognition in the academic discipline of Orientalism such as Mirza Kazem-Bek received in Russia.Footnote ³¹ However, if we look at published texts and translations (and it is worth remembering that most Orientalists spend most of their time producing these) we can find examples of this in the British Empire as well. The early years of the canonical Gibb series of Oriental texts are dominated by the collaboration between Edward Granville Browne and the Persian scholar Mirza Muhammad Qazvini, culminating in the latter's seminal text edition of Juwaini's Ta'rikh-e Jahan-Gusha, the first volume of which was published in 1912. In 1949 Arthur Arberry could refer to him as “the doyen of modern Persian Studies.”Footnote ³² Michael Dodson's recent work on the Government Sanskrit College at Benares has shown that the scholarly work produced there was the product of dialogue between British Sanskritists and Brahmin Pandits, with a preponderant role played by the latter, whose goals and interests were often very different from those of the British.Footnote ³³ If we now look in detail at the membership and publications of the original Orientalist institution, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a very different picture emerges from that sketched by Inden, Dirks, or indeed Said himself.Footnote ³⁴

In his original address on the founding of the Society in 1784 Sir William Jones said, “Whether you will enrol as members any number of learned natives, you will hereafter decide.”Footnote ³⁵ As Dr Rajendra Lal Mitra recalled in the Society's “Centenary Review”: “At first it was not expected that the natives of this country would join the society […] and the question was not mooted for many years afterwards. On 7 January 1829, Dr. H. H. Wilson proposed some native names, and they were elected; similar propositions were subsequently made from time to time, and duly adopted. In the Code of Rules now in force, it is laid down, that ‘persons of all nations shall be eligible as members of the society.’”Footnote ³⁶

Although the number of Indian members remained small, as early as 1838 one Babu Ramcomul Sen was made a secretary of the Society, and in 1853 he was joined by Ram Gopal Ghose, who in 1858 became a vice-president.Footnote ³⁷ Thereafter there was always at least one Indian vice-president, although in 1865 there were still only fifty-two Indian members, as opposed to 324 Europeans.Footnote ³⁸ However, if their role in the Society's governance was limited at this stage, Indians were prominent contributors to its publications. The very first volume of Asiatick Researches, the Society's scholarly proceedings, carried a contribution from an Indian scholar, Pandit Ramlochan, who had been Jones' Sanskrit tutor.Footnote ³⁹ It was the Asiatic Society, Dr. Mitra recalled, which came to the rescue of the Bibliotheca Indica series of publications of important Indian historical, linguistic, and philosophical works when its funding was withdrawn by the East India Company following the overthrow of the Orientalists by the Anglicists in the wake of Macaulay's 1835 Minute. “The Pandits and the Maulvies who had been employed by the government to edit the works volunteered their services free of charge, and one gentleman, Nawab Tanhar Jang of Chitpur, undertook to defray the entire cost of printing the Share ul-Islam.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Dr. Mitra himself produced the first descriptive catalogue of the Society's Sanskrit manuscripts, and the list of Arabic and Persian publications produced in the Bibliotheca Indica series by 1883 shows that all but one (the Ain-i Akbari) was produced with the involvement of a Muslim scholar (most of them described as “Maulvies of the Calcutta Madrasa”Footnote ⁴¹), with two, the Muntakhabat al-Lubab and the Maasir-i Alamgiri, edited by Maulavi Kabir al-Din with no European involvement.Footnote ⁴² The Sanskrit series was edited by a group of two German, three English, and five Indian scholars, and out of the total of 266 fascicles produced before 1883, 181 were edited by Indian scholars, Mitra producing thirty of them.Footnote ⁴³ The list of papers and contributions to the Society's Proceedings up to 1883 shows 178 articles by Indian scholars, although admittedly 114 of these were by the indefatigable Dr. Mitra, mostly on Sanskrit and Pali inscriptions. Interestingly, Mitra also played an important role in drawing up a list of the social precedence of the castes of Bengal for the 1881 census, which became a matter of fierce dispute among Indian scholars and officials.Footnote ⁴⁴

By the turn of the century the Asiatic Society was as much an Indian (or at any rate, Bengali) institution as a British one. In 1908 its president was the Hon. Mr. Justice Asutosh Mukhopadhyay, and the list of ordinary members included 146 Indians, or 35 percent of the total, and 271 Europeans. Of the thirty-six authors who contributed to that year's Journal and Proceedings, nineteen were Indians, although admittedly some were writing on scientific rather than historical or linguistic topics.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the overall conclusion could hardly be clearer: Orientalism in India was not an entirely European enterprise.

THE PROBLEM WITH RUSSIA

Historians of the Russian Empire are often unaware of how inapplicable Said's East-West binary opposition can sometimes be even to those arch-colonialists, the British in India. This is seen in a well-known debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid in the pages of Kritika in 2000, and to some extent in that which followed in Ab Imperio in 2002.Footnote ⁴⁶ Khalid convincingly demonstrated the often close connection between some branches of Russian academic Orientalism and imperialism, but as Maria Todorova pointed out in her response to the debate, he occasionally uses Said too uncritically, in particular in his assertion that the dichotomization of the world into East and West by Europeans “dates back to the Greeks.” This does injustice to Herodotus in particular, but also makes too many assumptions about the continuity of attitudes in the subsequent two-and-a-half millennia.Footnote ⁴⁷ For Western Europeans, Russia (and before that Byzantium) was sometimes considered part of the “Orient,” sometimes not, whilst in terms of power the “dichotomy” between Europe and Asia that Khalid speaks of only really began to emerge with the growth of European military and technological superiority in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸

Knight's approach here and in earlier work was to argue that Russian Orientalism, whether represented by individuals or considered as an entire academic discipline, was “idiosyncratic,” different from its French, British, and German counterparts because of Russia's distinctive position between East and West.Footnote ⁴⁹ Taking as his example the Petersburg-trained Orientalist V. V. Grigoriev (or Grigor'ev), Knight writes that he did not hold “Orientalist” views because he believed that the Kazakhs (or to use the passage Knight quotes, “separate individuals from a lower, immature race”) could be raised up to the Russian level, regardless of their race.Footnote ⁵⁰ Grigoriev's clear assumption is that European culture is “higher” and more “mature” than the Asiatic, something which lies at the heart of “Orientalism” as Said describes it, and his belief in the possibility of improvement through education echoes Macaulay's hope for the emergence of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect.”Footnote ⁵¹ As Khalid pointed out, “Orientalism invests heavily in romantic, civilizational ideas of the nation rather than racial ones.”Footnote ⁵² To this we might add “Utilitarian,” since neither Macaulay nor even the notorious James Mill thought that Indians were essentially backward; rather they considered that this backwardness had been produced environmentally by bad government, false religion, and defective education (something Mill warned would also happen in England without political reform).Footnote ⁵³ The difference, Knight suggests, lies in Grigoriev's belief in the value for Asiatics of maintaining or “rediscovering” their “national” traditions, but this too has its echoes in Western Orientalism, most obviously in the work of James Tod or Max Müller. Presented thus, Grigoriev's beliefs lay in a strange no-man's-land between the Anglicists and Orientalists of British India, but taken to their logical conclusion they would appear to doom Asian civilizations to eternal backwardness.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Vera Tolz has shown, some of Grigoriev's successors, most notably V. V. Barthold,Footnote ⁵⁵ later criticized this sort of “civilizational” stereotyping of the East as well,Footnote ⁵⁶ but although their targets were mostly Western scholars, Grigoriev's example shows clearly enough that, in this respect, Russian “Orientalism” did not differ significantly from its Western counterparts.

Knight adds that, far from assisting in Russian imperial expansion, Grigoriev opposed the Russian policy of conquest in Central Asia and wished to see the Kazakhs only under indirect rule, with the Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand remaining entirely independent.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nevertheless, if we turn to India once again we find that in this his attitude is no different from that of James Tod, who similarly argued against the outright annexation of the Rajput States of North-Western India by the British, and in his dedication to the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, addressed to George IV, asked that, “their admirer and annalist may, perhaps, be permitted to hope that the sighs of this ancient and interesting race for the restoration of their former independence, which it would suit our wisest policy to grant, may be deemed not undeserving of Your Majesty's regard.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Seventy years later Edward Browne, whom we have already encountered working with Muhammad Qazvini, supported the Persian Constitutional movement against British and Russian encroachments, drew international attention to Russian atrocities in Northern Persia, and even attacked the Indian Civil Service.Footnote ⁵⁹ Anti-imperialist Orientalists were hardly peculiar to Russia, but it has always been true that, whatever their personal views, the knowledge they produce can still be made use of by states for aggressive and conquering purposes. As Knight writes, “The mechanisms through which specialized knowledge of the orient is transformed into colonial power are not always clear, even in the context of Western Imperialism.” In fact Grigoriev himself, perhaps unwittingly, helped to produce a text that could have been of considerable use to the military authorities in Central Asia. Mirza Shams Bukhari's Ta'rikh-e Bukhara, Khoqand va Kashghar was commissioned by Grigoriev in 1859 from a Bukharan Mirza who was then living in Orenburg after having fled the Emirate during Emir Nasrullah's reign, and Grigoriev subsequently translated and published it.Footnote ⁶⁰ It provided some of the most detailed analysis the Russians then possessed of the internal politics of the Emirate under Nasrullah, and together with Nikolai Khanykov's Opisanie Bukharskogo Khanstva was one of the few sources on recent Bukharan history available to the Russians at the time of the conquest.Footnote ⁶¹ However, Bukhari was a political exile and had a particular interest in painting Emir Nasrullah in the blackest of colors; his description of the brutalities of Nasrullah's reign, which chimed with older Russian narratives of the massacre of Prince Bekovich-Cherkasskii's Khivan expedition in 1721, confirmed a number of Russian prejudices about those who became their new Central Asian subjects after the fall of Tashkent in 1865.Footnote ⁶²

ISLAMOPHOBIC PARANOIA IN TURKESTAN

Under Catherine the Great, the Russian state had espoused a policy of enlightened toleration of Islam, seeking to erastianize it by creating a muftiate and spiritual assembly in the border town of Orenburg that mirrored the state-controlled hierarchies of the Orthodox Church. The state even dispatched Tatar mullahs into the Steppe to “civilize” the Kazakhs,Footnote ⁶³ printed and distributed officially sanctioned copies of the Koran, and sought to play an important confessional role in the lives of its Muslim subjects.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, the mid-nineteenth century saw a sea change in Russian attitudes towards Islam. This was partly owing to increasing instances of apostasy amongst the baptized Tatars of the Volga Region,Footnote ⁶⁵ but was primarily because of the bloody war in the North Caucasus, where the Russians believed that Shamil and other Naqshbandi ishans Footnote ⁶⁶ had formed the backbone of the lengthy resistance to them. Alexander Knysh has suggested that this was unjustified, but that it contributed to an increasingly fixed idea of the danger posed by Sufi orders, or “Myuridizm,” as the Russians referred to it.Footnote ⁶⁷ This suspicion was extended to Muslims more generally, including the ‘ulama with whom the Russians had previously cooperated, as the idea of the enlightened, multi-confessional state began to lose ground to secular notions of grazhdanstvennost’ (civic values), Russian nationalism, fear of Muslim “fanaticism,” and pessimism over the prospects for the integration of Muslims into imperial society.Footnote ⁶⁸ This change is clear from the 1867 decision of the first governor-general of Russian Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, to exclude the newly conquered province from the jurisdiction of the Orenburg mufti and introduce Ignorirovanie, the “not knowing” of Islam. Under this system the state was supposed to sever its connection with Islam, and von Kaufman believed that this, together with the example set by the Russians of the superiority of Western civilization, would be enough to woo Muslims from their faith.Footnote ⁶⁹

Paradoxically, an exaggerated fear of Muslim revolt combined with a lack of resources meant that the colonial regime in Turkestan did nothing very active to undermine Islam, although the writings of colonial officials indicate clearly that they would have liked to.Footnote ⁷⁰ Christian proselytization was banned, waqf property was only very rarely confiscated and largely untaxed, the qazis' courts were preserved, and plans were even put in place to regulate the Haj, although they came to nothing.Footnote ⁷¹ However, what led to these survivals was fear of what colonial officials invariably referred to as “Musul'manskii Fanatizm,” rather than a continued belief in Islam's utility as a tool of government.Footnote ⁷² Such “Orientalist” ideas about the inherent “fanaticism” of Russia's Muslims gained wider currency through the unpleasant polemical writings of M. A. Miropiev, a product of the Anti-Islamic division of the Kazan theological academy, and later through those of Agafangel Krymskii, who was educated at Kiev University and believed the racial characteristics of Russian Muslims, particularly Turks, rendered them “fanatical.”Footnote ⁷³ In the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion, similar views of Muslims as “fanatical” could be found amongst some British writers and officials in India, most notably the vice-chancellor of the University of Calcutta, Dr. W. W. Hunter. But there these were challenged to a much greater degree, not least because the British sought (not always successfully) to turn India's Muslims into allies against the remainder of the population.Footnote ⁷⁴

In the continuing debate amongst Turkestan's colonial officials over whether military rule could be slackened and greater elements of civilian grazhdanstvennost' introduced to the region, the dangers of “Islamic fanaticism” invariably turned out to be the clincher which ensured the continuance of military control.Footnote ⁷⁵ This fear of Islam was brought to a head by the most significant violent challenge to Russian rule before the turmoil of the war years: the Andijan uprising of 1898. On the night of 13 May, an ishan from Ming-Tepe in the Ferghana Valley called Muhammad Ali, known as “Diwana” (“the mad”) or the “Dukchi Ishan” (because his father had been a spindle-maker), led his followers, most of whom were nomadic Kipchaks, in an ill-coordinated attack on the Russian garrison. Twenty-two soldiers were killed and twenty wounded, but the uprising had already been suppressed by the time the news reached Tashkent.Footnote ⁷⁶ Nevertheless, Andijan seemed to confirm Russian assumptions about the inherently “fanatical” nature of Turkestan's Muslims and the consequent dangers of an Islamic revolt and holy war. It also called into question the whole policy of Ignorirovanie, and led then Governor-General Dukhovskoi to advocate the creation of a state-sponsored Islamic hierarchy in the region, an appeal that fell upon deaf ears.Footnote ⁷⁷ This was not only because of a fear that there would be more rebellions stemming from “backwardness,” but also because of a perceived new Pan-Islamic threat: there were suggestions that the Dukchi Ishan had received a khalat and other encouragement from the Turkish Sultan.Footnote ⁷⁸

Building on earlier paranoia, the aftermath of the Andijan revolt saw the elaboration of a Legende Noire around Naqshbandi Sufism in Central Asia which is highly reminiscent of that created by the French about the Sanussiya in North Africa.Footnote ⁷⁹ V. P. Salkov's virulently anti-Islamic book on the uprising was circulated to all secondary schools, free libraries, and reading rooms.Footnote ⁸⁰ It accused the ishan of raping a minor, and contained lurid (and imagined) descriptions of him inciting his followers to revolt: “The Ishan ordered the declaration of a holy war against the hated urus, and immediately on all sides could be heard the awful, ill-omened, cries, which beggar description: Ghazavat! Ghazavat!! Ghaza!”Footnote ⁸¹

As part of the official response to Andijan the Samarkand military governor, Major-General Fedorov, assembled a committee (which included two local Orientalists, V. P. Nalivkin and V. L. VyatkinFootnote ⁸²) to put together a handbook on the tenets and practices of Islam for the edification of colonial administrators, a copy of which was placed in every district chancellery. This was replete with Islamophobic sentiments, and denounced “Dervishizm” and “Myuridizm,” pointed up the dangers of the Haj, described Central Asian maktabs and madrasahs as “the main supporters of Musulman obscurantism,” and looked forward to Islam's imminent demise: “Naturally, at this time no-one has any doubt any longer that Muslim culture has outlived its time and with each day comes closer to final fall and dissolution.”Footnote ⁸³ This bragging triumphalism was mostly bluff. Fear was much more evident in a passage that came just a few pages after the confident prediction above: “In conclusion we cannot fail to answer directly the question which arises unwillingly for every Russian with the memory of the recent sad events in Ferghana: how dangerous is Sufism to us with its Ishans? The recent history of so-called Myuridizm in the Caucasus, the development of Sufism in Turkey and the current state of dervishism in Africa are all too well known to every educated man to need further circulation. They serve as an excellent illustration of the vitality and strength of Sufism.”Footnote ⁸⁴ This lesson was underscored in lurid essays on “Dervishism in Turkestan” and “Jihad or Ghazavat.” (“It is not really holy war, but wild barbaric brigandage.”)Footnote ⁸⁵ As Martin Thomas has suggested, Orientalist stereotyping of this kind (and in particular exaggerated fears of Islamic “fanaticism”) could compromise the intelligence networks of colonial states, not least because it often led them to chase red herrings: one mark of a particularly talented or well-informed operative was the ability to see beyond such stereotyping.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the atmosphere of heightened paranoia after the Andijan uprising rumors of further conspiracies abounded. One bizarre case that began three months later provides a fine example of “applied Orientalism,” and an object lesson in both the damaging effect that “Orientalist” prejudice about Muslim “fanaticism” could have on a colonial administration and the usefulness of having an Orientalist (without inverted commas) among its personnel.

For over a year, from August 1898 to September 1899, the Russian administrators of the neighboring uyezds (districts) of Chimkent and Aulie-Ata, in what is now Southern Kazakhstan, tied themselves into knots pursuing a will o'the wisp of Islamic conspiracy and Sufi “fanaticism.” A Kazakh informant had spun a yarn to a series of credulous officials about the Dukchi Ishan having distributed firearms among the local population. He subsequently embellished this by persuading the Russians that the Amir of Afghanistan, ‘Abd ur-Rahman Khan, had sent a letter under his seal inciting the Kazakhs to rise up in a ghazavat against the Russians. Despite the fact that these accusations centered on the informant's father-in-law, against whom he had a grudge, not only was he believed but several officials went out of their way to affirm his trustworthiness. His allegations attracted the attention of the Tashkent prokurator (state prosecutor) and sparked a search for weapons amongst the Kazakhs of the Aulie-Ata district that lasted for over a year but turned up almost nothing. The bubble finally burst when the Kazakh informant was interviewed by the assistant to the nachal'nik (commandant) of the Chimkent district, Captain Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin, who immediately reported that he considered him to be not entirely sane. Lykoshin subsequently investigated, working with the Chimkent ‘ulama, and revealed that the whole affair had been a mare's nest. Their textual analysis of the letter from ‘Abd ur-Rahman Khan revealed it to be a shoddy forgery.Footnote ⁸⁷ By then, however, the local administration's year-long wild-goose chase had generated over one hundred and twenty folios of Doznanie (witness statements).

The reason Lykoshin's involvement made such a difference was that he spoke fluent Turkic and Persian; he was a significant contributor to late-Tsarist Oriental studies who had first given notice of his talents with a series of articles for Turkestanskiya Vedomosti (the government newspaper) on life in the “native” quarter of Tashkent.Footnote ⁸⁸ Since then, he had translated the early Bukharan historian Narshakhi from Persian into Russian, in collaboration with V. V. Barthold. He would later do the same with Muhammad Sadiq Kashghari's Code of Eastern Proprieties, on which he based a book of instruction in Muslim social mores for his less refined compatriots (first published in the second, more scholarly volume of the handbook on Islam for administrators referred to earlier).Footnote ⁸⁹ Lykoshin (1860–1922) was a hereditary nobleman from Pskov who studied at the Pavlovskaya Military Academy, began his administrative career as a pristav (police-chief) in the small town of Ura-Tepe in 1889, and never saw active military service. After serving in Chimkent he became commandant of the Khujand District from 1905 to 1912, and ended his career as a major general and governor of Samarkand Province from 1914 to 1917.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although Lykoshin did not have an academic background, he is perhaps the most prominent example of the overlap to be found between the production of scholarly work on Russia's colonial territories and their administration. His output was a mixture of conventional Orientalist scholarship (his translations of Narshakhi and the eighteenth-century Sufi poet Mashrab),Footnote ⁹¹ semi-ethnographic work,Footnote ⁹² and writings on land settlement, the functioning of the “native” administration, including qazis' courts, and the progress of “civilization” among the natives.Footnote ⁹³ His views of Russia's mission in Turkestan are best described as paternalistic. Though he hoped that this would be the ultimate outcome of colonial rule, he did not believe that Muslims were yet deserving of Russian citizenship, something that would be clearly revealed in his response to the events of 1917.Footnote ⁹⁴ Nevertheless, Lykoshin's views cannot be reduced to the simple “Orientalist” belief in Muslim “fanaticism” that predominated among his less-talented compatriots. Indeed, he was often able to use his abilities as an Orientalist to dispel some of these fears, and render signal service to Turkestan's colonial regime.

ORIENTALISTS IN THE SERVICE OF RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM

Vera Tolz has argued that clear distinctions should be made between different types of Orientalist “experts” who served the Russian Empire. She suggests that the difference between Grigoriev and N. P. Ostroumov's attitudes toward Muslim peoples, highlighted in the Kritika debate between Knight and Khalid, was due at least in part to the former having been educated in the Oriental Faculty of St. Petersburg University and the latter in the anti-Islamic division of the Kazan theological academy.Footnote ⁹⁵ Even in this case it is worth noting, as Knight does, that Grigoriev, too, was hostile to Islam, but it seems to me that this is not the most important point: Orientalists with “Orientalist” attitudes can be found among university-educated academics as well (Krymskii being a good example), whilst Lykoshin was not prejudiced against Islam in the same way despite having had a purely military education. What really matters is the degree to which the worlds of scholarship and colonial rule were interpenetrating.

As Jeff Sahadeo has suggested, the degree of state control over learned societies and institutions was particularly high in Russia, while in remote frontier areas it was easier for the intelligentsia to perceive the Tsarist state as a “progressive force.” This, together with a degree of intellectual freedom that was often greater than at the center, rendered state service more attractive to scholars.Footnote ⁹⁶ Hence, even if one follows Knight in regarding Grigoriev's role within the administration of Count Perovskii (governor of the frontier town of Orenburg in the 1840s and 1850s) as merely “decorative,” his broader assertion that the Russian state overall had low levels of “permeability” to the academic discipline of Orientalism requires qualification.Footnote ⁹⁷

M. K. Baskhanov's biographical dictionary of Voennye Vostokovedy (Military Orientalists) lists 450 military officers and administrators who made contributions to the discipline of Oriental studies in Russia. Many of them, including von Kaufman produced work of dubious intellectual worth, but many were important scholars, such as Lykoshin and Nalivkin. This has its parallels in Western Orientalism: Richard Burton began his career as an officer in the Bombay Army, Snouck Hurgronje was an adviser to the government of the Dutch East Indies, Gertrude Bell was closely involved with the British Mandate in Iraq,Footnote ⁹⁸ and during World War I the Arab bureau that managed British intelligence in the Middle East counted many academics in its ranks.Footnote ⁹⁹ But the degree of interpenetration was if anything greater in the Russian Empire. Alexander Marshall has shown that in Russia, just as in Britain, the worlds of military intelligence and Oriental studies overlapped extensively. This is seen most clearly in the career of Andrei Evgenievich Snesarev, a general staff officer who spent most of his career before the revolution in Tashkent. There he wrote about British India and edited a collection of articles designed to provide serving officers with detailed knowledge of the empire's southern Asiatic frontiers,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ before becoming the head of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow in the Soviet period.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Beyond the military, other, more strictly academic Russian Orientalists also “served the empire.” Nikolai Pantusov, best known for having edited the Persian text of an important nineteenth-century history of Kokand, spent much of his early career at the disposal of the military governor in Vernoe, capital of Semirechie Province. In 1877, he was sent to the newly annexed region of Kuldja in the Ili valley to produce a detailed statistical report for the administration.Footnote ¹⁰² Another early example is the unfortunately named Alexander Ludwigovich Kun, best known as the editor of Turkestanskii Al'bom, the remarkable photographic survey of the region commissioned by General von Kaufman.Footnote ¹⁰³ Son of a Hungarian immigrant, Kun graduated from the Oriental Institute of St. Petersburg University in 1864, his thesis entitled “A review of the religious and judicial-political aspects of the Al-Koran.” He was transferred from Orenburg to the Zarafshan Valley in November 1867, when Russian troops were still fighting the Bukharans.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He subsequently took part in military expeditions to Iskander-Kul in the upper Zarafshan valley, Shahrisabz, and Khiva, gathering information about newly-conquered territory even as the troops marched in.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ During the Khivan campaign Kun was part of a team of six military Orientalists who accompanied the expeditionFootnote ¹⁰⁶ and, with the help of his interpreter Mirza ‘Abd ur-Rahman, a Samarqandi Tajik, he selected and removed a large collection of documents from the archives of the Khanate. He hoped these would be useful in developing Russian policies on landownership and taxation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Subsequently, in Kokand the Russians suppressed a revolt against their client Khan, Khudoyar, which eventually led to the outright annexation of the Khanate. During that campaign Kun worked alone, and in his obituary his friend, the military statistician N. A. Maev, recalled Kun's experience:

This effort could be seen as a display of selfless dedication to the advancement of oriental scholarship, but a less sympathetic observer might remark that the risks Kun chose to run are nothing unusual in the world of spying and intelligence collection. He did not spend all his time campaigning however. Initially General von Kaufman assigned Kun to find and catalogue the legendary library of Tamerlane in Samarkand, but after lengthy enquiries failed to reveal its whereabouts he turned to humbler fare. It was his work on land tenure, waqf (religious endowments), and taxation that should have proved most useful to the colonial regime. By questioning local qazis (judges) and collecting and interpreting deeds of waqf in the Zarafshan Valley, Kun attempted to introduce an entirely unfamiliar system of Islamic taxation and irrigated agriculture to colonial officials, whilst his survey of waqf was supposed to reveal which estates had dubious titles that would allow them to be resumed or subjected to ordinary taxation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1876, he and his successor as “Orientalist attached to the Chancellery of the Zarafshan Okrug,” M. N. Rostislavov (another product of the St. Petersburg Oriental Faculty), were organizers and delegates at the Third International Congress of Orientalists in St. Petersburg.Footnote ¹¹⁰

In concrete terms, Kun's efforts had surprisingly little impact: the documents he seized in Khiva remained largely unused until the Soviet period, and the Russians never succeeded in mastering the Bukharan system of revenue collection based on the Islamic cess of Kheraj, a 20 percent tithe of the crop, assessed at prevailing prices every year. Instead, in 1873 they were forced to switch to a fixed land-tax based on a notional 10 percent of the value of the crop from irrigated land, and to devolve the assessment of this to local aksakals (village headmen).Footnote ¹¹¹ It would be another thirty years before the Russians attempted to carry out the sort of accurate agricultural surveys (or “settlements”) that were undertaken regularly by the British in India, and in the interim the system of revenue collection remained strikingly ineffective.Footnote ¹¹² Although Kun became inspector of schools in Turkestan, fellow Orientalist N. I. Veselovskii dismissed him from this post (for reasons that remain unclear), and his premature death limited his impact on Oriental scholarship.Footnote ¹¹³ His incomplete survey of Samarkand waqf was still being cited by Vyatkin forty years later as the most extensive work yet done on the subject, and no complete survey of waqf property was completed anywhere in Turkestan except that in Ferghana, overseen by V. P. Nalivkin.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Until 1924 the Islamic institution of waqf in Turkestan remained largely intact, untaxed, and unsupervised.Footnote ¹¹⁵

“THE PATRIARCH OF TURKESTAN STUDIES”

The “empire-serving” Russian Orientalist par excellence, as Adeeb Khalid has suggested, was Nikolai Petrovich Ostroumov.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Like Miropiev, Ostroumov was a pupil of Nikolai Ilminskii in the anti-Islamic division of the Kazan theological academy. There he was associated with the missions to convert the pagan peoples of the Volga-Kama region to Orthodoxy by educating them in their native tongues. Ostroumov's early work on Islam is typical of that produced in Kazan, and in particular at its Theological Academy in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and it does not make for edifying reading.Footnote ¹¹⁷ His thesis was a crude Islamophobic polemic, partly influenced by Ernest Renan. He devoted half of it to refuting passages from the Koran by quoting the “correct” versions of the same stories and doctrines from the Bible, and the other half to denying Muhammad's status as a prophet in openly abusive terms.Footnote ¹¹⁸ A fair sample of the tenor of his argument is this passage: “History tells us that, just as the study of the Koran threatens the intellectual, moral and social life of humanity, so the study of the Evangelists assists in the development of that life.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Robert Geraci has observed that Ilminskii, whom Ostroumov claimed as his mentor and who certainly acted as his patron, had little time for polemical proselytizing. If so, Ostroumov did not take this lesson to heart. In fact, he seems to have been much more heavily influenced by Father Evfimii Malov, who was the Professor of anti-Islamic studies at the academy while Ostroumov was working there, and whom Ostroumov briefly succeeded.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1877, Governor-General von Kaufman recruited Ostroumov as an “expert on Islam” to serve as inspector of schools in Turkestan.Footnote ¹²¹ There, Christian proselytization was forbidden and Ostroumov was forced to swallow his missionary zeal, although he did translate the Bible into Turkic. He turned his attention instead to the fields of education, publishing, ethnography, the study of Islamic law and, latterly, of Islamic reformism. During this time, from 1883–1917, he was the editor of what for most of the period was the area's sole native-language newspaper, the government-controlled Turkestanskaya Tuzemnaya Gazeta.Footnote ¹²²

Ostroumov became a key consultant to every governor-general of Turkestan who wanted an expert opinion on matters Islamic or more generally connected with local life, and he also acted as censor for publications in Turkic and Persian. As B. V. Lunin put it in a Soviet-era critique of Tsarist Orientalists, Ostroumov was: “A prominent figure in the colonial administration in the sphere of education, ‘the patriarch of Turkestan studies’ (in the words of V. V. Barthold), the author of ‘interesting and useful works on ethnography’ (in the words of S. F. Oldenburg and V. R. Rozen), ‘A great expert on the local region’ and ‘the representative of all Central Asian Orientalism’ (in the words of I. Yu. Krachkovskii) and at the same time one of the most reactionary figures amongst the ‘serving Turkestantsy,’ an inveterate monarchist and sworn foe of the revolution.”Footnote ¹²³

Notwithstanding the fulsome tributes recorded by Lunin, Ostroumov was not taken very seriously by many academics. For example, Barthold in his review of Sarty, Ostroumov's magnum opus, remarked, “It is of more journalistic than scientific interest.”Footnote ¹²⁴ However, Ostroumov's published views on Islam, the Sharia, educational policy, and Turkestani history and society more generally were enormously influential in official circles. In some respects his career and writings are clear examples in support of Said's contention that Orientalists often acted as handmaids of empire: he was closely involved in structures of imperial rule, his published work was used extensively by colonial administrators, and he had a typically rigid and dogmatic understanding of Muslim belief. Hostility toward Islam and the culture it had produced is a hallmark of his work, as is a conviction of the relative backwardness of the natives of Turkestan and the benefits brought by Russian imperial rule: “In a word: the Sarts—are a people with a future; their cultural capabilities are undoubted. What is also beyond doubt is that the bad, unsympathetic traits of their national culture can with time be smoothed and changed for the better under Russian influence.”Footnote ¹²⁵

Such views should not be taken as representative of all Russian Orientalism in Turkestaņ however. Lunin's critique reflects the fact that Ostroumov remained an Orthodox conservative to the day he died under house arrest in Tashkent in 1930.Footnote ¹²⁶ His contemporary V. P. Nalivkin similarly employed his linguistic talents and knowledge of Islam in the service of the colonial regime, but Nalivkin was a radical free-thinker who came to believe that Russia was incapable of any beneficial influence on native society, and joined the Tashkent Soviet in 1917.Footnote ¹²⁷

Unlike Barthold, Veselovskii, and other “classical” Orientalists who considered that the only interesting periods of Islamic civilization lay in the distant past, Ostroumov took a profound interest in the Muslim society that he saw around him. He was particularly interested in the modernizing intellectual developments and reform movements that developed in the latter years of Tsarist rule, generally known as “Jadidism.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Thus, although he quoted with approval the infamous 1883 lecture by Renan on “Islam and Science,” which claimed that all so-called Arab contributions to medieval science were the work of “Aryans,” the conclusion Ostroumov drew from this was that progressive, enlightening movements in Islam had deeper roots outside the Arab world, exemplified by the activities of the Young Turks, which offered hope for Turkestan.Footnote ¹²⁹ Although he harbored suspicions of Islamic modernism, suspecting its proponents of having a pan-Islamist or pan-Turkic agenda, he engaged with it intellectually to a far greater extent than any of his Russian contemporaries.Footnote ¹³⁰ He grudgingly acknowledged some of its achievements, and considered it an improvement on earlier “fanatical” attitudes, although he also called for a greater advocacy of sblizhenie—rapprochement—amongst reformist leaders.Footnote ¹³¹ Whilst his published correspondence with Muslim reformers such as Devlet-Kildeev, Murza-Alim, and Akhund Bayazid was often quite combative, it acknowledged them as intellectual equals who could be engaged in constructive debate.Footnote ¹³² Adeeb Khalid has examined Ostroumov's private correspondence with the pioneering Crimean Tatar reformer Ismail Bey Gaspirali, which was by no means consistently hostile. Indeed, when Gaspirali died in 1914 the Turkestanskaya Tuzemnaya Gazeta published a lengthy obituary, together with an appreciation by Ostroumov himself.Footnote ¹³³ In a curious way Ostroumov became a patron to the late-nineteenth-century generation of Muslim intellectuals, such as the poet Furqat, publishing their essays, short stories, and poems. He was even eulogized in Turki verses in the pages of the Turkestanskaya Tuzemnaya Gazeta, which remained almost the sole public forum for the expression of Muslim reformist views until censorship was relaxed after the 1905 Revolution.Footnote ¹³⁴ Ostroumov did not view the great expansion of reformist newspapers after this date as a negative phenomenon, but instead welcomed it as evidence that the Turkestanskaya Tuzemnaya Gazeta had educated Muslims in the value of print.Footnote ¹³⁵

Thus, although Ostroumov was an Orientalist who both harbored “Orientalist” views and served the colonial regime, he turns out to be a somewhat more complex figure than Khalid suggests in his debate with Knight.Footnote ¹³⁶ Furthermore, although he clearly had a better relationship with the regime than either Grigoriev or Kun, it is not clear just how useful his advice and writings were. His opinion that Islamic law was more or less identical in India and Turkestan, together with his advocacy of the use of a Russian translation (from English) of a key Anglo-Indian judicial text, the Hedaya,Footnote ¹³⁷ strongly influenced an attempt by Senator Count K. K. Pahlen's reforming commission of 1908–1909 to use “Anglo-Muhammadan” law as the basis for a codification of the Sharia in Turkestan (despite Barthold's arguments to the contrary).Footnote ¹³⁸ This led more or less directly to its failure, since the congress of qazis Pahlen assembled in Tashkent to consider the code, according to one eyewitness, rejected it with a firm “no.”Footnote ¹³⁹ Although Mirza Kazem-Bek did produce his own “codified” version of the Sharia at Kazan University, the rigid understanding of its norms that he shared with Ostroumov was never imposed across the Russian Empire.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ This is in striking contrast with the British codifications of both Hindu and “Anglo-Muhammadan” personal law that were incorporated into the Indian penal code. (The latter remains in force in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.) In both cases, the British transformed what had been more flexible compilations of “correct conduct” (the Dharmashastras) and jurisprudential commentary (Burhan ud-din al-Marghinani's Hedaya) into “codes” informed both by Roman law and British case law. We might question whether this enterprise was of a peculiarly colonial nature, given that in the 1890s Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman Khan carried out a successful bureaucratization of Islamic law in Afghanistan (also using the Hedaya).Footnote ¹⁴¹ Similarly the degree of Indian involvement in the creation of these codes and their actual impact on Indian religious and social practice are matters of debate, but the successful reifying and employment of these forms of knowledge by the colonial state in India is clear.