The challenge of working with heavily localized Muslim sources is how to make them useful for understanding broader contexts, especially if these broader questions are nowhere systematically addressed in the sources. Allen Frank is a master in this genre; one of his earlier books studied the identity of Muslims in the Russian Empire by analysing local versions of Islamic shrine catalogues (Islamic Historiography and “Bulghar” Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia, Leiden: Brill, 1998), and in another monograph he used a village history to analyse the anatomy and practice of a Muslim mosque community (Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia, Leiden: Brill, 2001). In his new book Frank explores another unpublished Tatar village history, but not for what this manuscript has to tell us about that community or its mosques; rather, the aim is to analyse the Volga Tatars’ general relation to Bukhara, the old centre of Islamic learning in Central Asia to which generations of Russia's Muslims went to study. This is possible because this manuscript – the Tarikh-i Barangawi, a history of the imams of Paranga village in Russia's Viatka region – provides narratives and documents from the Central Asian student years not only of the author, Ahmad al-Barangawi (1877–1930), but also of the latter's father, uncle and grandfather. Frank compares this information with the reminiscences of other authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the Tatars Shihabaddin Marjani and Galimjan Barudi, as well as the Tajik Sadraddin ʿAyni, and analyses shifts in the image of Bukhara as a city of sanctity.

Frank's major argument is that scholarship on Tatar relations with Central Asia has so far been largely reliant on the views of several well-known Muslim modernist authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Jadids – including Tatars such as Zahir Bigiyev and Shahr Sharaf – regarded Bukhara as a centre of Sufi “superstition”, “scholasticism” and corruption; and they saw their own mission as bringing Tatar/Russian/Western “progress” to the area. This image of Bukharan “backwardness” – expressed at a time when Russia's modernization and colonial encroachment was indeed making the Bukharan Emirate seem stagnant and helplessly outdated – was then projected back into the early nineteenth century; and the bad image of the city was further perpetuated in the Soviet period. Yet local nineteenth-century sources, like the Tarikh-i Barangawi, suggest that the Jadids’ views of Bukhara were in many cases questionable and one-sided, and that they were not shared by most Tatar imams and visitors to the city. Thus Ahmad Barangawi shows that education in the madrasas of Central Asia was not as limited in scope and quality as the Jadids wish us to believe. More particularly, the reformists (whose view of Islam centred on the importance of Quran and Sunna) were obviously wrong in their allegation that hadith was not studied at all in Bukhara.

The Jadids' critique of Bukhara was largely connected to their opposition to Sufism, which they regarded as un-Islamic; instead of Baha'addin Naqshband's shrine in Bukhara the Jadids visisted the mausoleum of the famous hadith collector Ismaʿil Bukhari. This reformist critique of traditional Islam provided the blueprint for the Soviet attacks on Islam in Bukhara; as Frank has it, after the October Revolution “Tatar and Bashkir communists dismantled Bukhara and Khiva's Islamic institutions with the same zeal that many of their fathers and grandfathers had displayed in coming to Central Asia to study” (p. 182). The paradox that Frank brings to light here is that Jadidism itself resulted from an Islamic revival among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia which started in the late eighteenth century, and which was largely modelled on the educational system and the Sufi brotherhoods of Bukhara. What the Tatars did was to copy successfully the Bukharan system: over many generations Tatar students studied at the feet of several dynasties of Bukharan shaykhs and professors, and when they returned to their home villages they introduced not only the Central Asian textbooks and Sufi affiliations to the Volga-Urals but also a preference for Bukharan habits and fashions, including in dress and food. In particular Frank's chapters on how Tatar students settled, studied, and made a living in Bukhara read like a piece of historical ethnography.

Against Western and Tatar scholars who prefer to base their opinion on easily available Jadid prints Frank argues for a reconstruction of the much more complex “traditional” Islam in Russia, on the basis of the difficult and multi-language manuscripts. His work leads to new questions: for example, if the Tatars obtained most of their Islamic knowledge from Bukhara, does this really imply that also Tatar Islamic reformism originated in Bukhara, perhaps inspired by reform-minded Bukharan professors? The alleged founder of Tatar reformism, the famous ‘Abd al-Nasir al-Qursawi (d. 1812), indeed developed his thoughts during his studies in Bukhara; yet it was in Bukhara that he was almost executed for his unwelcome critique of taqlid. And while the Tatar voices provide an amazing wealth of information on Bukhara, up to now we have only a few Central Asian sources that could place these views in perspective.