In a neighbouring carriage I heard the Oriental speech (vostochnaia rechʹ): two Tatars, a Kyrgyz [Qazaq] and an Uzbek mullah were chatting. I passed by and I heard the mullah ask, “Is he a Russian or a Muslim?” They told him I am Russian. I took advantage of the opportunity and explained in Turkish that I was Russian, but I knew Turkish. A conversation ensued, and in the end the mullah told me that he liked me very much, that I looked like an Ottoman Turk from Istanbul (Osmanli) and that it would be good for me to become a Muslim, because I was a Russian, but I knew Turkish. [He claimed that] the destiny of Muslims is very attractive: God has promised them paradise and other delights. I understood a few of his questions in Arabic, which amused him still more. Then he ran his hand over his beard, put his palms on his face, and said “God is great.” He made me do the same, and he concluded by shaking hands with me the way Orientals do; he was from Khiva and was inviting me to his home (yurt). In fact, I am not sure whether I am Muslim now, for I seem to have undergone the rite of becoming one… . At tea the mullah again tried to persuade me to become a Muslim, as this life is transient and deceptive, and it is Muslims’ destiny to have a [blessed] afterlife.Footnote 1
This is what the Russian Orientalist Aleksandr Samoilovich (1880–1938) jotted down in his diary while approaching Kazalinsk, today in southern Qazaqstan, in the morning of July 25, 1906. Samoilovich was travelling from Orenburg to Tashkent, and from there he headed further south to Samarqand, Merv, and Ashkhabad on a mission to collect sources about the Turkmens, their history, and their language.Footnote 2 Samoilovich must no doubt have found this encounter rather bizarre. One wonders, however, what it was specifically that caught his attention: was he surprised that a mullah could attempt to persuade a Russian into converting to Islam despite laws prohibiting conversion? Or was it the nonchalance with which the mullah vouched for the spiritual superiority of Islam over Christianity? There is of course no way for us to know. However, reading these few notes one may be led to think that to convert from the Russian Orthodox Church to Islam could be a possibility; after all, recent scholarship on Islam in the Russian empire has abundantly illustrated how Christian-Muslim interactions took place all the time.Footnote 3
At the turn of the twentieth century in imperial Russia, interactions between Orthodox Christians and Muslims could have various degrees of meaning and intensity, for they ranged from a casual encounter on a train to formalistic exchanges between appellants and imperial bureaucracy.Footnote 4 In spite of many opportunities for meaningful transactions, however, to move across confessional boundaries remained difficult and potentially dangerous. As Paul Werth has noted, the history of religious conversion in the Russian empire was one of “tensions … between ascriptive identity as imposed by state authorities and self-definitions reflecting subjective beliefs, outlook and aspirations. Conversions were never treated as a token of freedom of conscience. Indeed, over the centuries the empire regulated confessional identities by enforcing categories of religious ascription in such a way that ‘Orthodox status became both hereditary and unalterable.’”Footnote 5 It was only in the 1860s, when baptized Tatars from the Volga-Kama region began to petition the tsarist state for formal recognition as Muslims that the Russian authorities began to make concessions. In fact, such concessions reflected more considerations of bureaucratic expediency on an ad hoc basis than the recognition of the autonomy of the individual on matters of belief.Footnote 6 Apostasy from Orthodoxy to other confessions, however, remained strictly forbidden until the promulgation of the edict of toleration in 1905.Footnote 7 The empire then began to allow non-Russians who had been baptised to return to the religion of their forefathers in deference to the notion that non-Russian communities embodied ancestral confessional traits.Footnote 8 Expanding the notion of religious tolerance did not lead to the acceptance of conversions, however. Indeed, conversions from Russian Orthodoxy to any other religion in the empire were usually regarded as cases of “nativization” and as such they represented “a blatant subversion of the empire’s rule of assimilation,” as noted by Willard Sunderland.Footnote 9
While most scholarship so far has examined conversions from the point of view of institutional history, I would like in this article to put cases of attempted conversion from Orthodoxy to Islam in Russian Central Asia under the lens of social history. As the reader will see, these stories of conversion stand out for their rich texture and thus they provide valuable material that can improve our understanding of the complexity of life under colonial rule. Indeed, they shed light on situations when Slavic settlers encroached upon Central Asians and adapted to a life close to or within Muslim communities, that is, situations that were typical of a borderland society.Footnote 10
I shall review cases of conversion first by situating them against the background of the specific discursive context which informed bureaucratic practices among Russians in Turkestan. This will allow me to show that more often than not tsarist officials attempted to discredit anyone who wanted to convert or facilitated conversion to Islam. Surrounded by a Muslim-majority population which they perceived as intrinsically hostile by dint of its religious affiliation, tsarist imperial officials regarded any apostate not only as someone breaking the law, but also in moral terms on par with anyone who passed over to the enemy.Footnote 11 More specifically, I shall devote particular attention to the language employed by colonial authorities to frame apostasy either as the work of Muslim proselytizers or as reflective of a personality disorder on the part of the convert, meaning poor morals, mental deficiency, or greed. By proceeding in this fashion, I will argue that Russian colonial officials cast these aspersions on all successful converts as a means of minimizing and dismissing the phenomenon of Christians’ conversions to Islam.Footnote 12 I shall furthermore pay particular attention to the situations of tension that the conversion of Orthodox Christians to Islam appears to have created for the governing elite in Central Asia, tensions which more often than not reflected different, in fact conflicting priorities of imperial officials and churchmen commissioned to the region.
The Colonial Setting: Russian Turkestan
The Russian military campaign to subdue the Muslim khanates in Central Asia began in the 1850s, but it was only at the beginning of the 1870s that Russians could establish their rule over most of the region: they first annihilated the Khanate of Khoqand and later conquered significant portions of the Khanate of Khiva and Amirate of Bukhara. With their territories truncated and reduced, the latter two became Russian protectorates.Footnote 13 Emphasis on the military nature of Russian rule in Central Asia is important, in fact key to our appreciating the nature of colonial rule in this area; and not only because Russia took Central Asia by military force. Following the example of the North Caucasus (Dagestanskaia oblastʹ), the administration of the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan (otherwise known as ‘Russian Turkestan’) was left in the hands of militarymen in charge of the main institutions of the state (from legal to fiscal). Meanwhile, transactions among Central Asians were regulated by a group of native officials who were selected through a system of popular elections (cast by ballots). This peculiar form of governance was known as voenno-narodnoe upravlenie and made the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan distinct from most of the Russian core regions, where in 1864, or precisely during the period of the conquest of Central Asia, elected councils (zemstva) had been created to ensure broader participation of the local population with the imperial administration.
Russian Turkestan was also different in other respects, however. From the outset, Russians ruled over the region according to a laissez-faire policy (ignorirovanie) reflecting the convinction that a muscular intrusion into the life of the locals would inevitably stir up a feeling of discontent among the predominantly Muslim population and foment rebellions against imperial authority.Footnote 14 Such a policy built not only on the bitter lessons learned during several decades of war in the North Caucasus, but also on the idea that Central Asian Muslims were intrinsically fanatical and thus naturally defiant to foreign rule. In the eyes of the Russian military elite stationed in the region, this Islamophobic cliché found validation in May 1898 when, led by a Sufi sheykh, a group of Central Asians attacked a military garrison in Andijan. It was a relatively minor revolt (twenty-two Russian soldiers perished in the attack), but one that ended up reinforcing the deep-seated idea in the imperial mind that, by dint of its religiosity, the local population was unwilling to submit to the White Tsar.Footnote 15
The choice not to intrude into Muslims’ daily affairs had several significant consequences, which determined the nature of Russian colonial governance in the region. One such consequence was the necessity to uphold Islamic law (shari’a) in the regulation of business among locals; another was to bar Orthodox missionary activities from the region.Footnote 16 It has been repeatedly noted that, from the governance point of view, Russian Turkestan is comparable to overseas colonies of other contemporary empires such as French North Africa, British India, or Italian Cyrenaica, for that matter. Indeed, seen from the metropole, Turkestan looked like a far away place culturally removed from the center that offered incentives for economic exploitation and major plans for the resettlement of Slavic peasants.Footnote 17
On the other hand, if one takes a bird-eye view and compares officials’ habitus between the metropole and the colony, one recognises that such a cultural distance was in fact minimal. Indeed, the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan was ruled by a cast of characters who replicated the same cultural practices and moral postures that one can find elsewhere in the empire.Footnote 18 It is important to emphasize the cultural bias of tsarist rule in Turkestan, for Russian colonial officials’ concerns about Islam did not differ considerably from their peers’s opinions in the metropole. Let us take the idea of Central Asian Muslims’ ingrained zealotry as an example. Born first as an Orientalist trope, such an idea became an undisputed fact among colonial officials ruling over the region in spite of their protracted exposure to local culture.Footnote 19
Coming back to the issue of conversion from Orthodoxy to Islam, it must be noted that by the time Russia conquered Central Asia, stories about the enslavement of Slavs by fanatic Muslims inhabiting the borderland regions had aleady gained broad publicization. As noted by Elena Smolarz, such stories were purposefully circulated to create “a victimization narrative that served to legitimize imperial policy and the later invasion of the region.”Footnote 20 In the 1840s, for example, Vladimir Dalʹ, the author of a celebrated Russian etymological dictionary who in 1839 had joined the disastrous military campaign against Khiva,Footnote 21 played a notable role in publishing stories of Slavic slaves who were forced to convert to Islam.Footnote 22 Such stories were often burnished with fictionalized details for the general public to emphasize forced conversion. Usually, they were structured around a simple plot: once enslaved, Slavs were coerced into apostasy to Islam, feigned religious observance to survive the brutality of their masters, and immediately recanted their conversions as soon as they were brought back into the fold of Russian civilization. As we shall see, such a storyline would resurface in a few cases of Slavic settlers in Russian Turkestan at the beginning of the twentieth century.
That forced conversions represented a metaphor of the civilizational encounter between Russian Orthodoxy and Central Asian Islam is perhaps best demonstrated by the case of Foma Danilevskii. Appearing orignally in the pages of one of the organs of the military press, the newspaper Russkii Invalid, the story spurred the interests of none other than Fedor Dostoevskii. A commissionary of the 2nd Turkestan sharpshooter battalion, Danilov was captured by the soldiers of Pulad Khan (a Kyrgyz leader and son of the ruler of Khoqand ‘Alim Khan) near Marghelan in 1875 and murdered “because he had refused to enter their service and to embrace Mohammedanism.”Footnote 23 In a passionate portrayal that elevated Danilov as a heroic martyr of the Orthodox faith, Dostoevskii explained that “the Khan himself promised him pardon, reward and honors on condition that he renounce Christ. Danilov answered that he could not betray the Cross, and that as a subject of the Czar though in captivity, he had to abide by his duty toward the Czar and Christianity.”Footnote 24 Alexander Morrison, who has put Danilov’s case under the magnifying glass, concluded that Dostoevskii’s message was to create “a stark contrast between the simple faith and dignity of the Russian people, and the savagery and barbarism of their opponents.”Footnote 25
One of the environments where fears of Orthodox Christians’ conversion to Islam were most prominent was where missionaries operated. Despite the halt imposed by the first governor-general of Turkestan, Konstantin von Kaufman, on Orthodox proselitysm, missionary culture was omnipresent in the institutional setting of the colony.Footnote 26 For one thing, most of the Russian projects in the sphere of public education were left in the hands of Nikolai Ostroumov (1846–1930). The son of an Orthodox priest from Tambov, Ostroumov had studied at the Anti-Muslim division of the Kazan Theological Academy where he became a pupil of Nikolai Ilʹminskii before coming to Tashkent in 1877 to serve as inspector of schools and director of the teachers’ seminary. Not only did his writings embody all the Orientalist pretentions and irrational Islamophobia of the time,Footnote 27 but also Ostroumov never gave up on the idea that Russian educators and doctors in Turkestan were to play the role of “assimilators and missionaries.”Footnote 28
Ostroumov was not the only person in Central Asia to cultivate missionary sensibilities, however. While Christian proselytism was officially allowed in Turkestan only in 1913,Footnote 29 the “Diocese of Turkestan and Tashkent” was established in the city of Vernyi (today Almaty) as early as 1872.Footnote 30 By the time the diocese was flanked by a council representing the society of Orthodox missionaries in 1901,Footnote 31 stories about Slavic settlers converting to Islam, especially in the Qazaq steppe, had already circulated widely in publications sponsored by the Church.Footnote 32 Incidentally, one of the first priests to publish on this topic in the Pravoslavnyi blagovestnik (The Orthodox Chaplain), “the leading Russian journal concerned with the church’s work among non-Christian peoples,”Footnote 33 was the Kriashen missionary Efrem Eliseev,Footnote 34 who, like Ostroumov, had studied at the Kazan Theological Academy and was destined to lead the diocese of Turkestan and Tashkent.Footnote 35 Before moving to Vernyi in 1913, Eliseev was stationed in Tobolʹsk in 1902, where he published an abrasive pamphlet against Islam boasting of his exploits among the stereotyped fanatic Tatars and mullahs from Samarqand and Bukhara who fought off his attempts to convert local Muslims to Orthodoxy.Footnote 36 What is more, in the same period Eliseev came out with a curious story, “Punished Apostasy,” in which we first hear about a settler embracing Islam: in 1900 on the shores of the Lake Zaisan, today in eastern Qazaqstan on the border with China, Eliseev encountered one Konstantin Skorokhodov, a Russian burgher (meshchanin) “who had adopted the full guise of a Muslim in the steppe.”Footnote 37 For eighteen years, the missionary tells us, Skorokhodov had lived “in the steppe among the Qazaqs, fishing and stealing horses.”Footnote 38 Instead of serving as an example of a pious Christian among Muslims, claims Eliseev, Skorokhodov had ostentatiously recanted his faith: he did not wear the cross, and shaved his head and performed the namaz; these were all activities that, as we shall see later, were usually pointed at as markers of Muslimness. At this point of the story about Skorokhodov’s apostasy, Eliseev’s report takes a somewhat moralistic turn:
It pleased the Lord to stop the impious deeds of the apostate. When the missionary reached Lake Zaisan, Skorokhodov went 20 kilometres across the lake to a ‘sandy’ cape to get some hay. When a peasant named Yagodnik, who lived on this cape, offered Skorokhodov perch soup, since it was Lent and the time of the vigil, Skorokhodov mockingly replied that he would go to a Qazaq yurt and there eat soup made from horse meat…. Skorokhodov sat down, folded his legs Muslim-style in front of everyone and began to eat horse meat, saying that it was better than perch without ‘bones.’ The surrounding Qazaqs were very happy to see such extraordinary sympathy for Mohammedanism on the part of the Russian, while the Russians were deeply grieved and did not know where to hide from shame. But the blasphemer’s abuse came to an end … Skorokhodov choked on a large bone, which could not be removed, and he died in terrible agony. Before his death he said to his master: ‘You, Yakov Vasilyevich, after my death, do not let these dogs (the Qazaqs) bury me, but bury me yourself, God has punished me for my sins.’…Footnote 39
Accounts of Christian converts to Islam, such as the one offered by Father Efrem Eliseev, circulated widely in Russia, for anti-Islamic publications were always abundant. Though most probably fictionalized, they dovetail very well with similar cases of conversion taken up by tsarist officials in the Qazaq steppe. Time and again militarymen lamented how Cossacks, for example, failed to embody the virtues of the “civilized Russian:” they mixed with Qazaqs, adopted their attire and learned their language.Footnote 40 But at the turn of the twentieth century, tsarist authorities went so far as to claim that conversions among Slavs could become a major concern for the integrity of the colonial project in Central Asia. In the eyes of tsarist officials, Slavs’ conversions to Islam undermined the civilizational premises upon which the new settler society was based. Cases of Slavs going native and becoming Muslims “confronted the larger issue of what makes a Russian Russian and, in the process, cut right to the heart of complex Russian anxieties about culture, race, colonization, and the meaning of Russianness in the final decades of the empire.”Footnote 41 It is to such cases of apostasy that I now turn my attention.
The Renegade Scribe: Ilia Mileshkin
In spring 1902, rumors had it that one Ilia Mileshkin living in a village close to Namangan had appeared before a Muslim judge (qadi), converted to Islam and took the name of Abdullah. He had become a pious Muslim and was visibly diligent in ritual performance, reported local residents. Unwilling to concede that Mileshkin had become a renegade of his own volition, the military governor of Ferghana requested that action be taken to clarify whether the conversion had been in fact initiated by locals who had lured Mileshkin into the horrible sin of apostasy.Footnote 42
The Mileshkin affair was handed over to a bailiff (pristav), one Captain Katovich who led an official inquiry. Understaffed as his office was and overwhelmed by other tasks, the bailiff was obliged to rely on his men on the ground. He therefore had the Pishkaran county administrator (volostnoi upravitelʹ), a local by the name of Mir Haydar, together with several elders and a cavalryman look into the matter. Upon their arrival at the village of Begavat, they found Mileshkin at the house of the qadi. He was dressed in a white chintz robe, soft leather boots, and galoshes. What particularly struck the attention of the inquisitors was that the Russian was also sporting a skullcap over his shaved head. When they asked him what he was doing there, Mileshkin replied that he had come to Begavat to see the qadi and that he had adopted the Muslim faith, that he prayed at the Bay-Suvaqchi mosque.Footnote 43 On the next day, the county administrator proceeded to question the muezzin and the imam of the mosque. On that occasion the imam stated that the qadi had lodged Mileshkin’s wife in an empty courtyard close to where he lived, while the qadi’s brother brought Mileshkin to the mosque. Furthermore, the mullah testified that the Russian was brought to the mosque to join the evening prayer (Uzb. asr namozi) and that he had learnt by heart a specific supplication called qunūt,Footnote 44 which the qadi had written for him.Footnote 45
What is more, while searching Mileshkin’s place, they found additional evidence of his apostasy: indeed, someone had written the Arabic alphabet (sartovskaia azbuka, lit. “the Sarts’ alphabet”) for him and noted down a prayer, which had been transliterated into Cyrillic. In addition, they found that Mileshkin was using the qadi’s register and copying its headings to exercise his Turki. As the men of the county administrator pursued further their inquiry, they uncovered other important information. It turned out that the qadi had lodged Mileshkin not far from himself, in an empty room belonging to a local resident. He was the one who had given the white robe, the skullcap, and new leather boots to the Russian. Finally, the qadi collected offerings (Uzb. khudoyi) from his clients to support Mileshkin.Footnote 46
While the inquiry produced evidence indicating how the new apostate had integrated himself into the fabric of the local Muslim community, at the same time Mileshkin’s responses to the interrogation concealed his sympathy for local culture: the answers he gave to his inquisitors were artfully simple, in fact disingenuous. He sometimes did wear a robe and skullcap, he admitted, but the reason why he shaved his head was that there was no one to cut his hair in the village: as in the case of Skorokhodov, a shaved head was regarded as a marker of confessional Muslim belonging. Also, Mileshkin claimed to have become a mosque-goer merely to rest in the shadow, for it was impossible to find solace from the heat where he lived. And he dismissed the significance of his mingling with locals by explaining that he supported himself on the money he earned by writing for the “Sarts,” a term used in common parlance, especially among Russians, to denote city-dwellers in Turkestan. When questioned about Mileshkin’s conversion to Islam, the qadi categorically refused to acknowledge any role whatsoever. He even claimed that rumors about his involvement in this affair were a fabrication of his ill-wishers, for he had in fact advised Mileshkin not to live in the village. Questioned by colonial officials, others denied having seen the Russian in the mosque, clearly afraid that so much interest in this conversion case would lead to government retaliation against them.Footnote 47
Damning evidence in this apostasy case came from a source close to Ilia Mileshkin, however: his wife. Varvara Kovaleva, “a peasant girl,” as the records define her, testified that Mileshkin had bought land in the village of Begavat; hence their moving to the Ferghana valley, in the province of Namangan. When they made it there, they first occupied a shed, but after several days moved to a place close to the qadi. She said that Mileshkin had immediately expressed his desire to wear indigenous clothes (sartovskaia odezhda) and that he wanted to sew her a shirt in the Sart fashion, but she said she abhorred such type of clothing and was indeed resolute that she would not wear it. She added that Mileshkin often left the house while memorizing something that, although written in Cyrillic, was incomprehensible to her. Besides, she noticed that Mileshkin had taken off his cross. When she was staying in the women’s quarters at the qadi’s house, she heard the qadi saying something about Mileshkin: even though she did not know the Uzbek language, the qadi’s expressive gestures suggested that her husband had recanted the sign of the cross, and that he had wrapped his head in a turban.Footnote 48
Placed under arrest, Mileshkin submitted a plea to the Ferghana Province Military Governor on June 22, 1902. He reported that the head administrator and his men visited him late at night and under some vague pretext took him to the house of the local qadi. At this point in the story, Mileshkin claimed that
the county administrator took me by the side, took out ten roubles from his pocket and entrusted them to me saying: ‘Take them, buy yourself some tea, and do as I say!’ I replied: ‘tell me first what the matter is; then I’ll let you [know if I am willing to take the money].’ The administrator replied: ‘You must say before witnesses that the native judge [the qadi] made you a Sart [a Muslim] and all of us witnesses shall act to your advantage.’ But I told him: ‘I should prefer to die than kill a man for ten roubles!’ I added that nothing of the kind had happened to me [the conversion]. I turned away from him and went home.”Footnote 49
After a while, according to the petition, Mileshkin was summoned again to see the county administrator. This time he could finally find out what the matter at stake was: the county administrator held grudges against the qadi and wanted the latter to be removed from office, hence his request that Mileshkin blame the qadi for luring him into Islam. In sum, the Slavic peasant explained that the whole story of apostasy was a lie, and that all he had been doing so far was to offer scribal services to the local population for lack of a better way of earning money. With an artful rhetorical twist, Mileshkin ended his petition by stressing his Christian identity and challenging the Military Governor: if the latter would believe Muslim liars over him, he would appeal to the Governor-General in Tashkent:
I tearfully plead and beseech Your Excellency to clarify the essence of the matter: do not let [us], two Christian souls, die of hunger, for I am already praying in prison and my wife is hiding somewhere far away from me; and if you have now begun to believe the natives more [than me], then my words will not lead to anything, and I will have to bring this matter to the attention of the higher authorities.Footnote 50
The petition struck a chord with Mileshkin’s addressee, who took immediate action to remove the qadi from office, under the accusation of being untrustworthy (neblagonadezhnyi).Footnote 51 Not all the Russian authorities were happy with this decision, however. The Special Advisor to the Ferghana Military Governor, the Orientalist and ethnographer Vladimir Nalivkin (1858–1918), protested before the higher echelons in Tashkent that the qadi’s removal was too hasty (prezhdevremennym).Footnote 52 Nalivkin’s protest did not fall on deaf ears, for there was a cast of characters in the colonial administration who held that the evidence collected against the qadi was insufficient to merit his removal.Footnote 53 We do not know whether the qadi was reinstated. However, the available documentation indicates that some colonial officials were aware of the risk involved in taking such accusations for granted: it was fairly common among Muslims in Turkestan to petition the Russian government to accuse qadis of malpractice and more often than not such accusations turned out to be baseless and driven by malice.Footnote 54
Whatever the role played by the qadi in this case, most of the officials were adamant about the matter at stake: the officials claimed that evidence that Mileshkin had apostatized was incontrovertible, for his spouse had noticed how he refused to perform the sign of the cross. The Governor-General then resolved to request the opinion of the Turkestan Consistory, a court of the Orthodox Church based in the city of Vernyi. The prelate offered Mileshkin a last opportunity to deny his conversion to Islam. They entrusted a priest with the following task: “if it turns out that the peasant has indeed left the Orthodox church (otstupil ot pravoslavnoi tserkvy),” the priest ought to deliver a pastoral exhortation to Mileshkin to convince him “to return to the bosom of the Orthodox Church and stay therein until the last days of his life.”Footnote 55 And this is what Mileshkin duly did, recanting his conversion to avoid imprisonment and prosecution. This appears to be a case of an Orthodox peasant going native only to recant once caught in the crosshairs of tsarist officialdom.
1905: The Edict of Tolerance
With the 1905 edict of tolerance, a statement of conversion from the Orthodox Church to Islam no longer resulted in prosecution. But did it become easier to renounce the Christian faith and secure recognition of this renunciation? The answer must be in the negative, and for a simple reason: the edict stipulated (art. 4) that for individuals to be tolerated as apostates, they were required to produce evidence that their ancestors belonged to Islam.Footnote 56 Meanwhile, to shift from Orthodox Christianity to Islam remained a matter of deep concern for churchmen and tsarist officials alike.
On March 26, 1910, the Orthodox Bishop in Vernyi wrote to the Governor-General of TurkestanFootnote 57 in alarming tones, for he had repeatedly received reports of cases of Orthodox believers “being lured into Islam,” as he put it in deference to a lexicon established much earlier.Footnote 58 The Bishop was adamant about one thing: in many cases the cause of conversion was not a conscious preference for Islam, but an unfortunate coincidence of various circumstances. He claimed that people who had apostatized from Orthodoxy “to the religion of Mohammed” on the basis of spiritual considerations were few and far between. The Bishop was sure that “the doctrine of the false prophet” (dogmaticheskoe uchenie lzheproroka) had little appeal among the Slavic population, while it was Muslims’ communal life, organization, and more specifically willingness to support financially their needy members that constituted the greatest lure to conversion. But above all, conversion to Islam was plaguing Slavic settlers’ society and for reasons wholly understandable, he argued:
Our settlers often do not understand the reasons why local authorities do not fulfill their demands, and this state of affairs not only ruins them materially, but also exhausts them mentally and physically. And if at this time a dexterous proselytiser, who is able to convince the exhausted person that converting to Islam and joining its society will easily solve issues about land allocation, he will soon make a [new] proselyte of Mohammedanism.Footnote 59
The Bishop had reasons to believe that the situation was indeed rather grim, especially in the Syr-Darya valley, today located between Uzbekistan and southern Qazaqstan. Let us take an extended moment to review what was going on in those areas of new Russian colonisation:
One Sergius Bisarev, a priest officiating in Merke, a village in the district of Aulie-Ata, reported to me last February about the kidnapping of a 15-year-old Russian girl, one Anisia Kosmina Aleinikova, by a certain Ismailjanov. Earlier, according to the reports of the same priest, the same Ismailjanov had seduced two Kirichenkov sisters in succession, and had a son Michael by the latter. A scout priest of the Pishpek district has informed me that in the Qazaq county of Kukarevskaia, a Cossack by the name of Sergei Svetlichnyi sold two daughters, of whom the youngest is 12 years old, to a Qazaq, and his third 11-year-old daughter has already been contacted by the [same] Qazaq, and she is clearly in danger of meeting the same fate as her sister. Тhe same itinerant priest has reported that some new settlers have told him that while making their way to Semirechʹe and crossing the Lake Balkhash, they saw a Russian boy of 5–6 years of age begging Qazaqs for bread. Interested in the boy, the settlers wanted to talk to him, but a Qazaq suddenly came over and snatched the boy away [and took him] to his village.”Footnote 60
Our Bishop was deliberately overestimating the degree to which conversion to Islam among Russians happened under duress or on account of financial constraints. In fact, his main concern was to persuade the Governor-General that most of the conversions from the Orthodox Church to Islam affected underage individuals who were lured into apostasy by malevolent Muslims. He thus urged the Governor-General to take action and prohibit Russians to serve Muslims against remuneration.Footnote 61
The Bishop’s report, however, fell into the hands of the Military Governor of Semirechʹe, who replied that most of the cases of conversion to Islam had little to do with financial issues and material considerations. Therefore, the Military Governor opined, the policing measures requested by the Bishop had little purchase. More often than not it was the “low level of morality and religious knowledge” encountered among Russian settlers that determined their decision to apostatize. Reminding the Bishop of his call of duty, the Military Governor ended his reply by stating that conversion reflects morality and it was therefore down to the Orthodox priest to take care of the souls of the settlers.Footnote 62 The growing tension between the military officials and the churchmen represent two different, in fact diametrically opposing views of colonial governance in Central Asia. The former downplayed how the economic status of settlers could become a powerful incentive to convert, and he did so most probably because he was unwilling/unable to take measure to improve the standards of living among the settlers. In deference to his pristine clerical mission, the priest was adamant about the need to do something to rescue the soul of the Slavic Orthodox population in Central Asia.
This tension escalated when the Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs took matters into its hands and wrote to the Governor-General in Tashkent, explaining that the news of “frequent cases of Russians transitioning to Islam” (chastyi sluchai perekhoda Russkikh v musulʹmanstvo) reported by the press represented a matter of concern. Particularly worrying was the idea that Muslims in Turkestan were facilitating apostasy among Russians by offering financial gains, often as landownership. The head of the Department wanted to know whether such news reports were accurate.Footnote 63 Consequently, the office of the Governor-General began to collect information. The Bishop of Tashkent had once again the opportunity to report that things were not good. He explained that he could indeed observe “cases of Russian Orthodox Christians converting to Islam.” There was a particularly interesting case, said the Bishop, involving a Slavic peasant originally from the province of Ekaterinoslav. When found by the police searching the premises of a mosque in Tashkent, the peasant in question recanted his apostasy, and claimed he was afraid that Muslims would retaliate if he converted back to Orthodoxy. The Bishop had him immediately taken back to his native Ekaterinoslav, and later reported to the chancellery that the imam of the mosque in Tashkent, in particular, had been taking a muscular role in enforcing the peasant’s conversion to Islam. After his conversion, the imam had locked the Slavic peasant in his mosque to avoid a new change of heart. Interestingly, the Tatar imam managed to occupy a prominent position as teacher of religion at the Cadet college and Commercial School in Tashkent. “As for the reasons why Russians embrace Islam,” concluded the Bishop, “ignorance (nevezhestvennoe), foolishness (legkomyslie), and self-interest (korystʹ), together with a misleading understanding of the October Manifesto [of Tolerance] played a key role.”Footnote 64 Furthermore, he warned the Governor-General that Tatars appeared to offer financial support to apostates. In light of these circumstances, the Bishop concluded that it was “in the interests of Orthodoxy and the Russian nationality in the region” to take measures against figures such as the Tatar imam, whose influence could be detrimental for the colonial community.Footnote 65 The report was artfully designed to hit a sensitive nerve with officials at the Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs. Indeed, as early as 1870, the then head of the Department, Emmanuel Sivers, had urged the Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly to keep Tatar proselyzers at bay to minimize their influence in the steppe,Footnote 66 a policy which was further taken up and developed in Turkestan not only against mullahs, but also Tatar interpreters.Footnote 67
The military elite at the helm of the colonial administration kept understating the significance of conversions, however. The Tashkent City Commandant, for example, explained that in a situation in which settlers were exposed to an alien culture for such a long time, a few cases of apostasy to Islam were natural, and therefore politically negligible.Footnote 68 Following this line of thought, on January 7, 1912, the chancery of the Governor-General wrote back to the Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs in St. Petersburg to inform them that its search had established that only 24 cases of conversion to Islam were known in Turkestan: nine women and fifteen men.
All the women became renegades because of cohabitation with Muslims. It is difficult to judge to what extent material calculation played a role in these cases and to what extent considerations of a higher order played a role, since cohabitation is of primary importance. As for the men, the great majority of them are morally depraved, drunkards, incapable of any labor. They converted not out of any attraction to Islam, but solely for the purpose of receiving support from Muslim society in order to continue their immoral existence. Such support, indeed, was sometimes given, but only until the Muslims were convinced of the true cause of apostasy, and then the assistance ceased and the renegades turned back to Christianity. Only in 2 or 3 cases can we assume the presence of a sincere conviction in the superiority of Islam over Orthodoxy, which is easily explained on the one hand by ignorance, and on the other by circumstances of life, which threw the renegades into a Muslim environment and cut them off from communication with Russians. On the basis of the above factors, it is safe to assume that if Muslims are carrying out secret propaganda of Islam among Russians, this has no threatening results, since its influence falls, with few exceptions, on persons indifferent to any religion and bringing no honor to Christians nor to Muslims.”Footnote 69
The message sent from the imperial province back to the metropole was clear: there was no need to worry, for Islam was not winning the soul of Russians. Those who converted to Islam were either drunkards or women who had married Muslims and there was nothing to do with such a sorry cast of characters. To identify apostates with outcasts alone was key to suggesting that apostasy among settlers was politically insignificant, especially if read against the background of the “pan-Islamism”spectre. After the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and the beginning of the First Balkan War the following year, the Russian empire became virtually obsessed with Muslim political mobilization on the global stage. Such obsession reflected a general shift in attitudes among Russian colonial officials in Turkestan, whose first priority was to uncover Ottoman, Iranian, and Afghan agents who—Russians believed—covertly operated to subvert the empire.Footnote 70
In fact, the report to the Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs glossed over the fact that the situation of apostasy among Russians was much more diverse than depicted by the military elite in Turkestan. In 1911 authorities in Tashkent had repeatedly reported the strange case of one Pavel Maevskii: then 14 years old, Pavel served in the house of a wealthy Uzbek, one Shoh Mahmud Shoh Solihov. Like Ilia Mileshkin, Pavel was dressed à la Sart and spoke Uzbek, said the report. But what was more interesting was that the boy had been given over to the Uzbek family by his own father, a Russian who then worked as a scribe for the city judicial chamber. At the head of an already numerous family, the man was obliged to give the young Pavel to locals who would provide for him. This was a disgraceful case of voluntary submission to the forces of Islam, the report suggested, and one which reinforced Church leaders’ concern: Russians in Turkestan could easily “succumb to the predation of Islam” Footnote 71 because of their exposure to a Muslim people who were “‘the most fanatical in the world,”Footnote 72 an Orientalist trope which dated back at least to Nikolai Khanikoff (1819–78) and his Opisanie Bukharskogo khanstva, published in 1843.Footnote 73 The case of Pavel Maevskii was considered exemplary and therefore he ought to be freed from indigenous influence and brought back to his ancestral family.Footnote 74
Apostasy and Settler Society
The accounts above suggest that circumstances of conversion from the Russian Orthodox Church to Islam covered a broad social spectrum. The following case can illustrate the degree to which apostasy was typical of a colonial society where confessional communities intermingled. On the morning of August 17, 1912, one Daniil Voloshin, a forest ranger in charge of patrolling the woods in Aulie-Ata, realized that his 14-year-old daughter Mariia was missing from their place of dwelling, a settlers’ community called Nikolaipol. It took him a few hours to find out that she had been kidnapped by a Qazaq named Sydyk Bupyev, he claimed, who lived with his family in a nomadic encampment nearby. Together with another settler of German origin by the name of Heinrich Jansen, Voloshin went to the administrator of the Bauterek county, Qurmanqul Koshaev, and reported the incident. His report, however, fell on deaf ears. Flanked now by two cavalrymen, he returned to Nikolaipol where he was able to persuade Koshaev and Sydyk Bupyev’s kinsmen to look for the girl. The subsequent search for Mariia proved unsuccessful, however, most probably because the Qazaqs were willing to cover up the fugitives. Voloshin nonetheless found out that Mariia, Sydyk, and his men were hiding in Aulie-Ata. After a week, Voloshin located Mariia in the apartment of a Qazaq. The cavalrymen apprehended the kidnappers and took them to the district administration, while Mariia was given over to her father. The Qazaqs were put in prison, and the Voloshins spent the night in a caravansearai nearby. The next day all the parties were taken to a Russian policeman for a cross-examination. A colourful crowd of Qazaqs and settlers escorted them. During the interview, Voloshin stated that while on the road heading to the police station, Sydyk’s kinsmen and sympathizers had assaulted him and that Sydyk had seized Mariia’s hand and attempted to drive her away shouting: “She isn’t your daughter anymore, she’s now my wife!”Footnote 75 A priest who followed the crowd ordered the settlers aiding Voloshin to fend off the blows of the Qazaqs. But when a Russian peasant hit a Qazaq, the latter retaliated lashing a whip. The physical confrontation represents vividly the cultural tensions surrounding this case of bride kidnapping and conversion.
When questioned, Mariia admitted that she had left her parental home to follow Sydyk of her own will. She furthermore explained that they first hid in the mountains where a mullah solemnized an Islamic marriage, for she was willing to become a Muslim. Sydyk confirmed that he kidnapped Mariia with the intention of marrying her. At this point in the story, the police officer allowed Sydyk and his party to leave, admonishing them not to get close to Mariia anymore.Footnote 76 Meanwhile, a large crowd of Qazaqs gathered in the courtyard of the Provincial Administration building. They were Sydyk’s acolytes who, expressing their satisfaction with the fact that the authorities had released him without any punishment, proclaimed ostentatiously that they would kidnap Mariia again. Having heard such provocations, and fearing being attacked once again by the Qazaqs, Voloshin turned to the priest and requested his help. The latter interceded with the Commandant, who resolved to put Sydyk and his men under temporary arrest. Such an arrangement allowed Voloshin and his daughter to make it safely home. The documentation tells us that, once back, Mariia Voloshina was counselled by two teachers of the local school and that “she repented, kissed her parents and promised not to leave home.”Footnote 77 The idyll was not to last, however. Barely a week had passed when on August 31, she fled to join the Qazaqs again, where she remained until September 9 when local authorities were able to apprehend her. When they brought her again to the premises of the Provincial Administration, her demeanor was reminiscent of Ilia Mileshkin’s Muslim attire: she was wearing a Qazaq dress and sporting a turban on her head. When questioned, Mariia explained that during the day she was hiding in a gorge, in a Qazaq winter house, while in the evening she went to see Sydyk’s mother, who fed her. When asked about her religious affiliation, Mariia’s reply was uncompromising: she was a Muslim. When they told her that it was illegal for her to become a Muslim because she had been baptised according to the Orthodox rite, Mariia was irremovable and she once again stated that she had converted to Islam. Unresponsive to her parents’ tears and the exhortations of the Nikolaipol villagers, Mariia declared that she would join the Qazaqs, for she was in love with Sydyk. Unwilling to take action against the Qazaqs, the policeman held that, since Maria had run away of her own will and was already over 14 years old, the Qazaq could not be prosecuted. Mariia was to blame, he said, if she wanted to apostatize. This line of reasoning allowed the policeman to discredit the young Russian woman, a strategy which we have observed earlier. He opined that Mariia’s choice represented a case of “practical irrationality” (prakticheskoe nerazumie): “With regard to her intention to become a Muslim, this is the result of her ignorance and lack of Christian education, which, as I know, her father did not conduct [properly]. In this respect, that is to say, in preventing conversions to Islam, we can only hope on the clergy….”Footnote 78 However, there was no consensus on the matter. Headed by Daniil Voloshin, the settlers were unwilling to leave the situation as it was, and therefore sought the involvement of higher authorities from Tashkent. A senior advisor to the Governor-General who could interview all the parties to the dispute concluded that:
Sydyk’s seduction of an underage Orthodox girl [into Islam] cannot go unpunished; swift repression is desirable. Sydyk could be prosecuted under Art. 82 of the Criminal Code. The punishment is imprisonment in a house of correction or a fortress for seducing a person of the Christian faith into a non-Christian faith. But for this purpose, it is necessary to prove the existence of such an offense, which is rather difficult in the present case. As a person who has abducted an unmarried woman with her consent to marry her, Sydyk can be brought before the court according to the 2nd stipulation of article 1549 of the Penal Code, which punishes this offense with imprisonment of 4–8 months. In view of this, and considering that Sydyk’s deed will encourage other Qazaqs … who have already proven their base instincts, and taking also into account the fact that the case of Mariia Voloshina has received a great deal of publicity and has become a matter of great concern among the Christian population as well, perhaps it would be more expedient to expel Sydyk from Turkestan in order to quickly intimidate the Qazaqs.”Footnote 79
What came after is instructive to understanding the nature of tsarist governance of the region. Following a series of petitions coming from her father, colonial authorities proceeded to apprehend Mariia once again and enstrust her to her family, while Sydyk received a final warning: coming closer to Mariia again would cost him his freedom. His further attempts to convince officials that Mariia had converted to Islam of her own will and had married him proved ultimately unsuccesful.Footnote 80
Daniel Scarborough has recently observed that “the capacity of the diocesan hierarchy to control the religious practices of settlers across the vast territory of Turkestan was limited and compromise with popular religiosity inevitable. Yet the Orthodox nationalist agenda succeeded in exacerbating tensions between Christians and Muslims, contributing to the outbreak of violence in 1916.”Footnote 81 Scarborough is no doubt right in noting how in the region Slavs’ conversion to Islam became a matter of sustained attention among colonial authorities especially with the expansion of a settler society: with the increasing presence of settlers and their mingling with local Muslim communities, the cases of conversions from the Orthodox Church to Islam significantly increased.
The cases we have examined above show that more often than not conversions among Slavic settlers were prompted by financial incentives.Footnote 82 Informants, however, appear to have converted for various reasons—proximity, destitution, love, among other things—and there is little evidence whatsoever that religious revelation or doctrine informed apostasy and decisions to convert. I do not mean to suggest here that such cases of conversion are less genuine than those informed by intellectual motives or spiritual revelations alone. I emphasize this aspect underlying conversions among Slavic settlers because it points once again to the liminal, in fact transitional nature of the borderland environment in which settlers operated.
It is equally important to consider that the smear campaigns pursued by Russian officials were at once more than a laissez-faire policy and less than legal prosecution of apostasy. They represented a different kind of coercion altogether, one shaped by over a century of Orientalist discourse. Indeed, virtually all colonial officials in Russian Turkestan framed cases of conversion to Islam in two ways. First, they attempted to picture those who recanted their ancestral religion as either mentally weak or poorly educated in the Orthodox faith. Secondly, they claimed that Slavs had converted to Islam under the influence of Muslim fanatic proselytizers, a cliché deep-seated among tsarist officials. Seen from this point of view, the new law promulgated in 1905 only “ostensibly introduced a more liberal approach to the issue of religious tolerance.”Footnote 83 While the new law made conversion a possibility, in fact the identification of Russianness with Orthodoxy made any conversion to a non-Christian confession inherently adverse to the imperial cause; hence, the tsarist officials and churchmens’ attempts to minimize the apostates’ religious sincerity. What is more, proselitism and especially luring Orthodox Christians into Islam remained prohibited, as illustrated in the case of Mariia and Sydyk.
Although articulated and exchanged within the precincts of the colonial administration, the idea that Slavs converted to Islam under the influence of Muslims percolated through society with the resulting consequence that Slavic settlers accused of apostasy to Islam often claimed to have converted under duress to avoid punishment.Footnote 84 As we have observed, when dealing with instances of apostasy to Islam, tsarist bureaucracy deployed a language premised upon a civilizational bias: Islam was the religion of the false Prophet and Muslims were by nature fanatics. In fact, the tendency to police and obstruct conversions to Islam is to be found not only with the Orthodox clergy and nationalist zealots, but also with the military elite that ruled Russian Turkestan. True, officials tended to prefer accommodation to confrontation. However, such a preference merely reflects the cautious character of tsarist governance in the region, for fear of rebellions was always present in the colonial mind.Footnote 85 Furthermore, it was a way for the militarymen in Turkestan to deflect attention from metropolitan officials and avoid a situation where the highest echelons of power in St. Petersburg would meddle in the colony’s affairs. Ultimately, it is important to observe that tsarist officials were able to devise bureaucratic strategies to coerce Slavic settlers to remain true to their professed faith.
With missionaries reporting about the phenomenon in alarming tones and militarymen minimizing its significance, gauging just how widespread conversion to Islam was among Slavs in Central Asia remains difficult. Ultimately, whether ignored or inflated, many cases of conversion appear to have escaped the attention of the colonial administration, as a report submitted in January 1900 to the Military Governor of the Akmolinsk province clearly indicates:
There are many examples of Russians in the steppe who converted to Islam and became such earnest fanatics that they now fulfil the role of highly respected mullahs among the Qazaqs. Tokarev is one example: he is the son of a merchant from Akmola…. Many settlers consider it materially favorable to convert to Islam and fill their pockets by inciting Muslim fanaticism. One cannot keep track of everyone. Tokarev shows up at the Orthodox church; he is first to approach the cross; during the annual archbishop’s service he even goes to confession and communion. And yet everyone knows that he is married to a Qazaq woman according to the Muslim rite and serves as a mullah among women in the aul…. There he walks in mullah’s clothes, sporting a turban. But there are also many others.Footnote 86
Paolo Sartori (PhD 2006) is Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he also presides over the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia. His latest books are A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, 1943–1991 (Vienna, 2024) and with Pavel Shabley, Delo Mansurova: Imperiia i Sufizm v Kazakhskoi stepi (Moscow, 2025).
