A History of Islamic Societies

By the end of the nineteenth century, the already settled Muslim populations of Russia and China were increased by colonial expansion. Muslims in the Caucasus and Inner Asia were brought under Russian or Chinese rule. By contrast with the Portuguese, British, French, German, and Dutch empires, Russian and Chinese expansion took place on territories contiguous with the imperial homelands. The conquered territories were not regarded as foreign domains that would eventually win their independence, but as integral parts of the conquering empires. From the Russian and Chinese points of view the “colonial” problem was a “minority” problem. How best could Inner Asian and Caucasian peoples be governed and eventually assimilated into the body politic of imperial – and, later, Soviet Russian and Communist Chinese – societies? From the Muslim point of view the problem was how to define Muslim identity in the face of pressures to assimilate into foreign civilizations. In the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union unexpectedly allowed for a new wave of state formation among the Muslim peoples of Inner Asia and redirected the quest for religio-ethnic identities.

The Caucasus and Inner Asia under Tsarist Rule

The first stages of Russian rule in the nineteenth century paralleled other colonial situations. The Russian conquests gave Muslim-populated regions a new territorial and administrative organization. Russia organized new states in the Caucasus. It dismantled the Muslim states of Inner Asia and divided the region into two large governorates – one for the Kazakh steppes and Turkmenistan, and one for the territories of Transoxania, Khwarizm, and Farghana that would henceforth be known as Central Asia or Russian Turkestan. In this region, autonomous vassal states remained at Bukhara and Khiva.