Introduction

A number of preconceptions regarding nomadic religiosity and Islam have strongly affected our understanding of the ʿulamāʾ among Qazaq nomads. These ideas are evident in much of the Russian writing on Qazaq history, and commonly maintain that Qazaqs, while nominally Muslims, did not constitute the same sort of Muslim society as their sedentary neighbours in the Volga-Ural region and Central Asia because they did not share the same sort of emotional or social attachment to Islam. Qazaqs were often described as ‘shamanists’ and their lack of immediately recognis¬able Islamic institutions, such as mosques and madrasas, was further evidence of their ‘superficial’ devotion to Islam. According to much of this Russian writing, ‘pre-Islamic’ customary law defined Qazaq legal culture, and sharīʿa was an invasive species of law brought by outsiders, specifically Tatars and Central Asians. Qazaqs who administered custom¬ary law – biys – were understood to be secular tribal chieftains whose authority and homespun wisdom were similarly ‘pre-Islamic’, and, in any event, unpolluted by Islamic education. Furthermore, these scholars argue, Qazaq nomads, as ‘shamanists’, had no Islamic scholars of their own, and instead brought in (or were supplied with) Islamic scholars from their more recognisable Islamic neighbours in Russia and Central Asia to administer Islamic Law.

Such a view reveals a substantial inability to assess Qazaq social history on its own terms. But it retains considerable currency in much of the scholarship on Qazaq history, particularly scholarship that is mainly derived from Russian sources, and not least in Kazakhstan itself.

At the same time, Qazaqs, including members of the ʿulamāʾ who examined the history of their own Islamic institutions, frequently assert the nearly total absence of Islamic scholars among Qazaq nomads up until about 1830. For example, writing in Russian periodicals in 1881, B. Daulbaev asserts that before 1830 there were virtually no ‘mullahs’ among the Qarabalïq Qïpshaqs in Torghay oblast’. Muhammad-Salih Babadzhanov, writing in 1861, made a similar observation regarding the Qazaqs of the Inner Horde. The Bukhara-trained poet and scholar Mäshhür Zhüsĭp Köpeyŭlï (1857–1931) and the theologian and historian Saduaqas Ghïlmani (1890–1972) wrote in manuscript works that the first Islamic scholars did not appear among the Arghïns of the Pavlodar and Aqmola (Akmolinsk) regions until the 1830s.

Edigü and the final disintegration of the Golden Horde

Challenges from Chinggisid rivals to the Manghït amir Edigü following the death of Toqtamïsh around 1406, led to the final disintegration of Chinggisid political unity in the western steppe. Henceforth political power would be centred in specific regions (yurts) that would become the foundations of Chinggisid successor states of the Golden Horde. These states emerged primarily in the first half of the fifteenth century. While their dates of existence varied, ultimately most met similar fates of either disintegration or annexation to powerful neighbours such as Muscovy and the Qazaq Khanate. These successor states include the Noghay, or Manghït, Horde, the Great Horde, the Crimean and Siberian khanates, and the khanates of Kazan, Astrakhan and Kasimov.

Following a period of political chaos and confusion in the first decades of the fifteenth century, Temür's defeat of Toqtamïsh in 1395 resulted in several decades of turmoil in the Ulus of Jochi that ended in the final disintegration of the Golden Horde and the establishment of a number of successor states in the western Dasht-i Qipchāq. The first two decades of the fifteenth century were characterized above all by the ongoing conflict between Toqtamïsh and his son Jalāl ad-Dīn on the one hand, and the Manghït amir Edigü and his Chinggisid allies and puppets on the other.

The vast expanse of land that forms the physical setting for the Chinggisid era in Inner Asian history extends from the forests of Manchuria in the east to the steppelands west of the Volga River stretching to the Black Sea. The forest and taiga zones of Siberia constitute the northern boundaries while the agrarian-sedentary world of China, the Islamic world and Christian Eastern Europe frame the region from the south and west. With the exception of the oasis city-states, many of them fabled connecting links in the Silk Road, much of this region consists of grassy prairies, the steppe, bounded by forest-steppe zones in the north and interspersed with deserts and semi-deserts in the south.

The history of this region from antiquity to modern times has primarily centred on the interaction of the nomadic world of the steppes with the much smaller Uralic or Palaeo-Siberian forest populations to the north, the settled, largely Iranian-speaking populations of the oasis city-states to the south and the larger states, often empires, south and later north of the steppe zone. The rise of the Chinggisid Mongol Empire was, in many respects, a culminating point in a long line of nomad-based polities with roots and political traditions going back to the Xiongnu (third century BCE–mid-second century CE). It was the most complex of these polities.

With the annexation of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the 1550s, and the formal submission of the Bashkir tribes in the second half of the sixteenth century, large populations of non-Slavic and non-Christian populations found themselves under Russian rule. Already before the annexations of the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates there were substantial Finno-Ugric and Muslim populations residing in Muscovy. As early as the eleventh century the Russian principalities of Vladimir and Suzdal' were established on territories that several Finno-Ugric peoples inhabited, the Merya, Muroma and Meshchera. By the sixteenth century the latter groups had become russified, but as Russia gained control of territories in the Oka and Middle Volga regions other Finno-Ugric and Turkic groups became Russian subjects, but were not russified, retaining separate cultural and linguistic identities. As early as the end of the fourteenth century Turkic Muslims also formed part of the Muscovite state, and Muslims were among the troops of Ivan IV in the conquest of Kazan. These were so-called ‘service Tatars’, who included the khans of Kasimov and Muslim communities inhabiting the Oka Valley. Similarly, even before the 1550s, the Muscovite nobility and especially servitor class reflected a similar multi-ethnic character. In general terms cooperation and mutual accommodation characterized the relations between the Russian authorities and the native inhabitants, and particularly the elites, of the Volga-Ural region between 1600 and 1850.