Sharia in the Russian Empire

Studies the formulation, transmission and application of Islamic law under Russian colonial rule

This book looks at how Islamic law was practised in Russia from the conquest of the empire's first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire's Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and 'customary' law.

Drawing on difficult-to-access sources written in a variety of non-Russian languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), the contributors offer scholars of Russian history, Islamic history and colonial history an account of Islamic law in Russia of the same quality and detail as the scholarship currently available on Islam in the British and French colonial empires.

Key Features
. Presents the theory and application of Islamic law in the Volga-Ural region, the Kazakh Steppe, the north Caucasus and Central Asia from the 1550s to 1917
. Draws comparisons between Islamic law in Russia and elsewhere in the colonial world
. Based upon important, but largely unstudied print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian and the Turkic languages
. Brings together the work of an international collective of scholars of Islam in Russia

Paolo Sartori is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He is author of Visions of Justice: Sharia and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (2016).

Danielle Ross is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Islamic history at Utah State University. She is author of Tatar Empire: Kazan's Muslims and the Making of Imperial Russia (2020).

List of contents

Introduction: The Reach and Limits of Shari¿a in the Russian Empire, ca. 1552-1917, Danielle Ross and Paolo Sartori; 1. Islamic Education for All: Technological Change, Popular Literacy, and the Transformation of the Volga-Ural Madrasa, 1650s-1910s, Danielle Ross; 2.Taqlid and Discontinuity: The Transformation of Islamic Legal Authority in the Volga-Ural Region, Nathan Spannaus; 3. Debunking the 'Unfortunate Girl' Paradigm: Volga-Ural Muslim Women's Knowledge Culture and its Transformation across the Long Nineteenth Century, Danielle Ross; 4. Between Imperial Law and Islamic Law: Muslim Subjects and the Legality of Remarriage in Nineteenth-Century Russia, Rozaliya Garipova; 5. Islamic Scholars among the Kereys of Northern Kazakhstan, 1680-1850, Allen J. Frank; 6. Tinkering with Codification in the Kazakh Steppe: ¿Adat and Shari¿a in the work of Efim Osmolovskii, Pavel Shabley and Paolo Sartori; 7. Taqlid and Ijtihad over the Centuries: The Debates on the Islamic Legal Theory in Daghestan, 1700s-1920s, Shamil Shikhaliev; 8. Kunta ¿ajji and the Stolen Horse, Michael Kemper and Shamil Sh. Shikhaliev; 9. What We Talk about When We Talk about Taqlid in Russian Central Asia, Paolo Sartori; 10. Take Me to Khiva: Shari¿a as Governance in the Oasis of Khorezm (19th-Early 20th Centuries), Ulfat Abdurasulov and Paolo Sartori.

About the author

Paolo Sartori is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is the editor of the Brill series Handbooks of Oriental Studies (Section 8 Uralic & Central Asian Studies) and is editor in chief of the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient (Brill). He is author of Visions of Justice: Shari¿a and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Brill, 2016).Danielle Ross is Assistant Professor of Asian History in the Department of History at Utah State University. She has published a chapter in Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War I (Brill, 2016).

Product details

• Authors: Danielle Sartori Ross, Ross Danielle
• Assisted by: Danielle Ross (Editor), Paolo Sartori (Editor)
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2018
• EAN: 9781474444293
• ISBN: 978-1-4744-4429-3
• No. of pages: 320
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > History > Modern era up to 1918