Dreams of the Muftiate: The Kazakhs and the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (1868–1920)

• In Event: Local Agency and the Limits of Imperial Knowledge in the Kazakh Steppe and Beyond

Abstract

Founded by decree of Catherine II in 1788, the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (Orenburg Muftiate) held spiritual authority over Muslim clergy and institutions in the vast Muslim-populated provinces of the Russian empire. On the Kazakh steppe, however, its authority initially remained largely nominal. It was only from the 1820s that the Russian empire began extending its direct control over the Kazakh steppe. As the tsarist state expanded deeper into the steppe, annexing and politically integrating its territories, the Muftiate’s formal authority grew alongside it. This trajectory abruptly changed in 1868, when the Russian government excluded Kazakhs from the Muftiate’s jurisdiction.

This paper examines the anti-Islamic turn in tsarist religious policy, focusing on the exclusion of Kazakhs from the Orenburg Assembly and its broader implications. Paradoxically, despite being an imperial creation designed to regulate Muslim life under state oversight, many Kazakhs found their exclusion unsettling. By 1868, the Muftiate had become integral to the Muslim religious fabric of the Russian empire, even though such religious assemblies were conspicuously absent in Muslim states, including the Ottoman empire.

For nearly fifty years, from 1868 until the collapse of the empire in 1917, Kazakhs took repeated actions petitioned the Russian government, demanding reintegration into the Orenburg Assembly and even proposing the establishment of a local Muftiate. It was not until 1920, under the nascent Soviet regime, that Kazakhs were finally incorporated into the newly established Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia.

Author

• Nurlan Kabdylkhak, UNC at Chapel Hill