What is Islamic about reform among Muslims and what is not? How can we differentiate reform within an Islamic paradigm and a paradigmatic shift from the Islamic tradition to something else in a Muslim community? How do we establish the connection between reform as an intellectual or scholarly project and the translation of that project into social reality (or, in some cases, the absence of such a translation)? This article addresses these questions in the context of the Volga-Ural region in the late Russian Empire, where reformist Muslims attempted to reform existing Islamic educational institutions, particularly the religious seminaries called “madrasas,” as a means to modernize the region's Muslim communities. Educational reform initiatives among Volga-Ural Muslims originated within the framework of Muslim networks and institutions. Yet, especially after Russia's Revolution of 1905, reform in a number of prominent madrasas came to be characterized by various non-religious and at times even anti-religious influences emerging from the globalization of Western European modernity. Consequently, in these madrasas, education and the overall student experience turned into a secularizing process, and Islam as a religious system lost its weight and appeal for many students, who then engaged in a reform movement that evolved beyond an Islamic paradigm.

For the leading scholars of reform among Muslims, the idea of reform in Islam has usually corresponded with the concepts of renewal (tajdīd) and setting aright (iṣlāḥ) in the two authoritative sources of Islam—the Qur'an and the prophetic traditions. These scholars therefore trace the history of reform among Muslims as far back as the early centuries of Islam.Footnote ¹ Yet, they also note Europe's rise to global eminence, especially from the eighteenth century onward, as an historic development that obliged reformist Muslims to focus their efforts on dealing with the growing power discrepancy between Western European states and Muslim communities around the world. Since the late nineteenth century, a common response of reformist Muslims to this challenge has been a dedicated effort to render Muslim theology, law, and institutions compatible with the evolving standards of modernity—as perceived by reformist Muslims—in order to enable Muslim communities to adapt to those standards.Footnote ² Scholars generally characterize such efforts among Muslims as “Islamic” or “within Islam,” thereby locating them within an Islamic paradigm.Footnote ³ In the case of Volga-Ural Muslims, however, although the educational reform movement started as the product of an effort to improve schooling within the existing system of Islamic education, it gradually turned into a movement away from this system and from Islam in general. It came to mean leaving the Islamic tradition and adopting in its place a European-inspired, secular educational model.

The distinction I make here in locating madrasa reforms among Volga-Ural Muslims within or away from Islam is not about the compliance of those reforms with a universally accepted or unchanging “textual blueprint” that defines what is Islamic.Footnote ⁴ After all, even a cursory look at Muslims across time and space reveals many differences both in doctrine and in practice; the blueprint that defines what is Islamic can and does change in different contexts, and this fluidity eliminates the possibility of demarcating sharp lines around what is or is not Islamic.

What, then, differentiates a movement within Islam from one that moves away from it? I find Talal Asad's definition of Islam as a “discursive tradition” helpful in answering this question. Asad argues that Islam “is a tradition” that “includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur'an and the Hadith.” Yet, it is a discursive tradition, because it is “the practitioners' conceptions of what is apt performance, and of how the past is related to practices, that will be crucial for tradition, not the apparent repetition of an old form.” Therefore, a practice becomes Islamic if “it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam, and is so taught to Muslims” by the authorities of a given context, be they scholars, preachers, Sufi masters, or even one's parents.Footnote ⁵ This definition preserves the fluidity of what the designation “Islamic” means across time and space, but it also gives us an opportunity to evaluate how certain practices, such as the madrasa reforms of the Volga-Ural region, relate to a discursive Islamic tradition. If a reform activity initiates a change of attitudes about the very necessity of compliance with Islamic principles and discursive ideals, or if it cuts its participants off from the authority structures needed to maintain and engage those principles and ideals, it may be qualified as a movement away from the Islamic tradition. The educational reform movement among Volga-Ural Muslims provides both of these conditions, and therefore I suggest that it is better understood as a reform activity among Muslims that indicates a shift from the Islamic tradition to something else.

The Context of Educational Reform

Madrasa reform in the Volga-Ural region emerged in the context of two broader transformations: the large-scale reform projects of the late Russian Empire that aimed to increase administrative and economic efficiency in an effort to catch up with Western Europe's level of development, and the religious revival movements that surged within and spread through Muslim communities around the world from at least the eighteenth century onward.Footnote ⁶ Ğabdurrahîm bin Ğusman Utız İmenî (1754–1835) and Ebunnasr Ğabdunnasîr el-Qursâvî (1776–1812) were two prominent Muslim scholars from the Volga-Ural region in whose works we can observe the influence of the eighteenth-century religious revival movements among Muslims. Between the mid-seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, aspiring students of Islamic scholarship from the Volga-Ural region traveled to Bukhara, or more broadly to Transoxiana, to access a higher level of learning not available in Russia.Footnote ⁷ Utız İmenî and Qursâvî also studied in Bukhara, but then they called for a reevaluation of the long-established Bukhara-based Islamic scholarship and its practical implications in the daily lives of Muslims in the Volga-Ural region. Following a common theme among eighteenth-century Muslim reformers around the world, Qursâvî, especially, forcefully criticized the scholars of his time for dissociating from the founding sources of Islam like the Qur'an and the prophetic traditions and relying instead on the works of later scholars. These criticisms prompted long-lasting debates among the Volga-Ural ulama and provided an incentive for religious and educational reform by generating a vein of discontent about the quality of Islamic scholarship in the region.Footnote ⁸

Then, in the late nineteenth century, a more practical incentive for educational reform emerged among Volga-Ural Muslims as a result of the sweeping transformations in the Russian imperial framework. Following its defeat by European powers and the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War (1853–1856), the Russian state launched a series of reform projects that came to be known as the “Great Reforms.” These projects and the accompanying improvements in Russia's economic, political, and physical infrastructure, which continued until World War I, created many opportunities for Volga-Ural Muslims. Railways, postal services, and big financial institutions exposed formerly insulated Muslim communities to the effects of a rapidly globalizing world economy.Footnote ⁹ It became possible for a significant number of Muslims to travel to and stay in Russia's cosmopolitan cities or the Ottoman territories and Egypt. Some even went to Western Europe. A growing bureaucracy and the introduction of local governing bodies brought the imperial state closer to its subjects. Services that the Muslims had rarely accessed in earlier times, such as imperial educational institutions or public health facilities, became more readily available to them, especially in relatively urbanized locations.Footnote ¹⁰

A telling sign of the significance of these transformations is the support wealthy Muslim merchants gave to educational reform initiatives in the Volga-Ural region. Merchants experienced first-hand the fast-changing circumstances of the world that surrounded the insular peasant communities of the Volga-Ural Muslims. Thus they felt the need to train young Muslims with skills needed to adapt to the demands of an increasingly capitalist and globally integrated economy.Footnote ¹¹ The founder of one of the first reformed madrasas in the Volga-Ural region, Ğâlimcan Barudî (1857–1921), was the son of Muhammedcan Ğaliyef (1832–1909), a successful merchant who made a fortune in the 1860s by selling Asian shoes and headgear in the city of Kazan. Ğaliyef also developed an interest in finance, entered the boards of several banks in Kazan, and served as an elected member of the Kazan City Duma between 1875 and 1905.Footnote ¹² Similarly, the Hüseyinof brothers, one of the biggest Russian Muslim merchant families of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, financed the reform initiatives in at least two big madrasas in the Urals region: the Hüseyniye Madrasa in Orenburg and the Ğusmâniye Madrasa in Ufa.Footnote ¹³ One graduate of the Ğusmâniye Madrasa, Ziyâ Kemâlî (1873–1942), studied in Cairo with a scholarship from the Ufa Muslim Charitable Society, and when he returned to Ufa in 1904 the wealthy Muslims of Ufa helped him open a large madrasa, the Ğâliye, with a Westernized curriculum that offered courses on chemistry, history, psychology, and the Russian language, in addition to religious courses.Footnote ¹⁴

The Models for Educational Reform

The Volga-Ural Muslims’ discontent with the quality of their Islamic scholarship and the effects of the transformations in the Russian imperial framework form the backdrop against which madrasa reforms took place in the region, but they do not explain how these reforms turned into a movement away from the Islamic tradition. The answer lies in the models that inspired Volga-Ural reformists, namely the Westernized institutions of lay education in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Volga-Ural Muslims distinguished both places as Muslim-ruled territories, but nonetheless, the intellectual culture that evolved around their Westernized institutions of lay education, loaded with secular and even anti-religious ideological baggage, eventually permeated the reformed madrasas of the Volga-Ural region and the experiences of their students.

The idea of educational reform as a means to revitalize Muslim communities was a dominant theme among Muslim reformists of the late nineteenth century in many parts of the world. This idea materialized in many different forms that range from the modest improvements of the Zaytuna Madrasa in Tunis in the 1860s to the Aligarh Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in India that opened in 1875.Footnote ¹⁵ But the particular version of educational reform that struck students and scholars from the Volga-Ural region was the creation of European-inspired institutions of lay education in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. Especially in the Ottoman Empire, military engineering schools, professional—particularly medical, military, and judicial—schools, public schools at various levels, and a university in Istanbul constituted a new educational system that was independent from and parallel to the existing institutions of Islamic education.Footnote ¹⁶

It was no accident that Ottoman and Egyptian institutions of lay education were chosen as a model for madrasa reform in the Volga-Ural region. Most of Russia's leading reformist Muslims established and maintained close relations with the scholars and intellectual circles of these countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aside from the role of print media in facilitating such contacts,Footnote ¹⁷ increasing numbers of Muslims from the Russian Empire traveled to the Ottoman territories—mostly to perform the Hajj—thanks to improvements in transportation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Additionally, following the Crimean War and the Russian invasion of the Caucasus region, hundreds of thousands of Russian Muslims migrated to Anatolia and the Ottoman Balkans, especially from the Crimea and the Caucasus but also from the Volga-Ural region.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, when İsma‘îl Gaspıralı, a famous reformist Russian Muslim from the Crimea, visited Istanbul in 1874, his paternal uncle was already a resident of the city to host him.Footnote ¹⁹

Muslim students from the Russian Empire studied in the Westernized institutions of higher education in the Ottoman Empire, and some of them returned to Russia to found or teach in educational institutions that offered European-inspired courses with European pedagogical principles. In his European travel notes, Fâtih Kerimî, from the Kazan region, who taught at Hüseyniye Madrasa in Ufa after graduating from the Ottoman Imperial School of Public Administration in Istanbul, provides information about several Westernized institutions of higher education in Istanbul where Russian Muslim students studied or could study.Footnote ²⁰ Ğubeydullah Bubî (1865–1938) graduated from the same school and returned to his village in the Viatka Province of the Ural region after finishing his studies, where he and his younger brother Ğabdullah Bubî (1871–1922) turned the village madrasa into one of the most controversial Westernized madrasas of the Russian Empire, the Bubi Madrasa.Footnote ²¹

Even when the Russian Muslim students who went to the Ottoman territories or Egypt studied in seemingly conventional institutions of Islamic education, like the madrasas of Medina or al-Azhar in Cairo, they could still be influenced by the modernist scholars at them. These included the renowned Muslim reformist of the early twentieth century Muhammad ‘Abduh at al-Azhar, and the scholars whom Abdulhamîd II (1876–1909) exiled to Medina because of their political activities. Muhammad ‘Abduh, for instance, had a strong influence over Ziyâ Kemâlî, the founder of the Ğâliye Madrasa in Ufa,Footnote ²² and Ğabdurreşîd İbrâhîm (1857–1944), an influential Russian Muslim reformist and political activist, especially during the Revolution of 1905, received his initiation into politics from the exiled Ottoman scholars and intellectuals in Medina.Footnote ²³

Scholars from the Volga-Ural region who had finished their studies also traveled to the Ottoman territories and Egypt and met the scholars and intellectual figures of major cities like Istanbul, Mecca, Medina, and Cairo. For instance, Barudî studied first in Kazan and then in Bukhara. When he finished and returned to Kazan to open his own madrasa, which was named after his father Muhammedcan Ğaliyef as the “Muhammediye Madrasa,” he already thought the madrasa education system needed to be improved, but he did not know how to set about this.Footnote ²⁴ In 1886, he went on a Hajj journey through Istanbul and Cairo and exchanged ideas with the scholars and intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire along the way. He later wrote that this trip “enriched his understanding in the field of religion and straightened his ideas on madrasa reform.” Barudî does not specify whom he met during this journey or how his ideas on madrasa reform actually evolved as a result of his contacts, but from the changes that he initiated at the Muhammediye Madrasa beginning in the early 1890s, we can infer that he was influenced by the Westernist currents then prevalent in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ²⁵ Barudî was probably also inspired by Gaspıralı, who maintained close connections with Ottoman intellectual circles and inspired many reformist Muslims in the Russian Empire and Central Asia through his publications and personal encouragement. One of Barudî's first reform initiatives was to introduce a new method of teaching literacy, usûl-i cedîd (literally the “new method”), which Gaspıralı had borrowed from the Ottoman Empire and had been trying to propagate in Russia since 1884.Footnote ²⁶

Similarly, Zeynullah Rasûlî (1835–1917) studied in the Volga-Ural region. He went on two Hajj journeys in 1869 and 1882 during which he met famous religious scholars of the major cities on his way. In his first journey he received Sufi initiation into the Khalidi branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order from Sheikh Ahmed Ziyaüddin Gümüşhânevî, known for his innovative ideas about finding Islamically acceptable solutions to modern problems, such as initiating a mutual aid society as an alternative to banking.Footnote ²⁷ In Russia, Rasûlî gathered a large following as a Naqshbandi Khalidi sheikh, and in 1884, with the support of his followers, he built a complex that involved a mosque, library, hospice, and madrasa, which became known as the Rasûliye Madrasa. In the 1890s, and especially in the early twentieth century when Rasûlî's son Ğabdurrahmân Rasûlî started to administer the madrasa with his father, the Rasûliye Madrasa also joined the reformed madrasas of the Russian Empire.Footnote ²⁸

Aside from the creation of new, European-inspired schools, the Ottoman and Egyptian madrasas evolved and improved, particularly in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, there were various attempts to institute reformed but still Islamic educational institutions in Egypt.Footnote ³⁰ But these developments were rather imperceptible compared to the growth of new schools that provided lay education, and already by the end of the nineteenth century lay school graduates manned the bureaucracy, military, and press, especially in the Ottoman Empire but also in Egypt.Footnote ³¹ Not surprisingly, it was the impressive growth of these lay educational institutions, more than the improvements in religious educational institutions, which caught the attention of reformist Muslims in Russia.

Implementing Reform in Russia

Reformist Muslims of the Volga-Ural region could have followed the Ottoman or Egyptian models directly and tried to open lay educational institutions, but instead they focused their efforts on reforming the area's madrasas. The Volga-Ural madrasas appeared to have many inadequacies by the standards of modern educational institutions that these reformists observed in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and the Russian Empire. Their buildings were often poorly designed and maintained, lacking basic facilities and hygienic standards. Most madrasas had only one instructor who could teach in only one or a few fields of Islamic scholarship, which obliged the students to continually switch madrasas as they studied. The books students read were in Arabic—a foreign language for the Turkic-speaking Volga-Ural Muslims—but the region's madrasas offered only poor language instruction. Students entered a madrasa to study a more or less standardized list of books under the supervision of their instructors, each proceeded at his own pace, and more often than not, it took a discouragingly long time before one could read all the required books.Footnote ³² Nevertheless, the primary function of the region's madrasas was to provide men of religion to its Muslim communities, and they fulfilled this function adequately. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, when the major reform initiatives took place, the region's madrasas supplied significantly more men of religion than its Muslim communities could employ.Footnote ³³ Therefore, in theory at least, the reformists could have left the madrasas alone and established lay educational institutions.

But establishing lay educational institutions required securing permissions from the Russian imperial state, and this was unlikely until at least the 1910s.Footnote ³⁴ The madrasas, however, were relatively free from government intervention in the early stages of the madrasa reforms. Before the 1870s, Russian bureaucrats perceived institutions of Islamic education as connected to the mosques, and mosques in the Volga-Ural region remained under the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly, an institution that regulated the religious affairs of Muslims in the Volga-Ural region, most of European Russia, and Siberia, and answered to the minister of internal affairs.Footnote ³⁵ Beginning in the 1870s, the imperial state repeatedly passed laws to transfer the jurisdiction of maktabs (Muslim elementary schools) and madrasas from the Assembly to the Ministry of Public Enlightenment, but it was unable to enforce these laws. In the end, the Assembly lost its authority over the maktabs and madrasas while the Ministry failed to take them under de facto control. Muslim communities steadfastly thwarted the attempts of school inspectors to supervise and regulate maktabs and madrasas, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs was too wary of instigating a religious rebellion among Muslims to back the Ministry of Public Enlightenment bureaucrats with its police forces. By the century's turn, the Ministry of Public Enlightenment was able to require all maktabs and madrasas that had opened after 1870 to offer the Russian language as a course subject in order to obtain or maintain official recognition. Occasionally, it could even close certain maktabs and madrasas, but it could not control what Muslim instructors taught to their students or how they taught it.

Thus, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, when the first substantial attempts to improve Muslim schooling in the Russian Empire took place, maktabs and madrasas existed in an administrative limbo. Muslim reformists could take over an old madrasa and experiment with its system of education without having to get permission from the Ministry of Public Enlightenment or remain under the supervision of its inspectors. If they wanted to open a new madrasa, all they had to do to evade state intervention was offer the Russian language as a course subject, and the reformists willingly did this anyway.Footnote ³⁶

Another advantage of the existing madrasa system for the reformists was the high value that the Volga-Ural region's Muslim communities attributed to Islamic education, which, in practical terms, meant material support and a reliable supply of students.Footnote ³⁷ Almost every Russian Muslim community employed a mullah (a certified man of religion) to oversee its religious needs, and almost every mullah provided elementary Islamic education to the community's children.Footnote ³⁸ In addition, hundreds of Islamic scholars with more advanced levels of knowledge offered religious training at the madrasa level to aspiring young men in mosques and, when funds were available, in separate buildings that served as dorms and classrooms.Footnote ³⁹ Even if the Russian Muslim reformists secured permission from the imperial state and convinced their merchant sponsors to build lay schools as in the Ottoman Empire, finding students for them would be difficult. In fact, the Russian state did establish model secondary-level schools for Muslims that provided secular education along with some religious training, but their poor reception by the population remained a major problem in the Volga-Ural region until the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ Working with the existing system of Islamic education, on the other hand, enabled Russian Muslim reformists to tap into the readily available scholarly and student networks in order to attract students and spread their ideas of change.Footnote ⁴¹

Although locating their reform initiatives within the madrasa system enabled Muslim reformists to benefit from the Volga-Ural Muslims’ support for Islamic education, the continuity of that support in the long run required the approval of the region's Muslim communities regarding the actual content of those initiatives. In the Ottoman Empire, the government had avoided meddling with the existing institutions of Islamic education and created a parallel system of lay education for the very purpose of avoiding the ulama's opposition. Although this parallel system enabled the Ottoman state to realize its Westernizing reforms with minimal tension, it also created a Westernized elite that engaged in a bitter competition with the ulama and was alienated from the broader Muslim population.Footnote ⁴² In the Volga-Ural region, the early reformists were already members of the ulama, and as such, they already enjoyed the trust and respect of the broader Muslim population. The beginnings of their initiatives were experimental and limited in scope. They looked to the Westernized institutions of lay education in the Ottoman Empire for inspiration, but they still conceived the reform of madrasas as an improvement within the Islamic paradigm. Both the Muhammediye and Rasûliye Madrasas, for example, started as regular madrasas, and the initial changes that Barudî and Rasûlî introduced were small. Barudî concentrated on teaching Qur'anic exegesis and the science of hadith among Islamic sciences; that is, he broke away from the Bukharan tradition by focusing on the foundational sources of Islam. He also introduced courses in the Russian and Turkic languages, geography, history, math, and the science of nature, all taught in Turkic.Footnote ⁴³ Likewise, Rasûlî did not reform his course curriculum radically until his son started to oversee education at the Rasûliye Madrasa in the early twentieth century, but he did provide his students with physical facilities that were unusually amenable compared to those of regular madrasas.Footnote ⁴⁴

The convenient physical facilities that founders of reformed madrasas introduced at this early stage increased the popularity of their institutions among students. Such improvements mainly involved buildings and educational equipment that matched the standards of the imperial—both Ottoman and Russian—institutions of secondary education, such as stone buildings with several classrooms, large bedrooms, dining halls, and separate kitchens.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his reminiscences about the Muhammediye Madrasa, where he studied between 1907 and 1914, Bâqî Urmançı (1897–1990) writes that the Muhammediye Madrasa was different from other madrasas in not only its program but also its construction. It had well-aired bedrooms instead of the large sleeping areas divided into cells with curtains conventional in regular madrasas, common cafeterias rather than individual cooking in the student cells, hot water for tea around the clock, and separate facilities for bathing. Instead of empty rooms where students sat on the floor, classrooms had desks, blackboards, rostrums, and big maps, and there were laboratories for natural science and astronomy, a workshop for woodworks, an infirmary, a courtyard, and even a skating rink.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Secularization of Madrasa Education

The Revolution of 1905, which turned Russia into a constitutional monarchy, created a relatively liberal atmosphere and made bold cultural and political experimentation possible for the various population groups of the empire.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the years that followed, the reformed madrasas of the Volga-Ural region began to depart from the existing madrasa system in more radical ways. They started to prioritize the appropriation of European scientific achievements and pedagogical principles over aspiring to improve the existing system of Islamic education. The weight of non-Islamic subjects in their curriculums increased significantly, often at the expense of Islamic subjects. New extracurricular activities exposed students to the worlds of secular arts and politics. The reformed madrasas started to look less like religious seminaries and more like the Ottoman, Egyptian, or even Russian imperial institutions of lay education.

Revealing at this point is a look at the nature of education at one of the Ottoman institutions of lay education, the Imperial School of Public Administration, where several reformist Russian Muslims studied in the 1890s and after. Due to the near absence of religious education at this school before 1891, the Sublime Port had received several complaints about “the signs of weakness in the faith” of its graduates. In response, in 1891, the Ottoman authorities added a few religious courses to its curriculum. But even with the new additions, the number of weekly class hours for courses with a religious content remained at only about 15 percent. Even so, this development was criticized as a reactionary move by the teachers of non-religious subjects, who had been raised in the secular atmosphere of the earlier period and strongly influenced the students.Footnote ⁴⁸

Russian Muslim reformists generally had to improvise and proceed gradually while adapting the models they borrowed from Ottoman educational institutions, such as the Imperial School of Public Administration, to the Volga-Ural madrasas. Ğubeydullah Bubî, one of the reformers of the Bubi Madrasa, graduated from this school in 1895 and returned to Russia to, together with his brother Ğabdullah Bubî, take over teaching at the Bubi Madrasa from their father Ğabdul‘allâm Hazret. Ğabdullah Bubî in his memoirs provides a detailed account of how the two brothers gradually transformed the curriculum.Footnote ⁴⁹ Initially, students arrived expecting to study the conventional subjects that Ğabdul‘allâm Hazret had taught, and not the European-inspired courses that the Bubî brothers wanted to offer. Furthermore, some scholars in and around the Bubi Village already had a history of enmity toward Ğabdul‘allâm Hazret, and they became still more hostile as they observed the brothers gradually move away from the established madrasa system. Ğabdul‘allâm Hazret gave full support to his sons, but they still had to proceed with caution. They started by dropping, one by one, some of the conventional books from Ğabdul‘allâm Hazret's original list and introducing modern subjects in their stead.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this way, by the year 1900 they had built a six-year program that included the basics of Islam, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), the methodology of fiqh, ethics, oration, Arabic, Persian, Turkic grammar, Turkic composition, arithmetic, geometry, general history, geography, and logic.Footnote ⁵¹

This was still a modest curriculum relative to those of other reformed madrasas at that time. The brothers were disadvantaged by starting late, by their location in a distant village, and by having fewer funds (despite the support of a local merchant), but they were more daring in their projects than were other Russian Muslim reformist educators. By constantly improving their program from one year to the next, they managed to create the most radically reformed or Westernized madrasa program in Russia in about a decade and attracted students from across the empire. In the 1900–1901 school year, Arabic language and religious subjects took about 64 percent of the weekly class hours (105 out of 163), and there were no courses on exact sciences or the Russian language. By the 1910–1911 school year, the total of Arabic language and religion class hours had decreased to some 26 percent (57 out of 220), and the program included sixty hours of Russian language and eighty hours of European-inspired non-religious courses. Furthermore, Turkic or Turkish gradually replaced Arabic as the language of study and textbooks, even in religious courses.Footnote ⁵² (The evolution of the Bubi Madrasa program is shown in Table 1.)

Table 1. Evolution of the Bubi Madrasa Program^a

^a Ğabdullah Bubî included copies of the Bubi Madrasa programs for each of these years in his memoirs. See Märdanov, Minnullin, and Räximov, Bertugan Bubıylar, 35, 46–47, 51, 56–57; Makhmutova, Lish tebe, 77, 85, 92, 171, 181, 195, 198; Rafilia Gimazova, Prosvetitel'skaia deiatel'nost’ Nigmatullinykh-Bubi (konets 19–nachalo 20 vv.) (Kazan: Pechatnyi dvor, 2004), 170–82.

A key problem the founders of all reformed madrasas in the Volga-Ural region faced while developing such programs was finding teachers for such a broad spectrum of courses.Footnote ⁵³ In the madrasas of the Russian Empire, a single scholar typically taught or at least supervised all instruction. Only the largest madrasas offered a full curriculum, but even in those exceptional cases the chief instructor held classes only in his fields of specialization while advanced students guided the younger ones in other fields. In some cases it was possible for a scholar to not lecture at all but rather assign books to his students and follow their progress with oral examinations from time to time.Footnote ⁵⁴ The reformed madrasas could not maintain this system while they claimed to offer courses ranging from Qur'anic recitation to mineralogy, in a total of one hundred to two hundred class hours a week with a predetermined academic calendar. They needed to find and hire teachers who specialized in specific fields.

For example, the Hüseyinof brothers established the Hüseyniye Madrasa in 1889 by combining the madrasas of three scholars in Orenburg among whom Damulla Şâhımerdan Hazret became the chief instructor while the other two continued to teach under his supervision. Later, the teachers of the Ufa/Orenburg Tatar Teachers' School, which the government had opened in 1873 and closed in 1890, also taught at the Hüseyniye Madrasa and contributed to improving its curriculum.Footnote ⁵⁵ As the curriculum expanded, the Hüseyinof brothers hired specialists to teach different courses, and transferred administration from Şâhımerdan Hazret to an administrative board. Only a few of the teachers that the brothers hired were Bukhara graduates. Fâtih Kerîmî and Ğabdullah İbrâhîmof had diplomas from Istanbul, at least six others were graduates of al-Azhar in Cairo, three were from the American College in Beirut, and others had studied at the madrasas and imperial institutions of secondary and higher education in the Russian Empire. The brothers regularly sent successful graduates of their madrasa to government schools in Russia and the Ottoman Empire for further education, and a few students even attended universities in Europe. Those who continued their education at the expense of the Hüseyinof brothers served at the Hüseyniye Madrasa, or at one of the other educational institutions that the brothers sponsored, for four years after their graduation. As a result, former students of the Hüseyniye Madrasa who studied in Ottoman, Russian, or European institutions of lay education or al-Azhar in Egypt began to dominate its faculty by the 1910s.Footnote ⁵⁶

Another feature of the reformed madrasas that contributed to the intellectual development of students in significant ways was the extracurricular activities that most of them built into their programs. Literary activity was cherished and encouraged by the reformed madrasa teachers. Writing literary pieces, especially poetry, was common among all madrasa students, including those of the regular madrasas, but the reformed madrasa students published their works in amateur newspapers, which they perceived as a preparation for stepping into the real world of publication. Ziyâ Kemâlî, who founded the reformed Ğâliye Madrasa in Ufa in 1904, provided his students musical instruments and encouraged them to attend theater plays and concerts, although use of instruments is a controversial issue in Islamic jurisprudence and Volga-Ural Muslims generally maintained an attitude of uneasiness about those who played music.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Bubî brothers' father, Ğabdul‘allâm Hazret, had prohibited playing musical instruments at his madrasa, but the brothers encouraged their students to play an instrument like the violin, accordion, or flute.Footnote ⁵⁸ While constructing a new building for the Bubi Madrasa in 1907, they included a large hall in the plan, and there, the students organized musical spectacles, theater plays, literary nights, and scientific and political conversation sessions.Footnote ⁵⁹ Conversation sessions or presentations were common in other madrasas too. Topics of speeches given in sessions at the Ğâliye Madrasa included: “Why Do India and Indonesia Remain Slaves under the Domination of Britain and Holland?,” “Now We Are in the Twentieth Century,” “Revolution and the Types of States,” and “Our Nation and Its Signs.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Student Demands for Further Secularization

Such changes in the curriculum, teacher bodies, and the overall educational experience made available to the reformed madrasa students a whole range of new ideas and ideologies unimaginable for the students of regular madrasas. The teachers who came from the Ottoman Empire or Egypt and the textbooks they used introduced what historians of the Ottoman Empire have identified as “scientism,” a worldview that privileged reason and empirical observation over revelation as the means of knowing reality.Footnote ⁶¹ On the other hand, learning Russian and having access to the Russian-language publications familiarized reformed madrasa students not only with the various colors of Russia's growing socialist movement and the anti-religious views of the Russian intelligentsia, but also with pan-Slavism, which they could then use as a model to develop Muslim nationalisms.Footnote ⁶²

In the liberal political atmosphere that followed the Revolution of 1905, reformed madrasa students fraternized with Russian students, particularly in the city of Kazan, read the revolutionary—mostly socialist but also nationalist—literature, and wanted to participate in the revolutionary activities. Especially the extracurricular activities in the reformed madrasas provided students with occasions for political discussion and organized activity beyond the purview of their teachers. Gradually, the student profile of reformed madrasas began to be dominated by students who wanted to pursue lay careers and were interested in social and political questions of a secular nature rather than questions of religious scholasticism or even the religious aspects of those socio-political issues. They pressured the owners of reformed madrasas to depart from the course curriculum and daily regimen of regular madrasas in more radical ways and, as a result, pulled those madrasas further away from being Islamic institutions.Footnote ⁶³

Students of the Muhammediye Madrasa were among the first Muslim students in the Russian Empire to develop an interest in social and political questions of a secular nature and to start pushing the madrasa administration for more radical reforms. In 1902, a group of students there founded a reading circle called “İttihâd” (Unity) under the leadership of Fâtih Emirhan, who later became a well-known journalist and litterateur with leftist ideas. Members of İttihâd dressed in the European style, prepared several amateur newspapers that circulated in the madrasa, organized literary and musical events, and staged theater plays. Over time, Muslim students attending government schools in Kazan started to join them, too. During the revolutionary years, the members of İttihâd fraternized with students of the Imperial Kazan University, organized a society called “Islâh Cem‘iyeti” (the Society of Reform), printed and distributed pamphlets with revolutionary content, organized an “All-Russian Congress of Tatar Students” to which they invited Muslim students from across the empire, and published the leftist newspaper el-Islâh.Footnote ⁶⁴

Barudî, the founder of the Muhammediye Madrasa, himself was actively involved in imperial politics in the revolutionary years. In 1908, he was even exiled to Vologda for two years because of his political activities.Footnote ⁶⁵ But he followed a more conservative line than his students. Members of the Islâh Cem‘iyeti wanted him to relax discipline in the madrasa and de-emphasize religion entirely in its program. Neither Barudî nor the wealthy merchants who supported the Muhammediye Madrasa were willing to meet this demand. Barudî was a devout Muslim who considered the sciences of religion important and also had Sufi inclinations. The tension between the students and the madrasa administration grew rapidly, and members of the Islâh Cem‘iyeti left the Muhammediye Madrasa amid demonstrations.Footnote ⁶⁶

Similar events occurred at the Hüseyniye Madrasa in 1908. Two teachers fell into disagreement with its administration and transferred to the Bubi Madrasa, which was by now the most radically Westernized Muslim educational institution in the empire. Following this, 101 students of the Hüseyniye Madrasa petitioned the board for improvements in its program, more freedom for students to choose whether or not to follow an Islamic way of life, the recall of the two teachers, and the replacement of the madrasa manager. When the board rejected their demands, thirty-three students petitioned again. Mainly, they wanted the madrasa to adopt a more secular program by further limiting the number of religious courses. They also wanted some of the teachers to be fired. The board refused these demands once again, and the students formed an action committee. Under its guidance, they began to boycott the classes of teachers they did not like. At one point, they were only attending the classes of Fâtih Kerimî, another graduate of the Imperial School of Public Administration in Istanbul. They also sang the Marseillaise and read political pamphlets aloud from time to time. When the madrasa board decided to expel members of the action committee, thirty-three students left the Hüseyniye Madrasa in protest; twenty-seven of them transferred to the Bubi Madrasa, and six entered government schools.Footnote ⁶⁷

As opposed to the founders of other reformed madrasas, the Bubî brothers themselves encouraged student activity in the revolutionary period following 1905. They left the administration of the students’ daily life to an elected student committee and regularly organized discussions about what they deemed to be the pressing problems of Russia's Muslims. The Bubi students also established a society called “İttihâd” (probably in imitation of the earlier İttihâd Circle of the Muhammediye Madrasa) and held meetings with student representatives from the neighboring provinces. However, the students' self-administration collapsed by 1909. Books had started to disappear from the library, acts that would normally call for disciplinary action had started to go unnoticed, and life in the madrasa had become unpredictable. The Bubî brothers transferred all administrative decisions back to a pedagogical committee of teachers. But students were still content with the education they received at the Bubi Madrasa, because it provided the most Westernized curriculum among Russia's madrasas.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Loss of Devotion to the Islamic Tradition and Alienation

Although the earlier madrasa reformers of the Volga-Ural region altered their curriculums primarily to improve Islamic education and thereby to revitalize Muslim communities, a practical, unintended consequence of their endeavors was a reduction of the weight of religion in the thinking and lives of their students.Footnote ⁶⁹ This consequence should not be taken to imply a teleological relationship between curriculum change and loss of religious devotion. Other experiences show that it is possible to incorporate the achievements of empirical science into Muslim schooling without necessarily distancing students from the Islamic tradition. For instance, in the Turkish context, the famous theologian Bediüzzaman Said Nursî (1876–1960) took issue with late-Ottoman intellectuals' scientism and employed the concept of “reading” the “book of the universe” (kitab-ı kâinat) through observation and examination in order to conceptualize scientific investigation as a form of worship. This form of worship, Nursî suggested, could help one know God and come closer to Him through studying His creation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Later, the followers of Fethullah Gülen, a highly influential Turkish religious leader born in 1938, employed Nursî's approach in the hundreds of educational institutions they have opened in Turkey and around the world since the 1970s in order to arouse students' interest in the sciences while simultaneously reinforcing their religiosity.Footnote ⁷¹ By contrast, the founders of reformed madrasas in the Volga-Ural region who introduced new, European-inspired courses along with the Russian language in their madrasas and imported teachers and textbooks from the Ottoman Empire simultaneously, and perhaps unintentionally, exposed their students to the scientistic worldview of the Ottoman Westernizers and the anti-religious discourse of the Russian intelligentsia. It was this exposure that transformed educational reform among Volga-Ural Muslims into a secularizing process.

The more that reformed madrasa students were exposed to alternative worldviews, including but not limited to scientism and socialism, the less that they cared about whether or not an idea or practice was authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam, no matter who endorsed that authorization or how. Schooling in the regular madrasas, in principle, provided what we may call an “Islamic social patterning” to the students through engagement with long-established Islamic texts, the incorporation of religious practices into the daily regimen, and the idealization of piety in the example of madrasa instructors or model men of religion. Most members of the early generation of reformists, including the founders of some of the reformed madrasas such as Barudî, Rasûlî, or even the Bubî brothers, had received this Islamic social patterning as madrasa students before they developed their reform projects. As a result, for the earlier reformists the teachings of Islam and an Islamic way of life constituted a natural given. They sought adaptation to the transformations of the world that contained local Muslim communities by reconciling the norms and values of that world with the Islamic tradition. But the reformed madrasas provided students with a different kind of social patterning, one that prioritized the appropriation of Western European ideas and practices under the banners of enlightenment and progress. As Islamic social patterning faded away in the experience of the students, empirical science and Western European values replaced Islamic tradition as the starting point, or natural given, in their thinking. A new student culture emerged that idealized enlightenment and progress rather than piety.Footnote ⁷² These students, who constituted the later generation of reformists, became less insistent on trying to reconcile the norms and values of Western European modernity, which they witnessed through the mediation of the Ottoman Westernizers and the Russian intelligentsia, with the Islamic tradition. Instead, they tried to reconcile the teachings of Islam with social necessity, empirical science, and Western European values. When their efforts at reconciliation failed, many preferred to relegate Islam to a secondary position.

In his memoirs, Zeki Velidî Togan, the famous Bashkir political leader and historian, provides a frank account of how he experienced this process. While studying in the madrasa of his uncle Habîb Neccâr, who had reformist ideas, Togan had learned Arabic and Persian very well, developed acquaintance with the works of history and literature in these languages, and also studied some Russian. But he had not built a solid background in Islamic sciences. In 1908, he left his village intending to go to Egypt or Beirut for further study. He first went to Orenburg, where he met some students from the Hüseyniye Medrese who lived a free and easy life, drank alcohol, and gambled—acts forbidden in Islam. The students ridiculed Togan's Bashkir clothes from his village and gave him the first European-style clothes he had ever had. He asked for the support of a merchant in Orenburg in order to go to Egypt, but after a quick examination the merchant found his religious knowledge lacking and wanted him to first improve himself further in Russia. In the meanwhile, the reformist Muslim scholars that Togan met in Orenburg also encouraged him to stay in Russia, improve his Russian, and attend government schools.

Togan stayed in Russia and settled in Kazan. There, he took private courses on Qur'anic exegesis and Islamic jurisprudence, but also entered into the milieu of reformists, got to know the Muhammediye Madrasa students, who also drank alcohol and gambled, started to earn his way by writing in reformist newspapers, grew used to wearing Russian clothes, started smoking, developed acquaintance with the Russian Orientalists at the Imperial Kazan University, and studied Russian literature, math, and pedagogy. When, after one year, he visited his village, he noticed that the bond that had made him a part of this village was no longer intact. Later, he further adapted to the cosmopolitan culture of Kazan, and for a time he rejected religion altogether and drank heavily. Eventually, as he recalls in his memoirs, he developed a new understanding of religion in which he accepted the basic tenets of Islam, but he subjected the Qur'an to historical analysis and refused to abide by the practical restrictions and obligations of an Islamic way of life. This intellectual transformation led him to a painful conflict with his father. They reconciled thanks to the intervention of Togan's uncle, Habîb Neccâr, but his father only came to genuinely approve of him—though not his ideas—when Togan led the Bashkir nationalist movement after 1917.Footnote ⁷³

It is difficult to know how many young Volga-Ural Muslims shared Togan's loss of devotion to the Islamic tradition of his community, but the total student population of even the few well-known reformed madrasas that are recorded in historiography numbered several thousands.Footnote ⁷⁴ This younger generation of reformist Muslims constituted a new category among Volga-Ural Muslims.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although nominally they were madrasa graduates, they were no longer able or willing to act as members of the ulama.Footnote ⁷⁶ The reformed curriculums equipped them with skills to earn their livings in various jobs ranging from teaching in reformed maktabs to serving as clerks in business companies or joining civil service.Footnote ⁷⁷ They remained connected by the networks that emerged from their student years and by a shared world outlook that prioritized social and scientific progress and was sustained by a growing body of publications. But these also separated them from the rest of the Muslim community.

In a telling example from 1911, Fettâh Ğadlî, a reader of the Orenburg-based reformist periodical Şûra, describes these young and reformist Muslims as “some members of the youth who sell philosophies” that are “far from being in tandem with the sacred feelings of our people.” Ğadlî writes, “Although they are very few in number, they are very bold, and they defend their position powerfully.… However, the people do not accept their philosophy, which they express with a language that is a mixture of the Russian and Tatar vocabularies and which they themselves understand only superficially.”Footnote ⁷⁸

One radical expression of the boldness Ğadlî complains of was the way these younger reformists disparaged members of the ulama. In 1914, another reader of Şûra, Hüccetülhakîm Mahmûdof, wrote that the “national press,” which was dominated by young and reformist Muslims, “satirized and criticized [the ulama] without measure and without sparing to the extent that there [was] not a single novel or theater play in which the imams [had] not been insulted and ridiculed!”Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, the ulama were represented in reformist publications as ignorant, greedy, and intimidating figures with dark features. In the discourse of the younger reformists, the turban, which had long distinguished the learned class among Volga-Ural and many other Muslim populations, came to symbolize a bait that ignorant mullahs used to give the impression of being knowledgeable so they could lure and exploit common believers.Footnote ⁸⁰ Tensions gradually increased between reformist Muslims, especially younger ones, and the conservative members of the ulama who still enjoyed significant authority among local Muslim communities. It was precisely these communities that the reformists had long wanted to change, but despite occasional conflicts between congregations and their mullahs,Footnote ⁸¹ the common believers among Muslim peasants and most city dwellers valued piety and scholarship and therefore respected the mullahs. By moving away from religion and the ulama, reformist Muslims were alienating themselves from the broader Muslim population.

Reformist Russian Muslim publishers of the early twentieth century, in the Volga-Ural region as well as in other parts of Russia, often characterized this tension as a controversy between the progressive and enlightened (ziyalı) reformists, dubbed “Cedidciler” or Jadidists, and the reactionary and ignorant traditionalists, dubbed “Qadimciler” or Qadimists.Footnote ⁸² With a few exceptions, this characterization has dominated the historiography of Russia's Muslims.Footnote ⁸³ Some historians have also portrayed the efforts of Russian Muslim reformists as a successful “symbiosis” or “conciliation” between the religious and the secular, or the Islamic and the Western, thus justifying the categorization of the opposition to Muslim reformists as a reactionary response.Footnote ⁸⁴

One drawback of this line of thinking that has already been recognized in the historiography on Russia's Muslims is its poor appreciation of the conservative ulama's response to the problems arising from the changes in social, political, and economic circumstances.Footnote ⁸⁵ In fact, as Adeeb Khalid has also suggested, conservative members of the Russian Muslim ulama did respond to such changes, and they should be identified as proponents of a different kind of reform rather than as “traditionalists” or “reactionaries.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Another, equally important shortcoming of the historiography that celebrates the Russian Muslim reformists' “success” is its extensive and sometimes exclusive use of the writings of prominent and prolific reformist scholars in order to demonstrate how they reconciled the religious and the secular or the Islamic and the Western.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, for the students who studied in the reformed madrasas of the Volga-Ural region, the upshot of their educational experience was a loss of devotion to the Islamic traditions of the region's Muslim communities, and their consequent alienation.

The primary function of Volga-Ural madrasas was to raise pious and righteous Muslim men of religion who could, in turn, uphold a high standard of piety and morality in their communities,Footnote ⁸⁸ but the reformed madrasas ceased to fulfill this function. They were still called “madrasas,” nominally, but the form and content of the education they offered was more European or Western than Islamic. Moreover, their students often embraced the rather liberal and radical elements of the European or Western spectrum of ideas. Especially in the 1910s, when the liberal atmosphere of the revolutionary period following 1905 surrendered its place to St. Petersburg's restored authority,Footnote ⁸⁹ the Russian imperial bureaucracy also grew wary of this situation. If madrasas were categorically religious institutions, the imperial bureaucrats claimed, they should teach exclusively religious subjects and keep their students away from politics.Footnote ⁹⁰ Although the root cause of this wariness was an unfounded assumption about the existence of a separatist, pan-Islamist movement among Russia's Muslims,Footnote ⁹¹ the directors of the reformed madrasas still had to protect their schools from closure by convincing the police and the Ministry of Public Enlightenment inspectors that they operated exclusively religious institutions, which should continue to be categorized as “madrasas” and therefore left alone.Footnote ⁹² In 1911, as a result of such suspicions, the police closed the Bubi Madrasa and about seventy other reformed maktabs and madrasas.Footnote ⁹³ After the Bolshevik Takeover in 1917, many others had to close their doors along with the regular maktabs and madrasas, but the Soviet authorities recognized the graduates of most of the reformed madrasas as possessing training equal to the graduates of tsarist or Soviet secondary schools.Footnote ⁹⁴ Ironically, the Hüseyniye Madrasa was even converted into a Soviet Teachers' School, where prospective teachers were trained to raise atheist Soviet citizens, without radical changes in the form and content of the “madrasa” education it provided.Footnote ⁹⁵