Adeeb Khalid writes:

The Russian Empire sought legitimacy in the eyes of its Muslim subjects by claiming to be the upholder of Islamic values and the protector of Islam. The Muslim scholars, the ulama, affiliated with the assembly came to see the imperial state as a protector, and even the enforcer of their version of orthodoxy, an orthodoxy formed through the confluence of the interests of the ulama, the state and Russian Orientalists. For ordinary Tatars and Bashkirs, the state, its courts, its bureaucracy and its police provided new arenas in which to settle disputes, including disputes over matters of faith. All this is a far cry from the myth of unbroken hostility between Russia and Islam. Robert Crews makes many of these points in his new book on Russia’s management of its Muslim subjects from the reign of Catherine the Great until 1917.

(LRB 24 May 2007)

Harvard | hardback 463 pp. |ISBN: 9780674021648