Encounter

When Russian troops stormed Muslim Tashkent near daybreak June 15, 1865, chaplain Andrei Y. Malov of the Fourth Orenburg Line Battalion was first through the battered Kämalan gate. The Russian Orthodox priest, who won a military cross from army authorities for valor, headed a leading assault column with Russian battle cries of "ura!" and, holding his ecclesiastical cross high before him, urged on the attack as though in the name of Christianity. The fall of Islamic Tashkent, the first large town in Central Asia seized by czarist soldiers, marked a new, domestic period in affairs between Central Asia and Russia. Simultaneously, the capture signaled an imminent end to the latest stage in their independent religious, economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic relations, some of which had begun a thousand years before.

This confrontation at the gates of Tashkent was by no means the first spiritual encounter involving Central Asia and Russia, for religion had apparently brought about formal relations linking the two as early as A.D. 986. Kievan princes then reputedly sought instruction concerning Islam from Khwarazm, whose shah prematurely expressed his gladness "about their [the Russians'] desire to accept Islam, and welcomed them with rich gifts and sent one of his imams to teach them Islam's rules." These Russians, said Islamic historians with unwitting irony, became Muslims because of "a desire to receive the right to conduct war for the faith." But Vladimir of Kiev, according to an old Slavic version of the story, in A.D. 986 rejected the teachings of Muslim missionaries, saying, as a Russian leader might today, that "undergoing circumcision and neither eating pork nor drinking wine were disagreeable to him." If, as both Islamic and Russian Orthodox traditions agree, the Central Asians had that chance to spread Islam, they failed to convert the Russians at this critical juncture and thus lost a great opportunity to employ religion for tying this largest Slavic group to the East rather than the West.

Although the question of faith nearly always colored relations between Russian Christians and Central Asian Muslims, at least until the fall of Tashkent religion never became a primary issue between the regions, never sent crusades on the offensive solely to convert populations inhabiting one of those competing areas. This was probably because, in the time after Russia had accepted Christianity, the Central Asians dominated Russian territory only as accessories to Mongol rule in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, and the Mongols at that time did not favor Islam in Russia. Soon after the Golden Horde's collapse in the fifteenth century allowed the czars to push forward their frontiers in the direction of Siberia, Russia ran headlong into a recently formed khanate allied to Bukhara. Although Christian-Muslim antipathy had not brought them diere, this deliberate engagement became for both sides areligious contest as well as the first real test of political strength matching a Central Asian khanate against Moscow.

Abdullah Khan (r.1557-1598) of Bukhara in 1572 had sent a religious mission to bolster Islam in Siberia, and in 1598 in a message to his protégé, Kuchum Khan(r.1563-1598) of Siberia, re-emphasized the religious importance of Siberia's defense against the Russians:

The enemies of our faith at the present time are the kafirs [Russians] ... you must conclude peace [with local Asian chieftains] and think about taking your lands out of the kafirs' hands again. If you carry on the present practices without coming to an understanding ... you will remain powerless before the kafirs:

Kuchum and Abdullah died not long after this message was composed, and Russia went on to absorb Siberia, but though this clash strained diplomatic ties between Bukhara and Moscow, it raised no permanent religious barriers to their later intercourse.

Aside from this isolated collision of "believers" and unbelievers," as members of both religious groups saw each other, religion became an important matter of state for Central Asian-Russian affairs early in connection with pilgrimage and marriage, two kinds of special situations which repeated themselves sporadically between the time Astrakhan lost its independence to Russia in the sixteenth century and the Russian occupation of Central Asia three hundred years later. The most direct pilgrimage routes from Central Asia to Mecca lay directly across Persia, but were blocked by the hostile Shiite Muslims, and now the Central Asian Sunnites' chief alternate road through Astrakhan Tatar territory to Mecca was also cut off. Consequently, the Central Asians had to sue for permission to cross land held by Russia to go the long way via the Black Sea to Istanbul and thence to Mecca. Diplomatic correspondence to Russia from Bukhara and Khiva, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, often pleaded for unobstructed passage of Muslims to their Holy City or between their countries, permission which the Russians were usually reluctant to grant. Until Catherine II's ukase of May 9, 1780, the czarist attitude regarding communication between Muslim countries remained negative: "One of the rules of policy had been ... to block communication both to Muslims living in the bounds of the present empire with co-religionists, as well as equally to Muslims not subject [to Russia] inhabiting Greater Tatary, via this territory, with the Crimea, the Kuban, and the Ottoman Porte."

Further evidence for this Russian change of heart regarding religion came later in the decade. The Empress set in motion a program to convert the Kazakhs to Islam by employing Tatars from Kazan as missionaries to the plains. Their activity was meant to reduce the influence of Bukharan mullahs in that area. Regardless of persistant Kazakh resistance to the idea, such Tatar proselyting continued fairly successfully with support from Russian officialdom.

Despite a seeming turn in Russian foreign policy at that time, provoked by the request submitted in 1780 from the Bukharan ruler Abul Ghazi (r.1758-1785) through his envoy to St. Petersburg, Mullah Ir Nazar Bek Maqsud-oghli, no certain answer to requests for free passage across Russia by Central Asian religious pilgrims subsequently came from the Russian government. It persisted in dealing cautiously with each separate appeal. Russian foreign minister Count Karl...