Imperial Russia as Dar al-Islam? Nineteenth-Century Debates on Ijtihad and Taqlid among the Volga Tatars
Journal: UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam)
Year: 2015

The Muslims of the Russian Empire provide us with some interesting cases of how local Islamic scholars used the language and genres of Islamic law to describe their situation in a "northern" and non-Muslim state. The development of Islamic law in nineteenth-century Russia was influenced by close contacts to the Islamic centers of learning in Central Asia, by the restraints imposed by the Russian Empire on Muslims, and by the internal dynamics of the Volga-Urals region. In this article, I discuss