Turks across empires : marketing Muslim identity in the Russian-Ottoman borderlands, 1856 - 1914

225 Pages·2015·2.94 MB·English

by  Meyer

OXFORD STUDIES
IN MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY
General Editors
SIMON DIXON, MARK MAZOWER,
and
JAMES RETALLACK

Turks Across Empires
Marketing Muslim Identity in the
Russian–Ottoman Borderlands, 1856–1914
JAMES H. MEYER
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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© James H. Meyer 2014
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First Edition published in 2014
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Acknowledgments
Writing a book has been one of the most humbling, at times even humiliating, tasks
that I have ever undertaken. While I have often read in passages of this sort that the
process of writing a book involves many people, I had never really begun to under-
stand the meaning of those words until now. During the course of roughly ten years
of dissertation and book research and writing, such an enormous number of people
provided assistance or advice to me that I am simply unable to acknowledge them
all here. I would therefore like to apologize in advance to anyone who is left out.
This book is dedicated to everyone who has helped me through this process. At the
very top of this list are my parents, the two individuals most responsible for turning
me on to foreign countries and languages. Without my Mom and Dad enthusiasti-
cally dragging me to places such as Paris, Italy, and La Shebba, Tunisia when I was a
kid, I never would have gone to Turkey as a young adult after college. None of this
would have happened without their support and encouragement. My older brother
Jack was also an early inspiration for me in part because of his own travels and writing,
but also for suggesting, back in 1991, that I check out Istanbul. My sister Trish and
her family made visiting Ann Arbor during graduate school a lot more fun, helping to
remind me what going home was all about. Without my daughter Eszter, meanwhile,
I never would have stayed so long in Istanbul in the first place. I love them all more
than words can express.
Gordon Dobie gave me my first job in Turkey in 1992, and Clare Hogan shamed
me into studying Turkish. Filiz Mirkelam, Gülçin Bircanoğlu, and Ken Bucan, espe-
cially, helped make Istanbul a much nicer place to live in the 1990s. At Princeton
University, where I began my graduate school career as a thirty-year-old MA student,
Heath Lowry was willing to take a chance on me. Şükrü Hanioğlu was kind enough
to help me with some of my early struggles in Ottoman Turkish, and the department
sponsored my studies on Ottoman Island in Ayvalık, Turkey. Norman Itzkowitz took
me under his wing when I was feeling abandoned, and helped save my fledgling career.
At Brown, where I conducted my doctoral studies, my advisor Engin Akarlı chaired
the committee overseeing the dissertation upon which this book is based. Early on,
when I was in graduate school, Engin Bey told me “Don’t be afraid to fly!” and I have
tried my best to follow his advice. Tom Gleason kindly and energetically introduced
me to the academic study of Russia, and was instrumental in getting the original ver-
sion of this work off the ground. Adeeb Khalid provided important and useful feed-
back while serving on my dissertation committee as an outside reader, and has been a
great inspiration to me throughout graduate school and beyond. Mark Mazower, who
had tutored me on Balkan population movements at Princeton, gave me my first job
after graduate school when I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University.
Years later, Mark would emerge once again to help me greatly in the publication of
this book. I thank him so much for caring, and for believing in this project.
vi Acknowledgments
Since 2009, Montana State University has been my home. I have learned to
look at the borderlands from the perspective of a beautiful mountain ski town. My
department chair, David Cherry, and numerous people from my department—
especially J. Barton Scott, Billy Smith, Bob Rydell, Brett Walker, Catherine
Dunlop, Dale Martin, Dan Flory, Kristen Intemann, Michael Reidy, and Susan
Cohen—have helped talk me through the book-writing process and related con-
cerns at various points. My most junior colleague at MSU, Maggie Greene, has
read every word of this book multiple times, and has discussed this project with
me on countless occasions. I will never forget what they have done for me, and I
thank all of them for teaching me something about how to be a good colleague.
Peter Tillack and James Martin provided support and good cheer at numerous
points during the writing process, as did Greg Merchant, who helped greatly with
several of the photographs in this book. Outside of Montana State, friends in my
field—namely Lale Can, Pınar Şenışık, and Brett Wilson—provided me with useful
feedback on early drafts and revisions, as did Michael Reynolds, whose advice and
support came at a particularly critical juncture. Extra-special thanks are due to Bruce
Grant, who provided guidance and took this project seriously at a time when I most
needed help with it. Needless to say, any mistakes and errors belong to me alone.
Grant-giving organizations which supported research for this book include
the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Social Science Research Center,
ACTR-American Councils, the Institute of Turkish Studies, Fulbright–IIE, the
Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the National Council for
Eurasian and East European Research. I have also received support from Princeton
University, Brown University, and Montana State University in the form of short- and
long-term research grants. Research fellowships at the Harriman Institute at Columbia
University in 2007–08 and the Kennan Institute and Woodrow Wilson Center in
Washington, DC in 2011 provided incredible forums for discussing my work and
that of others. Short-term visits to workshops held by the Slavic Research Center of
Hokkaido University in 2008 and 2010, the Fisher Forum workshop on mobility at
the University of Illinois in 2009, and other workshops and talks held at Princeton
University, Columbia University, Georgetown University, Stanford University, the
University of Copenhagen, Humboldt University, and Montana State University
helped guide this project. I would also like to pay special thanks to the International
Journal of Middle East Studies, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, and
Routledge Press for providing me with permission to reproduce parts of their publica-
tions of my work in this book.1 My gratitude is also extended to Professor Dr. Fazıl
Gökçek and to Çağrı Yayınları for allowing me to reproduce some of their images.2
1 James H. Meyer, “Immigration, Return, and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in
the Ottoman Empire, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39:1 (2007), 9–26,
parts of which are used in Chapter 1; “Speaking Sharia to the State: Muslim Protesters, Tsarist
Officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and
Eurasian History 14:3 (Summer 2013), 485–505, sections of which appear in Chapter 2; and “The
Economics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Money, Power and Muslim Communities in Late Imperial
Russia,” in Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts, ed. Uyama Tomohiko
(London: Routledge, 2012), 252–70, parts of which appear in Chapter 4.
2 Fazıl Gökçek (ed.), Fatih Kerimi İstanbul Mektupları (Istanbul: Çağrı Yayınları, 2001)
Acknowledgments vii
Special appreciation is sincerely conveyed to the scholars, librarians, archivists,
and other friends and colleagues I have met during the course of researching this
book in Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Ukraine. The staffs of the archives
and libraries where I have researched this book have been incredible, as have the
representatives of the grant-giving agencies I have been fortunate enough to work
with. I would also like to thank the many people who have trained me in language
and paleographic skills over the years, whose expertise and patience I have hope-
fully put to good use. The staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department at Montana
State University have been very helpful, not to mention forgiving. The conversa-
tions I have had with colleagues, students, and friends at MSU—in the classroom,
in the office, and on the ski lift—have pushed this book in directions I could not
have thought possible.
At Oxford University Press, my editor, Robert Faber, put in a tremendous amount
of work to make sure that this project got off the ground. I feel deeply grateful
and indebted to him. Cathryn Steele, Janaki Chokkanathan, and Saipriya Kannan
have been very helpful and patient in dealing with my numerous q uestions regard-
ing pictures, designs, and other practical details. Elizabeth Stone’s copy-editing,
not to mention her professionalism, patience, and steely nerves under pressure
have been greatly appreciated. I would also like to thank my proofreader, Bob
Marriott, for his excellent work. Others to whom I owe thanks include Azat
Akhunov, who befriended me in Kazan and whose help was invaluable in helping
me find my way, research-wise, as well as Blair Ruble, Cassandra Balent, Elvira
Fedorova, Gülden Güneri, Guzel Nabiullina, İbrahim Maraş, Igor in Kazan, Ildiko
Beller-Hann, Il’dus Zagidullin, Ingeborg Baldauf, İsmail Türkoğlu, Jane Burbank,
Janet Klein, Jeff Bartos, Josh White, Mary Gluck, Michael Khodarkovsky, Mila
and Sveta in Baku, Norihiro Naganawa, Olga Litvin, Orit Bashkin, Paul Werth,
Refik Mukhametshin, Robert Crews, Robert Geraci, Simon Dixon, Tadeusz
Swietochowski, Tony Greenwood, Willard Sunderland, William Pomerantz, and
my neighbors—sorry! Also thanks to C.C., M.A., and E.H., wherever you are.
When I returned to Bozeman after winter break in January 2013, one of the
first things I did was put up on the wall a photocopy of the photograph that is now
on the cover of this book. I spent almost every day of the last several years sharing
some serious mental space with Yusuf Akçura, Ahmet Ağaoğlu, İsmail Gasprinskii,
and their friends, biographers, and peers. I will miss the entertaining stories and
challenging company of these fascinating individuals, even as I move on to new
things.
James H. Meyer
The Borderlands Lodge
Bozeman, Montana
August 2014

Contents
List of Figures x
Transliteration and Pronunciation xi
Dating xii
Introduction: Identity Freelancers 1
1. Trans-Imperial People 21
2. Insider Muslims 48
3. Activists and the Ulema after 1905 81
4. The Great Muslim Teacher Wars 107
5. The Politics of Naming 130
6. Istanbul and the Pan-Turkic Scene 151
Epilogue: The Post-Imperial Hangover 171
Conclusions: Turkic Worlds 179
Bibliography 183
Index 203