ABSTRACT
In 1913, when asked to comment on the registration of a "Kazan cultural and enlightenment society for the spread of education among Muslims," a high ranking state official, the curator ofthe Kazan Educational District wrote:
" (... ) the supposed unification of all Muslim aliens (inorodcy) into a confessional nation, milliat, and the stubborn attempts to establish the term [Le. Muslim] in the Russian public sphere, in the press, and last but not least in the statutes of societies is a dangerous expression of pan-Islamism (... ).,,1
The quote illustrates that as late as the second decade ofthe twentieth century, Russian state officials perceived that a Muslim, not an ethnic Tatar, movement was threatening the political stability of the Empire. Contemporary indigenous sources indeed bear witness to the dominant role of the Muslim layer of collective identity for national activists in the Volga-Urals before 1917? Ironically, the Russian state itself had played an
Nacional'nyj arxiv Respubliki Tatarstan, Fond 411, Delo 141, I. 13-13b. Cf. Allen J. FRANK, "Islam and Ethnic Relations in the Kazakh Inner Horde: Muslim Cossaks, Tatar Merchants and Kazakh Nomads in a Turkic Manuscript, 1870-1910," in Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asiafrom the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, Vol. 2, eds. Anke von Kligelgen, Michael
active role in the development of this supraethnic Muslim identity that it now wished to contain.
