ABSTRACT
AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, a "Muslim question" confronted the tsarist regime. Islam provoked intense anxieties among Russian elites about political loyalty and social integration. Many conservatives identified a diverse population of some 20 million Muslim subjects-a total exceeding the number of Muslims under the rule of the Ottoman sultan-as a particular threat to the domestic order. Spread throughout the Volga River and Ural Mountains regions, the Crimea, Siberia, the Caucasus, the north Caspian steppe, and Transoxiana, Muslims appeared to present a danger to the stability and integrity of this vast empire.1 Echoing earlier charges directed at Jews, critics such as E. N. Voronets claimed in 1891 that Muslims acted as a "state within a state."2 Moreover, they maintained ties to millions of co-religionists in states adjoining Russia's southern borderlands. In an era when the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II asserted himself as the caliph of all Muslims, the Ministry of the Interior in St. Petersburg warned local Russian police to monitor Muslim subjects for signs of sympathy with the "idea of a world-wide Muslim kingdom with the sultan at the head" and for evidence that they "pray for the former, and not for the Sovereign Emperor."3
