ABSTRACT
The question treated in this chapter will be the diffusion of al-Manar, not outside of Egypt, nor even simply outside the Arab world, but according to some authors outside the dar al-islam itself, that is, among the Sunni Muslim communities of the Russian Empire, with special mention of the Turkic-speaking Muslim communities of the Middle Volga and the Western Urals. The Muslims of the Middle Volga had been submitted to Russian authority since the mid-sixteenth century. They had then faced successive Christianization campaigns, especially during the eighteenth century, in the immediate aftermath of Peter the Great’s reforms. At the turn of the twentieth century, after new statuses for the Russian peasantry were implemented between 1861 and 1907, it was the turn of the Muslim populations of the Eastern Urals and Siberia to be confronted with the massive migration of Slavic peasants coming from Russia’s heartland.
