Introduction
When the Russians advanced into the Far East, the Tatars did not stay behind. Wherever the Russians laid a foundation, we Tatars went, too, and pitched our tent.Footnote 1
In early 1909, the renowned Tatar traveller ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm visited the Manchurian city of Harbin, a Russian colony on nominally Chinese soil. In the first volume of his extensive travelogue, published a year later in Istanbul, he used the above quotation to emphasize that Tatar Muslims from Russia had carved out a comfortable place for themselves in Russia’s colonial space. During the approximately two weeks that he spent in Harbin, ʿAbd al-Rashīd stayed as a guest in the home of the wealthy Tatar merchant family Āghīsh(ev). He proudly remarked that an entire area of Harbin’s economic centre—Pristan—resembled a Tatar neighbourhood, with Tatar houses and shops left and right. The traveller praised Harbin’s Tatar merchants for having built ‘almost a Tatarstan’ within merely a decade since the city’s founding in 1898.Footnote 2 At the same time, ʿAbd al-Rashīd took advantage of the presence of Russian institutions in the city. In Harbin, he was able to obtain Russian travel documents that allowed him to continue his journey to Japan, where he spent several months and came into contact with pan-Asianist circles.Footnote 3
ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm was one of the emblematic figures of Muslim mobility in the ‘age of steam and print’.Footnote 4 His 1909–1910 journey from Tsarist Russia to Ottoman Istanbul via China, Japan, India, and the Arabian Peninsula was extraordinary, but not unique. Recent scholarship has traced the endeavours of several illustrious Muslim travellers in East Asia, for example the Ottoman Saʿīd Muḥammad al-ʿAsalī (1870–1932), who worked as a school reformer in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), and the Indian Muhammad Barakatullah, who published the first Muslim journal in Japan.Footnote 5 Such activists, who sought to make a public impact through their speeches and writings, were only the most conspicuous part of the Muslim presence in East Asia. Again, the journey of ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm illustrates this point: on his journey from Russia through Manchuria to Japan, he benefitted from the support of the Tatar network in Harbin and other cities. In Japan, he began to rely on the assistance of Indian (Ismaili) merchants who would facilitate his journey to Hong Kong, Singapore, and on to India. In addition, his desire to learn more about China’s Hui Muslims, whose ‘discovery’ in the mid-nineteenth century fuelled fantasies of a Muslim China among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, played an important role in ʿAbd al-Rashīd’s travel plans.Footnote 6 The history of the extensive Indian merchant diaspora has recently been addressed by Mike O’Sullivan.Footnote 7 Danielle Ross has highlighted the significant role of the Tatars in the economic expansion of the Russian empire, particularly in Central Asia, where they ‘served in the vanguard of Russia’s colonial expansion’, without, however, addressing Tatar migration to East Asia.Footnote 8 In recent years, a number of scholars have provided illuminating insights into the modern history of the Hui Muslims in China.Footnote 9 This article aims to add to these strands of research by zooming in on the Harbin Tatars, thereby deepening our understanding of Muslim encounters and interactions in the East Asian space.
The Harbin Tatars provide a particularly interesting case study regarding the mechanisms of colonial co-optation and the scope for action in an unequal world order. Occupying a middle ground as ‘colonized colonizers’, Tatars suffered from discriminatory treatment in their homelands and mainland Russia but participated in and benefitted from the mechanisms of Russian colonialism in Asia.Footnote 10 As Danielle Ross has succinctly pointed out, using the opportunities created by Russian colonialism to expand their own trade networks, the Tatars effectively ‘blurred the categories of colonizer and colonized’.Footnote 11 Tatars were not only subjects of the Russian empire, but as Muslims they also formed part of an increasingly interconnected and globally conceived Muslim community.Footnote 12 Focusing, first, on how the Tatars created a space for themselves in Harbin’s colonial society and, second, on their encounters with other Muslims, especially the Chinese-speaking Hui,Footnote 13 we can see how they variously exploited, resisted, or sought to transcend colonial constraints for their own benefit and in the name of Islam. The interplay between social status, self-interest, and religious links in the experience of the Harbin Tatars can shed light on a neglected side of the history of modern East Asia, which was shaped, but not predetermined, by colonial inequalities.
As contemporary testimony shows, Harbin was an international and multi-ethnic city, but it also had a distinctly Russian character. The city was described by contemporaries as ‘Moscow in Asia’, referring to its Russian character, but it was also frequently compared to American frontier cities such as Chicago, emphasizing the vast economic prospects in a supposedly virgin territory.Footnote 14 The rapid growth of turn-of-the-century Harbin was inextricably linked to the construction of the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) between 1897 and 1902, which made the city a major transport hub and trading centre in East Asia. David Wolff has shown in his seminal study that Harbin became a particularly attractive destination for ethnic minorities from the Russian empire, such as Poles and Jews.Footnote 15 For these migrants, the colonial city offered equal rights and freedom from the oppression they suffered on the mainland. At the same time, Harbin shared many characteristics with other colonial cities, which typically divided their inhabitants along national and racial lines. Former residents of Harbin often recall the de facto segregation between immigrants from Russia and the Chinese population. Nothing made segregation in Harbin more visible than the terrible epidemic of 1910–1911, which claimed its victims almost exclusively from Harbin’s Chinese population.Footnote 16 Most of the Chinese in the area did not even live in Harbin itself, where Chinese residence was restricted, but in the neighbouring Chinese-administered city of Fujiadian.Footnote 17
Railway construction facilitated the influx of migrants not only from Russia but also from northern China, making Manchuria a frontier land at the crossroads of empires. China’s Manchu emperors had long prevented large-scale migration into their ancestral homeland, so Manchuria remained sparsely populated.Footnote 18 The dynamics of Russian expansion since the mid-nineteenth century changed this situation significantly, and eventually an estimated 25 million Chinese migrated to Manchuria between 1890 and the Second World War.Footnote 19 By 1913, the young city of Harbin had nearly 70,000 inhabitants, two-thirds of whom were immigrants from Russia and one-third Chinese nationals.Footnote 20 Early on, Harbin also became home to a small but vibrant Muslim Tatar community, which quickly organized itself to maintain a mosque, cemetery, school, and library. By the 1930s, due to a massive influx of refugees following the Bolshevik Revolution, Tatars had established communities in most of Manchuria’s major cities, from where they spread to mainland China and the Japanese empire. After the Second World War, most Tatars left East Asia again for destinations such as Turkey and the United States, not least because parts of East Asia’s Tatar communities had become involved in the Japanese war effort and propaganda machine.Footnote 21
However, it is not only this later outflow that often obscures the impact of the Tatars on the modern history of East Asia. Their presence in Harbin hardly fits into binary frameworks of interpretation, especially neat divisions between colonizer and colonized or representations of Harbin as ‘a combination of two very different cultures and peoples: Russian and Chinese’.Footnote 22 Tatars can in many ways be seen as a colonized ethnicity within the Russian empire, who faced discrimination and pressure to assimilate. At the same time, they joined the Russian colonizers in Manchuria, fulfilling their role in Russia’s colonial expansion and benefitting from a privileged legal status vis-à-vis the Chinese population in particular. At the same time, the Tatars’ adherence to Islam, with its universal and border-crossing claim, opened up the potential for interaction with other Muslims, especially with China’s sizeable Hui community. This shared religious commitment must be weighed against the fragmented linguistic landscape and the difficulties of communication between different Muslim communities. Given these practical challenges, even more sporadic encounters between Muslims in East Asia have often taken on a larger symbolic significance, revolving around shared Muslim-ness amid the transformations of a globalizing age.
The circumstances for Muslim encounters and activities in East Asia were extraordinarily dynamic. In the early twentieth century, the region experienced a series of political upheavals, wars, and disasters. The 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese war resulted in the division of Manchuria into a Russian sphere of influence in the north and a Japanese sphere of influence in the south. In China, the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 led to the transition from a monarchical to a republican form of government. The First World War and the subsequent Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the Russian empire but brought large numbers of refugees to Harbin and Manchuria. In this article, I zoom in on the Harbin Tatars from three different angles: first, I examine the Tatar community and its institutions within the multi-ethnic and multi-religious society of colonial Harbin. Second, I discuss how the Tatar presence in Harbin and East Asia, and the competiveness of the Tatars in the colonial space emerged as benchmarks of progress and decline in the context of the modernization discourse commonly known as jadidism. Third, I focus on Tatar encounters with Hui Muslims in Manchuria and mainland China. In particular, Harbin’s Tatar Imam ʿInāyatullah Aḥmadī (Inayetullah Seli-Ahmed/Ginietulla Selikhmetov, 1888–1926) visited China in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution, drawing lessons from the Hui’s struggle for inclusion in a multi-ethnic republican state. The Tatar presence in Harbin was not only locally significant but also radiated back into the Russian empire and China; it was even noticed as far away as the Middle East. It also laid the groundwork for further Tatar migration to East Asia, most notably Japan, where the Tatar community built the first Muslim institutions and was showcased by Japanese propaganda during the Second World War as evidence of Japan’s openness to Islam. By zooming in on the history of the Harbin Tatars, we see that even a largely non-Muslim region like East Asia became the site of various Muslim activities and encounters in the age of imperial globalization. Muslim experiences enrich the historiography of modern East Asian history, not only by offering a different perspective on the region’s transnational connectedness, but also by revealing the tensions and fissures inherent in the social divisions of the colonial order.
Russian Muslims in a colonial city
Harbin was originally part of China, but now Harbin is an international (mīždūnārūdnāy) city. All people here can live as they wish in all matters.Footnote 23
As historians of Harbin have pointed out, Harbin can be seen as a ‘microcosm of Russian society’, where different religions and ethnicities (or religiously defined ethnicities) lived together without necessarily mixing.Footnote 24 Harbin’s history has been studied from different thematic angles, reflecting the heterogeneous composition of the city’s population and the vicissitudes of its development. For example, studies have focused on the fate of Harbin’s Russian community under changing political regimes and the eventual transformation of Harbin into a fully Chinese city following the emigration of most Russian speakers after the Second World War.Footnote 25 Harbin’s Jewish community has been the subject of extensive research and numerous personal memoirs.Footnote 26 However, there is only limited research on Harbin’s Tatar community, scattered across different languages such as Russian, Turkish, Japanese, and English. Scholars have focused particularly on the 1930s and 1940s, when Tatar communities in Japan and Manchuria were involved in Japanese propaganda efforts.Footnote 27 Others have included brief observations on the Tatar community in broader discussions of the Russian presence in HarbinFootnote 28 or dealt with the Tatar presence in East Asia more generally.Footnote 29 One of the most detailed scholarly investigations of the Harbin Tatars is by Ōkubo Kōji, the pioneer of Turkish studies in Japan, which was published as early as 1924. Together with contemporary writings and memoirs, in particular a collection of texts published in the Turkish magazine Kazan in the 1970s, the various studies give us an idea of the place of the Tatars in Harbin’s society.
To understand the history of the Tatar community in Harbin, it is useful to examine it through analogy with the better-researched Jewish community in Harbin. Harbin was a ‘haven for Jews escaping eastward from Russia’,Footnote 30 offering unfamiliar freedoms and opportunities. Jewish migrants, like the Tatars, arrived in Harbin with the start of railway construction in the late 1890s. When construction was completed in 1903, the Russian-controlled CER, which was the local authority, granted permission for the establishment of a Russian Jewish organization to look after the religious needs of Harbin’s Jews.Footnote 31 The community thereafter hired a rabbi and opened a first house of worship in 1903, which was expanded into a synagogue in 1907. A Jewish school followed in the same year and a Jewish library in 1912.Footnote 32 The First World War and the Russian Revolution brought thousands more Jewish immigrants and refugees to Harbin, marking a new phase in the history of the community. In the 1913 census, more than 5,000 out of Harbin’s 68,549 inhabitants identified their ethnicity as Jewish.Footnote 33 The Tatar population in Harbin followed a similar trajectory, but was considerably smaller. The 1913 census counted 234 Tatars,Footnote 34 and in 1924 Ōkubo Kōji estimated the size of the community at 1,000 people.Footnote 35 Mahmud Tahir calculates that 900–1,000 Tatars lived in Harbin in 1930,Footnote 36 and Larisa Usmanova estimates their numbers at 1,500 and 550 for 1925 and 1935 respectively.Footnote 37 Despite these rather modest numbers, the institutional development of the Tatar community largely paralleled that of the Jewish community.
The Tatar community began to organize itself a few years after Harbin was founded. The CER authorities granted it a plot of land for the construction of a mosque, on which a first wooden building reportedly existed as early as 1901. This building was replaced by a single-storey stone mosque in 1906–1907. The mosque was located on the same street (Artilleriiskaia Ulitsa) as the synagogue.Footnote 38 In 1901, the community also bought land to build a Muslim cemetery, and a religious organization was formally established in 1904 or 1906.Footnote 39 In 1909, the community opened a school and hired ʿInāyatullah Aḥmadī as imam and principal.Footnote 40 The school was expanded and moved to a new building in 1917.Footnote 41 As a result of the First World War and the civil war in Russia, the Tatar community grew significantly through chain migration and an influx of refugees.Footnote 42 In response to this growth, the community began the construction of a new and more representative mosque in 1922, coinciding with the 1000th anniversary of the Tatars’ conversion to Islam. Ultimately construction would not be completed until 1937, as the Tatar community faced internal conflicts and financial troubles following the death of its long-time imam ʿInāyatullāh Aḥmadī in 1926.Footnote 43 The mosque still stands as a testament to the Tatar presence in Harbin and Manchuria, although the community all but disappeared after the Second World War, again paralleling the fate of Harbin’s Jews.
The fortunes of the Harbin Tatars were built on trade. For the aspiring Turcologist Ōkubo Kōji, Tatar migration to Manchuria was the latest expression of the Tatar nation’s enterprising and mercantilist character, which had long placed them at the forefront of Russia’s imperial expansion.Footnote 44 According to the Turkish historian Mahmut Tahir, who was himself born in Manchuria, the majority of Harbin’s Tatar community was involved in the Russia-China trade, exporting goods such as wool and animal skins to Russia and importing various types of textiles to China.Footnote 45 Most of the first migrants arrived from the Penza region in central Russia to supply Russian railway engineers and workers with goods from the homeland.Footnote 46 Tatar trading companies soon sprang up in Harbin, notably the house of Āghīshev. In the early twentieth century, the Āghīshevs were probably the most successful of the Tatar merchants. Even in a more general survey of important Russian businesses in Harbin, they were described as one of the ‘principal business firms in Manchuria’, in the line of ‘Gents’ and ladies’ outfitters’.Footnote 47 As an illustration of the Āghīshevs’ importance, Ōkubo described their extensive network of branches between Harbin, Kazan, Moscow, and New York.Footnote 48 Based on their economic success, the Āghīshevs also came to play a leading role in the self-organization of the Tatar community.
Another leading figure in the community was the aforementioned imam, ʿInāyatullāh. ʿInāyatullāh arrived from the Kazan region in 1907, initially on a temporary three-year contract, when he was barely 20 years old.Footnote 49 He was to remain the spiritual and intellectual leader of Harbin’s Tatar community for 19 years, until his untimely death in 1926. Despite his youth, ʿInāyatullāh quickly assumed the role of a father figure for his community.Footnote 50 His energy and erudition also impressed the much older traveller ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm, himself trained as a religious scholar, when the two met in 1909.Footnote 51 Later appraisals described him as a ‘passionate nationalist and free thinker’,Footnote 52 who worked tirelessly for the enlightenment (tanwīr) of his community.Footnote 53 ʿInāyatullāh thus combined a modernist approach to religion and religious education with a growing Tatar nationalist and pan-Turkic orientation.
As Larisa Usmanova has pointed out, ethnic nationalism did not become a dominant strand in the Tatar communities of Harbin and East Asia until the 1930s.Footnote 54 Before the First World War, Tatar migrants in Harbin identified themselves in mostly religious and imperial terms as ‘Russian Muslims’.Footnote 55 A Tatar self-governing body, initially presided over by a community leader and after 1912 by an executive council, was accordingly established as a religiously defined Muslim organization.Footnote 56 However, as a Muslim organization providing religious services and Islamic education, it also reflected the colonial division of Harbin between Russian and Chinese nationals. Tatar institutions, businesses, and residences were naturally located in the Russian-administered parts of the city.Footnote 57 Most Chinese Muslims, on the other hand, lived in the adjacent, Chinese-administered Fujiadian.Footnote 58 In a contribution to the Orenburg newspaper Waqt, ʿInayatullāh complained that even the few Chinese Muslims who lived near the Tatar mosque preferred to visit the Chinese mosque in Fujiadian on Fridays and Islamic holidays, even though it took them much longer to get there. Only two Chinese families also visited the Tatar mosque.Footnote 59 The Muslim organization for which ʿInayatullāh served as imam was nominally universal, but de facto it was dominated by Tatars and catered to the needs of the Tatar community.
For Tatar visitors from Russia, the Tatar mosque became an important point of orientation in Harbin. ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm, who arrived by train on a Thursday in January 1909, made sure that he attended the Friday prayer the next day. According to ʿAbd al-Rashīd’s description, Imam ʿInayatullāh honoured the traveller by letting him read the khuṭba sermon ‘in Turkish’ (turk lisāninda).Footnote 60 This reference, by which ʿAbd al-Rashīd meant not the Ottoman but the Tatar variant of the Turkic languages, reflected the Tatar composition of the congregation. For Hui Muslims in particular, a khuṭba in the Tatar language would certainly have been incomprehensible. ʿAbd al-Rashīd’s son Aḥmad Munīr, who visited Harbin in 1910 on his way to Port Arthur and Japan, arrived on the Islamic holiday of ʿīd al-aḍḥā, which he spent in the Tatar mosque. Imam ʿInayatullāh introduced Munīr and his two Ottoman companions to the congregation and read a sermon in Turkish and Arabic, in which he stressed the importance of Muslim encounters.Footnote 61 In addition to the mosque, two other institutions seem to have been central to the Tatar community. In the early days of Harbin, Tatar merchants gathered at a local tea house in Pristan, the ‘Kazanski Stolovy’.Footnote 62 After 1910, the library became a common place for daily reading practices and special occasions. Open not only to Muslim residents, it also attracted non-Muslims.
The library of the Tatar community offered a rich variety of periodicals and books in Tatar and Arabic, but even more so in Russian. According to ʿInāyatullah’s account, the library received 30 visitors a day in 1912, 20 of them Russians and Jews and 10 Muslims.Footnote 63 In 1914, the library reported 12,085 visitors for the previous year, of whom 4,785 were Muslims and the rest Russians, Jews, Georgians, and people of other nationalities.Footnote 64 In early 1912 several Russians also attended the opening ceremony of the new library building, which replaced the temporary library in the imam’s house.Footnote 65 In the same year, when the Tatar community organized a literary and musical evening in the library, many Russians and Jews also attended.Footnote 66 What comes to the fore here is the embeddedness of the Tatar community in the Russian-speaking society of Harbin. While many Tatars within the Russian empire still struggled with the Russian language, ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm noted approvingly that most Harbin Tatars were fluent in Russian.Footnote 67 Aḥmad Munīr, although himself a Tatar, was addressed in Russian by Ḥusayn Āghīshev during their first meeting.Footnote 68 Although the Tatars maintained their Muslim identity and adherence to Islamic practices, they also integrated into Harbin’s Russian society by dressing according to Western fashion and furnishing their homes in a European style.Footnote 69 As Ōkubo noted, from a Japanese perspective, the Tatars even looked more European than Asian.Footnote 70 The Russian language, Russian culture, and a shared interest in developments in the mainland thus created obvious links between Tatars and other migrants from Russia, regardless of religion and ethnicity.
Islam provided the Tatars with another basis for establishing connections in Harbin society. In his articles for the Tatar press, ʿInāyatullah occasionally referred to Harbin’s non-Muslim Chinese population when he explained political or economic developments in China and Manchuria, but he was much more interested in the Muslim Chinese. As a possible place for encounters, besides the mosque, he mentioned the Russian secondary school (gymnasium), which two Chinese Muslims and four Muslims from Russia attended.Footnote 71 ʿInāyatullah was also attentive to the presence of other Muslims in Harbin, particularly smaller groups of Caucasians, Turks, and Indians.Footnote 72 Topics such as religious dialogue or conflict between Muslims and other groups appeared only sporadically, as when ʿInāyatullah told the anecdote of a Polish Muslim officer in the Russian army who married a Lutheran woman in a nearby town and later persuaded her to convert to Islam.Footnote 73 Similarly, ʿAbd al-Rashīd told the story of a Russian military officer who embraced Islam and was even willing to risk his military career for his new faith.Footnote 74 A more unpleasant story concerned a swindler who collected money from Manchurian Muslims under the guise of being a Muslim from the Ottoman empire.Footnote 75 Intergroup conflict seems to have had a primarily economic basis, with Jews in particular being mentioned as rivals of Tatar merchants. ʿInāyatullah also reported clashes between Muslim and ‘pagan’ (majūs) Chinese over competition for day-labour jobs.Footnote 76 The scarcity of references to religious tensions per se, despite a marked interest in Muslim solidarity in the Tatar sources, probably reflects a climate of relative religious tolerance, for which Harbin was known. Thus, while the Tatars had little difficulty in asserting their Muslim identity, the coexistence of different communities in Harbin sometimes manifested in sharp economic rivalries.
Representing Tatar competitiveness between the colony and the homeland
Four or five years ago, the Manchurian region was devoid of knowledge (ʿulūm) and skills (maʿārif). It was like an open square (maydān) for the Tatars, but now the Tatars are gradually disappearing. Their place is taken by civilized (madaniyyatlī) German, French and Japanese merchants.Footnote 77
The Harbin Tatars can appropriately be described as colonized colonizers as they benefitted from the privileges of Russian colonial rule in Manchuria but often suffered discrimination at home within the Russian empire. Although their numbers were comparatively small, their presence in Harbin often took on a greater symbolic significance in contemporary discussions, which highlights their ambiguous position within the colonial framework. The background to this was the fierce debate among Tatar scholars and intellectuals about educational reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholars in favour of uṣūl-i jadīd (new method), or jadidism, advocated moving away from the traditional system of Muslim education, based on memorization and rote learning, and focusing instead on actual literacy, primarily in the (Tatar) vernacular, but also in Arabic and Russian. Second, like Muslim reformers elsewhere, they wanted to expand the school curriculum to include modern and secular subjects.Footnote 78 However, the attempt in 1906 to impose uṣūl-i jadīd on all Muslims schools in Russia led to what James H. Meyer has called the ‘great Russian teachers’ wars’, that is, intensified internal divisions and opposition to the jadidist project.Footnote 79 There is no evidence in the texts examined in this section that the Tatar community in Harbin experienced similar power struggles. It is likely, though, that the authors ʿInāyatullāh Aḥmadī, ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm, and Aḥmad Munīr were, overall, sympathetic to jadidism. We can also assume that the Tatar merchants in Harbin, who had to operate in an international environment, were more open to new educational methods than many Tatars in Russia. From the viewpoint of authors writing about this community, the Harbin Tatars created a fascinating link between education, economic success, and the vitality of a community. Their success (or lack thereof) in the competitive environment of a Russian colony could thus easily be used as a showcase to illustrate the strength or weakness of the whole Tatar community.
The new world in Harbin and Manchuria brought Tatars into close contact with other communities and thus offered an opportunity to make various comparisons. The position of the Tatars in an evolving and dynamic field of competition provides us with a relational and practice-oriented perspective on jadidism. Similar to other modernist movements in Muslim-majority societies, jadidism has been described as an attempt ‘to reconcile Islam with […] modernity’.Footnote 80 However, jadidist ideas, as we can see in Tatar writing on Harbin, show us that the aim was not to emulate a static model of modernity. Mustafa Tuna has more aptly described the jadidist mindset as a ‘cult of progress’, accompanied by fears of ‘degeneration’ in the struggle to survive amid the rapid social changes of the time.Footnote 81 Indeed, ‘progress’ (taraqqī) was a recurring catchword in the writing of Harbin’s Imam ʿInāyatullāh when he discussed the dangers of complacency in Manchuria’s evolving marketplace. In the logic of this fixation on ‘progress’ as opposed to ‘modernity’, stagnation was tantamount to regression, and the goal of reform was the ability to constantly improve.
David Brophy has shown that the Russo-Chinese frontier in Central Asia became a testing ground for jadidist ideas, as Tatar merchants and scholars established a number of schools that worked with innovative educational concepts.Footnote 82 The Tatar school in Harbin, too, appears to have been built on jadidist principles. Led by its young imam, it stressed the importance of teaching the Russian language and secular subjects, but it also offered instruction in Arabic and the Islamic religion. ʿInāyatullāh furthermore encouraged his students to study theatre and literature, and to organize literary and musical evenings where men and women could mix. As a writer, ʿInāyatullāh contributed to the reformist newspapers Waqt and Bayān al-Ḥaqq in Orenburg and Kazan, informing readers at home about developments in the Manchurian colony. The imam’s relationship with the wealthy merchant leaders of the Harbin Tatar self-governing body supports the impression that jadidism was based on an ‘alliance between wealth and progressive reformism’.Footnote 83 The community’s proximity to jadidist thought came to the fore when, in the 1920s, both the Crimean jadidist Ismail Gasprinski and Turkey’s president Kemal Atatürk were celebrated as role models in the Tatar school and mosque.Footnote 84 Against this background, it is notable that ʿInāyatullāh portrayed the Tatar presence in Harbin not as a triumph of education or of a modern interpretation of Islam but as a community threatened by a deepening crisis and imminent decline.
The fortunes of the Tatar community were obviously influenced by the political upheavals in Manchuria. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, fought on the battlefields of Manchuria and Korea, initially created a surplus demand for Russian products and brought thousands of merchants from Russia to Manchuria. During this period, the population of Harbin (including Fujiadian) increased from 100,000 in early 1904 to 250,000 in 1905.Footnote 85 However, Russia’s eventual defeat led to a sudden slump in consumption and resulted in an economic crisis. Increasing competition from Japanese and Chinese entrepreneurs made the situation even worse for Russian merchants.Footnote 86 While Japan had gained control of southern Manchuria as a result of the war, the railway infrastructure facilitated the influx of Chinese immigrants.Footnote 87 The sources suggest that the Tatars were at least as much affected by these developments as the Russian population in general. In his travel accounts, Aḥmad Munīr recounts an exchange with Ḥusayn Āghīshev, of the eponymous trading house, about the impact of the Russo-Japanese war. Āghīshev told the traveller that the war had brought 3,000 Tatar merchants to Manchuria but that most of them had left again after Russia’s defeat. The negative economic impact of Russia’s defeat on the Tatars has hardly been addressed in recent scholarship on the Russo-Japanese war, which has instead emphasized that Japan’s victory over Russia was a moment of Asian anti-colonial fervour that even enthused the Muslim populations in Russia itself.Footnote 88 However, it is important to remember not only that many Tatars fought in the Russian army against Japan but also that Tatar merchants in Manchuria benefitted directly from Russian colonialism and military expansion into East Asia.
In the early 1910s, ʿInāyatullāh wrote several newspaper articles on the changing history of the Tatar community in Harbin, essentially identifying three phases of the Tatar presence in Manchuria. The first phase began with the construction of the CER in the late 1890s and lasted until the railway was completed in 1903. During this phase, merchants of various ethnicities moved into Manchuria and brought life (rūḥ) to the region. With the end of construction, engineers and workers returned home, consumption fell, and many merchants left.Footnote 89 The years of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 marked a second period of prosperity for Tatar merchants. In a region that, according to ʿInāyatullāh, suffered from a lack of civilization and knowledge, there was little competition in the markets. The Tatars seized the opportunity to succeed in business, opening large shops in Harbin and elsewhere. The third phase began with the end of the Russo-Japanese war which brought a steady decline in the Tatar community’s population and economic power. The Tatars were increasingly unable to compete with skilled merchants from Europe and Japan. Moreover, they began to lose their morals (akhlāq) and squandered much of their capital on oversized houses.Footnote 90 Chinese labourers and merchants posed another serious threat, as they worked for a third of Russian wages, did not take holidays (except for the new year), lived frugally, and were content with small profits.Footnote 91 A Chinese boycott of Russian goods following Russia’s intervention in support of Mongolian independence in 1912 soon created another problem for merchants from Russia.Footnote 92 As a result of these challenges, ʿInāyatullāh lamented, the number of Tatars in Harbin had dropped from around 3,000–4,000 during the years of the Russo-Japanese war to 800 around 1907, only 200 in 1912, and finally to a mere 40–50 in 1914.Footnote 93 A similar decline, he noted, also affected Tatar communities in other Manchurian cities and even in cities in the Russian Far East, such as Khabarovsk, where former merchants now earned their living as porters and charioteers.Footnote 94 ʿInāyatullāh’s description was a warning to the Tatars in the homeland: the fate of the Far Eastern communities revealed the real weakness of the Tatars in the face of competition.
For ʿInāyatullāh, the obvious solution to Tatar inferiority was education. In August 1910, he confronted the readers of the Kazan newspaper Bayān al-Ḥaqq with the example of nations such as Germany, France, and England as well as the Jews, who had lifted themselves out of poverty through knowledge and effort (ijtihād). Muslims, on the other hand, were gradually moving towards degeneration (inqirāḍ) due to their ignorance (jahālat). ʿInāyatullāh therefore urged his Tatar readers to invest more in the education of their children rather than squandering their money on their own comfort. Only well-educated children would be an asset to both their parents and their community.Footnote 95 ʿInāyatullāh also took care to inform his readers in Russia about Tatar students in Manchuria who were examined in subjects such as the natural sciences, mathematics, geography, spelling, and recitation.Footnote 96 The school he ran in Harbin, soon named Maktab-i ʿInāyat in his honour, offered a varied and up-to-date curriculum. Ōkubo later described it as comparable to the curriculum of Japanese schools, with the addition of instruction in religion, the Qur’an, and the Tatar and Russian languages.Footnote 97 Despite his emphasis on the continuing decline of the Tatar community in Harbin, ʿInāyatullāh still presented his school to Tatar readers in Russia as a model for them to follow. His account reflected the contemporary interpretation that the Tatars’ talent for trade was no longer sufficient on its own but had to be supported by adequate education.Footnote 98 Mustafa Tuna has pointed out that Tatars tended to avoid markets that were already dominated by their competitors, usually Russian merchants.Footnote 99 According to ʿInāyatullāh, in order to hold their own the Tatars either had to withdraw from competitive environments such as Harbin or raise their level of education. In this sense, education was not an end in itself, but a means of restoring the community’s competitiveness and ensuring its long-term survival.
It is difficult to assess the extent to which ʿInāyatullāh may have exaggerated the plight of his community. Certain merchant houses, such as the Āghīshevs, seem to have flourished even in the years after the Russo-Japanese war. The travellers ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm and Aḥmad Munīr viewed the situation of the Harbin Tatars in a slightly more positive light than ʿInāyatullāh. ʿAbd al-Rashīd, as mentioned before, noted with approval that the Tatar neighbourhood was located in the heart of Harbin’s commercial centre, and he particularly praised the Āghīshevs for their business acumen and ambition. Although Ḥusayn Āghīshev and his brother Zāhidullāh, who together took over the management of the company from their father, had never been to school, they spoke perfect Russian as well as German (in the case of Zāhidullāh) and English (in the case of Ḥusayn). However, he criticized the lack of cooperation among the Tatars in business matters. ʿAbd al-Rashīd, who published several periodicals during his lifetime, also lamented the lack of interest of the Harbin Tatars in the Tatar press, stating that the two leading newspapers, Waqt and Bayān al-Ḥaqq, had no more than one or two subscribers each in Harbin.Footnote 100 Without newspapers, he argued, ‘a community (millat) cannot achieve progress (taraqqī)’ and civilization (madaniyyat) would remain superficial.Footnote 101
Aḥmad Munīr’s account, like those of ʿInāyatullāh and ʿAbd al-Rashīd, highlights the challenges of survival in the colonial space and emphasizes the individual and collective efforts needed to surmount adversity. More so than the two others, Aḥmad Munīr dwelled on the positive: he pointed out that although the Harbin Tatars numbered only 200–300 people, they spent substantial funds on building and maintaining useful institutions such as the mosque, school, and library.Footnote 102 He also praised the attention and discipline of the community during their imam’s Friday sermon, linking their economic and organizational achievements to their unity as well as their effort and zeal (ijtihād ve ghayrat).Footnote 103 According to Aḥmad Munīr, the members of the self-governing body, or ‘community committee’ (maḥalla kāmītītī), promoted solidarity between the rich and the poor by collecting individual contributions and, if necessary, ensuring that they covered the remaining expenditure themselves.Footnote 104 He was particularly impressed by the house of Āghishev and the global reach of its activities, which extended from Harbin to St Petersburg and Moscow in Russia, and on to major European capitals such as Berlin, London, and Paris.Footnote 105 In his interpretation, confirmed by quotes from exchanges with Ḥusayn Āghīshev, the Tatar merchants in Harbin were fully capable of competing with the Russians and even the Jews, especially in the fur trade in northern Manchuria.Footnote 106 While Munīr’s report on Harbin again portrayed a highly competitive economic environment, his portrayal of the Tatars’ successes made their future appear less bleak than the accounts of ʿInāyatullāh and ʿAbd al-Rashīd.
All three contemporary accounts show how questions of education and the self-organization of Tatar communities could be directly linked to experiences of economic success and failure. According to their representation, the colonial space of Manchuria, where fortunes could be quickly made and lost, became a testing ground for the strength of the Tatar people as a whole. On this basis, the community in Harbin was presented both as a model to emulate and as an illustration of Tatar inferiority compared to other nations. This adds another dimension to the presence of the Tatars in Harbin as colonized colonizers. They not only benefitted from Russia’s colonial expansion into East Asia, but their activities in the colonial space were also linked to challenges the Tatars faced at home. The degree of success of the Harbin Tatars in competing with other nations would indicate the future course that the Tatars in Russia would have to take in order to strengthen themselves against Russian domination. In this sense, participation in Russian colonialism not only benefitted the Tatars on an individual level but could also be seen as desirable for the future of the Tatars in general.
Muslim encounters in post-revolutionary China
The two representative groups of Muslims in Harbin are the Chinese and the Turkish [i.e., Tatar] peoples (minzoku). There are, of course, some religious links between the two. But they are different peoples and therefore their social lives are separate.Footnote 107
Tatars and Hui Muslims lived largely separate lives in the colonial city of Harbin. In an age of Muslim encounters, however, shared adherence to Islam was a powerful impetus for Muslim merchants, travellers, and others to interact with their co-religionists from other places. Newspapers in various languages regularly reported on the situation of Muslim communities around the globe, often explicitly promoting Muslim solidarity. In particular, the Chinese-speaking Muslims of China began to receive considerable attention in both Muslim newspapers and Orientalist circles, with exaggerated reports circulating about their numbers and political influence. For their part, Hui reformers sought to improve their level of education, particularly in Arabic, and took steps to re-establish links with other Muslim communities, especially in the Middle East. Wang Kuan (also known as Wang Haoran) of Beijing was probably the most important of the Hui modernist scholars. In 1906–1907, Wang visited the Middle East and arranged for two Arabic teachers to be sent from the Ottoman empire: ʿAlī Riḍā, who stayed in China for three years and was replaced by Sayyid Ṭāhir, and Ḥāfiz Ḥasan, who seems to have returned to the Ottoman empire after only one year.Footnote 108 In light of the intensifying contact between Muslim communities worldwide, it is worthwhile examining how Tatars and Hui specifically were able to forge connections.
The colonial situation in Harbin both facilitated and impeded connections being made. The opportunities created by Russia’s expansion into Manchuria brought Tatars and Hui into close proximity, but they had to overcome social segregation in the colonial city. Moreover, finding a common language posed a significant challenge in interpersonal interactions. It is likely that some Hui Muslims were able to communicate in Russian, but as Ōkubo pointed out, Arabic was a more natural link in terms of Islamic learning.Footnote 109 Knowledge of Arabic was strongest among people with a religious background, but the conversational skills of most Hui scholars were limited (as a last resort, communication could be done through writing). The potential of Arabic for communication between Tatars and Hui was demonstrated, for example, by ʿAbd al-Rashīd’s meeting with the imam of the Fujiadian mosque. ʿAbd al-Rashīd and the imam, whose Arabic name was given as Nūr Muḥammad and Chinese name as Wān Khūn Bīn, communicated in Arabic and they even exchanged addresses for future correspondence.Footnote 110 On this occasion, however, ʿAbd al-Rashīd also expressed pity for the students of the Fujiadian madrasa for their poor knowledge of Arabic, which made conversation cumbersome.
ʿInāyatullāh wrote about a first visit to the Fujiadian mosque and adjacent madrasa in August 1911. In his report, ʿInāyatullāh described the mosque as being similar to the Tatar mosques but noted that it lacked minarets and the crescent symbol. He also remarked that comparatively few Muslims actually visited it and that out of a population of 300 Muslim households, only 80 people attended Friday prayers. The madrasa, too, fell short of ʿInāyatullāh’s expectations, as all the students were the sons of imams from nearby villages, while the children of merchants and peasants were left uneducated. He also noted important differences in the interpretation of the faith. Unlike the Tatars, the Chinese Muslims forbade smoking and the consumption of horse meat, and they consequently regarded Tatars, who considered both to be permissible, as infidels (kāfirs). ʿInāyatullāh concluded, hardly flatteringly, that Chinese Muslims were ignorant but fanatical (nādānliklarī īla barābar ghāyat mutaʿaṣṣiblar).Footnote 111 A twofold separation thus existed between the Muslim communities: one of language and the other in the religious practices and interpretations of Islam.
Nevertheless, contacts developed. In 1912, the Tatar community in Harbin hired a Chinese Muslim, a certain Mūsā, as its muezzin. Mūsā had studied in Beijing with the Ottoman scholar Sayyid Ṭāhir, who had succeeded ʿAlī Riḍā as teacher of Arabic. Mūsā’s level of Arabic was therefore probably sufficient to communicate with ʿInāyatullāh. According to the latter, the Muslims of Fujiadian rejoiced at this appointment, which was hailed as a milestone in the exchanges between the two communities.Footnote 112 Thereafter, ʿInāyatullāh occasionally commented on recent events in Fujiadian, suggesting that communication had indeed intensified. The role of Sayyid Ṭāhir in this rapprochement is noteworthy, as it highlights the existence of wider Muslim networks in East Asia. Before hiring Mūsā, ʿInāyatullāh had visited Sayyid Ṭāhir in Beijing in the aftermath of the Xinhai Revolution and updated Tatar readers in Russia on the situation of Muslims in post-revolutionary China.
ʿInāyatullāh’s writing about his visit to Beijing linked China, Russia, and the Middle East in different ways. The early twentieth century saw a series of revolutions in which Muslims demanded political participation. In the Middle East, Iran and the Ottoman empire experienced constitutional revolutions in 1905–1906 and 1908–1909 respectively. Muslims had participated in Russia’s 1905 Revolution, demanding equal rights as citizens. These revolutionary parallels were not explicitly addressed in ʿInāyatullāh’s accounts (possibly because control of the press had meanwhile been re-established in Russia), but they were certainly present in the memories of his readers. The circulation of his articles and their publication in translation in Middle Eastern journals also testifies to a wider public interest in China’s Muslim communities in general and in post-revolutionary China in particular.Footnote 113 The Xinhai Revolution had not only overthrown the long-ruling Manchu dynasty but had even led to a transition to a republican form of government. ʿInāyatullāh therefore portrayed the revolution as a turning point in the history of Muslims in China, who now had to redefine their place in Chinese society. He regularly updated the readers of Waqt on the latest developments in China between late 1911 and 1914. The account of his journey, a nine-part series entitled ‘Letters from Beijing’ (Pīkīn maktūblarī), was published in June–July 1912 and marked the culmination of ʿInāyatullāh’s writings on China.
ʿInāyatullāh’s report shows how his perspective on Chinese Muslims evolved as a result of his journey, shifting from an initially condescending view to one of greater sympathy. At first, he emphasized their general ignorance and a certain fanaticism in their interpretation of Islam, which had long led them to oppose the use of print in the dissemination of Islamic teachings. As a result, ʿInāyatullāh argued, Chinese Muslims’ knowledge of Islam was extremely superficial. With a discreet nod to Tatar merchants, he shared his impression that booksellers from Russia could make a fortune selling Arabic books in China.Footnote 114 Similar to ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm’s travelogue, ʿInāyatullāh’s first articles conveyed a sense of superiority over the Chinese Muslims in terms of Islamic learning and civilizational progress.Footnote 115 In this sense, the hierarchies of colonialism were combined with the fine distinctions between different communities within the newly emerging notion of a ‘Muslim world’.Footnote 116 This modern idea of global Muslim unity, underpinned by an ever-increasing flow of news about Muslims around the world, created a framework for habitual comparisons based on Islamic learning and devotion to Islam. Chinese Muslims were often portrayed as backward in the first respect, but exemplary in the second.
Comparisons between different Muslim communities also often centred on a shared challenge: how to learn from and compete with non-Muslims while remaining distinct as Muslims? ʿInāyatullāh’s examination of Muslim activities following the Xinhai Revolution was a case in point. By making the Hui’s efforts in education and self-strengthening intelligible to Tatar readers in Russia, he offered a new perspective on the place of Muslims in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious state. According to historian Yufeng Mao, around the years of the Xinhai Revolution, many Hui intellectuals were preoccupied with the task of ‘making citizens […] out of the Hui’, urging Muslims to contribute to strengthening the Chinese nation so that it would become prosperous by global standards.Footnote 117 This positioned the Hui in a dual competitive framework: internationally between China and other nations, and domestically between various communities within China.
In contrast to the overthrown monarchy, the newly established Republic of China was conceived of as a social order based on merit. ʿInāyatullāh illustrated this idea in his description of the new republican flag, whose five colours represented the five communities of Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Muslim, symbolizing that they were all an equal part of the new Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Within this framework of unity based on difference, Muslims, like other communities, were called upon to make an active contribution to China’s success.Footnote 118 In this constellation of a multi-ethnic state, ʿInāyatullāh may have recognized direct parallels between the Muslims of China and of Russia. He noted that Chinese Muslims, like their Russian co-religionists, had successfully preserved their morals (akhlāq) and religion in a non-Muslim environment and should be proud of this achievement.Footnote 119 ʿInāyatullāh’s visit to a Muslim publishing house in Beijing not only foreshadowed his own publishing activities a decade later but also instilled optimism about the future role of Muslims in China. He met with Ding Baochen, the editor of Zhengzong Aiguo Bao (Newspaper of Authentic Patriotism), and his 50 staff members, all of whom were Muslims according to ʿInāyatullāh. ʿInāyatullāh noted that the journal had a daily circulation of 22,000 copies and that its mission was to protect the rights of the Muslim community and to inform Muslims about developments affecting their community.Footnote 120 Historical scholarship has underlined that the journal’s significance actually extended far beyond Hui circles, and that Zhengzong Aiguo Bao, after its launch in 1906, soon became one of the most successful popular newspapers in Beijing through its promotion of Chinese nationalism and political reform.Footnote 121 This impressive publishing activity convinced ʿInāyatullāh that the Chinese Muslims were no longer hostile to publishing but had begun to embrace the technologies of their time.
It is important to note that in Beijing ʿInāyatullāh was associated with a particularly modernist segment of Muslim scholars. While their ambitions and practices were not necessarily representative of those of other Muslim scholars in China, they provided a suitable opportunity for exchanges with Muslim modernists from other places, such as ʿInāyatullāh and the Ottoman scholar Sayyid Ṭāhir. The latter acted as an intermediary between the Hui in Beijing and the visitor from Harbin. ʿInāyatullāh was clearly moving into unfamiliar territory when he left Harbin and travelled through the Japanese-dominated part of southern Manchuria to the Chinese capital. En route, for example, he criticized the Japanese and Chinese trains for being less comfortable than the Russian ones, at least from the point of view of ‘people from Russia’ (Rūsyalī ādamlar).Footnote 122 Arriving in Beijing on 29 May 1912, ʿInāyatullāh met Sayyid Ṭāhir, who became his guide and constant companion during his stay in Beijing. Sayyid Ṭāhir first took his visitor to various mosques in Beijing, most notably the famous Niujie mosque or Masjid-i Maghrib, and introduced him to the local Muslim leaders. ʿInāyatullāh also received information that out of a population of about four million in Beijing, 50,000 were Muslims and that they maintained 32 mosques.Footnote 123 Sayyid Ṭāhir’s role in linking ʿInāyatullāh with Hui leaders illustrates the new potential that modernist Muslim networks had acquired in the early twentieth century.
In ʿInāyatullāh’s account, Sayyid Ṭāhir played a pivotal role in the educational and self-strengthening efforts of the Chinese Muslims. ʿInāyatullāh reported on a significant event in July 1912 at Beijing’s Huashi mosque (masjid-i sharaf), where Chinese Muslims gathered to discuss their place in the newly established republican system and form a Muslim association (jamʿiyyat-i islāmiyya). ʿAbdullāh, a Muslim official from the education ministry, represented the government and President Yuan Shikai, delivering a speech that emphasized the need for Muslim efforts and zeal (ijtihād wa-ghayrat) in the republic, which was met with enthusiastic cheers of ‘Long live the Muslims and the republic’ (yāshāsūn muslimānlar wa-jumhūriyyat). In this speech, summarized by ʿInāyatullāh, ʿAbdullāh stressed that Muslims had both new rights and responsibilities in the republican framework, and urged them to be willing to sacrifice their lives and material possessions (jān wa-māl) to join the ranks of the ‘heroic children’ (qahramān awlād) of republican China. Notably, it was Sayyid Ṭāhir who was given the honour of concluding this meeting with an Arabic speech that underscored the importance of unity (ittiḥād) and cohesion (ittifāq) for the survival of nations and states.Footnote 124 Later, in August 1912, he further elaborated on his ideas at Niujie mosque before a crowd of 4,000 people, emphasizing his tireless efforts to promote progress (taraqqī) and advancement (taʿālī) for Chinese Muslims and highlighting the urgent need to improve Muslim schools through investment in both financial resources and knowledge.Footnote 125 Beyond these public appearances, he sought to disseminate his ideas through his writing, translated from Arabic into Chinese for the benefit of ‘the common people and the elites’ (ʿawwām wa-khawwāṣ).Footnote 126 Through ʿInāyatullāh’s narrative, we are shown the convergence between reform-minded scholars and activities in different Muslim societies, with Sayyid Ṭāhir, an Ottoman Muslim with roots in Russia, providing guidance to the Chinese Muslims in Beijing during a period of political transition.
While ʿInāyatullāh’s insistence on the centrality of Sayyid Ṭāhir’s contributions may also reflect his personal bias, his account of the reform efforts show parallels to his writings on the challenges facing the Tatars. The Muslims of China, according to ʿInāyatullāh, had understood the need to address the deficiencies in their community and to catch up with their non-Muslim compatriots in education and economic life. In particular, ʿInāyatullāh criticized the prevailing religious dogma that prevented Chinese Muslims from taking up certain professions, such as blacksmith, watchmaker, and barber, for fear of being ostracized as infidels (kāfirlar).Footnote 127 As a remedy, the circle around Sayyid Ṭāhir opened new schools in Beijing as a first step towards progress and civilization (tamaddun).Footnote 128 These schools were intended to teach Muslim children the ‘truth of Islam’ (ḥaqīqat-i islām) and enable them to distinguish between true principles and harmful practices. The newly established Muslim association also aimed to prepare Muslims for various professions on the basis of ‘true Islamic education’ (haqīqī islām tarbiyasī).Footnote 129 The school curriculum combined instruction in Arabic, Islam, and the sharia with education in Chinese history and geography as well as modern sciences.Footnote 130 ʿInāyatullāh further stated that the influential Wang Kuan was a strong advocate of girls’ education. Wang’s own daughter had begun to study Arabic and the Qur’an with Sayyid Ṭāhir, and Wang planned to send her to Istanbul to continue her studies.Footnote 131 ʿInāyatullāh’s account of the post-revolutionary Hui reform movement shows a similar emphasis on education and preparation for economic life, as does his writing on the Tatar community. We also see a comparable Islamization of social reform, countering conservative positions based on tradition with the argument that reform was actually a return to the true principles of Islam. This, in turn, was similar to the strategies of Muslim modernists elsewhere in the world.
While ʿInāyatullāh repeatedly highlighted the general ignorance and fanaticism of Chinese Muslims, his portrayals of modernist figures were flattering. In particular, he emphasized their erudition, knowledge of foreign languages, and interest in global developments. The aforementioned Ding Baochen, editor of Zhengzong Aiguo Bao, is a good example. ʿInāyatullāh presented Ding as a young man who had already become famous among Muslims and non-Muslims alike for his knowledge of the Chinese language and literature, and who was also fluent in Arabic and Hindi.Footnote 132 He described Wang Kuan as an older man of 60, who had a perfect command of the Arabic language and religious sciences. Having seen the wider world, Wang Kuan had realized the degree of backwardness of the Muslims in China and decided to dedicate the rest of his life to the uplift of his community.Footnote 133 ʿInāyatullāh consistently addressed his interlocutors by their Arabic names—Ding Baochen as Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ and Wang Kuan as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān—making them instantly recognizable to his readers as Muslim rather than Chinese figures. Their portrayals were probably idealized, as ʿAbd al-Rashīd Ibrāhīm, in his more critical assessment, described Ding and Wang’s Arabic skills as limited to ‘a few words’ in the case of the former case and ‘very weak’ (ghāyat ḍaʿīf) in the case of the latter.Footnote 134 ʿInāyatullāh here seems to have actively sought to present his Tatar readers at home with Muslim role models who embodied the jadidist vision of being Muslim in an age of rapid transformations.
Early twentieth-century interactions between Muslim modernists inside and outside China remain understudied.Footnote 135 Very little is known about Sayyid Ṭāhir, although this Ottoman scholar exemplifies the global entanglements of Muslim encounters in East Asia. Sayyid Ṭāhir arrived in Beijing in 1911 as the successor to ʿAlī Riḍā. He and his predecessor took the opportunity to meet in Tokyo and become acquainted with the small Muslim community in Tokyo and Yokohama, which consisted mainly of Indian Muslims, at a meeting organized by the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barakatullah.Footnote 136 In Tokyo, the two Ottoman scholars stayed in the house of the Egyptian adventurer Aḥmad Faḍlī, who was well known in Japanese military circles and introduced his guests to, among others, General Utsunomiya Tarō of the Japanese General Staff.Footnote 137 As these connections show, Sayyid Tahir was present in Muslim networking activities in East Asia, which also involved Japanese pan-Asianists and can be seen, in a limited sense, as a precursor to Japan’s Islam policy in later decades.Footnote 138 At the same time, Sayyid Ṭāhir was a representative of the global ambitions of the Ottoman empire. In Beijing, his and ʿAlī Riḍā’s most important task was to teach Arabic to Chinese students and guide them towards an understanding of the textual sources of Islam, in line with the Ottomans’ claim to leadership of Muslims worldwide.Footnote 139 However, both scholars were not originally from the Ottoman empire, but from Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus.Footnote 140 This was probably why Sayyid Ṭāhir visited Russia in 1913 and took the opportunity to meet with Ismail Gaṣprinski in the Crimea to discuss ideas for reforming education in China.Footnote 141 One could speculate that their shared Russian background also played a role in Sayyid Ṭāhir’s acquaintance with ʿInāyatullāh. Sayyid Ṭāhir’s personal network thus reveals the global extent of the Muslim involvement in the history of modern East Asia.
The immediate goal of Sayyid Ṭāhir and his circle in Beijing—namely, the participation of the Hui as active stakeholders in the new republic—soon ended in failure. By late 1913, Yuan Shikai had already transformed the parliamentary republic into a de facto dictatorship and ʿInāyatullāh’s disappointment is palpable. He noted that Ding Baochen had meanwhile been executed and his newspaper Zhengzong Aiguo Bao closed.Footnote 142 Chinese Muslims, ʿInāyatullāh complained, had been all too ready to believe Yuan Shikai’s promises and were deceived by his positive remarks about Islam. In the new circumstances, education projects failed: teachers in public schools in Muslim areas were forced to live on handouts as the government withdrew its support, and the schools established by Sayyid Ṭāhir remained mostly empty. The Chinese Muslims had lost their way, ʿInāyatullāh commented, and needed a leader to help them find the right path.Footnote 143 He attributed their failure to (conservative) religious figures who, out of ignorance of their religion and the world, regarded all reform as unlawful innovation (bidʿat). However, he acknowledged that the sense of unity among Chinese Muslims remained intact and maintained that they only needed capable leadership.Footnote 144 Again, ʿInāyatullāh may have had in mind not only the Hui but also his own Tatar constituency. Although Hui and Tatars in colonial East Asia differed in status and privilege, their religion and shared aspirations for a more prosperous future provided a basis for interaction and rapprochement.
Conclusion
Since the late nineteenth century, East Asia has become a meeting place for Muslims from different backgrounds, and Muslim communities have been a significant presence in modern East Asian history. While some communities, notably the Hui, were already well established in many places in China, other groups and individuals arrived with the imperial expansion of Great Britain and Russia or the pan-Islamist outreach of the Ottoman empire. In Harbin, Tatars were an integral part of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment of the colonial city. Like Harbin’s Jews, the largest religious minority to immigrate from Russia, the Tatars quickly established Muslim institutions to meet the needs of the community and benefitted from a high degree of religious tolerance. As a consequence, they became firmly embedded in the Russian segment of Harbin’s segregated society, facilitated by their affinity with the Russian language and culture.
Like other imperial subjects arriving in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as their co-religionists from British India, the Harbin Tatars can be regarded as colonized colonizers. While facing oppression and discrimination in their homeland, moving into Russia’s colonial space not only enlarged their individual and collective freedoms but gave them the opportunity to profit from the privileges of Russian nationality. At the same time, the successes and failures of Tatar merchants in the competitive environment of the colony acquired symbolic significance as indicators of the strength or weakness of the whole Tatar nation in comparison to other religious and ethnic groups. On the one hand, this provides an economic and materialist counterpoint to the more intellectual dimensions of the Tatar self-strengthening movement. On the other, it demonstrates that the ability to become a colonizer, coveted most prominently by rising empires like Japan, was attractive on smaller scales even to non-sovereign groups like the Tatars, who lacked political independence. Against this background, even for peoples suffering from colonialism at home, it could seem both individually and collectively beneficial to participate in the ventures of the colonial powers.
While the Tatars were part of the Russian society in Harbin, their Islamic faith provided a basis for establishing networks beyond Russian rule. Although direct interactions between Tatars and the Chinese-speaking Hui Muslims appear to have been limited, their shared religion and the similar challenges they faced in modernizing their faith offered a basis for transcending colonial and linguistic barriers. The Tatar Imam ʿInāyatullāh’s observations on Hui activities in post-revolutionary China are particularly noteworthy, describing efforts to promote Muslim self-strengthening within existing imperial structures. According to ʿInāyatullāh, the establishment of the new Chinese republic highlighted the urgent need for China’s Muslims to overcome complacency and prepare themselves to compete for their place in a society built on meritocracy. While he does not explicitly reference the preceding 1905 Revolution in Russia, it seems likely that a meritocratic and multi-ethnic system of government, as envisioned in China, would have been attractive to Muslims in Russia as well. As ʿInāyatullāh’s connection to the modernist Hui scholars in Beijing shows, Tatar and Muslim self-strengthening was not (yet) necessarily tied to the concept of an independent nation-state. Instead, it could be envisioned and pursued within existing political frameworks through education and economic advancement.
The interactions between ʿInāyatullāh, the Ottoman scholar Sayyid Ṭāhir, and Hui modernists such as Wang Kuan reveal a web of often obscure connections from the Middle East to East Asia. Yet these connections did not revolve around a political vision of pan-Islamism. While European Orientalists of the time regularly warned of pan-Islamist propaganda and ambitions, habitually tracing all Muslim activity back to Ottoman intrigues, the actual interactions appear much more fragmentary and decentralized. Despite the presence of the Ottomans Sayyid Ṭāhir and, before that, ʿAlī Riḍā in Beijing, the Hui’s relations with the Ottoman caliphate seem to have been of minor interest to ʿInāyatullāh. For instance, although Wang Kuan’s school in Beijing was celebrated in Ottoman writings as ‘Dar al-ʿulūm al-ḥamīdiyya’ (Hamidian House of the Sciences) and portrayed as a symbol of Hui loyalty to Caliph Abdülhamid II, ʿInāyatullāh referred to it simply as ‘Dār al-ʿilm’ (House of Science), omitting any reference to the Ottoman caliphate.Footnote 145 ʿInāyatullāh’s writings suggest that for the Hui, the Ottoman empire primarily represented a source of modern education and Islamic knowledge in their efforts to improve their political and economic position within China. At the same time, his articles reflected the growing interest of Muslim modernists in Muslim communities elsewhere. As such, they were read not only in the Russian empire but were also picked up by the press in the Middle East, most notably Rashīd Riḍā’s influential modernist journal al-Manār. The circulation of this and similar information about the Hui community in the transnational media sphere greatly contributed to the imagination of East Asia as a space that was, at least partially or potentially, Muslim.
Although imaginations of a Muslim-dominated East Asia, which occasionally appeared in the writings of Muslim actors and Orientalist scholars, were ultimately far-fetched, the presence of Muslim actors and communities in modern East Asia merits serious scholarly attention.Footnote 146 While the Hui Muslims faced an uncertain fate as citizens of China, the presence of colonized colonizers such as the Tatars in East Asia was even more precarious, as it depended on shifting imperial power dynamics in the region. Their involvement in the colonization of Manchuria helped them to establish themselves and foster a Tatar diaspora network, facilitating Tatar migration into East Asia even after the end of the Russian empire. They found themselves increasingly under Japanese influence, however, and some segments of Tatar society became implicated in Japanese expansionism during the Second World War. When the war ended and Manchuria was reintegrated into a new China, their numbers diminished dramatically as almost all Tatars emigrated from the region. The story of the Harbin Tatars illustrates a complex reality; they were neither ruthless colonizers nor mere victims of colonialism but rather a community navigating the challenges and opportunities of a colonial world to secure a better future for themselves.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Jesko Schmoller and Knut Martin Stünkel for their encouragement and critical feedback on an early draft of this article, which helped shape its initial direction. My sincere thanks also go to Mohammed Alsudairi and Janice Hyeju Jeong for the opportunity to publish this article as part of the Forum. I am indebted to the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their careful reading and constructive comments, which helped improve the article. Access to key materials was made possible through the kind assistance of Komatsu Hisao’s team and the formidable staff of the Middle East library at Halle, Germany. Finally, I would like to express heartfelt thanks to Ryosuke Ono and Eliza Isabaeva for their steady support throughout the course of this project.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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