Introduction

In the above song, transcribed in 1915 by Ṣunʿatullāh bin Mullā Badraddīn, an imam posted in Keche Mui village, about 100 miles east of Kazan, a madrasa student confesses his feelings for his beloved. In this confession, he references numerous traditional Arabic and Persian-language books on ṣarf (grammar), fiqh (jurisprudence), manṭiq (logic) and ʿaqīda (doctrine). A few pages later, in the same diary, he records a list of the Tatar ‘national’ novels he had read in 1912.

Ṣunʿatullāh was one beneficiary of a process of rising literacy and education reform that had begun a century before he penned the song cited above: a village imam who was trained to educate people in the fundamen¬tals of Islam, resolve Islamic legal questions, communicate with imperial authorities in the Russian language, teach children to think of themselves as part of a Tatar ethno-national/linguistic community and model new technologies, farming techniques and ideas. Ṣunʿatullāh represented a new vision of what an Islam scholar (ʿalīm) could be. Simultaneously a preacher, a schoolteacher, a legal expert, a gardener and a beekeeper, he was jack-of-all-trades who would use his broad range of knowledge to help his increasingly literate congregation navigate the pitfalls of twenti¬eth-century life without losing touch with their faith.

Studies of Muslim education in the Volga-Ural region have focused overwhelmingly on the so-called Jadid movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s. This narrow focus and the accompanying debates over Jadidism's mass appeal and relevance obscure the broader history of Muslim knowl¬edge transmission under Russian rule. This chapter will argue that the debates and transformations that occurred in Volga-Ural Muslim men's education from the 1880s to 1917 were not unique or isolated, but, rather, represented the culmination of longer-term developments in ʿulamāʾ culture and popular religiosity.