I'm broadly aware that as an Enlightenment bookworm, Tsarina Catherine II is a poster-girl of enlightened despotism, aggressively pursuing reforms to center power around the crown within the rule of law and to slowly dole out better-defined rights and duties to her subjects. Her policy of conquest and colonization redrew Russia's lines on the map around large and storied populations of Muslims, sedentary and nomadic. To bring them under the same yoke as the Russian Orthodox Church, she seemed to rely heavily on the carrot over the stick, permitting them to build mosques and make Hajj to Mecca, and even creating the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly - a state agency led by a Tsar-appointed mufti to regulate the Muslim population, support the clergy with state funds, and keep an eye on what they teach and preach.
This last part fascinates me the most. It was a long-lived project to erect a well-defined 'church hierarchy' over the people and clergy, with its officials appointed and watched over by a Christian monarch. How did the Tatars themselves feel about this? Surely, conservatives among them would have immediately screamed that it were bid'ah, an alien innovation, while many others saw the opportunity for rubles and state-backed power and played along, and there may have been pragmatists who suspected that this were the best-case scenario for an ascendant Russia's treatment of their community. How did they justify service in an agency overseen by a Tsarina actively engaging in wars against their own recognized Ottoman caliph?
Are there any good sources in English that go into detail on the Assembly and its structure?
This last part fascinates me the most. It was a long-lived project to erect a well-defined 'church hierarchy' over the people and clergy, with its officials appointed and watched over by a Christian monarch. How did the Tatars themselves feel about this? Surely, conservatives among them would have immediately screamed that it were bid'ah, an alien innovation, while many others saw the opportunity for rubles and state-backed power and played along, and there may have been pragmatists who suspected that this were the best-case scenario for an ascendant Russia's treatment of their community. How did they justify service in an agency overseen by a Tsarina actively engaging in wars against their own recognized Ottoman caliph?
Are there any good sources in English that go into detail on the Assembly and its structure?