Abstract
This chapter discusses the situation and ideas on the changes in the status of non-Russian women in imperial borderlands with a focus on Volga-Ural region in the beginning of the 20th century, and in the context of the broader imperial/colonial politics of the time. It starts from a short overview of previous research on the issue of women’s rights and the politics for the emancipation of women in the imperial/colonial context. The next section introduces the reader to the situation of non-Russian women in the Russian imperial borderlands, and to the Russian imperial thinking around their rights and status. In sections three and four of this chapter, I explore the ideas around the rights and social status of women in the context of the Islamic reformism at the beginning of the 20th century. The third section shows how the developments in the Volga-Ural region were connected with the political ideas and emancipatory projects developed in other parts of the Russian Empire (Central Asia, Caucasus, Crimea). Finally, the last section discusses the issues with regard to the education and rights of the Muslim women in the Volga-Ural region on the eve of the revolutions of 1917.
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- 2.
Some leaders of the national movement were sending their daughters to study to Britain. Badar-ud-Din Tayyabji was an example, as he sent his daughter Atteya Faizi to England to receive higher education. He was sure that women’s participation in public affairs would play an important role in improving the fortunes of the Muslim society (Southard 1993, 19).
- 3.
The book by the Austro-Hungarian officer and traveler, Das Frauenleben der Erde, was published in Vienna in 1881. It is interesting to note that this book was reprinted in Russia after perestroika.
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Rokeya Sahawat Hossein, 1880–1932, was a founder of the first Women’s Association in Bengal, 1916.
- 5.
In the end of 18th—beginning of 19th century, for example, German settles were invited to take part in colonization of the lower Volga as well.
- 6.
See Cadiot (2010, 62–63) on attempts to assimilate the Muslim population in Russia through school education.
- 7.
See more Luehrmann (2011) on village communities of neighbors belonging to different ethnic groups (for example, Tatar and Mari) that preserved their religion, but often shared other aspect of the community life and some spaces as cemeteries.
- 8.
As a result of these politics a special group of Christianized Tatars, kriashcheny, appeared.
- 9.
In case of Tatars, Ilminsky’s school aimed to educate baptized Tatars (kriashcheny).
- 10.
The Kazan University was founded in 1804 and was one of the leading universities in the Russian Empire.
- 11.
On repressions against Muslim schools in the Volga-Ural region see, for example, Farkhshatov (2000, 68–80) and Makhmutova (2003, 231–245).
- 12.
See also Kefeli 2011.
- 13.
On missionary activity of N. P. Ostroumov, see Campbell (2007, 337–338).
- 14.
- 15.
Domostroi is a book of advice on family life written by an anonymous Slavic writer, dating back to the 14th century. Part of the advice concerned using violence in cases where women and other dependents at home were disobedient.
- 16.
Kaspi was the Russian-language newspaper published in Baku from the end of 19th century. In the pre-1917 years, Alimardan-Bek Topchibasi (Topchibashev), one of the leaders of the Muslim movement in the Russian Empire (and later Azeri national movement), became the head of the newspaper. I was using press-clip preserved in NART, 186/1/77.
- 17.
The dilation became accessible to public most probably due to destruction of the archives.
- 18.
Kaspi, 30.11.1917.
- 19.
Akhmet-Khadi Maksudi, 1868–1941, was a Muslim intellectual, linguist, and author of a textbook for teaching Arabic, French, Russian. He was repressed by the Soviet government (Rakhimov 1995).
- 20.
Musa Bigi (1873–1949) was a well-known researcher and theologian who was educated in the prestigious religious university Al-Azar in Cairo. He translated the Quran into Tatar in 1912.
- 21.
Zyiaddin (Parvazeddin) Kamali (1873–1942) was a Muslim scholar who was born in a village near Ufa and educated in Ufa, Istanbul, and Cairo. In 1906 he founded the new method medrese “Galia” in Ufa, and in 1915 he opened the first pedagogical high school for women (Almazova 2010, 36).
- 22.
On Fakhreddin’s writing on women, see Gimranova 2010.
- 23.
About the importance of Egyptian thought during the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the discussion on emancipation of women in the Muslim world, see also the publication in Russian by Baltanova (2007,191).
- 24.
The Russian translation of the speech was made by a Tatar historian, Alta Makhmutova.
- 25.
Two volumes of works by Musa Bigi in Russian translation were published in Kazan in 2005–2006. The publication included Woman through the Sacred Ayats of the Noble Quran, in translation and with a foreword by A. G. Hairutdinov.
- 26.
Ijtihad—an independent reasoning around texts of the laws in Islam.
- 27.
A shared literary language in Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century; it used Arabic script.
- 28.
Similar attitudes to women existed in Turkey. For example, Fatma Aliye (1862–1936) “placed primary importance on the family and regarded women as the driving force of ‘civilization’ via their roles as mothers” (Çakir 2006, 22, 337).
- 29.
Mukhlisa Bubi’s life received a lot of public attention in Tatarstan after 1991; see more in Chap. 9.
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Gradskova, Y. (2019). Imperial Politics, the “Woman’s Question” and the Volga-Ural Region in the Beginning of the 20th Century. In: Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Woman. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99199-3_2
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