Imperial Russia as Dar al-Islam? Nineteenth-Century Debates on Ijtihad and Taqlid among the Volga Tatars

The Muslims of the Russian Empire provide us with some interesting cases of how local Islamic
scholars used the language and genres of Islamic law to describe their situation in a "northern"
and non-Muslim state. The development of Islamic law in nineteenth-century Russia was
influenced by close contacts to the Islamic centers of learning in Central Asia, by the restraints
imposed by the Russian Empire on Muslims, and by the internal dynamics of the Volga-Urals
region. In this article, I discuss the writings of several Islamic scholars of the first third of the
nineteenth century with regard to three fundamental questions: (1) how to conduct the night
prayer during the "white nights" of the northern summer, (2) the question of whether the Friday
prayer is valid under non-Muslim rule, and finally, (3) whether the Tatar lands in Russia can be
considered part of Dar al-Islam. I demonstrate the various methodological approaches of Tatar
Muslim scholars, with a focus on the dichotomy between taqlid and ijtihad. This analysis is
embedded in a discussion of the Tatar and Russian/Soviet historiography of Islam in Imperial
Russia.