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"In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual culture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion"--

Abstract
This article explores how the Islamic elegiac genre of marthiya can shed new light on the social and cultural history of the Muslims of Russia's Volga-Ural region in the late imperial period (1870s-1917). The marthiyas enjoyed great popularity across geographical, ethnic, and factional lines as a medium for asserting and affirming social bonds and expressing collective identities. Volga-Ural marthiyas reveal the links between Sufism and Tatar national history-writing, demonstrate the interrelation between Sufi literature and Muslim revolutionary culture, and point to historical figures and groups that were left out of the evolving Tatar national historiography.

This article examines how Volga-Ural Muslims narrated their encounters with the sacred spaces visited during the hajj. It examines nine accounts hajj composed from the 1690s to the 1940s, to consider how changes in international politics, Russia's domestic politics, and the culture of Islamic learning within the Volga-Ural Muslim community led to writers to revise narratives of why the sacred spaces of Mecca were sacred, how best to experience the power of these sacred spaces, and how these sacred spaces fit into the local culture of Volga-Ural Islam under Russian and Soviet rule.

In April 1915, student-journalist Khaireddin Bolghanbai reported for the Muslim newspaper Qazaq on a recent literary-cultural evening held by the Orenburg [Muslim] Student Aid Society to collect money to aid wounded soldiers. The cultural evening brought together amateur performers from the city's Tatar, Bashkir, and Kazakh ethnic communities, and they performed to a sold-out house. In addition to the usual audience of urban youth, the event attracted people from the surrounding villages and even "elderly women with scarves on their heads and old men in winter hats, people the likes of which had never been seen in the Orenburg theater" (Bolghanbai, 2009 : 61). One of the highlights of the evening was a singing performance by two women : After Argyn, the Qazaq women Gainizhamal Dulatova and Zhangyl Qaiyrbaeva came out on stage and sang "Oh, My Poor Country" and "Kanderghazi." They received loud applause. The audience listened to the songs with particular attention and afterwards shouted "bis !" [encore]. These two women both appeared on stage in Kazakh skirts sewn tightly about the waist and flared at the hem. These women, though they had never appeared in front of a large audience before, performed with great exuberance. At previous literary and cultural evenings, Muslim women have never come out on stage and performed such lengthy songs. For this reason, on this occasion, our ladies carried the evening (Bolghanbai, 2009 : 62).

The article examines the role of early twentieth-century Tatar-language fiction in creating and popularizing national symbols and in redefining the categories into which intellectuals divided the members of their society. This article focuses, in particular, on the works of a number of post-1905 writers who have received relatively little attention in English-language scholarship. While not neglecting the imperial context, it takes an intellectual rather than social historical approach. It draws on Tatar-language poems, novels, memoirs, letters, and archival documents from the early 1900s. В статье рассматривается роль татарской литературы начала ХХ века в создании и популяризации национальных символов и переопределе­нии категорий, с помощью которых интеллектуалы стратифицировали членов общества. В центре внимания Даниэль Росс работы нескольких татарских писателей, активность которых выпала на период после Первой русской революции (1905-1907) (поэзия, проза, воспоминания, письма и архивные документы). Имперский контекст играет важную роль в интерпретации их творчества, однако автор определяет свой подход не как социально-исторический, а как "интеллектуальный", сформированный под влиянием постколониальной методологии.

Studies the formulation, transmission and application of Islamic law under Russian colonial rulePresents the theory and application of Islamic law in the Volga-Ural region, the Kazakh Steppe, the north Caucasus and Central Asia from the 1550s to 1917Draws comparisons between Islamic law in Russia and elsewhere in the colonial worldBased upon important, but largely unstudied print and manuscript sources in Arabic, Persian and the Turkic languagesBrings together the work of an international collective of scholars of Islam in RussiaThis book looks at how Islamic law was practiced in Russia from the conquest of the empire's first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire's Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and 'customary' law. Based upon difficult to access sources written in a variety of languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), it offers scholars of Russian history, Islamic history and colonial history an account of Islamic law in Russia of the same quality and detail as the scholarship currently available on Islam in the British and French colonial empires