Islamic Law and Legal Authority in Inner Asia Under Russian Imperial Rule: A Historiographical Survey

Abstract

This article presents a historiographical survey of scholarship on Islamic law and legal authority in Central/Inner Asia under Russian Imperial rule. It analyzes the debates, paradigms and assumptions that have dominated the field up to the present. The binaries that have dominated the field—between cooperation and insulation, rupture and continuity—disguise the complex legal history of the region. The historiography has shifted to emphasize a more pluralistic legal landscape, shaped by imperial intervention, local custom, practical considerations, and agency of ordinary Muslims. I suggest that by integrating a variety of sources, both archival and Islamic, scholars can take a bolder anthropological turn to develop new directions in historiography that will involve studying the lived experiences of legal actors and ordinary Muslims, gendered dimensions of legal practice, the meanings of socio-legal institutions, and the daily interaction between religious scholars and their communities.

1. Introduction and Historiographical Turns

This article offers a historiographical survey of contemporary scholarship on Islamic law and legal authority in the Muslim regions of the Russian Empire, with a focus on Inner/Central Asia, including the Volga-Urals, Kazakh Steppe, and southern Central Asia.1 Over the past three decades the study of Islamic law in the Muslim regions of the Russian Empire has undergone a profound transformation. The opening of archives across Russia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled historians to access an enormous corpus of materials that had long been restricted. These developments coincided with major historiographical shifts, such as the “imperial and anthropological turns,” which reoriented the study of Russian imperial history toward the experiences of its minority subjects, the dynamics of governance at the peripheries, and the entanglements of empire, religion, and law. This new scholarly landscape has allowed the Islamic legal history of Inner Asia, comprising the Volga-Ural region, the Kazakh Steppe, and southern Central Asia, to emerge as a distinct and vibrant subfield at the intersection of Islamic legal studies and Russian imperial studies. How has this growing scholarship reshaped our understanding of Islamic law and legal institutions, religious authority, and the relationship between Muslim communities and imperial rule? What paradigms have dominated the field, and which assumptions require reevaluation? This article engages with these questions through a critical synthesis of the literature, identifying conceptual developments and gaps for future research.

Four objectives guide this survey: First, it systematizes the scholarship across the regions of Inner Asia, emphasizing both commonalities and differences. Second, it examines how Islamic institutions functioned within the imperial framework and how administrative transformations redefined their jurisdiction and authority. Third, it explains how the concepts of legal pluralism, bureaucratization, and reform have shaped Islamic legal institutions. Finally, it identifies new avenues of inquiry, especially those attentive to lived experience and the gendered dimensions of law and legal consciousness, that can push the field toward a more anthropological and socially grounded historiography within broader discussions of colonialism, legal pluralism, women and gender studies, family studies, and the anthropology of law.2

The scholarship on Islamic law in post-Soviet historiography developed mainly in response to other topics and questions, which became possible to explore with the opening of the archives. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives boosted the “imperial turn” in the historiography. The “imperial turn” exemplifies the shift in the Russian and Eurasian studies to the study of minorities, peripheries, borderlands, ethnicity, and nationalism (David-Fox et al. 2006). In the study of Muslim communities under Russian rule, interest further developed, moving from questions of “ethnicity” and “nationality” to include religious identity and religious institutions. This coincided with the growing interest in studying the relationship between empire and religion, as well as religious minorities in the Russian empire (C. Freeze 2002; Werth 2007, 2014; Engel 2011) and its Muslim borderlands, challenging the dominant Russo-centric and imperial narratives. Second, the shift towards the study of minorities and borderlands was enriched by the “sociological and anthropological turn,” which directed various academic fields towards greater emphasis on the social context and the role of socio-cultural and religious factors in shaping practices, as well as on anthropological perspectives and methods. These approaches view how social and religious structures, norms, and interactions influence individuals and analyze the phenomena through the lens of human nature and cultural diversity. They shifted scholarly attention in the study of imperial history to the peasantry, daily life, custom, law, family, women, gender, and society more generally (Burbank 2004; Kollmann 2006; Engel 2011; Manchester 2011). Third, the study of the history of Islamic law in Inner Asia also benefited from scholarly developments in Islamic legal history. Much research in the last decade or more has focused on the impact of empire and colonialism on Islamic legal institutions, practices, and authority in various Muslim contexts. This field studies various aspects of the interaction between empire/colonialism and Islamic law, including reform of Islamic courts, the impact of colonial rule on legal actors and the authority of the ulama, legal pluralism and forum-shopping, codification projects, and the impact of empire on Muslim family, inheritance, and other legal spheres of life (Benton 1999, 2001; Roberts 1999; Kugle 2001; Zaman 2002; Hallaq 2009; Jeppie et al. 2010; Yahaya 2015, 2020).

2. Empire-Building and Legal Institutions

The incorporation of Muslim societies into the expanding Russian Empire unfolded as a prolonged process of political conquest and legal experimentation. From the mid-sixteenth century onward, Russian authorities were compelled to translate diverse Islamic and customary legal orders into categories intelligible to the state. The resulting regime of confessional governance was neither a monolithic system nor a coherent policy. Instead, it consisted of evolving regional arrangements that sought to manage Muslim communities through legal and administrative regulation.

3. The Volga-Urals: Institutionalizing Islam

Muscovy conquered the Kazan Khanate in 1552 and gradually incorporated large urban and peasant Muslim communities, as well as mostly nomadic Bashkir Muslims, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Steinwedel 2016). Muscovy destroyed not only the Khanate but also the legal and administrative state structures and their records. Thus, there is very limited premodern evidence on Islamic legal institutions (Khusainov 1993).3 It can be stated with caution that, by the time Empress Catherine II announced the Edict of Toleration of All Faiths in 1773, which officially ended the imperial policy of forced conversion of Muslims into Orthodox Christianity, no bodies of law were under Muslim control in the Volga-Urals except for family, inheritance, and waqf (an Islamic endowment) laws.

The most significant step toward legal institutionalization came in 1788 with the establishment of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (Orenburgskoe Magometanskoe Dukhovnoe Sobranie, the OA) (Azamatov 1999). With the establishment of the OA, Islamic family and inheritance law remained under the control of the ulama, albeit within an imperial framework. The creation of the OA was an unprecedented event in the Islamic history of Russia, as the state introduced a clerical structure for the Volga-Ural ulama that did not previously exist and was modeled on the state-controlled clerical structure of Russian Orthodoxy.4 Imperial legal policies imposed a regime of confessional governance and surveillance (Crews 2006). The function of the OA as an institution of appeal in Muslim personal law gave imperial officials a measure of control over the ulama, Islamic law, and the Muslim population at large. The OA’s archival records demonstrate how Muslim scholars mediated legal authority and resolved Islamic legal questions while accommodating imperial constraints.5

There are three crucial ways which the state employed to ensure better administration and legal incorporation of these Muslim communities into imperial structures, and which had an impact on Islamic law. First, the recognition by imperial officials that these peoples practiced a different set of laws (in this case, Islamic law), something that Jane Burbank termed the “imperial rights regimes”, according to which people were categorized by and ascribed to a set of their religious laws and customs (Burbank 2006). These laws were under the jurisdiction of each community’s religious authorities and served as the basis for the confessional politics that Paul Werth called “the multiconfessional establishment” (Werth 2014). These religious laws (including those defining the duties of the ulama) were framed through imperial law and incorporated into imperial codes.6 Second, the concept of the “civilizing mission” found expression in various regions of Inner Asia. While it is often associated with other Muslim territories later conquered by the Russian empire, the Volga-Ural region was also not immune to such a mission. Imperial authorities sought to “civilize” Volga-Ural Muslims by invoking a discourse of “bringing order” to the Muslim family. Although, in principle, matters of family law were left to Muslim jurisdiction, this did not prevent Muslims from appealing to Russian imperial authorities when they needed enforcement measures. The imperial administration, in turn, interpreted the growing number of petitions concerning family law as evidence of “disorder” within Muslim society and a justification for further intervention. (Garipova 2023a). One way to ensure order in this area was through the introduction of metrical books in 1828 (Usmanova 2004; Salakhova 2007)7, which would not only provide important statistics but also prevent disputes among Muslims, for example, about the amount of dower to be paid by the groom or about whether a woman had the right to remarry. Third, during approximately the same period, the 1830s, imperial officials began to introduce various imperial laws that pertained to and overlapped with Muslim family and inheritance laws. Although imperial elites did not interfere much in substantive Islamic law or in the ulama’s decision-making process, some imperial laws affected the functioning of Islamic family law. The result was a layered legal environment in which imperial and Islamic categories coexisted, sometimes uneasily.

4. The Kazakh Steppe: Codifying Custom and Marginalizing Islamic Law

Further south-east, Russian expansion onto the Kazakh steppe produced a different configuration of law and governance. On the Kazakh steppe, the Russian imperial administration privileged customary law (adat) over Islamic law (shari‘a), reflecting its perception of Kazakh legal “primitivism” (Martin 2001). The codification of adat was integral to the colonial “civilizing” project, which aimed to domesticate and eventually assimilate indigenous legal practices. Imperial officials hoped that recognizing adat would first facilitate rapprochement between customary and imperial legal systems and ultimately enable the gradual absorption of the former into the latter. To this end, adat was to be documented, studied, and tolerated, both as a means of maintaining political stability among the Kazakhs, and as a deliberate measure to marginalize Islamic law.8 From the 1822 Speranskii reforms onward, these ideas shaped broader administrative transformations: civil and criminal cases involving both Kazakhs and non-Kazakhs were transferred from biys’ courts9 to Russian tribunals, while the biys themselves were subjected to imperial oversight through formalized elections and defined duties. These measures aimed to control the legal sphere while sidelining shari‘a. Imperial officials often conflated adat and shari‘a, attempting to disentangle them through codification, a process discussed later. Yet Kazakh legal actors continued to draw on Islamic principles alongside customary norms, demonstrating that the distinction between adat and shari‘a was blurrier than colonial discourse suggested (Frank 2017; Sartori 2011a; Sartori and Shabley 2015).

5. Turkestan: Reform Through “Ignorance”

In southern Inner Asia, in the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan10, the imperial strategy of ignorirovanie, official “non-interference” with Islamic institutions, masked efforts to reform the qadi courts, which was also a form of “civilizing mission”. Russian officials consistently attempted to “bring order” to the Islamic courts because they viewed shari‘a as archaic and arbitrary. The Commission, led by F. K. Girs, which came to Turkestan in the early 1880s under Governor-General Cherniaev, was responsible for the recommendations that went into the 1886 statute (including the renaming of qadis to native judges (narodnye sud’ya)). The Commission criticized corruption among Islamic judges and proposed reforms that were only partially implemented (Morrison 2008; Sartori 2009a). According to the new legal system, as addressed by scholars in considerable detail (Khalid 1998; Morrison 2008; Sartori 2016), criminal cases were removed from the jurisdiction of qadis, and their authority was limited to certain civil cases, as was the case for Muslims in other regions. Colonial officials introduced elections for qadis and Russian courts as an alternative to Islamic courts.

These legal changes at the procedural and administrative level altered the balance of power between qadis, muftis, and local elders (aksakals). The territorialization of the qadis’ jurisdiction and the fact that the qadis were granted the right to appoint the muftis increased the influence of the qadis while decreasing that of the muftis (Sartori 2009a). The Russians also abolished traditional legal official positions, such as the Chief Judge (qadi kalan), which previously served to determine the validity of appeals; without them, Muslims presented their appeals directly to the colonial administration (Sartori 2009b). Traditional mediating roles, such as aksakals and court attendants, also underwent change as the Russians abolished the office of court attendant and deprived aksakals of formal legal authority, eroding the informal justice mechanisms that had anchored community consensus (Sartori 2011b). Despite these shifts, Muslims continued to engage Islamic courts, adapting their practices to new procedural norms and sometimes exploiting multiple legal venues and the overlapping jurisdictions for strategic ends.

Across these three regions, imperial legal policy oscillated between control and accommodation. Bureaucratic incorporation in the Volga-Urals, ethnographic codification on the Steppe, and reformist “ignorance” in Turkestan all reflected a broader experiment in managing religious diversity through legal categorization. The empire sought to domesticate Islamic law without codifying it and to discipline Muslim subjects without abolishing their legal autonomy. Recent historiography has moved away from viewing these arrangements merely as instruments of domination. Instead, scholars emphasize their dialogical nature: imperial officials depended on Muslim intermediaries to administer law, while Muslim jurists appropriated imperial forms to assert moral and communal authority.

6. The Ulama and the State: Beyond Cooperation vs. Insulation

The dominant historiographical paradigm for explaining the relationship between the Russian state and its Muslim subjects in the Volga-Urals, which contrasts “cooperation” with “insulation,” has outlived its utility.11 One argument suggests that the theological and legal discourse that developed in the nineteenth century testifies to the fact that Muslims lived a somewhat insulated life within the Russian state (Kemper 1998; Frank 2001). The other views Muslims as deeply integrated into imperial institutional and bureaucratic structures and suggests that the ulama and imperial authorities cooperated in regulating law and morality among Muslims (Crews 2006). This paradigm is linked to the claim that while archival sources suggest a degree of cooperation between the ulama and imperial officials, Islamic sources point to legal autonomy.

Such a discussion is not useful for several reasons. First, scholars who write about “insulated” Muslim communities in the Volga-Urals do not deny that the relationship between the state and the Muslims was cooperative (Frank 2001).12 Indeed, most of the ulama, perhaps with few exceptions, collaborated with an imposed administrative and legal order under the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Assembly. Yet, one needs to keep in mind that the Volga-Ural ulama also “resisted” it by preserving Islamic legal tradition as intact as possible.

One crucial factor that shaped the identity of the Volga-Ural Muslim communities was the policy of forced conversion of Tatars to Orthodox Christianity.13 Although it ended with the Edict of Toleration of 1773, the history of forced conversion, which lasted almost two centuries, had an impact on the practice of Islamic law. Shari‘a was central to the identity of Volga-Ural Muslims, who tried to preserve it. The ulama played a vital role in this process, as family law remained the only Islamic legal sphere in which religious scholars could defend and preserve that identity. It is with this consciousness that the ulama embarked on the cooperation with the state. Preservation of Islamic law was central to protecting the Muslim community and its identity.

Second, such a paradigm limits our ability to understand how the empire or imperial laws shaped or impacted Islamic legal practices. Such an approach impedes our understanding of the ulama’s agency in situations where they had to find solutions to communal problems arising from the imperial legal framework. Rather than focusing on binary categories, it would be more productive to explore how Muslim legal experts navigated constraints, responded to communal needs, and adjusted Islamic legal reasoning to the changing imperial context. In this respect, Sohaira Siddiqui’s recent book is helpful as it shows how “[t]he restrictions imposed by the English on Islamic law paradoxically also inspired new modes of Islamic legal reasoning that integrated Islamic law with Common Law principles” and how “Muslim lawyers and judges refashioned Islamic law in ways that legitimated it to both English colonizers and Muslim litigants” (Siddiqui 2025).

Another important reason for abandoning such a paradigm is connected to the sources used by scholars. Sometimes, there is a strong bias against the imperial archival sources in favor of Islamic sources. Now, when we have access to more diversified sources, a combination of both types of sources is useful as they not only complement each other but also because archival imperial sources contain numerous voices of Muslims which cannot be found in other places, including in the Muslim press, rare books, and manuscript collections.14 These Muslim voices are written in Turki in Arabic script. They include the voices of plaintiffs and defendants, of village elders, witnesses, neighbors, mediators, and, most importantly, women. They allow us to follow internal Muslim debates on issues such as inheritance division, marriage age, guardianship, dower, property, and others. This rich documentation, preserved in the archives, helps us understand how Muslims thought about lawful and unlawful legal practices in various areas of daily life. These sources complicate the assumption that imperial archives merely reflect the state’s voice. They also preserve the rhetorical and moral worlds of the Muslims themselves.

7. Legal Authority of the Ulama

The historiography on the ulama in imperial and colonial contexts demonstrates two trends in the question of the relationship between the ulama and the state, one that depicts a narrative of decline, portraying religious scholars as losing authority vis-à-vis the state’s expanding power (Hallaq 2009) and the other that underlines the ways the ulama adapted, negotiated, and reasserted their influence within the structures of imperial rule (Zaman 2002; Siddiqui 2025). The historiography of the ulama in the Russian Empire reflects both tendencies, revealing the coexistence of a narrative of “decline” and a more recent perspective that emphasizes resilience and agency of religious scholars vis-à-vis state power. Scholars working on various contexts in Inner Asia have demonstrated how administrative and legal changes and bureaucratization that followed them affected the authority of religious scholars—qadis and muftis, biys, akhunds, and even lower-ranking ulama.

Reflecting the first trend, Nathan Spannaus has suggested that the government marginalized akhunds. In the Volga-Urals, the government curtailed akhunds’ ability to perform their duties. It marginalized them within a hierarchy between imams and the OA, and the position of akhunds gradually disappeared in the 1850s (Spannaus 2019). In other parts of Inner Asia the elections of biys or qadis compromised the qualifications required to hold the post. For example, the biy “now mostly preoccupied with upholding clan status and power in the context of fierce competition among nomads for access to land and privilege”. As a result, Kazakhs turned to unofficial biys, or to imperial legal forums (Martin 2001). Scholars have noted the corruption of the institution of the qadi, who now could be chosen “not on the basis of their knowledge of the shari‘a but because they could rally a party of supporters” (Morrison 2008).

Another trend in the historiography, which developed largely due to access to legal documents from qadi courts and to Muslim petitions regarding various legal disputes, suggests that the ulama continued to exercise their traditional legal authority and found new ways to do so under colonial rule. Paolo Sartori states that although the colonial judicial structures provided an alternative to the Islamic courts, the qadis educated in the traditional system continued to exercise their jurisdiction, sometimes corruptly. In the context of the Volga-Ural region, Garipova argues that akhunds maintained their authority and continued issuing legal opinions and judgments, with their numbers increasing by the turn of the twentieth century (Garipova 2018).

The institution of the Orenburg Assembly, and especially the official hierarchy it headed, is often invoked as the one that brought transformation to the functioning of shari‘a and its “decline”. The official hierarchy for the ulama created by the state led “to significant transformations in how the shari‘a was applied” (Spannaus 2019, 2020). Spannaus connects the reformist project of one of the most prominent ulama of the Volga-Urals, Abu Nasr Qursawi, and his insistence on ijtihad, to “weakening Islamic institutions”. Yet, there is no evidence of weakening legal institutions in the first half of the nineteenth century. Akhunds’ legal authority, such as that of Fathullah al-Uriwi’s, for example, thrived under the framework of the OA (Garipova 2023a). Kemper has rightly noticed that Catherine II’s 1773 edict of toleration and institutional changes that followed for the Muslim community “had above all a stimulating impact on the regional Islamic discourse, ending the state-supported forced conversion of Muslims to Orthodox Christianity and allowing Muslims more freedom of action and expression” (Kemper 2021). Moreover, Qursawi died in 1812, but changes in the functioning of Islamic law began in the 1820s, when the OA was confirmed in its authority to oversee legal cases in family and inheritance—the only sphere of shari‘a left under the jurisdiction of the ulama. Since the earliest legal cases in the OA archive date back to 1819, we do not have other evidence on exactly how Islamic law functioned between 1788 and 1819. As many Muslim petitions demonstrate, Muslims, and especially women, used the possibility of appeal to the OA to request reconsideration of their cases by other imams or akhunds. This led to a more vibrant shari‘a space, boosting a shari‘a society15 in the territories under the OA’s jurisdiction.

The historiographical challenge, therefore, is not to determine whether the ulama cooperated with or resisted the empire, but to understand how they inhabited the imperial legal order. Their authority depended on a dynamic form of mediation between state law, Islamic tradition and custom, and social expectation. In this light, the ulama in the Russian Empire resemble their counterparts in other colonial contexts: actors who reformulated Islamic jurisprudence through the language of bureaucracy, legality, and moral reform. By combining imperial archival sources with Islamic legal documents, recent scholarship reveals the ulama as both products and producers of empire. They interpreted shari‘a through imperial categories, while imperial administrators interpreted Muslim society through ulama-mediated law.

We also need to examine the OA’s legal experts and legal authority. Scholars have analyzed the OA as a colonial institution that created a link of cooperation between the state and the ulama (Crews 2006), as an intermediary between Muslims and the state (Tuna 2015), through the activities of its muftis and qadis (Kemper 1998; Ross 2020; Zahidullin 2021) and through its regulation of some aspects of Muslim life, such as family and education (Azamatov 1999. However, the study of this institution remains a significant gap: first, we know little about the qadis and their interactions with muftis, beyond the fact that they formed a collegiate body; second, we know even less about its legal authority in practice. There is a strong need to humanize the history of the OA—that is, to identify who its members or qadis were and how they made decisions on various legal matters, including the process of how they examined candidates for different religious positions.

The role of the OA and Tatar akhunds/imams on the Kazakh steppe has been the subject of several studies. (Frank 2003; Shabley 2012; Sultangaliyeva 2023). However, the legal authority and functions of the OA and akhunds among the Kazakhs remain largely unexplored. Before 1868, many Kazakhs from Orenburg, Tobol’sk, Tomsk, and Omsk provinces appealed to the OA for legal issues. Kazakhs of the northern steppe were removed from the OA’s jurisdiction in 1868, however, many Kazakhs from the Astrakhan (Inner Horde), Orenburg, Ural’sk, and Samara provinces continued to seek help from the OA. Therefore, studies analyzing Kazakh petitions to the Orenburg Assembly and examining the Assembly’s broader legal role among the Kazakhs will be very timely.

There is also a need to assess the ulama’s legal roles alongside their other social roles. Recent research reveals that authority was rooted in various forms of knowledge and functions, making it useful to consider legal authority as part of the broader social and religious influence of the ulama in their communities. Education, including legal training (Pickett 2020), persisted throughout the imperial period, and authority remained grounded in the legal education provided at madrasas. Bukharan and Volga-Ural madrasas were regarded as prestigious learning institutions in the nineteenth century, yet Allen Frank notes a gradual decline in Bukharan prestige by the early twentieth century (Frank 2012; Ross 2020). Second, the ulama carried out many roles in their societies. For instance, a biy could serve multiple functions at once. Frank offers several biographies of biys who, among various responsibilities, could be a qadi, a mufti, a Sufi saint, a mudarris, a mosque founder, a military commander, a political leader, a local chief, a starshina, a deputy sultan (zasedatel’), an advisor to the Russian administration, and a poet (akyn) (Frank 2017, 2020). The public figures of the ulama—clerk (mirza), enforcer of public morality (mukhtasib), mudarris, mufti, and qadi—were often sufis, healers, and others (Pickett 2020). Therefore, a legal role could be complemented by other forms of authority, and performing these multiple roles generally did not create conflicts. The legal experts of the Volga-Urals, the akhunds, also held significant social influence. Before the formalization of the ulama in the Volga-Urals, in the absence of Muslim statehood, akhunds served as community leaders. Their social and legal authorities were interconnected and remained so into the nineteenth century. But how do these different roles impact the legal authority of a jurist? How did they communicate with ordinary people, and how did they decide their cases? How did they address more immediate concerns of common people, such as dietary laws, family and inheritance issues, ritual law, and others? A gap remains in scholarly research regarding the social and socio-legal roles of akhunds, biys, and qadis. One way to explore these questions is to examine how they resolved various issues.

8. Institutions of Law: Waqf, Land, Family, and Inheritance

The interaction between imperial authority and Islamic legal institutions in Inner Asia was most evident in legal processes concerning property, charity, family, and inheritance. Rather than being passive victims of imperial intrusion, Muslims adapted Islamic legal institutions to imperial administrative contexts, producing hybrid arrangements that were at once compliant and subversive.

9. Waqf

Among Islamic institutions, the waqf has long served as a crucial index of the relationship between religion and state. In the Volga-Urals, the Russian government did not attempt to legally regulate or institutionalize the management of Muslim charitable activity, even as it imposed restrictions on the size and type of charitable endowments (Ross 2017). The fact that the state officially permitted the construction of mosques and the activities of mullas shows that it recognized Islamic law. However, the state remained outside of the Muslim community’s charitable life. Muslims managed their own communal economy through mechanisms of zakat, sadaqa, and waqf, and Muslim charity largely remained outside the Russian administrative system (Zagidullin 2006; Ross 2017). In Turkestan, by contrast, the Russian colonial state intervened more directly. The state recognized only those waqfs bearing a khan’s stamp, thereby invalidating numerous local endowments. The resulting contraction of endowments pushed the communities to innovate. Many Central Asians forged documents or reinterpreted ownership categories to safeguard their charitable holdings within the constraints of the empire (Zagidullin 2006; Sartori 2012).

In Khorezm, or the Khanate of Khiva, which was conquered by the Russians in 1873 and remained a Russian protectorate, Khivan rulers retained internal political authority. The institution of waqf was not affected by Russian rule. As before the Russian presence, even after the Russian advance, the ruling dynasty of Qongrats continued to support family members of Sufi lineages by granting them a new form of economic benefit or revenue—long-term leases on waqf and usufruct rights—in exchange for maintaining those properties and increasing social support from the populace (Yakubov 2023). A new direction in the study of waqf is highlighted by Alisher Khaliyarov, who emphasizes the impact of global capitalism on the Khivan economy and demonstrates how global capitalist networks influenced Islamic legal practices more than Russian law. He explains how the institution of cash waqfs (an agreement for borrowing money by selling property, such as land or a house, then renting it back for a fee) became the primary instrument for utilizing cash waqfs in the Khanate of Khiva, mainly due to the khanate’s connections with global capital markets (Khaliyarov 2022). Khaliyarov’s work specifically shows the connection between Islamic legal institutions and the global economy, and how the latter has impacted the former. This is an outstanding analytical approach that should be applied in other regions of Inner Asia to understand the impact of global markets.

10. Land, Property and Colonial Legality

Land law provides another vantage point from which to observe the negotiation between shari‘a and empire. As Sartori explains, Russian colonial administrators in Turkestan initiated substantial changes in land ownership rights for Muslims, reserving all rural land for the state by restricting Muslims’ rights to possession and usufruct. However, these changes in imperial law governing the colonial territories in Turkestan did not affect the Islamic judicial procedures regarding property transactions. As a result, Islamic courts continued to notarize land sales, inheritances, and transfers as full ownership (mulk) under shari‘a. This practice effectively nullified the spirit of imperial legislation without directly violating it. It also highlights a broader pattern: Muslims appropriated the procedural space left open by the empire’s policy of “non-interference” to maintain continuity with Islamic norms.

Such maneuvering underscores the adaptive resilience of local jurisprudence. The colonial imposition of Russian property law did not eradicate Islamic categories; it recontextualized them. Disputes over guardianship of minors’ property, for instance, illustrate the changing balance of power. Traditionally, qadis acted as custodians of orphans’ wealth, but Russian officials increasingly required that such funds be deposited in state banks. Some Muslims accepted this practice as a safeguard against corruption; others viewed it as an intrusion into communal autonomy (Sartori 2014). In either case, the shift exemplifies how new bureaucratic mechanisms became entangled with older notions of trust, morality, and responsibility.

11. Family Law

The domain of family and inheritance law reveals the deepest penetration of imperial governance into Muslim social life in the Volga-Ural region. While there are several works on the functioning of the legal institutions of family and inheritance in the Volga-Urals, research on this topic on the Kazakh steppe is still in its infancy (see Shabley 2010, 2021). Although formally left to the jurisdiction of Muslim authorities, family matters were subject to increasing administrative surveillance. Through (1) the appellate function of the OA; (2) the introduction of record-keeping of summaries of family and inheritance cases and the translation of documentation into Russian; (3) the introduction of metrical books to record marriages and divorces; and (4) the implementation of some imperial laws related to marriage and divorce, the state transformed intimate relationships into legible legal data.

Imperial laws influenced the legality of marriage and divorce to some extent, especially when imperial and Islamic laws overlapped or diverged. An example of this is the marriage age, where imperial law set minimum ages for brides and grooms, and marriages recorded in this manner were considered legally valid. Reactions among Muslims varied. Some followed imperial law, while others married before the prescribed age or devised new practices, such as conducting double ceremonies. In that case, Muslims performed ijab-qabul16 for underage couples, which attested to a marriage in Islamic law, and they performed the nikah, an official ceremony performed by the mulla and recorded in the metrical books, later when the couple reached the marriage age (Garipova 2017a). In cases of divorce, imperial law affected women whose husbands were exiled, conscripted, or disappeared, as divorce from such husbands was regulated by imperial law (Garipova 2020). Other aspects of marriage, divorce, and inheritance were less impacted and warrant further research. Lastly, the influence of the OA as an extra-communal venue that provided an outlet for reconsidering cases is significant. Many Muslims, especially women, took advantage of this opportunity. Due to the existence of this institution, certain practices, such as petitions for divorce or requests to divide inheritance according to the science of shares rather than traditional family divisions, became more common by the end of the twentieth century (Garipova 2024). Such cases complicate conventional assumptions about gender and law in colonial contexts. Muslim women in the Volga-Urals and the Kazakh steppe were not silent subjects of patriarchal or imperial power. Through petitions, testimony, and appeals, they redefined the boundaries of legal legitimacy. Their agency demonstrates how imperial structures could become instruments of local moral negotiation, even within an asymmetrical power dynamic.

The study of the institutions of waqf, family, and inheritance reveals a recurring pattern: imperial governance imposed administrative constraints, but these constraints generated new spaces of Islamic legal creativity. The resulting legal order was hybrid, negotiated, and pragmatic. By analyzing these everyday institutions, scholars uncover how moral reasoning, economic necessity, and bureaucratic rationality intertwined to shape Muslim social life under Russian rule.

12. Legal Pluralism and Forum Shopping

Scholars of colonialism have shown how colonial rulers created new legal venues or reformed existing ones in the colonies, and how their colonial subjects quickly started using these institutions (Benton 1999). The system of legal pluralism allowed for some forum shopping across different legal venues (Benton 1999). British and French colonialism reveal a clear pattern that subject peoples quickly used the new courts established by imperial powers, especially marginalized individuals like women or those of low social status (Merry 2010). As Sally Engle Merry emphasizes, “many saw in the new institutions opportunities to escape the bonds of kinship or unfree status” and “as an opportunity to escape other forms of subordination (Merry 2010).

The use of such legal pluralism has been studied to some extent in the Inner Asian context as well. On the Kazakh steppe, many people appealed to higher legal authorities within the colonial administration due to dissatisfaction with the customary biy courts, which operated under codified customary law (adat) and assembly decisions (Martin 2001). Some felt that biys did not judge fairly, while others were angry at what they perceived as an abuse of power (Martin 2001). The Orenburg Border Committee also served as an institution where Kazakhs could bring their cases on civil and criminal matters. Kazakhs could ignore biys’ decisions and appeal to colonial authorities (Sartori and Shabley 2019). At the same time, however, many Kazakhs who sought guidance in resolving disputes preferred to turn to a “traditional” biy, an aksakal or a mulla within their own community (Frank 2017).17 Thus, a single dispute might pass through customary, Islamic, and imperial channels. This mobility of cases exemplifies what historians of other empires call “forum shopping”: the tactical use of multiple courts to maximize one’s chance of success. Far from being signs of confusion, such strategies reflected a sophisticated understanding of the empire’s layered legal geography.

A similar pattern appeared in Turkestan after its conquest in the 1860s. In Turkestan, too, Muslims took their disputes to parallel court systems and adjudicating venues that had not existed previously—a “native court” that applied shari‘a, a justice of the peace, a military district court, a public prosecutor, or the office of the governor-general. Central Asian Muslims profited from legal diversity as they chose among legal institutions and “learned to navigate a normative space that differed substantially from the juridical field typical of the Muslim polities” previously ruling the region (Sartori 2016). In both cases, further research may provide us with a clearer social portrait of the kinds of people who preferred to use Russian colonial institutions, the problems they brought, and whether they were successful in their appeal, i.e., whether they found a space where their rights were defended. At the same time, it would be interesting to ask what such appeals meant for communal life as a whole.

There exist several misconceptions in the literature about the pluralistic legal regime in the Volga-Urals. Crews suggests that after the creation of the OA and in the first half of the nineteenth century, Muslims petitioned the OA and provincial and central government officials with their legal cases and disputes, and many to the Tsar himself. Muslims challenged their religious authorities and resorted to the help of state institutions “to live according to God’s plan as they understood it” (Crews 2006). For the second half of the nineteenth century, Stephan Kirmse suggests that Tatars began to forum-shop because they “gained access to a new legal infrastructure”, namely, circuit courts (okruzhnye sudy) and began to bring their legal cases there (Kirmse 2013). However, such use of imperial courts by Muslims was not new. First, Muslims were already well familiar with the Russian imperial court system before the 1860s (Crews 2006; Ross 2022).18 Before the judicial reforms of the 1860s, land courts operated in the Russian Empire until they were abolished in 1862 and replaced by circuit courts shortly thereafter. Second, many of the cases Kirmse cites involve criminal offenses—such as theft, extortion, assault, and rape—over which Muslim judicial authorities had no jurisdiction.

Rather than a study of legal pluralism, one needs to consider jurisdiction and appeal, which have already been discussed in the literature. Criminal cases and other cases, such as custody of Muslim orphans, violation of marriage age, excessive beating of a wife, divorce of the wives of exiled men, and even financial claims of women at divorce (in case of a dispute) were in the jurisdiction of imperial courts while only family and inheritance law cases were handled by the Muslim authorities. In fact, Russian authorities very clearly marked the jurisdiction of imperial courts and Muslim authorities (both OA and parish imams and akhunds), and when Muslims sent their complaints to regional administrative offices, land courts or military commanders (starshinas etc.) for the Bashkirs, these cases were always sent to the OA if they concerned the disputes about personal status law. Similarly, the OA and Muslim authorities redirected Muslim cases to imperial civil and criminal courts if the imperial law even partially covered them (Garipova 2011). Therefore, such cases cannot meaningfully illustrate legal pluralism; instead, they reveal the structural limits placed on Muslim judicial authority within the Russian legal order.

The comparative picture across Inner Asia reveals that legal pluralism was neither uniform nor unlimited. In the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan, pluralism offered genuine choice and fostered new forms of legal agency. In the Volga-Urals, it operated within stricter administrative boundaries. In all cases, however, Muslims learned to translate their grievances across legal languages—imperial, Islamic, and customary—thereby redefining what it meant to act “within the law.” Given a clear jurisdictional division between imperial and Muslim authorities in the Volga-Urals, the state did not attempt to codify Islamic law in this region. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, Russian officials attempted to systematize laws related to family and inheritance. Alternatively, the state embarked on projects of codification on the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan.

13. Codification and the Production of Legal Knowledge

The systematization of indigenous laws and the production of their codified versions were frequent markers of colonial rule by various imperial powers. As in other imperial contexts, codification in Inner Asia was an attempt to transform a plurality of moral and legal norms into a single language of governance. The Russian imperial state’s drive to classify, translate, and standardize legal norms in the nineteenth century reshaped the very categories through which both officials and Muslims understood law.

On the Kazakh steppe, Russian authorities embarked on the codification of Kazakh customary law, undertaking several projects between 1804 and 1853. With the 1822 Charter on the Siberian Kazakhs (Ustav o Sibirskikh Kirghizakh), Russian officials undertook to record and formalize adat as the authentic law of the nomads. It was envisioned as a soft adaptation to the needs of colonial administration; for example, Russian officials in the steppe courts (narodnye sudy) and administrators were to familiarize themselves with Kazakh customary norms. However, the classification of customs that resulted from such codification was somewhat arbitrary, as officials confused adat and Islamic law. Although reflecting a blend of shari‘a and adat, such codification projects underlined prioritization of adat over shari‘a (Sartori and Shabley 2015). Imperial officials drafted Kazakh legal codes on the assumption that Kazakh legal tradition was composed of “pre-Islamic” customary nomadic law and “imported” Islamic law. Customs had to be studied “correctly” to underline that Kazakh customs differed from Islamic law. Institutionalizing customary law was a means to exclude shari‘a from Kazakh legal practice (Frank 2017).

In the 1840s, Russian imperial policies reflected a different approach towards the codification of adat. Officials began to juxtapose shari‘a with adat also for political reasons. This coincided with the period when imperial authorities recognized that proliferation of Islamic institutions, the ulama and clerics was no good for the steppe (with Orenburg governor-general Perovskii who even suggested prohibiting the Orenburg Assembly to interfere in Kazakh family matters), and that Islam was more of a threat to the Russian civilizing mission, to reforms on the steppe, and especially to cultural assimilation. These efforts coincided with and were motivated by the prevailing Islamophobia among Russian military and state authorities due to the wars in the Caucasus. In the early 1850s I. Osmolovskii initiated a new codification project and reevaluated the significance of shari‘a for the Kazakhs. His approach largely diverged from the previous attempts to underplay the importance of Islamic law. Thus, the codified adat emerged as a hybrid product. Kazakh judges trained under this system continued to reason in both idioms, applying written codes while invoking moral arguments derived from Islamic jurisprudence (Frank 2017; Sartori 2011a). The project that was meant to insulate the steppe from Islam in fact incorporated Islamic moral reasoning within adat. When the compilation, which produced a law code that highlighted a blend between Kazakh customary law and shari‘a, appeared, the project was suppressed and rejected by officials intent on excluding Islamic norms (Sartori and Shabley 2019).

In the Volga-Urals, codification took a more bureaucratic than legislative form. In 1822 Aleksandr Golitsyn, the Minister of Spiritual Affairs and Enlightenment, produced a relatively brief compilation of rules on Muslim marriage and divorce for these Muslim communities, in which the obligations of imams in performing marriages occupied a larger space (Garipova 2023a). These rules became the basis for another compilation on Muslim marital issues produced by Mufti Suleimanov in 1840 (published as 1841 Rules). Although some historians have treated the 1841 compilation as a codification attempt (Crews 2006), this cannot yet be considered as a codification of shari‘a in family law because the collection resembles more a set of rules or a sort of template that mullas had to keep in mind and follow when performing marriage or divorce to prevent confusion or disputes. Legal opinions and legal decisions in matters of family and inheritance law thus remained a prerogative of the ulama.

In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of compilations on Islamic family and inheritance law appeared in the Volga-Urals. The main goal was to systematize laws on the dissolution of marriage, scattered across various volumes and parts of the Digest of Laws, to facilitate and guide jurists’ work. In 1869, a secretary of Statistics Committee of Kazan guberniya N.N. Vecheslav published an article “Folk juridical customs among Tatars of Kazan governorship”. The publication appeared as a result of the program on gathering information about legal customs (o iuridicheskikh obychaiakh) and the questions for this compilation were suggested by Russian Geographical Society. Starting in the 1880s, this was followed by other compilations.19 This coincided with the discussions among Russian jurists and officials engaged in initiatives to reform marital law to legalize divorce and marital separation among the Russian population, and in 1902, the Ministry of Interior even tried to establish a uniform practice toward abused and neglected wives (Engel 2011). However, family law remained under the authority of the Church until the end of the imperial regime, and all attempts to codify Islamic family and inheritance law and to create a unified civil code for all Russian subjects remained unrealized.

In Turkestan, the Pahlen Commission sought to create a single written shari‘a code for all qadis. The idea was that shari‘a could be a recognized, predictable code and used also by the Russian judges and other interested parties “in order to ensure that the qadis’ judgements were in full conformity with it” (Morrison 2008). The text of Hidaya was proposed and discussed as the main text to be translated into Russian and used as such a source. Some scholars such as Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold (Wilhelm Barthold) expressed a number of criticisms: Bartold noted that the text was only a translation from English and it was “heavily influenced by British jurisprudential ideas.” He also stated that Islamic law was flexible, and a single commentary could not be used to comprehend all aspects of Islamic law. Moreover, the local ulama viewed the text with suspicion and did not recognize some of its content. Thus, the proposal to codify Islamic law on the basis of the translation of Hidaya was abandoned, as a consultative congress in May 1909 in Tashkent concluded that “this was still an ‘unfinished work’.” (Morrison 2008, 2015).

14. Legal Opinions (Fatwas) and Legal Decisions (Hukms)

If codification represented the empire’s attempt to define law through text, the fatwa and the hukm represented the interpretive acts of Muslims that reasserted the moral and discursive autonomy of shari‘a. As we have seen earlier, administrative and institutional changes had several important implications for the functioning of legal systems across various regions of Inner Asia, but fatwas and hukms continued to be produced there, more often outside official frameworks. Did the changes affect the ability of the ulama, biys and qadis to render independent legal decisions? To what extent did the ulama preserve their independence in rendering legal decisions? In the Kazakh steppe, biys and ulama continued to issue fatwas without much of the state’s impact. Frank suggests that “Islamic legal discussions among Kazakh nomads existed outside of the customary law courts established by the Russian authorities….” (Frank 2017). Fatwas addressed new challenges indicating legal adaptability. As new problems appeared as a result of Kazakh integration into Russian economy and commerce, ulama and biys discussed and produced fatwas on questions such as the legal status of marmots and whether it was possible to use marmot fat by Muslims, selling the fat from carrion to the Russians, dawir ceremony or whether a family could pay a religious figure to take on the sins of a deceased relative, the use of paper money (cash) for paying zakat, the lawfulness of using the unborn offspring of livestock as collateral in offering credit, and others (Frank 2017). Yet, these were the questions of communal importance to Kazakh nomadic and social life but not disputes between individuals, family members or clans. These, and especially how family disputes were resolved among the Kazakhs by their legal authorities, remains a gap in the scholarly literature and would need separate research.

Pavel Shabley has discussed fatwas as an instrument of power. In the Middle Horde, he suggests, fatwas written by local Kazakh ulama became a stumbling block in the struggle for power. To a big extent, these were largely conflicts between the Kazakhs themselves, albeit not without the intervention of the OA which sometimes took a side with more loyal ulama (Shabley 2017). In Turkestan fatwas continued to be used even more extensively by the Muslims who sought most suitable argument for their cause and even by the Russian officials who realized that requesting a fatwa could be a good strategy to both obtain and verify a “correct” interpretation of Islamic law on a particular question. Comparing fatwas with pre-colonial period, Sartori notes that “Muftis were not marginalized and their fatwas lost no legal significance” and that, on the contrary, muftis came under greater pressure both from their customers and from Russian officials (Sartori 2016). But what was the consumption of fatwa among Muslims is a good question to explore further. Who among Muslims asked for fatwas, from which social layers and categories? What kind of issues did they bring to the muftis and which questions did they seek a legal opinion on?

The institution of fatwa in the Volga-Urals, delivered by both the OA and imams/akhunds requires more clarification because they are sometimes confused legal decisions (hukm) and decrees. The decrees that the OA produced for the ulama under its jurisdiction are sometimes mistaken for fatwas (Shabley 2017).20 There is a need to differentiate between the OA decrees (ukazy) which had a power of law and which all mullas were to follow and could be even punished for violating them. Decrees were not legal opinions. The OA also rendered legal opinions (fatwas), usually asked by imams and akhunds or by ordinary Muslims on a particular issue. In my reading of individual legal cases from the OA archive, the Tatar-language documents reveal that imams and akhunds sometimes asked a fatwa from the OA especially when they were not sure what to do in a particular case. The OA also rendered hukms, rather rarely, usually in cases where they found the hukm of a mulla incorrect and overruled it.

With regard to who had authority to render a fatwa in the Kazakh steppe, Shabley rightly suggests that not only the OA but mullas too could render a fatwa.21 Sometimes mullas on the Kazakh steppe could not wait for an order/instruction from the OA and as a result issued their own fatwas or legal decisions without consulting with the OA or Russian officials (Shabley 2021). In the Volga-Urals, as well as Kazakh steppe, the practice of rendering fatwas by akhunds and knowledgeable imams was common throughout the nineteenth century. Akhunds and imams issued legal opinions and legal decisions and they did not need to consult the OA for this. In the first half of the nineteenth century prominent and less prominent akhunds, such as Fathullah al-Uriwi, issued independent legal opinions concerning family legal matters (Garipova 2023b). Although Shabley suggests that this weakened the authority of the OA (Shabley 2021), it rather did not—on the one hand, such practice ensured that Islamic family and inheritance law functioned at the level of the mahalla without much of the OA involvement on a vast territory; on the other hand, the OA retained its power to annul the decision of imams or send for reinvestigation.22

Imams and akhunds in the Volga-Urals, biys and mullas on the Kazakh steppe and qadis and state officials in Turkestan produced binding judicial decisions (hukms). The mechanisms governing decision-making varied across regions, and the topic awaits further study, especially on the Kazakh steppe. In Turkestan, qadis rarely adjudicated legal cases; they were primarily notaries and legal assessors, while the rulers and governors mostly issued legal decisions. The royal court could also request qadis to adjudicate legal disputes (Sartori 2016). In the Volga-Urals, legal decisions in family and inheritance law were rendered by an imam or akhund and were an outcome usually reached at a legal gathering (majlis) in the presence of the local village chief, elders, and other imams or akhund, after a lengthy process of interrogating the parties to the dispute, witnesses, and mediation. An imam/akhund then wrote a report with his decision explaining the details of the case to the OA and, once the OA heard the case, it could confirm it and send it to be announced to the parties to the dispute, usually through local police (Garipova 2018).

In the early twentieth century there appeared a genre of “public fatwa”, published in the Muslim periodical press. The OA published its own journal, Ma‘lumat, where it opened a section on fatwas. While these fatwas were essentially to inform the ulama and the public about important opinions of the OA on various issues, other journals, such as a traditionalist and conservative Din wa Ma‘ishat also published “public fatwas,” aimed at spreading legal opinions of the ulama as a counterbalance to the legal views of jadid ulama and intellectuals which were published in jadid newspapers and journals (Garipova 2016). In fact, Muslims sent many questions to the publishing offices of newspapers where they sought legal opinions on a broad range of issues, and this is another topic that awaits further research.

15. Madhhab, Custom, and Legal Flexibility

Inner Asia has historically been a Hanafi region, with other schools of law (madhhab) absent.23 It is thus different from other Muslim regions such as Arab lands or the Ottoman Empire, which exemplify a presence of legal pluralism, even though the official school of law was Hanafi. In Central Asia the attitudes of religious scholars towards non-Hanafi madhhabs seems to have been rather skeptical in favor of a Hanafi madhhab: “If there was a situation such that a Hanafi qadi ruled on an issue in contradiction with the Hanafi madhhab, and that ruling does not originate from those capable of ijtihad [independent reasoning for the purpose of deriving law], the ruling from that qadi is invalid.” (Pickett 2020). Pickett underlines that “The logic underpinning this ruling does not technically ban the other three schools of law, but in practice forbids any kind of forum shopping between mazhabs.” (Pickett 2020).24 Thus, although other legal schools were recognized as legitimate in legal literature, choosing other madhhabs was not a practice. Hence, looking into such influence of other schools of law on the Hanafi legal practice would be a new direction for future research. Other scholars have also pointed to such gap by underlining lack of scholarly knowledge in doctrinal differences and whether they contributed to legal diversity or if they affected legal behavior among Muslims (Sartori 2017).

Scholars have claimed that in the Volga-Ural region state officials and the ulama tried to impose a Hanafi orthodoxy. “For their part, Muslim scholars viewed the power of the state as a means to advance the systematic application of a particular reading of the Hanafi legal school, glossing the interpretations that emerged from this coincidence of interests as “traditional” (Crews 2006). However, evidence from legal cases does not support it. Rather, state officials were not interested in what legal school the ulama followed in their decisions; these were largely internal ulama debates. Recent research has demonstrated that some legal experts ruled decisions that diverged from mainstream Hanafi opinions (and utilized Shafi’i opinions) and, for example, allowed divorce of women whose husbands were missing or exiled and who experienced extreme hardship because of non-maintenance. Yet, the outcome of cases could also depend on the opinions of a particular Mufti who could decree that mullas follow only Hanafi opinions on a particular issue25 (Garipova 2023b). In the 1890s, the OA even initiated an empire-wide inquiry, under the leadership of then-qadi Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, asking prominent mullas to respond to the question about borrowing from other schools of law in cases where women suffered from marital hardship and unworking marriages (Garipova 2022).

The question of the relationship between shari‘a and adat is a difficult one, especially when it comes to their practical entanglement under conditions of empire. Among the bodies of law used by Muslims of Inner Asia—imperial law, shari‘a law, and customary law—customary law remains the least understood. Studies of the coexistence between custom and shari‘a in other Muslim regions have long demonstrated that Ḥanafi jurists often accommodated local practices, especially in spheres where specific legal norms were absent. This tendency toward accommodation is also visible in the Inner Asian context, where scholars have examined how Kazakh biys and ulama negotiated the coexistence of Islamic and customary norms (Frank 2017; Shabley 2012). Frank, in particular, highlights the porous boundary between the two normative systems and the pragmatic ways in which disputants and judges blended adat and shari‘a reasoning.

Sartori has shifted attention from theoretical compatibility to the judicial process through which custom was incorporated into Islamic practice under colonial rule (2011). In his study of qadi courts in Tashkent and Jasugum, he demonstrates that the encounter between Russian legal administration and Islamic institutions gave rise to a new form of legal creativity he calls the “birth of a custom.” Russian colonial policy of non-interference in Islamic legal procedure allowed qadis to adapt court practice to local norms. The result was the emergence of “established practices” such as the seven-witness rule in horse-theft cases, that had no precedent in classical Hanafi jurisprudence yet became a standard procedure at shari‘a courts. Sartori’s argument thus complicates the relationship between shari‘a and adat by showing how custom was incorporated into Islamic law under the Russian colonial rule. The Russian colonial state’s attempt to separate shari‘a and adat inadvertently enabled this fusion, since it preserved qadis’ procedural autonomy while assigning them administrative responsibilities. How adat and shari‘a blurred in areas most sensitive to Ḥanafi principles, such as family, property, and inheritance law on the Kazakh steppe and Central Asia remains a promising avenue for further research. For example, the OA sought to end the customary practice of levirate marriage on the Kazakh steppe and even sent orders directed at ending such practices to volost’ (prikaz) officials but it looks like this did not have much effect (Shabley 2012).

Danielle Ross rightly emphasizes that by the end of the eighteenth century, and in the transitional period between 1750 and 1820, three legal systems were interacting in the Volga-Urals: Islamic, steppe customary, and Russian. The paucity of documents prevents us from making definitive conclusions. Still, it is clear that with respect to financial rights of women related to marriage and divorce, women were resorting to Islamic legal standards concerning dower (mahr). A divorcing Muslim woman was subject to the rights under Islamic law. At the same time, it is not easy to trace any distinction between customary and Islamic law from the surviving sources for the pre-1820s period (Ross 2022). Indeed, when it comes to drawing a clear line between Islamic law and imperial law, one needs to look at the jurisdiction, which is more or less clearly defined by Russian imperial law. However, the distinction between customary law and Islamic law remains blurred. One such example of blended interaction between shari‘a and adat in the Volga-Ural region is the division of inheritance and the intergenerational transfer of property. When Muslims divided their inheritance, they considered a customary practice of familial care for parents, which placed the burden of caring for aging parents or other family members on the youngest son, in return for which he was entitled to a larger inheritance share. There are also examples of cases in which, in the absence of sons, a daughter who took care of her aging parent was entitled to a larger share than other daughters (Garipova 2024). Customary norms were incorporated into shari‘a practice or reconciled with it in some form. For example, new research on cash waqfs, mentioned above, shows that the Hanafi school of law allowed the establishment of cash waqfs in Hanafi regions. The waqf, an Islamic institution of personal piety, could be used to generate interest which looks antithetical to the notion of Islamic piety and prohibited by the institution of riba. However, moneylending was a widely permitted and even popular custom in nineteenth-century Khiva, as it was in the Ottoman Empire through conditional sale contracts (bayʿ-i jāʾiz) (Khaliyarov 2022).

The interaction between adat and Islamic law was a practical process, not a rigid conflict. In daily life, people strategically used both systems, demonstrating an awareness of multiple legal orders. The ulama strengthened their authority by referring to both scripture and local precedent, mediating between imperial law, Islamic law, and social expectations. This pragmatism was a core feature of the Hanafi tradition, which values context. The Russian Empire’s attempt to separate custom from religion failed because Islamic law already had its own mechanisms to mediate this relationship.

16. Jadidism and Reform of Islamic Law

Muslim reformism has surely dominated the literature on Muslim communities of Inner Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, while it focused largely on jadid thought on reform of educational institutions (maktab and madrasa), on political activism and various aspects of social change, research on Jadid activities with regard to the reform of Islamic law—substantive, procedural, or institutional—is rather scarce. An important impact of the Jadid reform on Islamic law, as reflected in the scholarly literature and warranting further study, is the reform of family law and women’s status in society. Public debate on the reform of family law in Inner Asia took place between 1905 and 1917, during the All-Russian Muslim Congresses (Kamp 2006). The 1917 Muslim women’s congress allows us to hear a variety of men’s and women’s voices and tactics about reforming Islamic family law and reinterpreting women’s rights (Kamp 2016). Both studies demonstrate a variety of Jadid views both among Turkestani Jadids and between Turkestani and Volga-Ural Jadids. During the Muslim congresses, reform of legal institutions was also discussed, but there is no comprehensive study on this topic. Also, previously, male religious scholars dominated discussions on legal reform; women joined public discussions in congresses and the periodical press (Kamp 2006, 2016). It was the first female qadi at the OA, Mukhlisa Bubi, who wrote about the importance of women marrying with a marriage contract that included stipulations to defend their rights (Garipova 2017b). The opinions of the Jadid intellectuals regarding Islamic law on the Kazakh steppe also varied. Some intellectuals on the Kazakh steppe were critical of Islamic law, considering it rigid, unable to respond to pressing changes, and unsuitable to the realities of life. In contrast, others argued for the need to follow shari‘a (Uyama 2009).

While Jadids and Islamic jurists/legal scholars are often represented in opposing camps, some were in fact individuals who bridged the two groups or navigated both cultural milieus. In his recent study, Thomas Welsford has written about one such Jadid, Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy, focusing on his legal career and his formation as a legal scholar before embarking on journalism and full-fledged Jadid writings. As a mirza, qadi, and mufti, Behbudiy drafted and signed hundreds of court reports (Welsford 2022). Another work is devoted to a prominent reformist-minded religious scholar, akhund and qadi of the Orenburg Assembly (between 1891 and 1905), Rizaeddin Fakhreddin. Like Behbudiy, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin was deeply rooted in the world of the ulama and had a legal career; he read hundreds of petitions from Muslim women (and to a lesser extent, men) requesting divorce or intervention in their family problems and, in the 1890s, proposed reform of family law (Garipova 2022). Moving aside from the historiographical contention between Jadids and Qadimists, such work is useful for understanding the complexity of various personalities, especially how some people who are largely identified as reform-minded understood the problems in their communities and why they pushed for reform in certain spheres of life, including the legal one. Indeed, Jadidism influenced the ulama’s legal debates, turning some of them into reform-minded activists and writers, but this topic remains largely unexplored. Many bright representatives of the ulama in the Volga-Urals, including Ziyauddin Kamali, Musa Bigiev, Muhammad-Najib Tuntari, Hujjat al-Hakim Makhmudov, and others also wrote on the reform of Islamic law.

Therefore, moving beyond the conflict between traditionalist and reformist jurists (Pickett 2020), which has dominated previous discussions about the ulama, would be a good strategy for future research. Welsford offers several strategies that could be useful. Rather than viewing the Jadids as unrepresentative of the broader Muslim community, it is necessary to examine how they are rooted in local practices, institutions, communities, and relationships. Another way is to take a sociological approach, i.e., to analyze how one’s career (its successes and failures) and other social experiences influenced one’s thought. One could also approach the study of legal thought from the perspective of another camp —the traditionalists —and analyze how they formulated their concerns in response to the Jadids (Garipova 2016). As Welsford suggests, combining various modes of historical writing could be a remedy: the history of ideas should be complemented by social and legal histories at multiple levels, a social history of an intellectual, a social history of community, a legal history of institutions, and a history of legal practices.

17. Continuity, Change, and Legal Consciousness

Debates about rupture vs. continuity remain central in the historiography of Islamic law in the modern period. While scholarship was dominated by the discourse of broad socio-political and legal ruptures brought about by colonialism (Jeppie et al. 2010; Hallaq 2009), in recent years, new scholarship has acknowledged the continuity with pre-colonial traditions. They underline continuity within the changed frameworks and ask how traditional Islamic legal institutions, authorities, and issues/problems continued to develop within these contexts. Scholars have observed both the continuity in legal discourses and the emergence of counter discourses, both of which could be responses to imperial rule. (Zaman 2002; Siddiqui 2025). While institutional change, such as reform or creation of existing courts, the certification of the ulama, approval by imperial institutions, and others, are changes that can be easily traced and undeniable, a more difficult task is to trace changes in the practice and interpretation of particular socio-legal institutions, how Muslims reinterpreted them or how Muslim understanding of them changed or did not change. One way to look at such changes is to trace the legality of such practices and the legal consciousness of Muslims, i.e., how Muslim understanding about them changed over time.

Scholars suggest that Muslim legal consciousness underwent substantial changes during imperial rule. S.E. Merry explains the term “legal consciousness” to show how ordinary working-class people used courts to speak about their rights, negotiate and define them—not only the types of problems they bring to court but also “which problems are defined as worthy of legal intervention and which are not” and how eventually people redefine a particular formulation of a problem (Merry 1992). Merry further suggests that “popular legal consciousness reshapes law itself”—hearing and listening to stories about what the law is and what it can and cannot do defines what law itself is, and the way it is talked about and understood in these local settings is an important aspect of people’s agency (Merry 1992).

I want to draw attention to this understanding of “legal consciousness” because, in the field of Islamic legal history, including in Inner Asia, there is still a gap in how Muslims understood particular institutions and practices, and how, or whether, such understanding changed in the long nineteenth century. There are also considerable gaps in our knowledge of the agency of ordinary Muslims, including women, with respect to how they shaped particular understandings of law. How did Muslims think or debate about domestic violence, land, waqf, dower, guardianship, divorce, how did they negotiate what was lawful and unlawful, legitimate or illegitimate practices and how did interpretations affected their lives? Did these understandings change in the nineteenth and early twentieth century? Were people able to redefine patriarchal discourses? What kind of obstacles societies faced when attempting to redefine some discourses? What was the agency of the ulama in these social debates?

18. Conclusions

The study of Islamic law in Inner Asia under Russian imperial rule has undergone remarkable growth and can easily be placed within the broader field of Islamic legal studies. This scholarship demonstrates a similar pattern of imperial impact on Islamic legal institutions—starting with the Volga-Urals and expanding into the Kazakh steppe and Turkestan: at various historical periods, the jurisdiction of Islamic law was curtailed in the criminal and administrative sphere as well as in land property, leaving family, inheritance and waqf questions to the authority of local legal experts. There were spheres of shari‘a law (such as dietary laws, trade, and others) that were dealt with by religious scholars autonomously. At the same time, Islamic law in Inner Asia functioned within a pluralistic legal landscape, i.e., that various imperial institutions offered outlets for Muslims to appeal or bring their legal cases for consideration. Scholars have agreed that despite the limitations of Islamic legal authorities, the ulama, biys, qadis, and ordinary Muslims all played roles in maintaining, adapting to, and reinterpreting Islamic legal practices to adjust to changing situations. By tracing the recent literature on the transformations of Islamic legal authority from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, this study has shown that the encounter between shari‘a and empire produced not the erosion of Islamic law but its rearticulation in new social and epistemic forms.

Future research would be necessary to examine the lived experiences of legal actors and ordinary Muslims, the gendered dimensions of legal practice, the impact of bureaucratization, and Muslim legal consciousness with respect to socio-legal institutions. Integrating archival and Islamic sources and emphasizing the entangled nature of law, society, and empire will allow scholars to reconstruct the legal past of Inner Asia more fully. This is not only a history of Islamic law under the Russian empire—it is a history of Muslim resilience, negotiation, and adaptability under imperial rule.