Siberia is a historical and geographical area within the Asian part of Russia. Sunni Islam is an official religion of the vast majority of the Turkic-speaking population living in southern Western Siberia, located between the Ural Mountains to the west and the Yenisei River bed to the east. It is one of Russia’s most resource rich regions, which also boasts unique natural and cultural-historical attractions.
According to the most widespread point of view, Islam emerged in the Siberian Khanate as an official religion in the 1570s under Khan Kuchum, a descendant of Genghis Khan. However, there is a legend among the Muslims of Western Siberia, according to which Islam entered this territory earlier – in 1394, when the first Muslim missionaries, students and followers of the Persian religious figure and a Sufi teacher, Baha’ al-Din Naqshband, began to spread the true faith among pagans.
It should be highlighted that all researcher consider the spread of Islam in Siberia as a long process, in which preachers from the Nogai Horde and the Kazan Khanate also took part. The adoption of Islam contributed to the rejection of the archaic Tengrian religion and played a great role in strengthening the state of the Siberian Tatars, opening the way to the Islamic civilization: the Arabic and the Persian languages, as well as Arab culture in general, spread. In addition, the adoption of Islam brought the Siberian Tatars even closer to their Kazan kin, whose ancestors had become Muslims as early as the X century. Islam contributed to the strengthening of ties between the Siberian Tatars and the Turkic-Muslim peoples of Central Asia, from where came the clergy, educated people, and religious and secular books. These factors influenced the development of education of the Siberian Tatars and the spread of literacy.
The Siberian Tatars, along with the Volga-Ural Tatars, who began migrating to Siberia in the XVI century, and the Kazakhs, who arrived in the region in the XV century, made up the three major ethnic groups practicing Sunni Islam in this region. Native Tatars, as well as newcomers, settled interspersed with Russians and other peoples of Siberia. The adoption of Islam marked changes in the political and ethnic structures of the Tatars and the Kazakhs, which influenced the formation of the Kazakh Khanate and the establishment of the Siberian Khanate as an independent state.
The tolerant policy towards Muslims implemented by Empress of Russia Catherine II and her successors gave an additional impetus to the development of Islam in Siberia. Despite the emergence of the confessional organization established by Catherine II’s Decree of 22 September 1788, permission to publish religious books in 1800, including textbooks and dictionaries for the Tatars of Tobolsk Province, Muslims in the Russian Empire faced various restrictions and challenges in their everyday life until 17 April 1905, when the Manifesto on Freedom of Religion was adopted.
The formation of the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia (since 1948 – the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European part of the USSR and Siberia) was facilitated by two All-Russian Muslim congresses held in 1917 after the February Revolution. The participants of the congresses formulated the main political goals of the Muslim movement, which were not destined to come true in the conditions of the beginning of the Civil War. In general, the Bolshevik authorities initially treated Islam favorably, viewing Muslims as representatives of the most oppressed and backward nationalities that had suffered under the tsarist autocracy. In turn, some theologians and the Muslim intellectual elite of the Jadid movement (the ideology of Muslim modernism) were ready to cooperate with the new authorities. The Muslim clergy of a number of cities in the Siberian region, in particular Tomsk, spoke from pro-Soviet positions with slogans “For Soviet power, for Shariah”, “Soviet power does not contradict Islam”.
The 1920s in the history of Islam in Siberia can be characterized as the time of relatively peaceful coexistence between state bodies and Muslim organizations. By 1927, there were 166 Muslim communities and 185 clerics in Siberia. Their activities were limited mainly to worship and teaching religious doctrines, and also manifested themselves in the purposeful strengthening of religiosity among young people and women.
But the Bolshevik leadership, which from the very beginning had established strict control over Muslim communities, from the mid-1920s, in the course of the Cultural Revolution, industrialization and collectivization, moved to the direct suppression of Islamic religious life and culture. One of the largest conflicts between the Siberian authorities and Muslims was the attempted emigration to Türkiye in 1924-1926 of nearly 3 000 Tatar Bukhars living in the Tarsky district of the Siberian region. With the strengthening of Soviet power, administrative and repressive pressure intensified, and anti-religious campaigns took more and more odious forms.
The stabilization of church-state relations during the Great Patriotic War led to the opening of a number of mosques. Thus, in 1943 the Novosibirsk Muslim community was registered, and in December 1944 the Omsk Muslim community was given the Sobornaya Mosque. However, in the process of spiritual suppression of Islam under the guise of atheistic propaganda, which began in the second half of the 1960s, mosques began to close again. It was during the development of mass atheism that the phenomenon of domestic religiosity emerged: home mosques and madrasahs, unofficial spiritual leaders in families became widespread, which compensated for the shortage of clergy.
Despite all the vicissitudes of the atheistic XX century, among the Siberian Tatars continued to function the notions of belonging of a number of local clans to the ancient missionaries who came to the banks of the Irtysh River to spread Islam among the Siberian pagans at the end of the XIV century. The legends tell of a fierce holy war with local polytheists, during which most of the ascetics of Islam were exterminated. Their burial places, called “astana”, have acquired cult status for Siberian Muslims, and demonstrate Siberia’s connection with the rest of the Islamic world. Sufi brotherhoods and Sufism in general played a crucial role in the development of the cult.
The elimination of anti-religious pressure on Russian confessions during the Perestroika years created a more favorable environment for Islam. The registration of new Muslim communities and the opening of mosques began. The process of returning old mosques to Muslims and building new ones accelerated significantly from the second half of 1991. It is worth noting the return to Muslims of the most significant monument of Muslim architecture in Siberia - the Yembaevo mosque, built in the mid-XIX century according to the project of Istanbul architects (Yembaevo village, Tyumen region).
Ethnic migration that took place in the early XXI century from the states that emerged in the post-Soviet space (Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) has to some extent influenced the emergence of Islam as the fastest growing religious denomination among modern residents of the Siberian regions. Islam in Siberia reflects the global movement of the religion that originated in the Arabian Peninsula and penetrated to the northern, Siberian, and even circumpolar regions, to the “very edge of the world”.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
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