This project intends to contribute to the discipline by identifying the state policies toward religion in the former Soviet republic of Tatarstan, a constituting part of the Russian Federation, and offering an explanation to the approach employed by its governments toward religion. This project’s topic, the relationship between government and religion, is currently underdeveloped not only in the context of Central Asia and postcommunist studies, but in the social sciences in general. Concerning the policy-related aspect, this study is significant from the standpoint of both regional and global governments and NGOs as it assesses the issues related to national security and human rights, such as freedom of religion, freedom of peaceful association, and freedom of expression. The case of Tatarstan is especially interesting as it appears to adopt more accommodating and less regulatory strategies toward religion while most Central Asian Muslim cases do not. My question is why? A number of well-established competing theories purport to explain the trends in government policies toward religion, including the modernization theory; civilizational, or essentialist, approach; the state security explanation; and ideology. However, their explanatory power fades in addressing the proposed Eurasian case. This project intends to address this gap in the literature. I propose that the initial level of nationness, or national cohesion, at the end of Soviet Union is responsible for the lenient policies toward religion in Tatarstan. In doing so, I draw on democratization literature, which argues that for a successful transition and consolidation of democracy one of the necessary factors is the popular agreement on national identity and borders. In the Eurasian case of Tatarstan, this is a key factor that forces the former Communist Party bosses who currently run their republic as presidents, prime ministers, and the heads of parliament to employ relaxed policies toward religion. I hypothesize that in Tatarstan, where by the end of the communist rule Tatars came to be a minority in their home republics, religion was perceived as a potent tool for national revival and nation-building. I test the proposed theory using data from the printed sources and interviews.

This paper is a study of the military history of Qajar Iran’s confrontation with Russia in two 19th century wars. The study examines Iran’s response to Russian attempts at annexation of the Caucasus in three distinct phases. First, Qajar Iran’s reliance on its tradition army, namely relying on highly mobile tribal cavalry, light artillery, and poorly fortified fixed positions such as forts and towns. Second, the beginning of developing a European style army (nezam-e jaded), first with the help of Russian and Polish POWs and fugitives, later with the aid of the French. This phase included fortifications of towns (especially Irvan) based on European engineering, and building of modern, European style forts (e.g Abbas Abad), as well as the training of an infantry and artillery force for the army. Third, was the expansion of the Nezam forces under British trainers and its development into a military force capable of facing the regular Russian army in an effective manner. The paper will explain Qajar Iran’s military strategy and examines a number of battles to illustrate how military tactics evolved. The main conclusion of the paper is that while the Qajar state managed to improve its military performance against Russian aggression, it ultimately failed to understand the strength and strategic superiority of the Russian Empire and resources available to it. The study is based on original Persian, English and French sources. Sources include both histories and memoirs and observations by Iranian and non-Iranian observers.

According to al-Muqaddas? (writing in the late fourth/tenth century), the city of Baykand was surrounded by one thousand rib??s. The nature of the rib?? as a type of fortification has long been an interest of scholars of the medieval period. A consensus is forming that rib?? should properly refer to an activity (raba?a) associated with the defense of frontiers that takes place at certain locations which are then referred to as rib??s, rather than a particular architectural form. While this definition gives us some direction toward understanding the nature of these frontier fortifications, it leaves questions about the foundation, ownership, and maintenance of rib??s in the medieval period. Who built rib??s (or rededicated existing fortifications as rib??s), how and why did a fortification become associated with the activity of raba?a, and how were these fortifications provisioned and manned? In this paper, one case study will be examined to explore these questions. The image of Baykand (or Paykand, but also referred to as “the City of the Merchants”) presented by al-Muqaddas? is one of a city whose rural hinterland was dotted with fortifications forming a defensive network around the city. This is an image that many medieval geographers likewise attribute to a number of other Transoxanian cities during the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. Such statements in medieval sources are often disregarded as exaggerations, but we should presume the existence, in such cases, of a tradition of fortification construction in a region so described. Why were such networks of fortifications needed and who was responsible for their construction and maintenance? In this paper, the history of fortifications in and around Baykand during the Islamic era will be examined to date the appearance of these rib??s. This history will then be compared to the history of settlement in and around Baykand over this same period, with special emphasis on the resettlement of local merchants during the period of the conquests, to identify the origins of these rib??s. Comparisons will be made to nearby cities, such as Bukh?r?, in order to explore the broader tradition of rib?? construction in the region.

This paper investigates the impact of narratives from English witnesses of Ivan IV’s – the Russian Tsar also known as “the Terrible”—violent expansionism into the Muslim khanates of Central Asia during the 1550s and 1560s. In particular, the subjugation of the Muslim khanates situated in the border zone between the predominately Christian regions west of the Volga and the predominately Muslim regions eastwards marks the beginnings of Ivan’s expansion into Central Asia. Populated by various Tatar tribes, they became a target for Ivan due to accelerating Ottoman expansion into the Balkans and around the Black Sea after their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, which until that time had been the center of the Orthodox Christian world. When Ivan took up that mantle, he also aggressively occupied the khanates of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556), which he had managed prior through puppet rulers and a policy of assimilating (converted) Tatars. The first Englishman to land in Russian territories, Richard Chancellor, arrived in the midst of these bloody campaigns (1553). Subsequent travelers, most notably Anthony Jenkinson, who became an “ambassador” of sorts between Queen Elizabeth and the Russian, Central Asian, and Persian rulers he met on his several voyages, also deplored this expansionist violence. Jenkinson witnessed the aftermath of this violence on his eastward journey of 1558, where he observed “[h]eaps of dead Nagayans [Nogai Tatars] lay unburied over the island on which Astrakhan is built, and many of the survivors were offered as slaves” for the price of “a loaf of bread.” Jenkinson and the other early English travellers' accounts are important as often the only extant records of these events. Furthermore, these accounts from the 1550s and 1560s were subsequently published in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (1599–1600), which sought to provide precedents to spur the “sluggish” English onto imperialist efforts similar to the Iberians and, as he suggests by commencing his collection with “the worthy Discoveries, &c. of the English toward the North and Northeast by Sea,” the Russians. This paper thus proposes to show, using the model of “frontier orientalism” for European regions that had experienced Islamic imperialism in the past even as they sought to participate in the modern Western European imperialist project, how the accounts of the English merchants who witnessed the impact of Ivan’s massacres introduces dissonance into Hakluyt’s proto-imperialist “epic of the English nation.”