Chapter VIII (2)

These Bulgarians attempted the conversion of Vladimir, the then sovereign of Russia, who (the Russian chronicler tells us) had found it necessary to choose some religion better than his pagan creed, but they failed to overcome his objections to the rite of circumcision and to the prohibition of wine, the use of which, he declared, the Russians could never give up, as it was the very joy of their life. Equally unsuccessful were the Jews who came from the country of the Khazars on the Caspian Sea and had won over the king of that people to the Mosaic faith. [790] After listening to their arguments, Vladimir asked them where their country was. “Jerusalem,” they replied, “but God in His anger has scattered us over the whole world.” “Then you are cursed of God,” cried the king, “and yet want to teach others: begone! we have no wish, like you, to be without a country.” The most favourable impression was made by a Greek priest who, after a brief criticism of the other religions, set forth the whole scheme of Christian teaching beginning with the creation of the world and the story of the fall of man and ending with the seven œcumenical councils accepted by the Greek Church; then he showed the prince a picture of the Last Judgment with the righteous entering paradise and the wicked being thrust down into hell, and promised him the heritage of heaven, if he would be baptised. But Vladimir was unwilling to make a rash choice of a substitute for his pagan religion, so he called his boyards together and having told them of the accounts he had received of the various religions, asked them for their advice. “Prince,” they replied, “every man praises his own religion, and if you would make choice of the best, send wise men into the different countries to discover which of all the nations honours God in the manner most worthy of Him.” So the prince chose out for this purpose ten men who were eminent for their wisdom. These ambassadors found among the Bulgarians mean-looking places of worship, gloomy prayers and solemn faces; among the German Catholics religious ceremonies that lacked both grandeur and magnificence. At length they reached Constantinople: “Let them see the glory of our God,” said the Emperor. So they were taken to the church of Santa Sophia, where the Patriarch, clad in his pontifical robes, was celebrating mass. The magnificence of the building, the rich vestments of the priests, the ornaments of the altars, the sweet odour of the incense, the reverent silence of the people, and the mysterious solemnity of the ceremonial filled the savage Russians with wonder and amazement. It seemed to them that this church must be the dwelling of the Most High, and that He manifested His glory therein to mortals. On their return to Kief, the ambassadors gave the prince an account of their mission; they spoke with contempt of the religion of the Prophet and had little to say for the Roman Catholic faith, but were enthusiastic in their eulogies of the Greek Church. “Every man,” they said, “who has put his lips to a sweet draught, henceforth abhors anything bitter; wherefore we having come to the knowledge of the faith of the Greek Church desire none other.” Vladimir once more consulted his boyards, who said unto him, “Had not the Greek faith been best of all, Olga, your grandmother, the wisest of mortals, would never have embraced it.” Whereupon Vladimir hesitated no longer and in A.D. 988 declared himself a Christian. On the day after his baptism he threw down the idols his forefathers had worshipped, and issued an edict that all the Russians, masters and slaves, rich and poor, should submit to be baptised into the Christian faith. [791]

Thus Christianity became the national religion of the Russian people, and after the Mongol conquest, the distinctive national characteristics of Russians and Tatars that have kept the two races apart to the present day, the bitter hatred of the Tatar yoke, the devotion of the Russians to their own faith and the want of religious zeal on the part of the Tatars, kept the conquered race from adopting the religion of the conqueror. Especially has the prohibition of spirituous liquors by the laws of Islam been supposed to have stood in the way of the adoption of this religion by the Russian people.

It would appear that not until after the promulgation of the edict of religious toleration in 1905 throughout the Russian empire and the active Muslim propaganda that followed it, were cases observed of Russians being converted to Islam, and those that have occurred are ascribed to the strong attraction of the material help offered by the Tatars to such converts and the influence of the moral strength of the Muslims themselves. [792]

Not that the Tatars in Russia had been altogether inoperative in promoting the spread of Islam during the preceding centuries. The distinctly Hellenic type of face that is to be found among the so-called Tatars of the Crimea has led to the conjecture that these Muhammadans have absorbed into their community the Greek and Italian populations that they found settled on the Crimean peninsula, and that we find among them the Muhammadanised descendants of the indigenous inhabitants, and of the Genoese colonists. [793] A traveller of the seventeenth century tells us that the Tatars of the Crimea tried to induce their slaves to become Muhammadans, and won over many of them to this faith by promising them their liberty if they would be persuaded. [794] Conversions to Islam from among the Tatars of the Crimea are also reported after the proclamation of religious liberty in 1905. [795]

A brief reference may here be made to the Tatars in Lithuania, where small groups of them have been settled since the early part of the fifteenth century; these Muslim immigrants, dwelling in the midst of a Christian population, have preserved their old faith, but (probably for political reasons) do not appear to have attempted to proselytise. But they have been in the habit of marrying Lithuanian and Polish women, whose children were always brought up as Muslims, whereas no Muhammadan girl was permitted to marry a Christian. The grand dukes of Lithuania in the fifteenth century encouraged the marriage of Christian women with their Tatar troops, on whom they bestowed grants of land and other privileges. [796]

One of the most curious incidents in the missionary history of Islam is the conversion of the Kirghiz of Central Asia by Tatar mullās, who preached Islam among them in the eighteenth century, as emissaries of the Russian government. The Kirghiz began to come under Russian rule about 1731, and for 120 years all diplomatic correspondence was carried on with them in the Tatar language under the delusion that they were ethnographically the same as the Tatars of the Volga. Another misunderstanding on the part of the Russian government was that the Kirghiz were Musalmans, whereas in the eighteenth century they were nearly all Shamanists, as a large number of them were still up to the middle of the nineteenth century. At the time of the annexation of their country to the Russian empire only a few of their Khāns and Sulṭāns had any knowledge of the faith of Islam—and that very confused and vague. Not a single mosque was to be found throughout the whole of the Kirghiz Steppes, or a single religious teacher of the faith of the Prophet, and the Kirghiz owed their conversion to Islam to the fact that the Russians, taking them for Muhammadans, insisted on treating them as such. Large sums of money were given for the building of mosques, and mullās were sent to open schools and instruct the young in the tenets of the Muslim faith: the Kirghiz scholars were to receive every day a small sum to support themselves on, and the fathers were to be induced to send their children to the schools by presents and other means of persuasion. An incontrovertible proof that the Musalman propaganda made its way into the Kirghiz Steppes from the side of Russia, is the circumstance that it was especially those Kirghiz who were more contiguous to Europe that first became Musalmans, and the old Shamanism lingered up to the nineteenth century among those who wandered in the neighbourhood of Khiva, Bukhārā and Khokand, though these for centuries had been Muhammadan countries. [797]

This is probably the only instance of a Christian government co-operating in the promulgation of Islam, and is the more remarkable inasmuch as the Russian government of this period was attempting to force Christianity on its Muslim subjects in Europe, in continuation of the efforts made in the sixteenth century soon after the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century many of the Kirghiz dwelling in the vast plains stretching southwards from the district of Tobolsk towards Turkistan were still heathen, and the Russian government was approached for permission for a Christian mission to be established among them. But this request was not granted, on the ground that “these people were as yet too wild and savage to be accessible to the Gospel. But soon after other missionaries, not depending on the good-will of any government, and having more zeal and understanding, occupied this field and won the whole of the Kirghis tribe to the faith of Islam.” [798]

After the conquest of Kazan by the Russians in the sixteenth century, the occupation of the former Tatar Khanate was followed up by an official Christian missionary movement, and a number of the heathen population of the Khanate were baptised, the labours of the clergy being actively seconded by the police and the civil authorities, but as the Russian priests did not understand the language of their converts and soon neglected them, it had to be admitted that the new converts “shamelessly retain many horrid Tartar customs, and neither hold nor know the Christian faith.” When spiritual exhortations failed, the government ordered its officials to “pacify, imprison, put in irons, and thereby unteach and frighten from the Tartar faith those who, though baptised, do not obey the admonitions of the Metropolitan.”

In the eighteenth century the Russian government made fresh efforts to convert the heathen tribes and the relapsed Tatars, and held out many inducements to them to become baptised. Catherine II in 1778 ordered that all the new converts should sign a written promise to the effect that “they would completely forsake their infidel errors, and, avoiding all intercourse with unbelievers, would hold firmly and unwaveringly the Christian faith and its dogmas.” But in spite of all, these so-called “baptised Tartars” were Christians only in name, and soon began to try to escape from the propagandist efforts of the Orthodox Church and abandoned Christianity for Islam, their so-called conversion merely serving as a stepping-stone to their entrance into the faith of the Prophet.

They may, indeed, have been inscribed in the official registers as Christians, but they resolutely stood out against any efforts that were made to Christianise them. In a semi-official article, published in 1872, the writer says: “It is a fact worthy of attention that a long series of evident apostasies coincides with the beginning of measures to confirm the converts in the Christian faith. There must be, therefore, some collateral cause producing those cases of apostasy precisely at the moment when the contrary might be expected.” The fact seems to be that these Tatars having all the time remained Muhammadan at heart, resisted the active measures taken to make their nominal profession of Christianity in any way a reality. [799] But in the latter part of the nineteenth century efforts were made to Christianise these heathen and Muslim tribes by means of schools established in their midst. In this way it was hoped to win the younger generation, since otherwise it seemed impossible to gain an entrance for Christianity among the Tatars, for, as a Russian professor said, “The citizens of Kazan are hard to win, but we get some little folk from the villages on the steppe, and train them in the fear of God. Once they are with us they can never turn back.” [800] For the Russian criminal code used to contain severe enactments against those who fell away from the Orthodox Church, [801] and sentenced any person convicted of converting a Christian to Islam to the loss of all civil rights and to imprisonment with hard labour for a term varying from eight to ten years. In spite, however, of the edicts of the government, Muslim propagandism succeeded in winning over whole villages to the faith of Islam, especially among the tribes of north-eastern Russia. [802]

The town of Kazan is the chief centre of this missionary activity; a large number of Muslim publications are printed here every year, and mullās go forth from the University to convert the pagans in the villages and bring back to Islam the Tatars who have allowed themselves to be baptised. The increasing number of these Christian Tatars, who have gone to swell the ranks of Islam, has alarmed the clergy of the Orthodox Church, but their efforts have failed to check the success of the mullās. [803] Especially since the edict of toleration in 1905, mass conversions have been reported, e.g. in 1909, ninety-one families in the village of Atomva are said to have become Muhammadan, [804] and as many as 53,000 persons between 1906 and 1910. [805] This propaganda is said to owe much of its success to the higher moral level of life in Muslim society, as well as to the stronger feeling of solidarity that prevails in it; [806] moreover, the methods adopted by the Russian clergy, supported by the government, to make the so-called Christian Tatars more orthodox, have caused the Christian faith to become unpopular among them. [807] On the other hand, the propaganda of Islam is very zealously carried forward; “every simple, untaught Moslem is a missionary of his religion, and the poor, dark, untaught heathen or half-heathen tribes cannot resist their force. In many villages of baptised aborigines the men go away for the winter to work as tailors in Moslem villages. There they are converted to Islam, and they return to their villages as fanatics bringing with them Moslem ideas with which to influence their homes.” [808]

The tribes that have chiefly come under the influence of this missionary movement are the Votiaks, the greater part of whom are baptised Christians, but many became Muslims in the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries; and the influence of Islam is continually growing both among those that are Christian and among the small remnant that is still heathen. The Cheremiss, like the Votiaks, are a Finnish tribe, about a quarter of whom are still heathen, but many have already embraced Islam and it is probable that most of them will soon adopt the same religion. The movement of the Cheremiss towards Islam made itself manifest in the nineteenth century and though many of them were nominally Christian, whole villages of them became Muhammadan despite the laws forbidding conversion except to the Orthodox Church. [809] They became Muhammadan through their immediate contact with the Bashkirs and Tatars, whose family and social customs were very similar to their own. The process sometimes began with intermarriages with Muhammadans—e.g. in one village a Cheremiss family intermarried with some Bashkirs and adopted their faith; the converts being persecuted as “circumcised dogs” in their own village, moved away and founded a new settlement some miles off, some wealthy Bashkirs helping them with money; but as they were officially registered as heathen, they could not get permission for the building of a mosque, so a few Bashkir families in the neighbourhood moved into the new settlement, in order to make up the number requisite for obtaining the necessary official permission. [810] A similar process has several times occurred in other villages in which Muhammadans have come to settle and have intermarried with Cheremiss. [811] In other cases there has been a definite missionary movement—e.g. in the beginning of the nineteenth century the village of Karakul was inhabited by Christian Cheremiss, but shortly after the middle of the century some families were converted to Islam by a Cheremiss who had become a mullā; on his death he was succeeded by a Bashkir from another village. Later on, the converts moved away to Tatar and Bashkir villages, their place being taken by Tatars, until the whole village became practically Tatar, few of the younger generation retaining any knowledge of the Cheremiss language, and intermarriages taking place only with Tatars. [812] Apart from this proselytising activity, there has been a very distinct spread of Tatar influence in speech and manners among the Cheremiss. The Tatar language has spread among them, bringing with it the moral and religious ideas of Islam; the adoption of the Tatar dress is held to be a sign of superior culture, and if a Cheremiss does not dress like a Tatar he runs the risk of being laughed at by the first Tatar he meets or by his fellow Cheremiss; all this cultural movement tends to the ultimate adoption of the Tatar religion. [813] After their conversion, the Cheremiss are said to be very zealous in the propagation of their new faith and receive the assistance of wealthy Tatars; [814] on the other hand, the Russians despise the Cheremiss as an inferior race and apply opprobrious epithets even to those among them who are Christians. [815] About one-fourth of the Cheremiss are still heathen, but Muslim influences are so powerful among them that it is probable that in course of time they will for the most part become Muhammadans. [816] The Chuvash, who number about 1,000,000, have nearly all been baptised; there are about 20,000 of them that are still heathen but these are gradually being absorbed by Islam, while some of the Christian Chuvash have become Muhammadans and the rest are coming under Muslim influences. The extent of their zeal for their converts may be judged from the instance of a Christian Chuvash village, the priest of which had spent several years in collecting the 300 roubles necessary for the repair of the church; eight Chuvash families became Muhammadan and in the course of a few months 2000 roubles were collected for the building of a mosque. [817] Such ready activity is characteristic of the Muslim propaganda now being carried among the aboriginal tribes. Each family that accepts Islam receives help either in money or in kind: a house is built for one; a field, cattle, etc., are purchased for another; when several families in a village are converted, a mosque is built for them and a school established for their children. [818]

Of the spread of Islam among the Tatars of Siberia, we have a few particulars. It was not until the latter half of the sixteenth century that it gained a footing in this country, but even before this period Muhammadan missionaries had from time to time made their way into Siberia with the hope of winning the heathen population over to the acceptance of their faith, but the majority of them met with a martyr’s death. When Siberia came under Muhammadan rule, in the reign of Kūchum Khān, the graves of seven of these missionaries were discovered by an aged Shaykh who came from Bukhārā to search them out, being anxious that some memorial should be kept of the devotion of these martyrs to the faith: he was able to give the names of this number, and up to the last century their memory was still revered by the Tatars of Siberia. [819] When Kūchum Khān (who was descended from Jūjī Khān, the eldest son of Chingīz Khān) became Khān of Siberia (about the year 1570), either by right of conquest or (according to another account) at the invitation of the people whose Khān had died without issue, [820] he made every effort for the conversion of his subjects, and sent to Bukhārā asking for missionaries to assist him in this pious undertaking. One of the missionaries who was sent from Bukhārā has left us an account of how he set out with a companion to the capital of Kūchum Khān, on the bank of the Irtish. Here, after two years, his companion died, and, for some reasons that the writer does not mention, he went back again; but soon afterwards returned to the scene of his labours, bringing with him another coadjutor, when Kūchum Khān had appealed for help once more to Bukhārā. [821] Missionaries also came to Siberia from Kazan. But the advancing tide of Russian conquest soon brought the proselytising efforts of Kūchum Khān to an end before much had been accomplished, especially as many of the tribes under his rule offered a strong opposition to all attempts made to convert them.

But though interrupted by the Russian conquest, the progress of Islam was by no means stopped. Mullās from Bukhārā and other cities of Central Asia and merchants from Kazan were continually active as missionaries of Islam in Siberia. In 1745 an entrance was first effected among the Baraba Tatars (between the Irtish and the Ob), and though at the beginning of the nineteenth century many were still heathen, they have now all become Musalmans. [822] The conversion of the Kirghiz has already been spoken of above: the history of most of the other Muslim tribes of Siberia is very obscure, but their conversion is probably of a recent date. Among the instruments of Muhammadan propaganda at the present time, it is interesting to note the large place taken by the folk-songs of the Kirghiz, in which, interwoven with tale and legend, the main truths of Islam make their way into the hearts of the common people. [823]