Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev and the idea of Muslim Marxism: empire, Third World(s) and praxis

Abstract

This paper revisits the idea of Muslim Marxism, as espoused through the life and work of the Tatar Muslim and Bolshevik intellectual and revolutionary Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev (1892–1940). I argue that Sultan-Galiev’s oeuvre – a unique synthesis of Marxist, Muslim modernist, anti-colonial and Third World praxis – represents a path-breaking take on Muslim selfhood and practices of belonging.

Keywords:

• Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev
• Muslim Marxism
• jadīdism
• satr
• praxis
• Colonial International
• empire
• Tatarstan
• Bolshevism
• Islamic modernism

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at ‘Reformers and Intellectual Reformulation in Contemporary Islam’, SOAS and Queen Mary, University of London, 29–30 January 2015; the TWAIL conference ‘On Praxis and the Intellectual’, American University in Cairo, 21–24 February 2015; and ‘Islamic Law and Empire’, 1–2 June 2015, held as a part of IGLP: The Conference at Harvard Law School. My thanks are due to the organisers and participants of the exhilarating TWAIL Writing Workshop for this special issue of Third World Quarterly for their very helpful comments and suggestions. Of course, all errors are mine and mine alone.

Notes

1. Marx, “Zur Kritik der Hegel’schen Rechts-Philosophie,” 72.

2. Cf. Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultan Galiev, 278.

3. See generally Rodinson, Marxism and the Muslim World.

4. As is undoubtedly known to the readership of this journal, the geopolitical designation ‘Third World’ is as problematic as it is helpful to describe global power relations. There were many Worlds in the Cold War context that were Third in their relation to the First World powers, some even located within the First and Second Worlds. I use the singular and the plural versions of this designation concomitantly, to underline this plurality. Sultan-Galiev did not use the designation in question, instead opting for ‘the East’, which, as we shall see, meant for him something rather similar to the later concept of Third World, including with regard to its inherent geopolitical plurality. Today’s overall preference for the concept of ‘Global South’ is fraught, and perhaps blessed, with similar ambiguities.

5. See generally Sagadeev, “Mirsait Sultan-Galiev.”

6. The most comprehensive collection of Sultan-Galiev’s oeuvre is available in Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy. This publication also contains a comprehensive bibliography of academic works on Sultan-Galiev at pp 703–710. A still relevant critical analysis of sources on Sultan-Galiev (despite being published in 1986) can be found in Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultan Galiev, 289–300.

7. See especially Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Les mouvements nationaux; Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse et le mouvement national; Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Le soufi et le commissaire; Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultan Galiev; Bennings and Wimbush, Muslims of the Soviet Empire; Benningsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism; Benningsen et al., Soviet Strategy and Islam; Carrère d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire; and Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge. For an interesting work of fiction, see Tengour, Sultan Galièv ou la rupture de stocks.

8. See, for example, Froese, “‘I am an Atheist and a Muslim’.”

9. For two seminal studies on Ismail Gasprinskiĭ in English, see Lazzerini, “Ismail Bey Gasprinskii”; and Lazzerini, “Ismail Bey Gasprinskii’s Perevodchik/Tercüman.”

10. al-Harawī, Fatḥ bāb al-‘ināyah bi-sharḥ al-Niqāyah, 195.

11. In the Crimea in the 1880s Gasprinskiĭ championed a new (phonetic) method (uṣūl al-jadīd) of teaching the Arabic alphabet, from which the name of the larger Muslim reformist movement (jadīdism) was derived. Jadīd activities primarily concerned Muslim communities in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet state, but were also present in some other centres of Islamic learning, such as Istanbul and Cairo.

12. See generally Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca, 20–25. For a detailed analysis of the jadīd educational reforms, albeit with a focus on Central Asia, see Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 155–183.

13. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 27. In Islamic law, the ḥudūd (lit. ‘limits’) offences are considered to be the most serious transgressions, for which the penalties are interpreted as prescribed in the Qur’ān itself. Zina is one such offence, relating to adultery or fornication.

14. A community distinct from the (other) Volga Tatars who have seemingly (better) preserved ‘their Finnic ethnic type and speak a special (western) dialect of the Kazan Tatar’ language. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslims of the Soviet Empire, 233.

15. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 476.

16. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 108.

17. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 217–218. See also note 4.

18. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 58.

19. That is, long before the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s would tackle the very same problematic. It is for this reason that Maxime Rodinson famously branded Sultan-Galiev ‘a forgotten precursor’, while Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay published a book entitled Sultan Galiev, le père de la révolution tiers-mondiste. See Rodinson, Marxism and the Muslim World, 133–141; and Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sultan Galiev.

20. Attributed to Sultan-Galiev by his adversary Tobolev in a propaganda publication called Kontrrivolutsiyon Soltangäliefcheleke karshy [Against the Counterrevolutionary Sultan-Galievism], published in Kazan in 1930 and cited in Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 58. Despite the nature of this publication, there is little doubt that this was, indeed, Sultan-Galiev’s view on Eurocentrism. See, for example, Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 215–222.

21. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 529.

22. See generally Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 525–538.

23. Ibid.

24. Mir-Said Sultan-Galiev ‘took part in the First All-Russian Muslim Congress of May 1917 in Kazan and in July 1917 became one of the leading members of the Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan. In November 1917 he entered the [Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)] and, because of his exceptional gifts for organization, rapidly became the highest-ranking Muslim in the CP hierarchy – member of the Central Muslim Commissariat, chairman of the Muslim Military Collegium, member of the Little Collegium of the Narkomnats [People’s Commissariat of Nationalities], editor of Zhizn’ natsional’nostei, the official organ of the Narkomnats, and member of the Central Executive Committee of the Tatar Republic’. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 207–208. For an alternative short account of Sultan-Galiev’s many functions within the Soviet state, see Davletshin, Sovetskiĭ Tatarstan, n. 19, 133–134.

25. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 8–9; See also Akademiiu nauk Tatarstana, Islam v istorii i kul’ture tatarskogo naroda; Mukhametshin, Islam v tatarskoĭ obshchestvennoĭ mysli nachala XX veka; Vahidov, Prosvetitel’skaia ideologiia v Turkestane.

26. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 93.

27. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 193. Even the language in which such writings appeared was often called ‘Muslim language’ (musulmān tili, müsülman tili, musul’manskiĭ iazyk).

28. Muslim modernity (or Islamic modernism) is often described as an idée reçue, based on both traumatic and ‘productive’ Muslim experiences with European Enlightenment, modernity and colonialism. The phenomenon is, however, much larger in scope, and can arguably be traced back to various historical Muslim polities long before the late 19th century, ie before the time of the well-established Muslim modernist reformers, such as Muḥammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (1838–1897). As such, Muslim modernity can be compared to other historical examples of ‘early modern’ phenomena around the world. See, for example, Goldstone, “The Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World,” 249–284. With his ideas about progress and reform, Ismail Gasprinskiĭ can certainly be counted among the Muslim modernists of his time.

29. See especially Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 184–187; and Critchlow, “Vatan and the Concept of ‘Homeland’ in the Muslim Soviet Republics,” 481–488.

30. The Ottoman usage of the word millet before the Tanzimât (1839–76) primarily related to the (legal) concept of a separate confessional community, self-governed via its own system of personal laws. The Tanzimât brought a new usage of the term, more akin to the concept of ‘nation’, although a number of communities it pertained to were still primarily confessional. In modern Turkish, millet translates as ‘nation’.

31. Thus, for example, in Ottoman Turkish a separate word for ‘nation’ – milliyet – was used to distinguish it from the more open-ended concept of millet. See Meyer, Turks across Empires, 120–121.

32. Centuries-long Ottoman sultans’ claim to caliphal authority ended in 1924, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the office of the caliph, to great dismay across the Sunnī Muslim world. The caliph (in Arabic: khalīfa) is traditionally considered to be the Prophet Muḥammad’s deputy, or successor, on Earth, and thereby a rightful ruler over the Muslim umma.

33. Gasprinskiĭ claimed that, after the third century AH, ‘the Muslim world was reduced to (a condition of) rigor mortis’, a condition he thought he could change with his ‘reason-centred’ educational and social policies. Lazzerini, “Ismail Bey Gasprinskii,” 157. However, Gasprinskiĭ did not think that such change could be brought about by means of socialism, which he rejected as an illusion. Ibid., 163.

34. That is, both the February Revolution in March 1917 and the October Revolution in November the same year.

35. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, 288.

36. Khalid, Islam after Communism, 56.

37. Bennigsen and Quelquejay, Les mouvements nationaux, 70–71.

38. Sultan-Galiev, cited in Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 46. In March 1918 Sultan-Galiev founded the Muslim Communist–Socialist Party, which maintained its independence from the Russian Communist Party for some time. See Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge, 141.

39. For an example from Turkestan, see Khalid, Islam after Communism, 61.

40. Of which the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in September 1920, organised by the Communist International, was perhaps the most symbolic, if eventually unsuccessful, project. The capital of Azerbaijan was, in that period, hailed as a ‘Mecca of the anti-imperial struggle’ for the sheer number of Muslim revolutionaries present there. See Dumont, “Bakou, carrefour révolutionnaire, 1919–1920,” 414.

41. One such policy was razmezhevanie (delimitation), which led, inter alia, to the dissolution, in 1924, of the Turkestan Soviet Socialist Republic into several smaller Soviet republics and oblasts. The dissolution of Turkestan was seen by many Soviet Muslims as an attempt by the early Stalinist state to exert greater control over their affairs.

42. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 409.

43. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 397.

44. Unfortunately for Sultan-Galiev, his ‘going underground’ did not go unnoticed. Several months before denouncing Sultan-Galiev in a speech to the delegates of the Fourth Conference of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, on 10 June 1923, Stalin himself apparently warned Sultan-Galiev that he was ‘playing a dangerous game’. See Baker, “Did he really do It?,” 599. For the full transcript of Stalin’s speech, in which he accused Sultan-Galiev of both pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism, see Stalin, “Rights and ‘Lefts’,” 308–319.

45. Bennigsen and Wimbush, Muslim National Communism, 51.

46. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 363–374.

47. Ibid.

48. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 364.

49. Ibid.

50. Alternatively the possibility of a faithless Muslim may have signalled the forging of a radical take on Muslim subjectivity, which, while persistently denounced in the mainstream Muslim traditions, would not be dissimilar to explorations of agnosticism and atheism in other Abrahamic traditions, most notably in liberal Jewish theology. See, for example, Kaplan, The Meaning of God.

51. In the larger Islamic tradition the jadīds’ and Ottoman art of satr (concealment) could be compared to the Sunnī legal and philosophical device of iḍṭirār (compulsion) and the Shī‘ī concept of taqīyya (dissimulation) – both of which render concealment of one’s true religious beliefs and hieropraxis permissible in times of extreme danger and duress.

52. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 511–512.

53. Velidi Togan, Bugünkü Türkili (Türkistan) ve Yakın Tarihi, 556.

54. Ibid.

55. Kuttner, “Russian Jadīdism and the Islamic World,” 384.

56. The employment of satr is certainly not the only example of the jadīds’ giving an old (in this case Ottoman) social tool a new use. Writing about the early 20th-century Central Asian jadīd discourse, Adeeb Khalid describes how the jadīds ‘had appropriated the literary device of ibrat – taking admonition from noteworthy example – which had deep roots in Islamic tradition but was now given a new form’. Khalid, “Representations of Russia,” 197.

57. Rossiiskaya kommunisticheskaya partiya (bol’shevik), cited in Baker, “Did he really do It?,” 599.

58. Sultanbekov and Sharafutdinov, cited in Baker, “Did he really do It?,” 601.

59. Ibid.

60. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 471.

61. Tagirov and Sultanbekov, “Velikiĭ providets,” 7.

62. Ibid. For an overview of Arab communist ideas and movements in the 20th century and their relations with Sultan-Galiev’s oeuvre, see Ismael, The Communist Movement in the Arab World.

63. Sultan-Galiev, Izbrannye trudy, 525–538.

64. See, for example, de Sousa Santos, Another Production is Possible; Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South; and Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.