Waqf in Turkestan: the colonial legacy and the fate of an Islamic institution in early Soviet Central Asia, 1917–1924

Abstract

The paper investigates early Soviet policies regarding the institution of waqf (charitable endowment) in Turkestan, questioning the issue of the post-colonial character of the early Soviet administration. After taking into consideration practices related to waqf management in modern Muslim states and European colonial empires, the paper briefly describes the tsarist administrative approach to the issue. We then address the ambiguity inherent in Soviet policies on waqf requisition and restitution during Civil War years. In the section that follows we deal with different groups of Muslim intellectuals that attempted to use the Soviet state in their mutual struggle over authority in Central Asian society and describe the creation and functioning of the bureaucracies responsible for managing waqf. Finally, we outline some provisional conclusions on the legacy of tsarist colonialism for Soviet power in Central Asia and the role played by progressive Muslim intellectuals.

Notes

1. Parts 1, 2 and 6 of this paper were written by N. Pianciola; parts 3, 4, 5 by P. Sartori. An earlier version of this paper benefited from the comments and suggestions of Adeeb Khalid, Marco Buttino, Jürgen Paul, Andrea Graziosi, Guido Franzinetti and an anonymous reviewer for Central Asian Survey.

2. Vladimir L. Genis, ‘Deportatsiia russkikh iz Turkestana v 1921 godu (‘Delo Safarova’)', Voprosy istorii, No 1, 1998.

3. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp 125–181.

4. Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).

5. As a rule, there are two types of waqf: public (khayrī) and familial (ahlī). The first are endowments whose founder alienated his property for charitable purposes, therefore providing institutions like schools, mosques and hospitals with revenue. The second are endowments, whose founder bequeathed part of his property to his descendants. From the legal point of view, this difference is irrelevant, while for social and economic reasons, these two forms were of different nature. In Central Asia waqf developed a mixed nature, i.e. both ‘public’ and ‘familial’.

6. For these estimates see David S. Powers, ‘Orientalism, colonialism and legal history: the attack on Muslim family endowments in Algeria and India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol 31, No 3, 1989, p 537.

7. The issue awaits further research. Estimates based on Soviet historiography can be found in old works such as Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia (London: Tauris, 1988, or French ed. 1966) and Alexander G. Park, Bolshevism in Turkestan, 1917–1927 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957). Park relates that endowment properties comprised between 8 and 10 per cent of the cultivated acreage in Central Asia at the end of tsarist rule, and approximately 20 per cent of cultivated acreage in the Bukharan Emirate (ibid, p 217).

8. T. Zarcone, La Turquie modern et l'islam (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), p 140.

9. For instance, family waqfs were abolished in Egypt in 1952. Cf. ‘Wakf’, Encyclopédie de l'Islam, 2nd edn, Vol. XI (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp 65–109. The section on waqf in Central Asia was written by R. D. McChesney. See also his case study of Balkh in Afghanistan: R. D. McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia. Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480–1889 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

10. S. Knost, ‘The waqf in court: lawsuits over religious endowments in Ottoman Aleppo’, in M. Khalid Masud, R. Peters and D. S. Powers, eds, Dispensing Justice in Islam: Qadis and Their Judgements (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp 427–450.

11. On this issue, see B. Johansen, ‘Legal literature and the problem of change: the case of the land rent’, in B. Johansen, Contingency in a Sacred Law. Legal and Ethical Norms in the Muslim Fiqh (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp 446–464.

12. A. Christelow, Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p 23.

13. Powers, op cit, Ref 7, pp 535–571.

14. In India, European domination was the product, initially, of commercial enterprise rather than direct military conquest. India was not subjected to British agricultural settlement; a far greater number of Indians—Hindu and Muslim alike—were present in the colonial bureaucracy in South Asia than in North Africa.

15. Powers, op cit, Ref 6, p 563.

16. The best work on waqf in British India is G. C. Kozlowski's, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

17. Powers, op cit, Ref 6, p 563.

18. Even though a limited number of Russian and Ukranian peasants settled in the Ferghana and Syr-Darya oblasts, only the Semirech'e oblast', inhabited by Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomadic pastoralists, was legally open to agricultural colonization during tsarist times.

19. Nishiyama Katsunori, ‘Russian colonization in Central Asia: a case of Semireč’e, 1867–1922', in Komatsu Hisao, Obiya Chika, John S. Schoeberlein (eds), Migration in Central Asia: Its History and Current Problems (Osaka: The Japan Center for Area Studies, 2000), p 69.

20. In this latter administrative unit especially in the so-called ‘Hungry Steppe’, a region to the southwest of Tashkent, important agricultural and irrigation projects began to be implemented in the last years of tsarism.

21. Syr-Darya was the second oblast' in Turkestan in terms of Slavic agricultural colonization. In 1911 in Syr-Darya, 8 per cent of the total usable land had been occupied by Slavic settlers (mainly concentrated in the Kazakh pastoral areas), while in Semirech'e the figure was 14 per cent. Cf. State Archive of the Southern Kazakhstan Oblast' (GAIuKO), f. 243, op. 1, d. 435, ll. 2, 1ob, report on the economic conditions of Southern Kazakhstan (1924).

22. Despite its purported provisional nature, the statute remained the colony's fundamental law until 1886.

23. ‘Proekt polozheniia ob upravlenii Semirechenskoi i Syr-Dar'inskoi oblastei’ (11 July 1867), Art. 295, in M. G. Masevich (ed.), Materialy po istorii politicheskogo stroia Kazakhstana, Vol 1 (Alma-Ata: Izd. ANKazSSR, 1960), p 306.

24. Central State Archive of the Republic of Uzbekistan (hereafter TsGARUz), f. R-36, op. 1, d. 455, ll. 2–3ob.

25. Ibid, ll. 23–25.

26. In many cases waqf established in Bukhara included lands in the Samarkand region and vice versa: Alexander Morrison, ‘Russian rule in Samarkand, 1868–1910. A comparison with British India’, PhD dissertation, Oxford University, 2005, p 66.

27. Aleksandr Liudvigovich Kun (1840–1888) studied at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the Sankt Petersburg University. A protégé of the famous Orientalist V. V. Grigor'ev, he moved from Orenburg to Turkestan in 1867, where he served in the Samarkand region. In 1873 he authored a booklet for administrative use on ‘Land rights and tax systems in Muslim Law’. He took part in the Khiva (1873) and Kokand (1875) expeditions. Apparently, in both cases he was in charge of taking over Khans' archives and other valuable documents and manuscripts kept by Central Asian rulers. From 1876 to 1882 he worked as the chief inspector of schools in Turkestan. In 1882 he left Central Asia for Vil'no (Vilnius), where he died. Cf. B. V. Lunin (ed), Istoriografiia obshchestvennykh nauk v Uzbekistane. Bio-bibliograficheskie ocherki (Tashkent: FAN, 1974), pp 203–208.

28. R. S. Kats, Iz istorii vakufnogo voprosa v dorevoliutsionnom Turkestane i Sovetskom Uzbekistane, 22 February 1945, Archive of the Uzbek State Historical Museum, Samarkand, M-916, pp 8, 10. We would like to thank Marco Buttino for allowing us to use this source. The figure given in the article cited is 59,991 tanap for waqf lands in the Samarkand region. Based on archival documentation (TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 14, d. 22, l. 43). Morrison however reported the figure of 51,991 tanap (Morrison, op cit, Ref 26, p 66).

29. ‘Polozhenie ob upravlenii Turkestanskogo kraia’ (2 June 1886), in Masevich (ed), op cit, Ref 23, pp 352–379. The articles that deal with waqf are no. 265, 266, 267, 285, 286, 289 and 299.

30. Vladimir Petrovich Nalivkin (1852–1918) was one of the most important tsarist scholars of Central Asia. He arrived in Turkestan with the army, taking part in the conquest of Khiva and Kokand, but he left shortly afterwards. He was one of the most extraordinary personalities of the Russian presence in Central Asia and he wrote, together with his wife, a study on the women in the sedentary population of Ferghana based on direct observation (V. P. Nalivkin and N. Nalivkina, Ocherk byta zhenzhchiny osedlogo tuzemnogo naseleniia Fergany, Kazan, 1886). In 1917 he headed the committee of the Provisional Government in Turkestan after the February Revolution. Cf. M. Buttino, La rivoluzione capovolta. L'Asia Centrale tra il crollo dell'Impero zarista e la formazione dell'Urss (Naples: l'ancora del Mediterraneo, 2003); and Z. Validi Togan, Vospominaniia. Borba musul'man Turkestana i drugikh vostochnikh tiurok za natsional'noe sushestvovanie i kul'turu, Moscow, 1997 (orig. Istanbul 1969). See also his Tuzemtsy ran'she i teper' (orig. Tashkent, 1913), republished in Musul'manskaia Srednaia Aziia. Traditsionalizm i XX vek (Moscow: RAN, 2004), and biographical notes in ibid, pp 13–17, 276–280.

31. V. Nalivkin, ‘Polozhenie vakufnago dela v Turkestanskom krae’, Ezhegodnik Ferganskoi oblasti, Vol. 3, 1904, p 37.

32. Ibid, p 41.

33. A. M. Iuldashev, Agrarnye otnosheniia v Turkestane (konets XIX–nachalo XX vv.) (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1969), p 75.

34. S.N. Abashin, ‘Islam v biurokraticheskoi praktike tsarskoi administratsii Turkestana (Vakufnoe delo dakhbitskogo medrese 1892–1900)’, Sbornik russkogo istoricheskogo obshchestva 155, no. 7 (Moscow: Russkaia panorama, 2003), p 183. Given how little research has been done on the subject, these can only be temporary conclusions.

35. Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, pp 246–247.

36. For an early Western account based on Soviet secondary literature, see Park, op cit, Ref 7. On requisition of waqf, see S. Tursunov, Natsional'naia politika Kommunisticheskoi Partii v Turkestane (1917–1924 gg.) (Tashkent, Uzbekistan, 1971) p 233; Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, p 248.

37. On the chaotic situation in Turkestan during the revolution and the Civil War, see Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, and A. Khalid, ‘Turkestan v 1917–1922 godakh: bor'ba za vlast’ na okraine Rossii', in Tragediia velikoi derzhavy: natsional'nyi vopros i raspad Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow: Sotsial'no-politicheskaia mysl' 2005), pp 189–226.

38. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 394, l. 86ob (20 December 1919).

39. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 389, l. 1–1ob (15 March 1919) (message from the Commissariat for Nationalities to the Provisional Revolutionary Soviet). The Commissariat's secretary complained that the passage of waqf management from one commissariat to another took too much time. The transfer was decided on 6 February 1919 (TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 394, l. 86). Andreev (1889–1939) was a Russian born in Kzyl-Orda uezd who worked as a teacher in Turkestan's Russian-native schools and then taught Uzbek in the Tashkent commercial school. After the revolution and Civil War, he was known principally as a writer on historical and revolutionary subjects. Cf. Lunin, op cit, Ref 27, pp. 84–87.

40. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 404, l. 44ob (10 December 1919).

41. Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, pp 292–301.

42. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 152, l. 63 (5 September 1920).

43. Ibid, l. 62 (7 September 1920).

44. For example, on 20 January of 1920 the mutawallī of a madrasa in the city of Kokand was elected by a consultative assembly of the mullahs and the elders of the local community, TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 628, l. 13. On famine as a crucial factor in local politics during the Civil War in Turkestan, see Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, pp. 237–268.

45. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 394, l. 71 (9 May 1919).

46. Ibid, ll. 70–78ob.

47. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 394, l. 86ob (20 December 1919). This statement was obviously drawn up by an European officer of Narkomnats. The colonial tone of the phrase is condescending, but similar phraseology was habitual for Bolsheviks in reference to Russian peasants as well.

48. Ibid, l. 75 (24 May 1919).

49. Ibid, ll. 66ob–69 (undated, but probably July–December 1919), Pravila o poriadke ustroistva upravleniia i zavedivaniia vakufnym imushestvam Turkestanskoi Respubliki, especially Art. 4 and 10. This step was almost word for word identical to Article 265 of the Turkestan Statute of 1886.

50. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 394, l. 76.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid, l. 90.

53. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 404, ll. 44–44ob.

54. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 389, l. 8.

55. Further confirmation of institutional chaos at this time is the fact that the head of the section of the Commissariat for Nationalities asked for instructions to be sent to the various provinces before the Commissariat for Nationalities board, and especially, the TurTsIK, had given their approval, because if they had waited for sanction from these two institutions, they would have risked the initiative reaching a deadlock yet again.

56. TsAGRUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 394, l. 86ob (20 December 1919), Doklad zavedivaiushago vakufnym otdelom komissaru vnutrennykh del Turkestanskoi Respubliki. The project is in ibid, ll. 83-83ob (nd, but 1919). The text refers to the Commissariat for Nationalities and not the Home Commissariat, so we can deduce that the project was stopped between July and the beginning of December 1919, when the waqf section was still under the Commissariat for Nationalities.

57. Ibid, ll. 83–83ob (nd, but 1919).

58. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 389, l. 20ob (6 March 1920). Munawwar Qārī was immediately requested to find a suitable person to become permanent head of this section of the Commisariat.

59. For the role of Musbiuro Communists and their proposal at the beginning of 1920, see Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, pp 399–402.

60. ‘Only limited power was recognized to the Tashkent government, as Moscow directly controlled defence, foreign affairs, railways, mail and telegraphs, finance and the economy.’ (Buttino, op cit, Ref 30, p 402). However, education and agriculture, the main areas where waqf was an important factor, were left, at least formally, to the governments of the individual Soviet republics.

61. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 628, l. 6 (October 1920).

62. Munavvar Qori Abdurashidxonov, Tanlangan asarlar (Tashkent: Ma'naviyat, 2003, p 53).

63. Rezoliutsii i postanovleniia s'ezdov kommunisticheskoi partii Turkestana 1918–1924 gg. (Tashkent: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo Uzbekskoi SSR, 1958), p 109.

64. R. Ia. Radzhanova (ed), Turkestan v nachale XX veka: k istorii istokov natsional'noi nezavisimosti (Tashkent, Shark, 2000), p 452.

65. TsGARUz, f. R-17, op. 1, d. 45, ll. 16–16ob, Stenograficheskie otchety zasedanyi 6 s'ezda kommunist. Partii i 10 s'ezd Turk.respub. 1921–1923 gg.

66. Many thanks to Adeeb Khalid for this reference. The document was published by Dina Amanzholova (ed), Rossiia i Tsentral'naia Aziia, 1905–1925 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Karagandy: Karagandinskii GosUniversitet im. Buketova, 2005). See also Radzhanova, op cit, Ref 64, p 393 for a reference to the waqf issue in the decree.

67. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1414, ll. 55–59.

68. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 628, l. 14. The document is a petition dated 29 March 1920, addressed to the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment. The inhabitants of the Mīr Ābād district of Tashkent complained that the mullahs and imams working in two of the district's old mosques had agreed with the mutawallī to change the conditions in the leases of some shops, which was part of a waqf supporting the mosques. The petitioners asked the Commissariat to intervene and restore the previous leasing conditions.

69. Kats, op cit, Ref 28, p 13.

70. The research concerning the period 1920–1924 profited from the material gathered in the Narkompros fond in TsGARUz. It is significant that certificates issued by qadi courts on waqf property are nearly completely absent from this collection.

71. The articles in the decree are suspiciously similar to the articles on waqf in the 1886 Statute—making the Soviet decree a sort of legislative restoration of the status quo ante. Particularly Article 3 of the Soviet decree ratifying the ‘distribution’ of agricultural waqf lands to peasants is clearly derived from Art. 265 of the 1886 Statute. The 1922 decree states: ‘The right of use to all waqf lands of agricultural interest is granted to dehkan and all matters pertaining to this land are regulated following the laws of Soviet power on land use’ (TsGARUz, f. R-38, op. 2, d. 254, l. 24, 10 June 1922). This is the text of the 1886 Statute: ‘The populated land [naselënnye zemli, where peasant communities were present], that is part of waqf land and recognized by government, shall remain in use by the agricultural communities, based on Articles 255–261, 263 and 264 of this Statute [i.e. the articles regulating land use in the colony, equivalent to the ‘laws of Soviet power on land use’ in the 1922 decree]' (Polozhenie ob upravlenii Turkestanskogo kraia, 2 June 1886, reported in Masevich, op cit, Ref 23, p 373).

72. A similar collegial body was to be established at the oblast' level if the number of madrasas was less than 40 in whole oblast' (for instance in the Tashkent oblast').

73. Differently from the Northern Caucasus where it acted as a ‘shariatic tribunal’, in Soviet Turkestan the mahkama-i shar‘iyya was an institution staffed by Muslim jurists, who advised the indigenous population on legal matters. At the same time, in issuing authoritative judicial opinions (fatwa) and publishing articles in the local press, mahkama-i shar‘iyya sided with the major campaigns launched by the Soviet government, such as the modernization of Islamic education, anti-Basmachi propaganda and land-reform. The procedure which led to the establishment of an institution such as this in the year 1919 is still a controversial issue. The expression mahkama-i shar‘iyya was certainly in use in Turkestan in the late years of the tsarist empire to refer to the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly established by Catherine II in Ufa, cf. ‘Ma'lūmāt zhūrnālī’, al-Islāh, 1 March 1916, p 159. This may suggest a close analogy between the two institutions For other information, see P. Sartori, ‘The Tashkent ‘Ulamā’ and the Soviet State (1920–1938): a preliminary research note based on NKVD documents', in P. Sartori and T. Trevisani (eds), Patterns of Transformation In and Around Uzbekistan (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 2007), pp 161–184. On mahkama-i shar‘iyya in North Caucasus during the Soviet period, see V. Bobrovnikov, ‘Makhkama shar‘iya’, in Islam na territorii byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii: entsiklopedicheskii slovar', Vol 1 (Moscow, 2006), pp 263–265.

74. Talaba, ‘Āchīq khatt’, Haqīqat, No 1, 10 August 1922, back cover.

75. Mahkama-i shar‘iyya idārasī, ‘Āchīq khattga jawāb’, Haqīqat, No 2, 15 September 1922, cover page verso.

76. ‘Mahkama-i shar‘iyyada’, Turkistān, 14 October 1922, p 3.

77. TsGARUz, f. R-904, op. 1, d. 40, l. 146.

78. TsGARUz, f. R-39, op. 2, 133, ll. 1–3.

79. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2272, ll. 2–4, Polozhenie o poriadke i sposobe provedeniia dekreta TurTsIKa ot 28-go Dekabria 1922 g.

80. His autobiography can be found in RGASPI, f. 62, op. 4, d. 633, ll. 100–100ob. We thank Adeeb Khalid for this reference.

81. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1029, ll. 73–73ob. The original Uzbek-language message of the Tashkent Old City Executive Committee to the mahkama-i shar‘iyya can be found in TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1029, l. 74.

82. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1423, ll. 112-133ob, V Turkestanskii Tsentral'nyi Ispol'nitelnyi Komitet. Ot predsedatelia Glavnogo Vakufnogo Uprovleniia pri Narkomprose Khal'mukhameda Akhunova—Doklad.

83. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1423, l. 112.

84. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1425, ll. 116–117, Zamestiteliu predsedatelia soveta narodnykh komissarov Turkrespubliki tovarishchu Parkutskomu, ot predsedatelia Glavnogo Vakufnogo Upravleniia Turkrespubliki Akhunova Khal'mukhameda—Dokladnaia zapiska.

85. Rezoliutsii i postanovleniia, op cit, Ref 63, p 178.

86. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1425, l. 91, V sekretariat Sovnarkoma TASSR.

87. Ibid, ll. 92–93ob.

88. Ibid, l. 94.

89. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2274, l. 23.

90. Zahīr al-Dīn A^clam's election in 1926 inflamed Tashkent's Muslim population. Cf. TsGARUz, f. R-904, op. 1, d. 32, ll. 10–10ob.

91. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2274, l. 25.

92. Ibid, l. 23.

93. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1425, ll. 105–105ob.

94. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2274, ll. 28–28ob.

95. Ibid, l. 30.

96. Ibid, l. 24.

97. Ibid, l. 26.

98. These norms stated that a certain amount of farm land should be distributed on the basis of the number of people who were able to work on it, in accordance with a defined ratio.

99. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1414, ll. 49–51.

100. TsGARUz, f. R-25, op. 1, d. 1425, ll. 92–93ob.

101. TsGARUz, f. R-24, op. 1, d. 2273, ll. 14–14ob.

102. Kats, op cit, Ref 28, p 17. The TsIK decree on Uzbekistan, initiating its ‘land–water reform’ was published on 2 December 1925; cf. Park, op cit, Ref 7, p 220. According to Joseph Castagné, ‘La Réforme agraire au Turkestan’, Revue des Etudes Islamiques, No. 11 (1928), pp 396–397, and E. L. Shteinberg, Ocherki istorii Turkmenii (Moscow, 1934), pp 116–117, waqf in Turkmenistan had already been totally supressed in 1925.

103. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2284, l. 20.

104. Ibid, l. 19.

105. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2299, l. 30ob.

106. The names of the Andijan waqf section's staff can be verified in ibid, 6.

107. Ibid, l. 29ob.

108. Ibid, l. 27ob.

109. Ibid, l. 28ob.

110. Ibid, l. 27ob.

111. Ibid, l. 6.

112. Ibid, ll. 31–31ob.

113. Ibid, l. 2.

114. TsGARUz, f. R-34, op. 1, d. 2280, l. 136.

115. Ibid, l. 8.

116. Ibid, l. 10.

117. Ibid, ll. 15ob–15.

118. Cf. Adeeb Khalid, ‘Backwardness and the quest for civilization: early Soviet Central Asia in comparative perspective’, and Adrienne Edgar, ‘Bolshevism, patriarchy, and the nation: the Soviet “emancipation” of Muslim women in pan-Islamic perspective’, Slavic Review, Vol 65, No 2, 2006, pp 231–251 and 252–272. A study of policy towards Muslim women with a strong comparative approach is Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan. Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006).

119. For the Ottoman case see ‘Vakf. IV’, Encyclopédie de l'Islam, op cit, Ref 9, p 97. Under the Safavids, in Iran the waqf was administered by a state institution called sadr, on this issue see B. Fragner, ‘Social and internal economic affairs’, in P. Jackson and L. Lockhart (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol 6 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp 519–521.

120. On 16 March 1922 the GPU wrote from Samarkand that in many districts the ‘Basmachi’ had created their own systems for collecting contributions and taxes in kind. Because of the terror they aroused, in several cases Soviet organizations supplied commodities and other goods requested by the guerrillas (A. Berelowitch and V. Danilov (ed), Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VChK-OGPU-NKVD. Dokumenty i materialy. Vol 1. 1918–1922 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), p 587).

121. Khalid, op cit, Ref 4, pp 299–300.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niccolò Pianciola

Niccolò Pianciola, is acting Professor of History of Eastern Europe, Università di Trento, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Via Santa Croce, 65 I-38100 Trento, Italy (E-mail: [email protected]).

Paolo Sartori

Paolo Sartori is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Oriental Studies, Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Mühlweg 15, 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany (E-mail: [email protected]).