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Abstract
This article offers a close reading of several unpublished manuscripts by the Russian Orientalist, administrator and missionary ideologue Nikolai Petrovich Ostroumov, who spent most of his career in the Turkestan governor-generalship. Ostroumov's violent Islamophobia and close relationship with the colonial administration support to some extent the thesis of Edward Said and other postcolonial theorists that European views of the ‘Orient’ were an epistemological construction of negative attributes that reflected European self-perceptions, and that academic Orientalism was often the handmaiden of colonial power and expansion. However, much of Ostroumov's writing was so abstract and divorced from the social and political realities of Turkestani society that it was of little practical use, something compounded by his view of Orthodox Christianity and Islam as polar opposites. Ostroumov's private writings reveal a deep anxiety regarding the durability of Russian conquest and rule in Central Asia, and paranoia about the decline and destruction of the Christian faith and European civilization.
Acknowledgements
My warm thanks to Alexander Morrison for his highly stimulating questions, and also for his corrections to the text and helpful suggestions.
Notes
1. N.P. Ostroumov ‘K vospominaniiam o V.P. Nalivkine i A.F. Kerenskom’ (1927) TsGARUz F.I-1009 Op.1 D.66, (published in Asanova Citation2008, 389).
2. Bayly (Citation1996, 143) notes that ‘Orientalism, in Edward Said's sense, was only one among a variety of localized engagements between power and knowledge.’
3. N.P. Ostroumov ‘Turkestanskii General-Gubernator M.G. Cherniaev’ TsGARUz F.I-1009, Op.1, D.98, l.3 (hereafter M98).
4. A good example of this was the debate over the regulation and administration of waqf (Islamic endowments) by the colonial regime (see Abashin Citation2002; Morrison Citation2008, 60–66, 88–94).
5. Amongst this group we can count V. Vyatkin, V. Nalivkin, A. Kun and many others. So far as Ostroumov himself is concerned, the famous Soviet Orientalist I. Krachkovskii (Citation1958, 131–2) wrote that he ‘was considered at the centre [i.e. in Saint Petersburg] as the representative of all Central Asian Oriental Studies. … His works on Islam, as V.V. Barthold suggested, were a long way from the modern standards of the discipline.’
6. N.P. Ostroumov ‘Turkestanskii general-gubernator M.G. Cherniaev’ TsGARUz F.I-1009 Op.1 D.98.
7. N.P. Ostroumov ‘2-i Turkestanskii general-gubernator M.G. Cherniaev (1882–84)’ Tashkent, February 1930 (typescript). Alisher Navo'i National Library of the Republic of Uzbekistan, Manuscripts division, No. 8824. (Hereafter Ostroumov 1930.)
8. Hereafter the handwritten manuscript which forms the basis for the typescript is referred to as M98, and the drafts as M98/1 and M98/2. The latter appear to be parts of Ostroumov's original diary, and Ostroumov himself noted in the margin of the fair copy: ‘I am putting these observations to one side for a future historian and have placed them together with my notes’ (M98, 103). In one of the drafts (M98/2, 18) he has added a remark (dated 1927) that he is preserving them for future students of the gymnasium.
9. This can be found in the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan, F.968 Op.1 D.43. Its publisher, Alekseev, writes that it dates from 1884. Most of its observations can be found in one form or another in Ostroumov's diaries.
10. See for instance his arguments with the committee convened to consider the ‘Muslim Question’ in 1888: TsGARUz F.I-1 Op.31 D.540.
11. Ostroumov's description of shari‘a as a rigid and all-encompassing code was entirely characteristic of colonial understandings of Muslim law, which almost never took into account local variations, legal pluralism, the simultaneous existence of forms of civil law, and the vital interpretative role played by judges (Kugle Citation2001; Morrison Citation2008, ch. 7; Giunchi Citation2010).
12. Ostroumov here seems to be referring to the hadith recorded by al-Bukhari (Citation1855, 225–226), which states that ‘dead soil belongs to him who brings it to life’, although it also states that such a judgement must be upheld by a legitimate Muslim ruler.
13. V.V. Barthold (Citation1966, 340) notes that ‘an impartial attitude to Islam was for him [Ostroumov] almost as difficult as for a believing Muslim towards Christianity’.
14. All of this helps to put his remarks about ‘wild and uncultured Asiatics’ into perspective, making them appear like a habitual stamp of the ‘Orientalist’ habits of the East.
15. Ostroumov never concealed his confessional ideals, applying them to almost all the internal and external political actions of the Russian empire. Particularly noteworthy is his judgement of Russia's victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1877, where the Orthodox stamp in his judgements is notable in his confessional assessment of one colonial empire in the manner and actions of another (it suggests a distorted mirror-image). All the more noteworthy is his final verdict: ‘How the soul rejoices to know that now in the Slavic territories liberated by us Christian sciences can develop freely’ (1899, 40–41).
16. It is true that Lunin, and other scholars who have followed his lead (Alekseev, Flygin, Germanov and others), referring to Barthold's remarks, describe Ostroumov as a ‘good islamoved’. However, Barthold (Citation1966, 336–341) severely criticizes Ostroumov's work on Islam, and clearly considers that much of it consists of mere compilation.
17. This tendency is criticized by V.V. Barthold (Citation1905, 107–112), who, whilst he does not name Ostroumov directly, surely has him in mind when he mocks Turkestani Orientalists for their literal interpretation of the shari‘a as a rigid code and their belief that the failure of local society to conform to these ancient norms shows that local Muslims do not understand their own religion. Rather than theoretical knowledge derived from classical texts, he writes, ‘What would be truly useful and essential to future administrators would be how the local judges in different areas of the region act in practice, and how they interpret the laws of shari‘a and ‘adat.’ This plea fell on deaf ears.
18. This seems like a variation on a remark Skobelev made to the British journalist Charles Marvin (Citation1882, 92–3) in 1881: ‘I hold it as a principle in Asia that the duration of peace is in direct proportion to the slaughter you inflict on the enemy. The harder you hit them, the longer they will be quiet afterwards.’
19. This article does not appear to have survived, but from the context of Ostroumov's remarks we can probably guess at its content.
20. Ostroumov (1927, in Asanova Citation2008, 386–387) notes that Nalivkin himself would resort to ‘the whip and beating when he met coarse and impudent natives’.
21. Barthold to Ostroumov (1911) TsGARUz F.I-1009, Op.1 D.27 ll.169, 191–205.
22. Ostroumov describes and criticizes other ‘depraved habits of the natives’, in particular paedophilia (M98/2, 271). He then almost immediately describes the puppet theatre in the bazaars of Tashkent as an interesting and under-researched aspect of the culture of the Sarts (M98/2, 272).
23. In his diary, Ostroumov recalls the observation of the officials of the Land Settlement Administration dealing with land tax in Ferghana Province, who hailed the Sarts ‘for their welcoming nature and reproached the Russian administration for the harsh measures it is carrying out against that people’ (M98/1, 103). Ostroumov does not comment on these sentiments.
24. The desire of Jura-Bek, the former hakem of Kitab and an honorary colonel in the Russian army, to occupy some sort of official position, together with his open criticism of Cherniaev, also produces a negative reaction from Ostroumov. He writes that Jura-Bek is treated with unwarranted kindness by von Kaufman, adding: ‘and even this did not satisfy this Asiatic upstart. What sort of loyal Russian subject is he? How can we entrust to him Russian rule in an alien [inoplemmenyi] and differently-believing [inovernyi] region?’ (1930, 65; M98, 71–72).
25. He expresses a similar distrust towards the Lutheran director of the Tashkent gymnasium, Yanko (M98/2, 88).
26. TsGARUz F.I-1 Op.31 D.540 ll.5, 17; F.I-1009 Op.1 D.175 l.62. Ostroumov's influence is clearly visible in the volume of the Pahlen Commission's report, Pravovoi Byt Tuzemnogo Naseleniya (Legal Culture of the Native Population) (Palen Citation1910), although the attempt to redraft the shari‘a along the lines envisaged here ended in farce (Morrison Citation2008, 275–282).
27. Documents testifying to this are currently being prepared for publication in a collection to be entitled Kolonial'nye Arkhivy, edited by S.N. Abashin, T. Kotiukova, O. Mahmudov and others.