MOHAMMEDAN RUSSIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3347, 8 May 1918, Page 53

MOHAMMEDAN RUSSIA.

By Jessie Mackat.

Not long ago I wrote about a section of the Mohammedan faith which had given special trouble to Britain in India in the early part of the last century. From this starting-point it is not irrelevant to glance over Mohammedan elements -which at this very moment maybe giving almost a death-blow to the illguided Republicanism of Kussia. We are used to considering our own Empire a mighty suzerain of Mohammedan States, but we are apt to forget what immense tracts of Islam belong, or did belong, to th 3 overgrown dominion of Russia. How are these elements surveying the double break-up of Russia and of Turkey, late the spiritual head of Islam ? This question occupied the attention of a publicist in the Round Table as late as the end of last year, and although no conclusion could be arrived at, the data supplied by the writer cannot but possess singular interest for students of contemporary history. Strange to say, Russia holds a greater Turkish-speaking population, not to say a greater Mohammedan population, than Turkey held even at the beginning of the war. Not more than 8,000,U00 of people speaking Turkish obey the Sultan, while of Russia's 20,000,000 of Mohammedans 16.,000,000 speak the language of Russia's hereditary foe. This is a fact, on the face of sufficiently disquieting for Christendom just now, if unmodified bv circumstance.

"Let us first look at the Tartar elements in Russia itself. These lie largely in the giant basin of the Volga. (Let it be remembered that the people we call Turks came from a Tartar horde whose home was Central Asia —the land of the Turcomans.) The student of Russian historyneeds no reminder of that scourge of mediaeval Muscovy, the " Golden Horde," which poured out of the rame wild tableland as the Turks. These have left their descendants in the Tartars of the Middle Volga—or Tatars, as our writer more correctly designates them. This great "yellow" tract of Russia has for capital the old-world, Oriental town of Kazan, the ancient seat of these Turcoman eavages in the west. This branch is almost isolated by genuine Russians on the west, and Finnish tribes, pagan still under a thin Christian veneer, which bound the Kazan Tartars north and south. Where the Volga joins the Caspian Sea there are found the Tartars of Astrakhan. The Crimea holds another small Tartar population. But greater than all of these is the Islamic borderland of the Caucasus, where 2,500,000 of Tartars, cut off from their co-religionists in Russia proper by Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, and Kalmucks, are practically joined to the Islamic hinterlands of Persia and Asiatic Turkey. In Asia proper the great Mohammedan belt from the Caspian to the borders of the Chinese Empire contains at least 12,000,000 who are followers of the Prophet, but exhibit extremely diverse varieties of culture, from the rude illiteracy of roaming desert tribes to the long-settled and long flourishing seats of trade and learning, Bokhara and Khiva. In Russia proper, we have seen, the Tartar element are islands in an Aryan Sea, and here, where the Turanian and Islamic strains dominate all, there is no political unity but their common fealty to Petrograd. Russia was acquiring this stretch of Asia for about 400 years, and this difference in time is fully reflected in the governing institutions. In some cases these have been orderly and comparatively advanced; in some cases the tie is close, in others (specially those of Khiva and Bokhara) Russia has been content to allow systems of native government similar to our own in Hyderabad and other Indian principalities which own the British as overlords. But these accidental differences in government are not so disintegrating to tli3 Pan-Islamic idea as certain inherent differences which reflect and accentuate the geographical isolations of which we spoke earlier. First, and fatal to all hope of cohesion, is the difference of creed. Central Asia and the Tartars of the Volga are Sunni, the sect of the European Mohammedans in general; but in the thickly-peopled Caucasus the contiguity of Persia accounts for a strong Shia element; and Baptists and Jesuits are brothers born compared with Sunni and Shia. In some cases also Russian intolerance has dealt hardly with isolated tribes, while the more important Khanates have retained all their old ecclesiastical rights and courts. The partitioning out of other tribes among rival primates of Islam was an astute move of Russian strategy. Secondly, there is the difference of culture and occupation. Around Tashkend and Samarcand, both belonging to ancient Asiatic civilisations, there are settled agricultural populations, Avhile the Trans Caspian Turkomans and the Kirghiz are still roving nomads, scorning the arts of peace and settlement. Some of these last are only veneered with the faith of Islam. In the Caucasus this sharp difference of culture is very marked. Lastly, there is the difference of language. * The Caucasus is a nest of diverse dialects. Other groups in Central Asia speak Iranian or Persian languages. Turkish, indeed, is the main language of this Turanian region, but even this indigenous language is split up into varities that greatly detract from any solidarity of sentiment east of the Ural and the Caspian. The Tartars of the Caucasus look upon Baku as their centre, which speaks the literary Ottoman language of Constantinople, and the Crimean Tartars are inclined also to favour Baku. The Tartars of the Volga and Siberia ; n the districts round Tobolsk, regard Kazan as their cultural home.

The. Arabian Tartars, or -people of the Amu-Dana and Sir Daria Rivers, speak Eastern Turkish, a language very different from Western Turkish, and these follow the more ancient and distinctively Turanian literaTy tradition of Tashkend. With all these differences, however, there

are yet some dangerous elements of unity, which the new Pan-Turanian school has sought to develop for its own ulterior ends.

(To be Concluded.)