Abstract:

When scholars explore religious institutions among Muslim societies, they traditionally focus on mosques, maktab-madrasas, and the ‘ulama (Islamic scholars). In this paper, I propose to shift our attention to other Islamic institutions that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th-century Russian empire, such as Muslim benevolent societies, libraries, and even athletic clubs. The emergence of such institutions is often explored through the lens of rising secularism among tsarist subjects. However, this perspective does not necessarily align with how Muslims who established, funded, and participated in these new institutions perceived them. For these Muslims, the establishment of charitable organizations or ‘Muslim libraries’ was a religiously commended activity. Indeed, Islamic charity in the forms of zakat and sadaqa has been traditionally practiced by all Muslims. These traditions of Muslim charity served as the foundation for the development of charitable societies and other new Muslim institutions in the Russian empire. Another factor shaping their development was the proliferation of othe civic and faith-based charities across the wider Tsarist state. This paper traces the history of Muslim charitable societies, libraries, and athletic clubs on the Qazaq steppe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It utilizes archival materials collected from the archival institutions of Kazakhstan and Russia.