Russian class and madrasah in 1870–1917: the history of confrontation (on the example of the city of Chistopol, Kazan province)

Abstract

In 1870, special rules for organizing the system of education for non-Russian schoolchildren appeared in the Russian Empire. This was a sign of the beginning of intensive work aimed to integrate the Tatars into the general imperial social and cultural system. One of the articles of the law on March 26, 1870 called for the opening of Russian classes at the madrasah. In 1875, 11 Russian classes functioned at the different madrasahs in the Kazan province. But most of the Russian classes worked in Kazan. In the city of Chistopol, where a large Tatar community lived and the famous madrasah worked under the patronage of Muhammad-Zakir Kamalov, the Russian class was opened only in 1881. Kamalov perceived the new changes negatively, so in Chistopol, in the 1880–1890s, there was a conflict arosed between the supporters of a religious figure and the officials of educational control. One of the participants in the conflict was Mir-Sa‘id Yunusov, the teacher of the Russian class. In the article, we reconstructed his family and work cases on the basis of archival documents. Besides, we used Qayyum Nasiri's memories of the experience of organizing the Russian class in Kazan as an analogy. The writers Fatih Karimi and ‘Ayadh Ishaqi also studied at the Chistopol Madrasah in the late 1880s and early 1890s, so we used materials related to their lives for our work. The author concludes that the Russian-class madrasah of Chistopol case was mainly caused by the arrow of age and personality problems.