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Cesari argues that both religious and national communities are defined by the three Bs: belief, behaviour and belonging. By focusing on the ways in which these three Bs intersect, overlap or clash, she identifies the patterns of the politicization of religion, and vice versa, in any given context. Her approach has four advantages: firstly, it combines an exploration of institutional and ideational changes across time, which are usually separated by disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, it illustrates the heuristic value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods by statistically testing the validity of the patterns identified in the qualitative historical phase of the research. Thirdly, it avoids reducing religion to beliefs by investigating the significance of the institution-ideas connections, and fourthly, it broadens the political approach beyond state-religion relations to take into account actions and ideas conveyed in other arenas such as education, welfare, and culture.
This article offers an analysis of the set of bureaucratic procedures and practical knowledge employed in the process of land assessment and land-tax collection on irrigated plots in the Turkestan krai of the Russian empire. It explains the consequences of a mechanism of taxation founded on fictional rural communities in a context largely dominated by individual landownership, very different from the one Russian officials had become acquainted with in European Russia. A second juridical fiction was constituted by the absence of a positive endorsement by Russian regulations of native property rights on rural land - these rights being recognized only thanks to the renvoi to Muslim law. Land surveying technicalities, thus, were supposed to convey both the consecration of the absence of individual rights, and a thorough image of effective 'communal' possession, on which landtax was raised. Debates between Russian officials and attempts to improve land surveying reflected this ambiguity and tried to accommodate this normative framework with the imperial State's concurrent interests: expanding fiscal liability, and preserving State land properties. These debates ultimately led to the establishment of a special commission to amend the Turkestan Statute of 1886. The 1900 amendments have often been interpreted in Soviet historiography as a government-backed spur to the commodification of rural land. I argue that a specific legislative amendment proposed by this commission was positively exploited by native Muslim peasants in order to circumvent the existent land-tax allocation system. They chose to step out of their 'community' and have their plots counted, on special certificates (dannye), as separate fiscal units. The article offers a tentative estimation of this phenomenon and attempts to trace the typical profile of those Muslim subjects who took this opportunity. This practice was tolerated by 'liberal' Russian officials, who saw a positive move towards private property in it. Curiously, though, the promotion of private property was regarded as a benefit of Russia's 'civilizing mission' in Turkestan, just as the establishment of fictitious rural communities had been.
Writing in 1872, Sir Alfred Lyall, Governor of the North-Western Provinces of British India, was talking about the reluctance amongst many of the old Muslim scholarly class of North India to embrace the modern, enlightened learning of the West. For Lyall, to be an “Orientalist” was to be one of those Anglo-Indian advocates of state support for “Oriental Learning”—the study of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit—in the tradition established by Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who had been worsted by the “Anglicists” led by Lord Macaulay in 1835. To adopt the meaning popularized by Edward Said, we might say that while Lyall makes a classic “Orientalist” judgment about the value of Eastern civilization, he is also making an observation about the relationship between knowledge and power that still resonates today. Lyall is consciously echoing Macaulay's notorious statement, “A single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia,” which has often been taken as a byword for the arrogance of Europeans confronted with an Orient to which they felt themselves superior. The obvious point is that Macaulay had no interest in Oriental knowledge or knowledge of the Orient: he was not an Orientalist at all. Perhaps this is why Said dealt with him only tangentially.