Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan Adeeb k halid abstract

partment of Spiritual Affairs, “already have among them many figures desir-
ing the isolation of their co-religionists and turning them towards Turkey, as the
religio-political centre.”
78
In Turkestan, “the well known impressionability,
unculturedness, and therefore the credulity of the local population”
79
provided
further reasons to be suspicious. Once the Balkan wars began, Turkestani
authorities, especially the Governor-General A. V. Samsonov, became very sus-
picious of any Muslim activity. To be sure, wiser counsel prevailed among
many high-ranking officials. The chief of the Tashkent branch of the 
Okhrana
told his superiors in St. Petersburg that
“in Turkestan, district-level administration sees in each
µsh±n
having 
murµds
[dis-
ciples] a preacher of pan-Islamism, an enemy of Russian power preparing an up-
rising of the natives against Russia, the separation of Turkestan from Russia and
its union with one of the neighbouring Muslim countries.”
80
On the eve of the war, the governor of Ferghana took an unusually sanguine
view of the matter when he suggested to Samsonov that the underlying causes
of any disaffection among the local population were economic, while “pan-
Islamism […] does not represent for us a danger greater than, say, Catholic
propaganda in Russia.”
81
But such caution was not universally shared, and it
could not overcome the deeply entrenched suspicion of indigenous society and
441
77 CGA RUz, f. 2, op. 2, d. 369, l. 8ob.
78 Circular letter to all governors, 7 October 1910, 
in
Kotjukova, 2004, p. 87.
79 A. V. Samsonov’s characterisation in circular to all 
oblast’
governors, 28 October 1912, 
in
Kotjukova,
2004, p. 88.
80
Nachal’nik, Tashkentskoe okhrannoe otdelenie
, to 
Direktor, Departament policii, osobyj otdel
, 10 Decem-
ber 1911:GARF, f. 102, op. 241, d. 74, ch. 84, ll. 36-36ob.
81 Military Governor, Ferghana, to Governor-General, Turkestan, 12 April 1914: GARF, f. 102, op. 244,
d. 74, ch. 84B, l. 99ob.
Culture and Power in Colonial Turkestan

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442
of its “fanaticism”. The fears of “fanaticism”, or pan-Islamism and of Ottoman
machinations combined to render the “natives” unassimilable. Colonial differ-
ence trumped common sense.