Tsarist elites framed a ‘Muslim Question’ alongside the Jewish, Polish, and German Questions.

Evidence

Russian intellectuals and policy-makers brought a somewhat different lens to bear on Muslims, however. By the early twentieth century, they had come to imagine a ‘Muslim Question’ alongside the ‘Jewish’, ‘Polish’, ‘German’ and other ‘Questions’ about the loyalty of non-Russian and non-Orthodox groups. But until the end of the nineteenth century they tended to concentrate on different populations in specific locales within the empire or along its frontiers, acknowledging ethnic, linguistic and social distinctions among these groups. In fact, some of these communities had been subjects of the tsar for centuries. Others had been the object of more recent—and brutal—tsarist campaigns to subjugate populations in the North Caucasus and Central Asia. Thus the charge of ‘fanaticism’— itself the creature of a secularising critique of European Christianity and, simultaneously, a reaction to anticolonial movements around the globe— was one that Russian elites levelled against these diverse Muslim populations in very distinct ways. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 508

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s central thesis that a ‘Muslim Question’ was constructed alongside the ‘Jewish Question’ in European thought; parallels post-9/11 framings of Muslim loyalty in the West.