Золотоордынское обозрение (Dec 2014)
Kasimov Tsardom in the Tatar Memory of the 19th century
Abstract
In August 1834, the mullah of the cathedral mosque in the town of Kasimov addressed to parishioners with a solemn speech on the occasion of majority of the successor of a throne. In this speech he made short digression to the history of Kasimov Tsardom focusing on the listing of its rulers with short characteristic of some of them. At that time, there were no professional studies on the Kasimov Tsardom, while it was almost completely ignored in general works on Russian history (of Karamzin, Polevoy, Tatishchev, Shcherbatov). Some Tatar families kept genealogies-shedzheres, but in the absolute majority, they did not record the ancestors and especially events before the 18th century. An indirect evidence about the life in Kasimov during the 15th–18th centuries contained in the eastern books (for the most part, of an apparent religious and didactic content) do not give grounds for the claim that there existed a written fixation of the local history events. Tombstone inscriptions were illustrative but hardly informative evidence of the events of the 16th–17th centuries. They provide minimal information about past rulers. The writing of a Kasimov Tatar chronicler Qadyr Ali-bek of the 1830s obviously was not yet known. Researches of local ethnographers (I. Gagin, I. Krasnov) could serve as a source of knowledge of the Tatars interested in history. These studies rarely appeared on the pages of periodicals including the journal “Otechestvennye zapiski” (Domestic Notes). Comparison of these publications with the speech of Abdulwahid Smailev discovers their interrelation or the use of a common source. An analysis of the mullah’s speech shows that the fragmentary information from some Russian sources published at that time and the deaf echoes of the long-standing history in Tatar oral and written tradition of the first half of the 19th century developed, in the end, in a fairly consistent picture. In general, this picture was chronologically correct, but it was not full of details and abounded in factual errors.
