The historiography of collectivization in the Muslim-majority regions of the USSR has grown considerably over the last decades and a scholarly consensus has coalesced around the idea that collective farms across the Caucasus and Central Asia served as a flexible infrastructure to preserve the integrity of Islamic institutions such as shrines and mosques, especially when said institutions existed and operated unofficially. With the preponderant weight of scholarly attention focused upon practices of adjustment to social changes, however, manifestations of dissent within the rural environment of kolkhozes have been largely neglected so far, even though in certain regions of the USSR collectivization was met by peasant resistance. In this research note we would like to address this shortcoming by offering a summary and textual edition of an original work of Islamic jurisprudence which disputes Soviet state ownership of the agricultural produce. The work in question is titled Risāla fī ‘l-‘ushr and was crafted in Arabic by Muḥammad b. Dāwud Ḥājjī al-Aqūshī (1895–1947) in Dagestan in the late 1940s.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. ‘Amr al-Bazzār. 2000. Musnad al-Bazzār. Medina: Maktabat al-‘ilmiyya.
Abū Khātim Muḥammad b. Ḥibbān al-Bustī. 1993. Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Ḥibbān bi-tartīb Ibn Bulbān. Beirut: Mu’assasat al-risāla.
Mirza Haji al-‘Ayaki. 2017. ‘Ulamā’ Darga fī’l-qarn al-‘ishrīn. Makhachkala: no place of publication.
Muḥammad b. al-ḥājj Aḥmad al-Badawī al-Khartikunī. 2018. Fatāwā al-Khartikunī. Makhachkala: Dār al-risāla.
Muḥammad b. Dāwud Ḥājji al-Aqūshī al-Naskentī, Risāla fi ‘l-‘ushr, MS Karabudakhkent, Mosque Collection, inv. no. 83.
Abashin, Sergey. 2011. Ethnographic Views of Socialist Reforms in Soviet Central Asia: Collective Farm (Kolkhoz) Monographs. In Exploring the Edge of Empire: Soviet Era Anthropology in the Caucasus and Central Asia, ed. Florian Mühlfried and Sergey Sokolovskiy. Berlin: Lit-Verlag: 83–97.
Abashin, Sergey. 2015. Sovetskii kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei. Moscow: NLO.
Bobrovnikov, Vladimir O. 2004. Arkheologiia stroitel’stva islamskikh traditsii v Dagestanskom kolkhoze. Ab Imperio 3: 563–593.
Bobrovnikov, Vladimir. 2006. ‘Traditionalist’ versus ‘Islamist’ Identities in a Dagestani Collective Farm. Central Asian Survey 25/3: 287–302.
Clark, Katerina. 1984. The Mutability of the Canon: Socialist Realism and Chingiz Aitmatov’s I dol’she veka dlitsia den’. Slavic Review 43: 573–587.
Dudoignon Stéphane A. and Christian Noack, ed. 2014 Allah’s Kolkhozes: Migration, De-Stalinisation, Privatisation, and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s–2000s). Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag.
Dudoignon, Stéphane A. 2022. Gnosis as Dissent? In Soviet and Present-Day Tajikistan. Journal of Central Asian History 2/1: 273–308.
Edgar, Adrienne Lynne. 2004. Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila.1994. Stalin’s Peasants. Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York—Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frank, Allen J. 2019. Gulag Miracles: Sufis and Stalinist Repression in Kazakhstan. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
Kamp, Marianne. 2024. Collectivization Generation: Oral Histories of a Social Revolution in Uzbekistan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kamp, Marianne and Niccolò Pianciola. 2021. Collectivisation, Sedentarisation and Famine in Central Asia. In Routledge Handbook of Central Asia, ed. Rico Isaacs and Erica Marat. London: Routledge: 41–55.
Perović, Jeronim. 2016. Highland Rebels: The North Caucasus During the Stalinist Collectivization Campaign. Journal of Contemporary History 51: 234–260.
Pianciola, Niccolò. 2001. The Collectivisation Famine in Kazakhstan, 1931–1933. Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25: 237–251.
Roy, Olivier. 1991. Ethnies et politique en Asie Centrale. Revue du monde musulman et de la Méditerranée 59–60: 17–36.
Sartori, Paolo. 2024. A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, 1943–1991. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press.
Sartori, Paolo. 2025. “Qāḍī by Necessity: Muḥammad al-Khartikunī against the “Wahhabis” in 1980s Dagestan.” Islamic Law Blog, July 17, 2025, https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/07/17/qa%e1%b8%8di-by-necessity-mu%e1%b8%a5ammad-al-khartikuni-against-the-wahhabis-in-1980s-dagestan/.
Viola, Lynn. 1996. Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York—Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zevaco, Ariane. 2014. From Old to New Macha: Mass Resettlement and the Redefinition of Islamic Practice between Tajikistan’s Upper Valleys and Cotton Lowlands. In Allah’s Kolkhozes: Migration, De-Stalinisation, Privatisation, and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s–2000s), ed. Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Christian Noack. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag: 148–201.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 176 | 176 | 24 |
| Full Text Views | 16 | 16 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 38 | 38 | 0 |
The historiography of collectivization in the Muslim-majority regions of the USSR has grown considerably over the last decades and a scholarly consensus has coalesced around the idea that collective farms across the Caucasus and Central Asia served as a flexible infrastructure to preserve the integrity of Islamic institutions such as shrines and mosques, especially when said institutions existed and operated unofficially. With the preponderant weight of scholarly attention focused upon practices of adjustment to social changes, however, manifestations of dissent within the rural environment of kolkhozes have been largely neglected so far, even though in certain regions of the USSR collectivization was met by peasant resistance. In this research note we would like to address this shortcoming by offering a summary and textual edition of an original work of Islamic jurisprudence which disputes Soviet state ownership of the agricultural produce. The work in question is titled Risāla fī ‘l-‘ushr and was crafted in Arabic by Muḥammad b. Dāwud Ḥājjī al-Aqūshī (1895–1947) in Dagestan in the late 1940s.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 176 | 176 | 24 |
| Full Text Views | 16 | 16 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 38 | 38 | 0 |