Hijra and forced migration from nineteenth-century Russia to the Ottoman Empire - A critical analysis of the Great Crimean Tatar emigration of 1860-1861

This article presents the first in-depth socio-political analysis of the ro le of traditionalist Crimean Islam and Russian colonialist policies in caus ing a vast emigration of Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland to th e Ottoman Empire following the Crimean War. Using Russian, Turkish, Tatar a nd Western sources we recreate the conditions for this extraordinary migrat ion that saw 200,000 of the Russian Empire's 300,000 Crimean Tatars abandon their ancestral homeland for Ottoman lands in what is today modern day Bul garia, Romania and Turkey in the years 1860-1861. We trace the beginning of this movement to the emigration of Caucasian highlander Muslims (such as t he Circassians, Chechens, Lazes, Abkhaz, etc.) to the Ottoman Empire in 185 9 following the defeat of Sheikh Shamil's anti-Russian guerrillas. The emig ration of Caucasian Muslims had a ripple effect on the unstable Crimean Mus lim society of the nineteenth century. We show that there were internal mec hanisms operating within Crimean Muslim society that led to this extraordin ary migration (such as a pre-modern, extraterritorial identification with t he Ottoman Empire as the Dar al Islam, i.e. realm of Islam; a desire to pre serve traditional-patriarchal Crimean Islamic traditions from infidel influ ence of Russian colonists) as well as outside influences (such as Cossack d estruction of Crimean Tatar villages during the Crimean War; massive loss o f land by Crimean Tatars to Russian landlord-pomeshchiks). We also present the first study in English on the abandonment of the Kuban steppe and south Ukrainian steppe by the Nogai Tatars (a sub-group related to the Crimean T atars).