Maḥmūd Khwaja Ahrār,23 writes that the standard formula used by many of the documents refers to Khwaja Ahrār's conversion. Barthold to maintain that even in the nineteenth century amlak and mulk were simply larger and smaller quantities of the same thing: he gave the following definition which he said applied to both. Whether this view was justified or not, it would form the core of the debate among Russian officials immediately after the conquest of Samarqand and the Zarafshan Valley.
In the early spring at the time of the first sowing, the amlākdār would continue to collect qush-pul.57 He would be.
Pressures on the Fiscal System in the 1870s
The tax proposed by Chaikovskii would be levied on all cultivated land, at a rate of 10% of the average harvest. Chaikovskii had taken part in the 1866 military campaigns in Central Asia and would become military governor of Ferghana Oblast in 1898. This was because, Kun wrote, the peasants considered the kifsen – the benefit that tax officials were entitled to as payment – as part of the kharāj tax, and deducted it from the amount they gave to the state.
In the TS the term sarkār appears to have been more current among Russian officers before Kun conducted his research, and amlakdars are not even mentioned in the description of Bukharan's tax system given by General Staff Officer L. Despite the most careful oversight developed and energetic Russian administration and all efforts to improve and improve the correct collection of taxes, the administration of tumans and amlyakstv [sic], in the old Bukharan system proved unsustainable. The reform began with the abolition of sarkārs and amlakdārs at a time when the weaknesses of local economic organization in the Syr-Darya region became clear.
Although it generally seems likely that this change reduced the tax burden in Turkestan, it was no longer as responsive to the whims of the harvest as it had been. The reason for the petitions of the inhabitants of Katta-Kurgan about the burden of tax collection is mainly in the sudden transition from the previous amlākdāri collection system to a new order, more strict and fair. More importantly, under this system, the Russians effectively washed their hands of the most difficult element of all - the distribution of tax within villages and aksakalties.
Problems with Mulk
Rostislavov was writing at the end of a decade in which the question of the legitimacy of the mulk estate, and especially the tax privileges it entailed, was the subject of heated (and often frustrated) debate among Russian administrators. Recipients of the tarkhān were exempted from paying various taxes, which instead fell on the rest of the population. Although many royal orders granting tarkhān status have been published, nothing is known about how these recipients took advantage of the tax privileges.
In April 1868, Captain Mikhailov, the commander of the Ura-tepe division, wrote to the head of the Syr-Darya oblast administration, asking whether a general kharāj rate could be applied to what he simply referred to as mulk land (which probably implies). that it was a variety that had previously been exempted from kharāj), and some of the special tax privileges of its owners were revoked. One in four of the owners has documents from the father of the current Amir, others from the previous owners of the property. In August 1868, Abramov wrote indignantly to von Kaufman that "Some of the natives who receive the revenue from mulk do not even understand the meaning of the term mulk"101 and argued that in the vast majority of cases titles to mulk land were fraudulent.
I suggest to your Excellency that in addition to the documents entitling them to the use of mulks, you also require from those khwājas with pretensions to income from mulk land their genealogical documents, which will then leave no doubt as to the origin of the khwājas. from Hanafie102 and Sayyids from Fatima. It is not entirely clear when and how von Kaufman discovered the importance of the figure of Muḥammad al-Ḥanafiyya in the genealogies of the khwāja. Even if Abram and von Kaufman could be equipped with nasab-nāms, such as related groups of Kazakh origin were still making in the 19th and 20th centuries,109 it seems highly unlikely, given Abram's hostile comments about their influence, that they would have used it as a reason to maintain their tax benefits.
A Legal Fig-leaf?
In August 1869, Colonel Nikolaev's Commission on the Land Question concluded that in cases where there was no documentary evidence of mulk status, all tax benefits would be removed and the land would be treated as amlāk, "state land"; this seems to have been based at least in part on the information that Abramov supplied them with from the Zarafshan Valley.110 Correspondence between Kaufman and Abramov suggests that they were looking for reasons to eliminate the tax privileges associated with the Mulk land, because they thought the income from it have helped sustain dangerous religious elites: a legal justification would not be difficult to find. It dates back to a time before any official reform of the tax administration, and interestingly, the Russians still used officials inherited from the previous regime to collect the kharāj. The shareholders then refused to hand over the share that belonged to them to the owner of the mulka, because they had already given it as land tax.
Too many mulks have changed hands too many times through sale, which in his view made them completely invalid: "There are no mulks in first-hand ownership, none even in the hands of direct descendants of the first and therefore legal owner of the mulk not. Abramov's own land commission, which began work in 1871, found that here most mulk owners had lost (or were hiding) their documents and could not prove their descent from the original beneficiaries of the mulks they claimed Abramov's commission got its information about the existing tax burden from an amlākdār's register (daftar or tetrad'), which suggests that these officials collected kharāj on all types of land there.118 This register also shows that by 1871, at least in some places, a uniform level of kharāj was levied on both amlāk and mulk land, at a rate of 1/5 of the crop.119 In 1872 the question was not yet officially settled, but in practice it appears that kharāj was levied at the same rate of mulk land throughout. from amlāk, despite the protests of owners that it infringed on the privileges they enjoyed before the conquest. Abramov's comments to von Kaufman when the mulkdārs in the large town of Peishambe petitioned against taxation make this clear enough: he said that these were merely expressions of discontent by the wealthier classes of society who were previously evading their fair share of taxes did, and now did everything they could to encourage and organize petitions against the reform of the tax system among the.
Claims by mulk owners that tax demands against them are illegal are widespread. Although in principle the draft plan of the Land Commission recognized mulk-i ḥurr-i khāliṣ as private property "in cases where it was not occupied by foreigners and is in the direct use of the owners", it did not mention nothing else. forms of mulk, or indeed of the continuation of the tax privileges attached to it. It is still unclear to me where the idea arose that mulks could not be transferred by sale, or why the Russians would not accept more recent documents from the Bukharan rulers as proof of the right to exemption from taxation.
Abandoning the Aristocracy?
Instead, they often claimed that a landed aristocracy as such did not exist in Turkestan, at least not as it would be understood in Europe: General Staff Officer L. Kostenko confidently asserted, (perhaps after following Alexander Burnes), that "in Central Asia an aristocracy and in general a privileged class does not exist."131 V. The correspondence between von Kaufman and Abramov reveals that they believed that a considerable part of those landowners claiming tax privileges in the Zarafshan valley were sayyids or khwājas: the idea that lower taxes under the Muslim regimes were closely linked to high religious status was far from entirely erroneous, but what is more important in this context is that the Russians thought this to be the case.133 While wary of interfering directly with waqf, they decided that mulk land could and should be more aggressively pursued, not least because the religious lineages they believed it maintained, was more dangerous than the 'organized' Islam of the mosque or madrasa.
In his posthumously published draft of a new Turkestan charter, von Kaufman recalled that immediately after the invasion, the local population had little faith in Russian authority or justice and looked up to traditional leaders in the countryside, especially the ishans of Sufi brotherhoods. who were trying to whip them into a gazavat or holy war.134 Von Kaufman regarded the entire population of Turkistan as fanatics, but its elites, whether political or clerical, especially so. Von Kaufman, along with many other officers in Turkestan, cut his teeth fighting in the Caucasus, a war which generally seems to have deeply colored Russian attitudes towards Islam, fostered a deep suspicion of all forms of Sufism (or Myuridism , as the Russians called it) and brought about a sea change in the imperial policy of trying to co-opt local elites.135 Once a key tactic in securing newly conquered regions for the Empire, from the second half of the 19th century, the inclusion of local aristocracies in the Russian nobility had been firmly abandoned.136. Instead, the Russians sought to marginalize pre-existing elites when they established what Ronald Robinson called "the non-European foundations of European imperialism" in Turkestan.
Metropole, colony and imperial citizenship in the Russian Empire. Kritika: explorations in Russian and Eurasian history. However, we do not yet know to what extent these elites have succeeded in reconstructing themselves within the structures of the young Russian colonial state, and in the offices it has created or adapted. Khwāja Ahrar: an investigation into the perception of religious power and prestige in the late Timurid period, PhD diss.
Sowing the Seeds of National Strife in this Foreign Region': The Pahlen Report and Pereselenie in Turkestan, 1908–1910. Contested Grounds: Ambiguities and disputes over the legal and tax status of land in the Emirate of Manghit, Bukhara.
