Questions for reading response to Robert Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” The American Historical Review, 108, 1 (February 2003), 50-83. Crews Empire and Confessional State.pdf

Please provide short answers to the following questions and upload or cut and paste them here. If you provide a direct quotation, make sure to include the page number!

1. In the first part of the article, Crews describes the Russian Empire as a “confessional state”. What does he mean by this term?
2. Also in the first part of the article, Crews describes how, beginning in the late eighteenth century with tsar Catherine II (‘the Great’), the Russian Empire attempted to impose more control over the lives of its Muslim inhabitants, in ways that were similar to how it dealt with Russian subjects of other faiths. What is ONE of the main ways in which the Russian state attempted to regulate the affairs of Muslims (be as specific as possible)?
3. From page 67 on, Crews provides numerous examples, based on primary sources, of the ways in which Muslims in the Russian Empire called on the state for intervention in their own communal and domestic affairs. List THREE examples that you found particularly interesting, along with the page numbers on which you found these examples.
4. Optional: Do you have any questions after reading this piece?