Musa Bigiev

Musa Jarullah Bigiev (died 28 October 1949) was a Tatar Muslim scholar, theologian, philosopher and publicist, and one of the leaders of the Jadid movement, the Islamic modernist movement in the Russian Empire. ¹ The scholar and Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam Mustafa Sabri gave him, in criticism, the nickname "Luther of Islam". ¹ After an education in Kazan, Bukhara, Istanbul and Cairo, he became a political activist for the Ittifaq, the political organisation of the Muslims of Russia, taught in Orenburg, wrote journalistic texts and translated classic works into Tatar; after emigrating from the Soviet Union he travelled Europe and the Near and Far East while writing and publishing. ¹ The Arabic article calls him Shaykh al-Islam of Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. ²

His birth is disputed in the sources themselves, and the museum states the readings rather than smoothing them over: the English article's lead gives 25 December 1873, its text lists 1870, 1875 and 1873 as the opinions and gives the place as the village of Mishar or the city of Novocherkassk; the Urdu article gives 24 September 1873 in its lead and 24 September 1874 at Rostov in its text; Wikidata carries 1874, 1875 and 1878, with Kikino as birthplace; the Arabic article dates him 1878–1949. ^{1 3 4 2} The record follows 1875, the year used in the titles of the scholarly literature cited by the English article (Kanlidere, 1988; Akhmetova, 2008), at year precision and marked debated. ¹

He was born into a middle-class family as the younger of two brothers; after his father was appointed akhoond the family moved to Rostov-on-Don, and after the father's early death in 1881 his mother, Fatima, provided for the education of Musa and his elder brother Muhammad Zahir Bigiev. ¹ He spent most of his youth studying at madrasas in Kazan, Bukhara, Samarkand, Mecca, Medina, Cairo — where he attended the Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah and was educated by Muhammad Bakhit al-Muti'i — Damascus, Istanbul and Uttar Pradesh in India, where he studied Sanskrit and the Mahabharata. ^{1 3} In 1904 he returned to Russia and married Asma Aliye Khanim, the daughter of a merchant and madrasa teacher from Chistopol, then moved to St. Petersburg and attended lectures at the law faculty of the Imperial University as an auditor, to compare Islamic and Western legal systems. ¹ The Arabic article adds that he was imam of the grand mosque of Petrograd, established a printing press there serving the Arabic, Persian, Tatar, Turkish and Russian languages, and that the press was later confiscated from him. ²

During the Revolution of 1905 he became actively involved in founding the Muslim political organisation Ittifaq al-Muslimin, beginning with the first Congress of the Muslims of Russia at Nizhny Novgorod in August 1905, and took part in the second and third congresses, at which he was elected to the central committee. ¹ From 1910 he taught at the Husayniya madrasa in Orenburg, held lectures at the city's philanthropic association, and was secretary of the fourth Muslim congress in 1914; in 1915 he published Islahat Asaslare ("The Fundamentals of Reform"). ¹ After his publications in Rizaeddin bin Fakhreddin's journal Shura drew immense criticism from the local ulama, he left Orenburg. ¹

He welcomed the February Revolution of 1917. ¹ In 1920, at Ufa, he presented a programme of social reform, "Appeal to the Islamic Nations", to the Muslim religious administration; it formed the basis of his book Islam Milletlerine ("To Muslim Nations"), of which 5,000 copies were printed in Berlin in 1923, and following its publication he was arrested in Moscow. ¹ His arrest provoked a storm of indignation — the Tatars of Finland appealed to the Turkish government, and the leading newspapers of Istanbul and Ankara published pleas for his release — and the campaign succeeded: he was freed on condition of living in Moscow under state surveillance for two years. ¹ In May 1926 he was included in delegations of Soviet Muslims to the Pan-Islamic congresses in Mecca and Cairo, and on the return trip he attended sessions of the Turkish parliament and met Prime Minister İsmet İnönü. ¹ Back in Leningrad in 1927 he found the political climate harshly worsened: he was forbidden to leave the country, was out of work, and his wife and four of his children were temporarily arrested; in 1930, after he and his family were deprived of food coupons, he secretly left the country. ¹

He crossed into Chinese Turkestan but was not permitted to settle in Kashgar, travelled on horseback to Afghanistan, whose ruler Nadir Shah gave him an international passport, and went on to India. ¹ In 1931 he spoke at the World Islamic Congress in Jerusalem, and he visited Ankara, Berlin — where he founded an Islamic publishing house — Finland, Iran and Iraq, where he studied Shia Islam; in 1937 he again visited India, and travelled with Abdurreshid Ibrahim to Japan, China, Java, Sumatra and Singapore. ¹ After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 he was arrested by the British authorities in Peshawar without charge and kept under house arrest until 1945, despite the petition of the ruler of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan; in those years he wrote ten of his major works. ¹ After his release, illness forced several surgeries; in 1948 he travelled to Turkey and from there to Cairo, where he died on 28 October 1949 and was buried at the royal cemetery of the Khedives of Egypt. ^{1 4}

He was officially rehabilitated by the High Court of the Russian Federation in February 1997, and one of Kazan's streets is now named after him. ¹ In 2007 a documentary on his life, The Manuscript and the Fate, was sponsored by the Kunstkamera museum in St. Petersburg, and his Quran translation was reprinted in 2010 from copies saved by descendants. ¹

Bigiev published 64 books and more than 120 essays and articles on theology. ¹ Among the works the article lists are his translations of the Quran and of Hafez's Diwan into Tatar; Tarihu'l Qur'an ve'l-Masahif, on the history of the Quran and its texts; Rahmet-i Ilahiye Burhanlari ("The Storms of God's Clemency"); Insannarning Aqidah Ilahiyatlarena Ber Nazar ("A Glimpse of the People's Belief in God"); Ozin Konnarda Ruza, a book of ijtihad on fasting during long days; his commentary on al-Ma'arri's Luzumiyat; Büyük mevzularda ufak fikirler ("Small Thoughts on Big Issues"); Qavaid-i Fiqhiyya, on the principles of Islamic jurisprudence; and Islahat Asaslare ("The Fundamentals of Reform", 1915). ¹ His best-known polemical work, named by the Arabic article, is al-Washi'ah, against Shia doctrines. ^{2 1}

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum.

His reform position. In his essay Rahmet-i Ilahiye Burhanlari ("The Storms of God's Clemency") Bigiev argued that God would also include unbelievers in his mercy and forgiveness. ¹ The article's Views section dates the essay to Orenburg in 1910, while its own works list dates it 1913; the disagreement is the article's and is stated here rather than resolved. ¹

Criticism from the ulama. The mercy argument elicited criticism from many ulama, including Ismail Gasprinsky. ¹ The Istanbul scholar and Shaykh al-Islam Mustafa Sabri criticised Bigiev for what he called "dangerous and heretical" ideas, was responsible for the banning of three of his works in the Ottoman Empire, and coined for him the epithet "Luther of Islam"; in Sabri's account, European material progress had impressed Bigiev so much that it damaged his confidence in his own civilisation. ¹ The Kadimist (old-method) journal Din vä Ma'ishät carried articles against him in nearly every issue, and fellow reformers also opposed him. ¹

Polemics against Shiism. The English article describes Bigiev as one of "the most notorious Sunnite polemicists against Shiism in the 20th century", on the strength of works such as Al-Washi'ah fi Naqd 'Aqa'id al-Shi'ah, in which he claimed that during his travels in Iraq and Iran he had not met one Shia individual who knew the Quran to a satisfactory level. ¹ The museum records this as the article's characterisation of his polemical writings; it is not a second independent attestation of a school, and his faith is therefore recorded as unknown in his data record. ⁴

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
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