Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: conversion, apostasy, and literacy

In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier's mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples.

The immediate catalyst of the events that Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli chronicles in this book was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region's Kräshens, the Muslim and animist Tatars who converted to Russian Orthodoxy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.