Russian Orientalism by David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye

Author:David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye [Oye, David Schimmelpenninck van der]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16289-9
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

The Kazan Theological Academy was the only one of the Russian Orthodox Church’s four senior institutions of higher learning to teach Asian languages and beliefs.105 Like the city’s university, the academy developed this expertise largely because of its pedagogical mandate for the empire’s east. Thus, as had been the case at the university, its orientology had a largely practical aim. But its ultimate objective was different. Instead of training government officials to deal with Asians both within and beyond the Russian Empire’s borders, the academy prepared missionaries to convert unbaptized minorities to Orthodox Christianity (as well as to return Old Believers to the official church). Therefore, its faculty’s perspective on the East was different from that of their secular colleagues at the university.

While the implications of this “missionary orientologist” worldview would seem to be evident, the reality proved to be more complicated. Many of those involved in anti-Islam and anti-Buddhist studies at the Kazan Theological Academy naturally held a strong antipathy to the objects of their scholarship. However, such hostility was by no means inevitable. As the earlier writings of its most prominent orientologist, Nikolai Il’minskii, suggest, even devout Christians could study a rival faith with relative detachment. Il’minskii’s opinions about Islam hardened in his later years, but it is perhaps no coincidence that this enmity only developed when he had largely abandoned the ivory tower for practical missionary work.

If anything, Russia’s best-known missionary orientologist, Father Hyacinth, was perhaps too sympathetic to those he studied. To be sure, he was hardly a faithful member of the church. Often described as “a freethinker in cassock,” he had remained a monk against his will by order of the tsar, and his perspective was distinctly secular. Despite having been praised by subsequent generations of church leaders, his clerical contemporaries hardly encouraged his academic pursuits.

If the contributions of Kazan University to orientology are well known, those of the Theological Academy are considerably more obscure. Surveys of the discipline’s history in Imperial Russia often suggest that serious scholarship of the East in Kazan ended in 1854, while those that do acknowledge its survival at the academy tend to criticize it as overly subjective and reactionary.106 Given both the church’s traditional apathy for proselytization and the low esteem held by many secular academics for Orthodox clergy in the nineteenth century, Kazan’s missionary orientologists faced an uphill battle for intellectual respectability. But it would be going too far to dismiss the academy’s place in Russian orientology altogether. As Mark Batunsky points out, the faculty of its anti-Muslim department “were the first professional Islamologists in the history of the Russian missionary endeavor who sought enthusiastically to substitute scientific methods and stereotypes characteristic of the nineteenth century for widespread, intuitively vague notions about the Muslim religion.”107

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