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A scholarly consensus has yet to be reached as to the identity of Sharīf al-Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī. Relying on similarity of names, most researchers have assumed that the work was written by sayyid Qul Sharīf, the alleged author of Qiṣṣa-yi Ḥubbī khwāja, who was killed during the Russian siege of Kazan in 1552.8 Il'ia Zaitsev, meanwhile, tentatively suggests that the work might have been composed in Astrakhan by mawlāna Sharīf al-Dīn Ḥusayn Sharīfī, the author of Jaddat al-ʿāshiqīn.9 This hypothesis is based on the evidence that in 1549 Sharīf al-Dīn's father Kamāl al-Dīn Khwārazmī (d. 1551) travelled from Samarqand to Aleppo via Ḥājjī Tarkhān/Astrakhan, thus passing through the Volga region around the time of events related in Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān. According to Zaitsev, Sharīf al-Dīn Ḥusayn Sharīfī could have been the author of this work and hence called himself in the manuscript Sharīf al-Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī, while Qul Sharīf, the defender of Kazan, was a different historical figure. Il'ias Mustakimov opposes this argument, arguing that Sharīf al-Dīn Ḥusayn could not have witnessed the events in Kazan because he was on the hajj trip with his father when the events in question unfolded.10 While for Mustakimov, as for most Tatar historians, Qul Sharīf and Sharīf al-Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī remain one and the same figure, Togan describes Qul Muḥammad Sayyid, a defender of the citadel's fourth entrance and the leader of local Sufis, and Sharīf, the author of the Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān, as two distinct individuals.11 This uncertainty regarding the identity of the author has to do with the scarcity of our sources on the history of the Kazan Khanate. Very few written testimonies have survived and very few scholars have explored those that have. 12  rather modest,13 it is the very content of Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān and the manner in which its first publisher presented it that has contributed to the relative marginality of this source in scholarship on Islam in Central Eurasia.14 Il'ia Zaitsev is one of the few scholars who has not relied solely on Togan's edition of the source, but tried to engage with the original manuscript and suggested some alternative readings of names mentioned by Sharīf. On the basis of Russian chronicles, Zaitsev managed to identify three chief defenders of Kazan in 1550, all of them members of the Crimean aristocracy: Qozïjaq oghlan, Barbulsun atalïq, and Torchi bik. They fled the city in 1551, but were soon captured by Russians. Sharīf praised in his work the brave hero Aq Muḥammad ughlan, whose biography Zaitsev followed on the basis of Russian sources: in 1551 Aq Muḥammad managed to escape to the Noghay Horde and then to Crimea, where he occupied prominent positions at the court up to 1577.15 Zaitsev's seminal works remain the only ones in Russophone scholarship that take the Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān seriously as a source on the history of Kazan Khanate and substantiate its account by cross-referencing it with Russian documents and chronicles.
Let us now return to the question of how Togan conceptualized the significance of this hitherto-unknown historical source. Togan situated the Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān with reference to a number of themes, the most significant of these being the idea of the holy war against the infidels (ghazā). By emphasizing the author's pious rhetoric against the 'cursed infidels, ' Togan proposed  Even if Kazan did not, in fact, originally derive its name from Ghazan Khan, it is nevertheless telling that, as we shall see, its name was often rendered in Islamicate sources as 'Ghazan' . Togan was among the first scholars to identify the link between this latter rendering and the city's longestablished associations with Ghazan Khan and other transregional religious connections.23 The first instances where we encounter references to the city of 'Ghazān' are sixteenth-century khanal chancellery documents. The earliest such document dates from 1523, and is a conferral of fiscal immunity (yarlïgh) issued by Kazan Khan Ṣāḥib Garāy, referring to "the areas of Ghazān and the blessed properties" (wilāyat-i Ghazān wa mamālik maḥrūsa). Il'ias Mustakimov read this chancellery formula as a sign of Ilkhanid courtly influence.24 Based on this evidence, Il'ia Zaitsev was first to observe that the author of the Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān used a similar formulation in referring to the land (wilāyat) of Bulghar.25 Similar such references to the city of Ghazān as the center of a distinct land or region thereafter proliferated in the writings of Volga-Ural Muslim scholars. To give a reader the sense of persistence with which madrasa-educated individuals continued to associate their main city with Ghazan Khan and the holy wars even in the Soviet Union, let me provide a series of examples.
As early as 1104 , Qadīr Muḥammad b. mullah Shaykh Muḥammad produced a copy of a Persian legal manual Tarjama-yi mukhtaṣar, identifying the place of composition as 'Ghazān, in the territory of Bulghar.'26 This manuscript is one of the rare instances of book production in the Tatar quarter of Kazan after the fall of the Khanate. Interestingly, the former capital features in the book's colophon27 as part of the imagined Bulghar land28 and not as a political centre of either an imperial district or the historical Kazan Khanate. Further development of manuscript culture in the region provided more opportunities for developing a new spatial framework for the Volga-Urals' Muslim culture. For example, one early 18th-century copy of Gulistān by Saʿdī notes that it was copied in Baranga village (qāriya) of the Alat district (al-ṭarīq) of the Bulghar domain (wilāyat).29 Another Persian book dated to 1780 in the Christian era (masīḥiya) follows the same pattern: 'in Bugadï village of Kazan district (rāh) of Ufa domain.' The copyist adds here the exact institutional setting, namely the madrasa of mullah Muḥammad Ḥanīfa b. Ṣālih.30 Both colophons refer to a district by using a word for 'road' (Arabic al-ṭarīq; Persian rāh). In both instances, this seems to be a calque for the Russian word doroga, which by the The territorialized use of the word 'road' in Muslim manuscript production thus reflected a discourse of spatiality as developed at the early stage of entanglement of Russian and Muslim conceptualizations of the region. Although the Russian empire subsequently abandoned the doroga as an administrative unit, Muslim copyists continued to use the word 'road' to mean 'district' , thus establishing an alternative mental geography, distinct from the changing colonial administrative vocabulary.31 The colophons of early Tatar manuscripts also contain the names of copyists, but rarely mention their nisbas, the spatial attributive names that would connect an individual to a place on the map. The Muslim authors writing near Kazan in the early 18th century, such as Murtaḍā al-Simitī, would be referred to as al-Ghazānī.32 One manuscript colophon reads as follows: "this noble book has been copied by the poorest of men ʿAbdullāh b. Muslim b. ʿAlī al-Urālī at the madrasa akhund ʿAbd al-Salām b. Uz Muḥammad al-Ghazānī in Qarghālā settlement [near Orenburg] in 1164 [1750/51]."33 In this and other such colophons, explicit references to places were replaced by attributive names that show the migration of Tatar population to the South Urals in the mid-18th century. While the teacher is clearly defined as coming from Ghazān/Kazan, the village of Qarghala is not yet spatially situated. The long process of figuring out of how to conceptualize these new settlements was accompanied by formulating alternatives: either to think of these categories as part of the Bashkir lands or to integrate them into the realm of Bulghar.
The 19th-century Arabic-script epitaphs similarly included the attributive name al-Ghazānī as referring to the entire region of Muslim settlements near Kazan, as in the case of the gravestone of imam Sulaymān b. Muḥammad  Nadhīr al-Ghazānī al-Sharīfī erected at the cemetery of Tübän Orï in 1836.34 Another gravestone inscription dated 1906 belongs to the hand of the calligrapher ʿAbd al-Bārī al-Bārūdī al-Ghazānī, who lived in the city of Kazan but the tombstone with his epitaph was placed at the graveyard of the village of Pändälgä in Penza region.35 The same observation holds true for manuscript copying: throughout the 19th century multiple scribes in and near Kazan continued to identify their home city as Ghazān.36 By the end of the century, references to the city of Ghazān appeared not just in the learned discourse of 'ulama in Inner Russia but also in the ordinary writings of urbanites on topics such as medicine and the occult (Figure 1). One possible reason for keeping up the tradition was that the region continued to be a religious frontier: the Russian Orthodox mission constructed its own narrative of Kazan as an important center of Christianity and Muslims responded by finding ways to retain their distinctiveness and epistemological autonomy.37 Strikingly, references to the city of Ghazān continued right up to the Great Terror of the 1930s. The old inventories of Islamic manuscripts held at Kazan University Library contain a traditional colophon, written in Arabic in 1935: However anachronistic this evocation of ancient city titles (in particular, the term al-maḥrūsa features on coins as an attribute of the Golden Horde cities,39 also used by Sharīf al-Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī on fols. 60a, 61b) and chronologies might seem for the time of Great Terror in Russia, the sense of Muslim mental mapping was still very much part of the individual self-consciousness, so strong that it could even enter the Soviet archival documentation.
To contextualize the ghazā motif of Sharīf's work Togan tried to establish a link between the author and the Yasawī legacy: he suggests that the Yasawī shaykhs were somehow more inclined towards the holy battles for the sake of religion than members of other spiritual brotherhoods. However, attributing the articulation of holy war exclusively to the Yasawī profile cannot be completely accurate. In fact, we know little about the presence of Yasawīs in the Volga-Urals before the arrival of the Naqshbandiyya mujaddidiyya in the late 18th century.40 Tatar philologists celebrate the poet Mawlā Qolïy, who was active in the mid-17th century, as someone initiated into a Yasawī tradition.41 His written oeuvre, however, does not allow us to specify what exactly stood behind this affiliation. More evidence can be mined from the numerous works related to Dawlat Shāh al-Ispijābī (d. 1714), a Yasawī shaykh with followers in Tobolsk and Bulghar. He was a figure featuring prominently in a variety of ghazā narratives in both the Volga-Urals and Siberia. Al-Ispijābī was a prolific author and an important itinerant Sufi, whose writings contain some treatment of the topic of jihad.42 An autograph of his work Abwāb al-jinān (1709), in particular, contains a statement that the manuscript was sent by the author to his brethren in villages near Bulghar (Figure 2), thus attesting to a Yasawī presence in the region.43 A commonality of religious traditions in Western Siberia and the Volga-Urals is of special importance for us here, because Togan suggested that some features of the text's language reveal commonality with the language of Siberian Tatars.44 For him these linguistic aspects served as an argument for the cultural unity that existed among the populations of the late Golden Horde. Commonalities do not end here, however. Sharīf claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad and belonged to the category of sayyids.45 Moreover, the text identifies him as a descendant of Sayyid Ata, a prominent figure of Yasawī hagiographies, whose spiritual offspring were also active among the Muslims of Siberia starting from the 1570s.46 The conversion narratives composed in Siberia between the mid-17th and mid-18th centuries, which give al-Ispijābī credit for establishing the cult of sacred sites in the region, portray the motif of holy war against the infidels for the spread of Islam as central to the entire narrative.
As I have shown elsewhere, the Siberian conversion narratives derived their inspiration directly from the 14th-century Yasawī accounts from the region of Middle Syr Darya.47 Interestingly, some Yasawī hagiographies continued to circulate in Tatar  to do this, however, there was no need for Muslim scholars and activists to associate themselves with the Yasawīs or any other brotherhood. Although Togan suggests that there was a particular association between the Yasawīs and ghazā in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, we know that in later epochs the idea of jihad was widespread, and in no way confined just to one or other concrete Sufi affiliation.50 Some scholars and Sufis would still request writings on the holy war and fights for the spread of Islam.51 There is also evidence for the broad popularity of tales about the caliph 'Alī, who was portrayed as a warrior against infidels, in the second half of the 19th century.52 There is no Thus, writing about ghazā and Ghazān continued for centuries after Sharīf's death. This was despite the fact that both Sharīf himself and the Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān soon faded into obscurity. It is of no surprise, because the manuscript discovered by Togan is the only known copy of this work that had been completely inaccessible to Muslim authors in Russia. Despite the stable popularity of non-conformist narratives throughout the 18th and 19th centuries resulting in the waves of pious emigration to Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire, to the best of my knowledge not a single Muslim author in imperial Russia made use of the figure of Sharīf or tried to expand on his ideas simply because his legacy was not available to them. When Shihāb al-Dīn al-Marjānī describes the discovery in 1814/15 of a gravestone that belonged to a Muslim martyr who perished 'at the hands of the infidels' and its placement in the main prayer room of the First Stone Mosque of the city (later called the Marjānī mosque), neither does he evoke the figure of Sharīf, nor his ghazā narrative.53 At the turn of the 20th century, Tatar nationalist sentiment elevated the figure of Süümbikä (b. ca. 1521), a Kazan princess captured by Russians before the final siege, to symbolize the melancholy of the defeated and all the pain of Tatars' losing their statehood;54 this served to confer upon the fall of Kazan a mournful, elegiac mood, rather than the idea of heroic struggle as conveyed in Sharīf's work. The memory of warriors defending the city, who perished in the citadel, was not in demand for the national narratives simply because their symbolism of pride did not match the emotional register of trauma. Eventually, modern Tatar nationalism has turned Ghazān ( While the ghazā theme understandably occupies the central position in Sharīf's historical work, Togan's decision to work on the ẓafar nāma may have been informed by personal concerns, which perhaps had some influence on the way how his discoveries were received in Soviet Russia and the post-Soviet republics. The Bolshevik regime left him no chance of returning to his home country, where in his youth he strived to help establish a new political order that  Kharun Iusupov (1914-1968.58 Togan was certainly aware of the historical prominence of Muslim graveyards in the Volga-Urals as well as of the Tatar historiographical tradition in the study of these locales.59 He repeatedly refers to the rich epigraphic material gathered by Iusupov to demonstrate the Muslim legacy of Kazan Tatars, whose very name, Togan insisted, was not borrowed from the Russians in the 19th century, but rather was already attested in the mid-16th-century Ottoman sources.60 In his article, Togan avoids the discussion that took place among the Soviet linguists as to whether the language of Bulghar inscriptions should be identified as an early form of Chuvash or Tatar, simply relying here on the authority of Iusupov.61 55 On the involvement of Muslims in revolutionary events and the Civil War: Salavat Iskhakov, Rossiiskie musul'mane i revoliutsiia (vesna 1917-leto 1918)  Thanks to the Iron Curtain, Togan's publication of Sharīf al-Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī's commemoration of victory remained inaccessible to researchers in Soviet Russia, but Turkish scholars continued the study of this source. Akdes Nimet Kurat (1903Kurat ( -1971, a Tatar émigré historian in Istanbul, published the first Turkish translation of the work, while Ayşe Melek Özyetgin analysed the source philologically and offered a translation into modern Turkish.62 This latter work, in particular, helped lay the foundation for the first Tatar publications that saw the light in the course of the 1990s,63 the era of substantial political and economic autonomy of the Republic of Tatarstan. 64 The new wave of Tatar nationalism and cultural rapprochement with Turkey enabled an elevation in status for the author of the Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān. Following the opinion of their Turkish colleagues, Tatar historians now identified Sharīf al-Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī with Qul Sharīf, the leader of the city's defence during the last siege before the city's capture in 1552, whose name features in Russian sources. Since its inception in October 1989, the annual commemorative march, the Day of Memory (khäter köne), in the city center has become a regular public manifestation of Tatar nationalism. For years, this event has been attracting thousands of citizens. What is commemorated, however, is not the glorious heroism that Sharīf described in his narrative, but the dramatic events of the Russian conquest and the melancholy of modern nationalism embodied in the figure of Süümbikä. The prominence of 1552 in memory politics of sovereign Tatarstan made Qul Sharīf's figure central as a political symbol of the new mode of relationships between Kazan and Moscow. This symbolism has rapidly taken shape in stone: in 2005 the Qul Sharīf mosque was erected within the walls of the Kazan Kremlin (a related decree was published by the President jesho 65 (2022) 1058-1079 Mintemer Shaimiev already in 1995), more than four centuries after the last call to prayer on this hill. Since then, regardless of its political message, the mosque has become a commonly accepted symbol of the city and the republic. This is despite the fact that, with a new turn of centralization of power under Putin, the political and even religious status of the Qul Sharīf mosque has started to decline. At the time of writing, in winter 2022, the Tatarstani government has been in consultations about the construction of a new Congregational Mosque in Kazan to celebrate the 1100th anniversary of the Bulghars' conversion to Islam.65 In the new political environment, the creation of this new mosque might serve to marginalize the old one. The Qul Sharīf mosque and public celebrations of the Day of Memory will only remain a reminiscent of the republic special status in Yeltsin's Russia. There is no surprise, therefore, that even the research on Ẓafar nāma-yi wilāyat-i Qazān has largely stopped: today there is still no direct translation into Russian or Tatar made from the manuscript original and no in-depth study of the text. 66