#mukhlisa bubi

[woman-loving]

On 11 May 1917, just a couple of weeks after the abdication of Nikolai II, the participants of the All-Russia Muslim Congress elected a woman, Mukhlisa Bubi (Mukhliṣa Būbī), as a qāḍī[1] (a Muslim judge) to the Central Spiritual Administration. This was a unique event not only in the history of Russia’s Muslims but also in the whole modern Muslim world.[2] Approximately nine hundred Muslim delegates from different regions of the Russian Empire participated in the Congress of 1-12 May 1917, representing all social, intellectual, and political trends, with Muslim modernists constituting the majority of the delegates.[3] For the first time, 112 Muslim women also participated in a political congress as delegates. These women proposed reforms to women’s political, social, and marital rights, reforms that a special Muslim Women’s Congress had formulated a month earlier; and the issue of women’s rights became one of the most fiercely debated issues at the congress.[4] 

The main concern of the congress was, however, not the women question; rather, the central issue was whether Muslims should strive for cultural or territorial autonomy in the future political structure of Russia. Regardless of their political and intellectual stances, all delegates agreed that sharīʿa and Muslim identity, which differentiated Muslim populations from the Christian population of Russia, must constitute the foundation of any kind of autonomy.[5] The congress decided to transform the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly, the main institution that had represented Muslims in the Russian Empire, into a modernized Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Inner Russia and Siberia. They made the position of muftī subject to elections instead of direct appointment by the Tsar.[6] Also elected, for the first time, were six qāḍīs. In the Administration, muftī and qāḍīs represented a collegiate body. They gathered regularly to hear, discuss, and decide on requests of Muslims to construct new mosques and establish new maḥallas. They also assessed the qualifications of candidates for official religious positions, who had been nominated by maḥalla communities. They also responded to petitions (‘arḍ) on family and inheritance disputes, reassigned cases to local ākhūnds and imāms for further investigation if needed, and controlled the resolution of these cases. 

For one of these qāḍī positions the assembly elected Mukhlisa Bubi – in absentia, for she was not even present at the congress. By May 1917, Mukhlisa was already a well-known and respected woman of religious authority. In 1897 she and her brothers had set up the first girls’ madrasa, in Ij-Bubi, a Tatar village in present-day Tatarstan, Agryz district. This school provided new-method (uṣūl-i jadīd) education to girls of all ages, and trained female teachers. After the government closed the school in 1911, under the pretext that it was a hotbed of Pan-Turkist and Pan-Islamist activities, Mukhlisa was invited to teach at another girls’ madrasa, in Troitsk, where she worked as the principal and a teacher from 1911 to 1917. 

After her election to the office of qāḍī in May 1917, Mukhlisa Bubi directed the newly established Family Department within the Central Spiritual Administration, which dealt with issues of divorce, dower (mahr), marital consent, inheritance, and other legal complaints of women. On subsequent All-Russian Muslim congresses in 1923 and 1926 she was reelected to this position. In the meantime, she continued to write in Islām mäjälläse, the Administration’s Tatar-language journal, on legal and social issues concerning Muslim women. Beginning in the late 1920s, the Bolsheviks started their full-blown repression of Islam in the USSR, and closed almost all mosques and Muslim schools. Like so many other Tatar Muslim activists, intellectuals, and religious scholars, Mukhlisa was accused of being a member of an anti-Soviet bourgeois-nationalist organization, and was executed in 1937. Around that time the Central Spiritual Administration practically ceased operating.[7]   

--Rozaliya Garipova, "Muslim Female Religious Authority in Russia: How Mukhlisa Bubi Became the First Female Qāḍī in the Modern Muslim World," Die Welt Des Islams, 57, 2017.