| Russian Influence is Consolidated in Central Asia |
By the end of the nineteenth
century the Muslim populations of central Asia had come under Russian and
Chinese rule. Like the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Germans, and the
Dutch, the Russians and Chinese became rulers of Muslim peoples. From the
Russian and Chinese points of view, the “colonial” problem took the form of
a minority problem. How best could central Asian people be governed and
eventually assimilated into the body of imperial and then soviet Russian, and
Chinese societies? From the Muslim point of view, the problem became how to
define Muslim identity in the face of pressures for assimilation into a foreign
civilization. Nowhere in the Muslim world has colonialism had a more profound
and lasting effect.