Note 75 — Chapter VIII · THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AMONG THE MONGOLS AND TATARS.

The town of Kazan is the chief centre of this missionary activity; a large number of Muslim publications are printed here every year, and mullās go forth from the University to convert the pagans in the villages and bring back to Islam the Tatars who have allowed themselves to be baptised. The increasing number of these Christian Tatars, who have gone to swell the ranks of Islam, has alarmed the clergy of the Orthodox Church, but their efforts have failed to check the success of the mullās.75 Especially since the edict of toleration in 1905, mass conversions have been reported, e.g. in 1909, ninety-one families in the village of Atomva are said to have become Muhammadan,76 and as many as 53,000 persons between 1906 and 1910.77 This propaganda is said to owe much of its success to the higher moral level of life in Muslim society, as well as to the stronger feeling of solidarity that prevails in it;78 moreover, the methods adopted by the Russian clergy, supported by the government, to make the so-called Christian Tatars more orthodox, have caused the Christian faith to become unpopular among them.79 On the other hand, the propaganda of Islam is very zealously carried forward; “every simple, untaught Moslem is a missionary of his religion, and the poor, dark, untaught heathen or half-heathen tribes cannot resist their force. In many villages of baptised aborigines the men go away for the winter to work as tailors in Moslem villages. There they are converted to Islam, and they return to their villages as fanatics bringing with them Moslem ideas with which to influence their homes.”80