The Alimov family of ishans

The Alimovs are a Mišär family of imams and ishans from the village of Kuy Suvõ (Russian: Ovechy Ovrag) in the Sergach country of the Nizhny Novgorod province — the same Mišär heartland from which the ancestors of the Estonian and Finnish Tatars came. The family produced teachers of the village's ancient madrasa, the most famous Sufi sheikh of the Nizhny Novgorod region, and the founder and first imams of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque; two of its members perished in the repressions of the Soviet occupation authorities.

What an ishan is

In the Islam of the Volga–Ural region an ishan is a Sufi sheikh — a spiritual teacher around whom a circle of followers gathered and whom the people revered as a holy man. On the Volga the ishans carried above all the tradition of the Naqshbandi brotherhood. An ishan's authority came not from office but from his chain of teachers and personal piety; his grave or home could become a place of pilgrimage. In Mišär villages the ishan was often also the imam and the madrasa teacher (mudarris) — as in the Alimov family.

The village of Kuy Suvõ and the family's roots

The family's earliest known ancestor is Abdulzhalil Bikkinin (b. c. 1769), imam of the first mosque of Kuy Suvõ from 1787 and mudarris of the village madrasa — one of the oldest schools in the south of the Nizhny Novgorod province. His son Yunus (1793–1852) continued in his father's office. From Abdulzhalil's descendants branched several clerical lines: the Abdulzhalilovs, who produced the ishan Sadek, and the Alimovs — the descendants of Abdulzhalil's son Alim, who became the imams of the Moscow mosque.

The ishan Sadek-abzi (1829–1886)

The family's most famous cleric is Yunus's son Sadek Abdulzhalilov, known as Sadek-abzi — a Naqshbandi sheikh, scholar, philosopher and mudarris of the Kuy Suvõ madrasa. He is held to be the best-known ishan of the 19th-century Nizhny Novgorod region, famous among all its Mišärs to this day: visiting his house — in tradition the “house of the saints” (izgelär jortõ) — has survived as a pilgrimage custom into our own time.

Bedretdin Alimov and the Moscow Cathedral Mosque

Alim's son Bedretdin Alimov moved to Moscow, where he became mullah of the city's second Muslim congregation. In 1894 he submitted the first petition to build a new mosque; permission came in 1903, and the mosque — today's Moscow Cathedral Mosque — rose remarkably fast, from May to November 1904. Bedretdin was its first imam-khatib. On 3 February 1910 he led the Moscow Muslims' delegation at the laying of the foundation stone of the Saint Petersburg mosque. By the family account he died between 1910 and 1912; the mosque's official chronicle ties the end of his service to 1913. (The life years “1870–1937” circulating on the English Wikipedia contradict these sources — his eldest son was born already in 1866.)

The sons: imams between two regimes

Bedretdin had five sons, to whom he gave a religious education:

• Safa (Muhammed-Safa) Alimov — the eldest son, the mosque's second imam-khatib and mudarris; on his initiative a wooden madrasa building rose beside the mosque in 1912–1913. On his fate the sources diverge: the mosque's official chronicle gives his years as 1866–1913, but the family tradition holds that in the early 1920s he was deported to the Solovki prison camp, where he perished in 1921, and the family remembers him as a martyr.

• Abdurakhman Alimov (1873–1928) — the second son; in 1903–1904 he collected donations for the mosque's construction as far as China, studied six years in Arabia and spoke French; he served the mosque as muezzin and mullah. The Cheka interrogated him at the Lubyanka through two nights and demanded he renounce his faith; he refused, suffered a stroke that same night, and died ten days later, in February 1928.

• Salahetdin Alimov — returned to the home village, where from 1914 he was imam of the second mosque of Kuy Suvõ; he organised relief work during the First World War and remained the village mullah in Russia under Soviet rule.

• Fateh Alimov — lived in Moscow.

Legacy

The Moscow Cathedral Mosque the Alimovs built remained one of the very few working mosques in all of Russia under the Soviet occupation authorities, and it works to this day. The family's memory was carried on by Abdurakhman's daughter Sufia Alimova (b. 7 April 1917 in Moscow), whose family archive preserved some forty rare photographs from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; her recollections are among the main sources of this story.

Connection to the Estonian Tatars

No direct documented link between the Alimovs and Estonian Tatar families is known. Their story is here because it shows the very world the Estonian Mišärs came from: the villages of the Sergach country, the network of imams and madrasas of the Nizhny Novgorod province, and the migrations of the service Tatars' descendants to the great cities of the empire. The ancestors of the Estonian Tatars walked the same road — village, madrasa, merchant city; the Saint Petersburg imam Muhammed-Zarif Yunusov and Bedretdin Alimov are both fruits of this same Mišär clerical culture.

Sources

This article draws on the Moscow Cathedral Mosque family history (muslim.ru, based on the recollections of Sufia Alimova), the mosque's official history (dumrf.ru, mihrab.ru), the biographical dictionary of the Nizhny Novgorod Tatars (nizhgar-tatar) and the Medina publishing house study of ishanism as the Sufi tradition of the Middle Volga (J. Guseva). Where the sources diverge (Safa Alimov's death; Bedretdin's life years), the divergence is stated in the text. It also rests on this knowledge base's pages: The Mišärs' road to Tallinn, the Nizhny Novgorod migration and the service Tatars.