Protecting Soviet Muslims: Muhajir Activism and the Minority Treaties, 1917–1934

Abstract

Abstract It is a historiographical convention to view interwar debates over the protection of vulnerable populations through the prism of ‘minority rights’, a regime fashioned by European empires, emerging nation states and the League of Nations. This article challenges that convention by widening the lens to recover actors who, in the 1920s–30s, contested the premises of international protection. Taking the transnational debate over the fate of Soviet Muslims as its principal case study, the article brings together two histories. First, it examines the strategies of Muslim émigrés from the USSR— sometimes in concert with, sometimes against, co-religionists across South Asia and the Middle East —to appropriate, resist and navigate that order in defence of Muslims inside the Soviet state. Second, it foregrounds the Soviet Union’s attempt to re-engineer the post-Versailles minority protection regime by appealing to Muslims under colonial rule. Whether advanced on behalf of ‘minorities’ or ‘majorities’, the language of protection became entangled with claims to sovereignty, the management of religious and social difference, and anti-colonial struggle. More broadly, the article argues that protection— not minority rights alone —offers a sharper and more inclusive framework for understanding the interwar international order and the political-legal templates it bequeathed to the twentieth century.