25 Facts About Musa Bigiev

Musa Bigiev taught in Orenburg, wrote journalistic texts and translated classic works into Tatar.

Musa Bigiev was born into a middle-class family as the younger of two brothers.

Musa Bigiev spent most of his youth studying at madrasas in Kazan, Bukhara, Samarkand, Mecca, Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul and Uttar Pradesh in India, where he studied Sanskrit and the Mahabharata.

Musa Bigiev became good friends with Abdurreshid Ibrahim, the editor of the newspaper Ulfat, in which he published several times.

Musa Bigiev participated in the second and third congresses of 1905 and 1906, where he was elected as a member of the central committee of the parliamentary group in the Duma.

Musa Bigiev was responsible for providing the protocols of the Ittifaq meetings.

Musa Bigiev held lectures at the city's philanthropic association and became secretary of the fourth Muslim congress in 1914.

Musa Bigiev held close contact with other anti-British Indian activists and arranged for them to live in the Soviet Union.

In 1920, Musa Bigiev could be found in Ufa, where he presented a program for social reform with the title of "Appeal to the Islamic Nations" to the members of the Muslim religious administration; this included the allegiance of the Russian Muslims to the caliphate above the Soviet State.

Musa Bigiev's arrest provoked a storm of indignation; for example, the Tatars of Finland requested the assistance of the Turkish government, which at that time was on friendly terms with the new Soviet regime.

The campaign finally succeeded; Musa Bigiev was freed on the condition that he was to live in Moscow under state surveillance for two years.

Several years later, in May 1926, Musa Bigiev was included in delegations of Soviet Muslims to the Pan-Islamic Congresses in Mecca and Cairo.

The political climate had worsened harshly; Musa Bigiev witnessed the League of Militant Atheists and was personally forbidden to leave the country.

Musa Bigiev was out of work; he continuously applied to the scholar Ignaty Krachkovsky as a teacher of Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages at Leningrad University, and in 1929 even applied to the government of Afghanistan for a job.

Musa Bigiev first crossed the border into Chinese Turkestan, where he tried to settle down in Kashgar; however, the Chinese government prohibited him from doing so.

Musa Bigiev then travelled on horseback to Afghanistan, where its ruler Nadir Shah provided him with an international passport.

Musa Bigiev visited Ankara, Berlin, Finland and Iran and Iraq, where he studied Shia Islam.

Musa Bigiev resumed his tour in 1937, again visiting India, more specifically Bombay and Benares.

Musa Bigiev was then invited by Abdurreshid Ibrahim to Japan; the two travelled together to China, Java, Sumatra and Singapore.

The ruler of Bhopal, Hamidullah Khan, petitioned for his release, but Musa Bigiev was kept under house arrest until 1945.

Musa Bigiev was buried at the Royal Cemetery of the Khedives of Egypt.

Musa Bigiev was officially rehabilitated by the High Court of the Russian Federation in February 1997.

The influence of Musa Bigiev was felt beyond the Russian Empire, for example in Istanbul, where the scholar Mustafa Sabri Efendi criticized Musa Bigiev for his "dangerous and heretical" ideas and was responsible for the ban of three of his works in the Ottoman Empire.

Musa Bigiev has been described as one of "the most notorious Sunnite polemicists against Shiism in the 20th century", along with such figures as Muhibb-ud-Deen Al-Khatib and Ehsan Elahi Zaheer.

Musa Bigiev wrote extensively; for example, he published 64 books and more than 120 essays and articles on theology.