Abstract
This article examines the relationship between religious identity, language, and educational experience in the context of the Russian Empire’s educational and Orthodox missionary policies in the Kazakh Steppe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The primary objective of the study is to analyze the spiritual-cognitive resilience of traditional Islamic educational institutions in response to the policy of Orthodoxization and Russification implemented by the tsarist administration through the system of Nikolai Ilminsky. The author examines the phenomenon of colonial diglossia which emerged during this period, wherein Russian-Christian texts were increasingly elevated as the administrative "High-variant," while the Kazakh-Turkic identity, rooted in Islamic values, was positioned as the "Low-variant." The article argues that the methodology of instruction using the Arabic script in traditional qadim schools contributed to the formation of a resilient cognitive framework that helped preserve Islamic religious identity in the face of Orthodox missionary efforts. Furthermore, it illustrates how the early generation of Kazakh intellectuals (the Alash elite), who emerged amidst this dual systemic pressure, negotiated the constraints of colonial diglossia to develop a bilingualism that combined Western analytical tools with an Islamic-national identity. This research is situated at the intersection of the sociology of religion, postcolonial studies, and psycholinguistics.