AEI’s Leon Aron has published a long interesting a review of the book “For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia” in the New Republic this month: Poskrebi russikogo i naydyosh tatarina: scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar. The origin of this quip is uncertain (attributed to Napoleon, it is found in Michelet, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Marx, and Lenin); but its accuracy has made it into something of a Russian proverb. This past summer the adage even found its way into one of Vladimir Putin’s long, surly, preening, and occasionally vulgar monologues disguised as a press conference. The observation about Russia’s largest Muslim people is literally true of some of Russia’s most distinguished families, who trace their origins to the Golden Horde conquerors. Rasputin’s assassin, Prince Felix Yusupov, was from one such family; Vladimir Nabokov, whose ancestor Nabok Murza was a fourteenth-century Russianized Tatar prince of Moskovy, was a scion of another. And the reference to the Tatars certainly is correct in a larger historic sense. Outside of Spain, where the Muslim presence was ended by expulsion at the end of the fifteenth century, the thirteen hundred years of Islam’s continuous presence within its current borders make Russia Europe’s oldest and largest Muslim nation.