Society
The state was governed by the khan. His actions were based on decisions and consultations of a cabinet council, or Diwan. The nobility comprised the ranks of bäk (beg), ämir (emir), and morza. Military estates consisted of the uğlan (ulan), bahadir, içki (ichki). Muslim clergy also played a major role. They were divided into säyet (seid), şäyex (sheikh), qazí (qazi), and imams. The ulema or clergy played a judicial role, and maintained the madrassas and maktabs (schools).
The majority of the population were qara xalıq (black people): a free Muslim population, who lived on state land. The feudal lands were mostly settled by çura (serfs). Prisoners of war were usually sold to Turkey or Central Asia. Occasionally they were sold within the Khanate as slaves (qol) and sometimes were settled on feudal lands to become çura later. The non-Muslim population of the Khanate were required to pay the yasaq.
Read more about this topic: Khanate Of Kazan
Famous quotes containing the word society:
“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)
“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)
“A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)