married Asma Aliye Khanim, daughter of a merchant and madrasah teacher from Chistopol. Afterwards, he moved to St. Petersburg and attended lectures at the Law faculty of St. Petersburg Imperial University as an auditor, in order to be able to compare Islamic and Western legal systems. He also became good friends with Abdurreshid Ibrahim, the editor of the newspaper Ülfät, in which he published several times. Political activist During the Revolution of 1905, Bigiev became actively involved in the founding of the Muslim political organization, and later party, Ittifaq al-Muslimin, starting with the first Congress of the Muslims of Russia, which was held in Nizhny Novgorod in August. He also 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. Bigiev was responsible for providing the protocols of the Ittifaq meetings. After the end of the Revolution, he also worked in publishing (in 1908 editing and publishing his deceased brother's book "A trip to Mesopotamia") and from 1910 onwards as a teacher at the Husayniya madrasah in Orenburg. He also held lectures at the city's philanthropic association (Orenburg Jäm'iyät-i Khayriyäsi) and became secretary of the fourth Muslim congress in 1914. In 1915, he published Islahat Asaslare ("The Fundamentals of Reform"), a catalogue of social and political change among the Muslims of Russia between 1904 and 1915. After his publications in Rizaeddin bin Fakhreddins journal Shura drew immense criticism from the local Ulama, he left Orenburg. Under the Soviets Bigiev welcomed the February Revolution, claiming that "slavery is gone, and will never come back". Even after the takeover by the Soviets, he saw the new regime as a potential ally against what he perceived to be the primary enemy of the Muslims of the world – the British Empire. During the course of the Russian Civil War, Bigiev toured the Volga region together with Abdul Hafiz Mohamed Barakatullah in order to mobilize the Muslim population for military service against the British. He also held close contact with other anti-British Indian activists and arranged for them to live in the Soviet Union. In 1920, 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