to the caliphate above the Soviet State. The program formed the basis for his book Islam Milletlerine ("To Muslim Nations"; or Islamning Elifbasi, "The Alphabet of Islam", as response to Nikolai Bukharins "Alphabet of Communism") of which 5,000 copies were printed in Berlin in 1923. Following this publication, he was arrested in Moscow while on his way from Petrograd to a conference in India. The Soviets had begun to suppress all forms of religious expression, including "Pan-Turkists" and "Pan-Islamists". His 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 leading newspapers of Istanbul and Ankara published telegrams with pleas to set Bigiev free again. The campaign finally succeeded; 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, Bigiev was included in delegations of Soviet Muslims to the Pan-Islamic Congresses in Mecca and Cairo. On the return trip, he attended several sessions of the Turkish parliament and met the Turkish prime minister İsmet İnönü. After his return, he was also elected by the Leningrad Tatars to become their delegate at a congress of Muslim clergy in Ufa. He returned to Leningrad again in 1927. The political climate had worsened harshly; Bigiev witnessed the League of Militant Atheists and was personally forbidden to leave the country. He was also 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. His wife and four of his children were temporarily arrested. In 1930, after he, his family and other clergymen where deprived of food coupons, he finally decided to secretly leave the country. Exile He first crossed the border into Chinese Turkestan, where he tried to settle down in Kashgar; however, the Chinese government prohibited him from doing so. He then travelled on horseback to Afghanistan, where its ruler Nadir Shah provided him with an international passport. This allowed him to go to India, where he met some of his friends he had made in earlier years. However, he did not stay in India for long, instead starting a period of worldwide travelling. In 1931, he held a