This article explores a hitherto unknown incident in the region between Aulie-Ata and Chimkent in the eighteen months following the Andijan Uprising against Russian rule in Central Asia in 1898, in which the late Tsarist Orientalist-Administrator Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin found himself called upon to uproot an imaginary conspiracy. It uses this to explore late Russian imperial attitudes to Islam, and the degree to which, despite his unusual knowledge of Central Asian culture and society, Lykoshin's attitudes were in many ways highly typical of Russian officialdom in this period.