A.K. Bustanov

The sacred texts of Siberian Khwāja families: the descendants of Sayyid Ata

The descendants of the Prophet Muhammad inherited his charisma and sacred prestige. These properties were shared by his descendants who became the legendary Muslim saints and scholars, also in Central Asia and Siberia, and whose names are connected with the early history of the Islamization of the Siberian Tatars. New manuscripts of a genealogical treatise, which is the main topic of this article, the Shajara risālasī, were recently discovered. An edition (with variant readings) of the Tatar text and an English translation are here offered for the first time. Yasaviyyan influence in Siberia was known to have existed as early as the 17th century. However, critical reading of the genealogical treatise makes it possible to trace back the islamization of the Siberian Tatars by one century. Bukhara and Urgench could be identified as the centres from where this islamization drive of Siberia was launched. The sacred genealogies circulated for about four centuries in the common intellectual space of Central Asia, Eastern Turkestan, Siberia and the Volga-Ural region, untill the Bolshevik reign brought all this to an untimely end.

Muslim Literature in the Atheist State

This article explores the revitalization of interest in Islamic literature in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. A broad picture of the preservation and transmission of religious knowledge in atheistic society appears in the biography of Zainap Maksudova (1897–1980), a scholar of Tatar manuscripts who spent her life collecting and interpreting the written legacy of Muslim intellectuals from the Volga-Urals region. Considering Maksudova’s experiences in religious and academic studies, this article draws attention to a cohort of specialists with similar interests and life experiences. Maksudova was at the forefront of this cohort and produced major works on the intellectual history of Muslims in Inner Russia. Muslim Soviet scholars navigated the difficult terrain between the study of the Islamic past and the ideological structures of the Soviet academic establishment. These specialists also served as a bridge between the circles of religious personnel and secularized academics. Such a bridge enabled the exchange of ideas, establishing a common discourse on the shared past.

Russia’s Islam and Orthodoxy beyond the Institutions: Languages of Conversion, Competition and Convergence

Islam and the Orthodox Church in contemporary Russia are usually studied in isolation from each other, and each in relation to the Kremlin; the latter demands the development of a home-grown and patriotic ‘religious traditionalism, as a bulwark against subversive ‘non-traditional’ imports. This volume breaks new ground by focusing on charismatic missionaries from both religions who bypass the hierarchies of their respective faith organizations and challenge the ‘traditionalism’ paradigm from within Russias many religious traditions, and who give new meanings to the well-known catchwords of Russias identity discourse. The Moscow priest Daniil Sysoev confronted the Russian Orthodox Church with ‘Uranopolitism’, a spiritual vision that defies patriotism and nationalism; the media-savvy Geidar Dzhemal projected an ‘Islamic Eurasianism’ and a world revolution for which Russias Muslims would provide the vanguard; and the Islamic terrorist Said Buriatskii found respect among left- and right-wing Russians through his Islamic adaptation of Lev Gumilevs ‘passionarity’ paradigm. On the other side, Russian experts and journalists who propagate the official paradigm of Russias ‘traditional Islam’ argue from either Orthodox or secularist perspectives, and fail to give content to the concept. This allows even moderate Salafis to argue that their creed is Russias real ‘traditionalist’ Islam. This book was originally published as a special issue of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.

The Language of Moderate Salafism in Eastern Tatarstan

ABSTRACT After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian became the main linguistic vehicle of Islam in Russia. Muslims who still speak in their native languages (such as Tatar, Chechen and Daghestani) now have to face and compete with the powerful growth of ‘Islamic Russian’, a new sociolect of the Russian language, which is characterized by the integration of Islamic terminology, either in loanwords or with Russian substitutes. This article argues that differences in ideology do not predetermine the choice of the linguistic vehicles: a group of Salafis in Tatarstan – so far ignored in scholarship but very active in publishing – employs the Tatar language for its moderate fundamentalist rhetoric to a native audience, and translates its texts into Russian only as a second step, to reach an audience beyond the republic of Tatarstan. While it is usually taken for granted that Salafi ideology comes with an international appeal, these Tatar Salafis’ adherence to the native tongue can be explained by the national movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Dmitriy Yur'evich Arapov (1943–2015)

Many things sprang to mind when we heard that Dmitriy Yur’evich Arapov passed away on 14 December 2015 in Moscow: a disappearing archetype in Russian academic culture; an individual embodying principles of sober and neutral scholarship; a walking encyclopaedia; and simultaneously an extraordinarily helpful colleague, humorous, modest to a fault and unpretentious, despite his characteristic role as a senior authority for younger generations of scholars. Born in Yerevan on 16 May 1943 into a mixed Russian-Armenian family of intellectuals in the field of geology, Dmitriy Yur’evich spent his childhood in Leningrad, home to Russia’s major centres of Oriental studies. Yet it was in Moscow that Arapov would study and pursue his academic career, becoming a leading light of Moscow State University’s History Faculty. In 1966 he graduated with a thesis on sixteenth-century relations between Central Asia and Iran, and in 1978 he defended his dissertation on the Russian Orientalist historiography of the Bukhara Khanate, under the supervision of Georgiy Andreevich Novitskiy (1896– 1981). In conversation he would also acknowledge the mentorship of Petr Ivanovich Petrov (1884–1971), a historian of Safavid Iran who taught at Moscow State University between 1943 and 1971. Just like the famous Bartol’d (under whom Petrov had studied), Arapov always considered himself a historian of Central Asia, although much of his work also concerned the Caucasus. In the 1970s and 1980s he directed annual expeditions of Moscow State University history students to the Soviet republics of Central Asia, mostly to Uzbekistan. Dmitriy Yur’evich Arapov was a rapacious investigator of imperial and Soviet archives, and an outstanding publisher of documentary sources collated from numerous archives. In 2001 and 2006 he published annotated collections of imperial laws and decrees, analytical reports and statistics concerning Islam in tsarist Russia (Arapov 2001a, 2006). His habilitation (doktorskaya) of 2005 was a comprehensive analysis of the official role of Islam in the Russian Empire as a whole, covering not only Central Asia but also the Volga–Urals and the Caucasus (Arapov 2004). One impressive achievement of this work was Arapov’s inquiry into the numerous state projects (both realized and abandoned) to establish regional Muslim Spiritual Administrations, including in the South Caucasus. In the mid-2000s Arapov turned to the study of state–Islam relations in the Soviet period, with financial support from the Marjani Foundation. His archival findings, collected in three volumes (Arapov 2010, 2011; Arapov and Kosach 2010), provided the groundwork for a critical revision of the interpretation of Soviet state–Muslim “clergy” relations spanning the entire Soviet period. Arapov published original source materials as diverse as Soviet state police reports about Muslim personalities and Islamic feasts, Communist Party documents on Islam-related policies, and the teaching programmes in the Soviet madrasa in Bukhara, the Mir-i Arab. These three volumes – and especially Arapov’s diligent commentaries on them –have become a standard reference work for anybody studying Islam in the USSR. One particular aspect of Arapov’s source publications is that they preserve the imperial style of speaking about Islam, offering insights into the formation of the “Russian Islamic lexicon” that not only public officials and academic Orientalists, but also Muslim activists still use