Nation, Language, Islam

Nation, Language, Islam
Author: Helen M. Faller
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2011-04-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9639776904

A detailed academic treatise of the history of nationality in Tatarstan. The book demonstrates how state collapse and national revival influenced the divergence of worldviews among ex-Soviet people in Tatarstan, where a political movement for sovereignty (1986-2000) had significant social effects, most saliently, by increasing the domains where people speak the Tatar language and circulating ideas associated with Tatar culture. Also addresses the question of how Russian Muslims experience quotidian life in the post-Soviet period. The only book-length ethnography in English on Tatars, Russia’s second most populous nation, and also the largest Muslim community in the Federation, offers a major contribution to our understanding of how and why nations form and how and why they matter – and the limits of their influence, in the Tatar case.

Tatar Empire

Tatar Empire
Author: Danielle Ross
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253045738

In the 1700s, Kazan Tatar (Muslim scholars of Kazan) and scholarly networks stood at the forefront of Russia's expansion into the South Urals, western Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. It was there that the Tatars worked with Russian agents, established settlements, and spread their own religious and intellectual cuture that helped shaped their identity in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Kazan Tatars profited economically from Russia's commercial and military expansion to Muslim lands and began to present themselves as leaders capable of bringing Islamic modernity to the rest of Russia's Muslim population. Danielle Ross bridges the history of Russia's imperial project with the history of Russia's Muslims by exploring the Kazan Tatars as participants in the construction of the Russian empire. Ross focuses on Muslim clerical and commercial networks to reconstruct the ongoing interaction among Russian imperial policy, nonstate actors, and intellectual developments within Kazan's Muslim community and also considers the evolving relationship with Central Asia, the Kazakh steppe, and western China. Tatar Empire offers a more Muslim-centered narrative of Russian empire building, making clear the links between cultural reformism and Kazan Tatar participation in the Russian eastward expansion.

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia
Author: Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 080145476X

In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire's Middle Volga region (today's Tatarstan) was the site of a prolonged struggle between Russian Orthodoxy and Islam, each of which sought to solidify its influence among the frontier's mix of Turkic, Finno-Ugric, and Slavic peoples. The immediate catalyst of the events that Agnes Nilufer Kefeli chronicles in Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region's Krashens, the Muslim and animist Tatars who converted to Russian Orthodoxy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.The traditional view holds that the apostates had really been Muslim all along or that their conversions had been forced by the state or undertaken voluntarily as a matter of convenience. In Kefeli’s view, this argument vastly oversimplifies the complexity of a region where many participated in the religious cultures of both Islam and Orthodox Christianity and where a vibrant Krashen community has survived to the present. By analyzing Russian, Eurasian, and Central Asian ethnographic, administrative, literary, and missionary sources, Kefeli shows how traditional education, with Sufi mystical components, helped to Islamize Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples in the Kama-Volga countryside and set the stage for the development of modernist Islam in Russia.Of particular interest is Kefeli’s emphasis on the role that Tatar women (both Krashen and Muslim) played as holders and transmitters of Sufi knowledge. Today, she notes, intellectuals and mullahs in Tatarstan seek to revive both Sufi and modernist traditions to counteract new expressions of Islam and promote a purely Tatar Islam aware of its specificity in a post-Christian and secular environment.

Languages of Islam and Christianity in Post-Soviet Russia

Languages of Islam and Christianity in Post-Soviet Russia
Author: Gulnaz Sibgatullina
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2020-06-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004426450

In her book, Gulnaz Sibgatullina examines the intricate relationship of religion, identity and language-related beliefs against the background of socio-political changes in post-Soviet Russia. Focusing on the Russian and Tatar languages, she explores how they simultaneously serve the needs of both Muslims and Christians living in the country today. Mapping linguistic strategies of missionaries, converts and religious authorities, Sibgatullina demonstrates how sacred vocabulary in each of the languages is being contested by a variety of social actors, often with competing agendas. These linguistic collisions not only affect meanings of the religious lexicon in Tatar and Russian but also drive a gradual convergence of Russia's Islam and Christianity.

The Crimean Tatars

The Crimean Tatars
Author: Brian Glyn Williams
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004121225

This volume provides the most up-to-date analysis of the ethnic cleansing of the Crimean Tatars, their exile in Central Asia and their struggle to return to the Crimean homeland. It also traces the formation of this diaspora nation from Mongol times to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A theme which emerges through the work is the gradual construction of the Crimea as a national homeland by its indigenous Tatar population. It ends with a discussion of the post-Soviet repatriation of the Crimean Tatars to their Russified homeland and the social, emotional and identity problems involved.

Religious Language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab

Religious Language of a Belarusian Tatar Kitab
Author: Shirin Akiner
Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2009
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783447030274

Tatars from the Golden Horde settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 15th-16th centuries. By descent they were Turco-Mongols, by religion Muslim. Within a few generations they lost their native language(s) and spoke only Belarusian and Polish. In order to record and hand on the essentials of their faith they translated essential religious works into Belarusian Polish. These languages were normally written in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets - 'Christian' scripts and so unsuitable for Islamic texts. The Tatars therefore devised their own system of orthography, using Arabic letters to convey the phonology of the Slav languages. They also created a religious vocabulary that was suited to the expression of Islamic ideas. For general ethical concepts they drew on Belarusian and Polish, but for terms relating to Islamic doctrine and practice they used Arabic loanwords, 'Slavicising' them morphologically and phonetically. This linguistic fusion represents a remarkable cultural monument of Islam in Europe. The first part of the present work traces the six-hundred year history of the Tatars in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania - a territory now divided between Belarus, Lithuania and Poland. It draws on a wide range of sources, including contemporary accounts in Latin, Old Russian, medieval French, Polish, Italian and Turkish. The second part consists of a detailed study of a Tatar manuscript (Kitab) held in the British Library. Extracts of such manuscripts have previously appeared in print, but this is the first full-length examination of a Tatar text. The main language is Belarusian (mixed standard and dialect forms), and in places heavily Polonized.A CD-ROM with a Latin-script transliteration of the entire Belarusian-Polish British Library Kitab is included in the sleeve of the book.

Terrains of Exchange

Terrains of Exchange
Author: Nile Green
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190222530

Drawing together Indian and Iranian Muslims with Christian missionaries, Hindu nationalists and Japanese imperialists, this book brings to life the local sites of globalisation that transformed Muslim religiosity through the long nineteenth century. Nile Green evokes terrains of exchange that range from the Russian empire's borderlands to the Indian princely states and the car factories of Detroit. He casts a microhistorian's eye on the religious productions that spilled from these many sites of contact. Whether looking at imperial evangelicals and Iranian language-workers, or Indian Muslims and Yogi masters of breath control, each chapter unravels local forces of religious contact, competition and exchange. Green draws on a huge range of materials, from Indian magazines for African Americans to Muslim Japanology; from Urdu tales of ocean-going saints to the diaries of German missionaries; from Bibles in Tatar to the first Arabic printed books. Challenging perceptions of an age usually identified with the unifying ideologies of Pan-Islamism and nationalism, his book reveals more muddled human terrains in which Muslims defended, reformed and promoted in an increasingly connected world. Terrains of Exchange presents not only global history from the bottom up but global history as Islamic history.

Russian Hajj

Russian Hajj
Author: Eileen Kane
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501701304

In the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of imperial conquest and a mobility revolution, Russia became a crossroads of the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. The first book in any language on the hajj under tsarist and Soviet rule, Russian Hajj tells the story of how tsarist officials struggled to control and co-opt Russia's mass hajj traffic, seeing it as not only a liability but also an opportunity. To support the hajj as a matter of state surveillance and control was controversial, given the preeminent position of the Orthodox Church. But nor could the hajj be ignored, or banned, due to Russia's policy of toleration of Islam. As a cross-border, migratory phenomenon, the hajj stoked officials' fears of infectious disease, Islamic revolt, and interethnic conflict, but Eileen Kane innovatively argues that it also generated new thinking within the government about the utility of the empire's Muslims and their global networks.