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.

The Volga Tatars

The Volga Tatars
Author: Azade-Ayse Rorlich
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press Publi
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN:

The Volga Tatars is the first Western-language study that investigates the history of the Volga Tatars since the tenth century A.D. The central theme of the book is the shaping and evolution of the identity of these people, focusing on the history of the first non-Christian and non-Slavic people incorporated into the Russian state. The author has clearly defined, for the serious student and the general reader alike, a solid frame of reference in which to place the pre-1917 history of one group of Russia's Islamic people. She has carefully analyzed Tatar history and brilliantly illustrated the relevance of their past with regard to modern events and issues. The book contains an excellent bibliography that draws together a wealth of material hitherto unknown to Western readers and unavailable within any other single source. Rorlich's scholarly and comprehensive study is a welcome addition to the Hoover Institution Press's Studies of Nationalities in the USSR.

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.

The Volga Tatars

The Volga Tatars
Author: Azade-Ayse Rorlich
Publisher: Hoover Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2017-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817983937

The Volga Tatars is the first Western-language study to investigate the history of the Volga Tatars—the earliest non-Christian and non-Slavic people to be incorporated into the Russian state—from the tenth through the twentieth centuries. The rare scholar to access sources in the Tatar language, Azade-Ay&şe Rorlich examines the shaping and evolution of Tatar identity, tracing the people's origins and conquest by the Russians, tsarist attempts to obliterate Tatar culture, and the growth of Tatar nationalism. At once a study of history, culture, religion, and politics, the book presents a solid frame of reference for one of Russia's Islamic peoples both before and after the Russian Revolution and illustrates the relevance of the Tatar past to modern events and concerns.

The Volga

The Volga
Author: Janet M. Hartley
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245645

A rich and fascinating exploration of the Volga--the first to fully reveal its vital place in Russian history The longest river in Europe, the Volga stretches over three and a half thousand km from the heart of Russia to the Caspian Sea, separating west from east. The river has played a crucial role in the history of the peoples who are now a part of the Russian Federation--and has united and divided the land through which it flows. Janet Hartley explores the history of Russia through the Volga from the seventh century to the present day. She looks at it as an artery for trade and as a testing ground for the Russian Empire's control of the borderlands, at how it featured in Russian literature and art, and how it was crucial for the outcome of the Second World War at Stalingrad. This vibrant account unearths what life on the river was really like, telling the story of its diverse people and its vital place in Russian history.

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.

The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity

The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity
Author: Steven Ratuva
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 2044
Release: 2019-08-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789811328978

This handbook provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge analysis of ethnicity through diverse multidisciplinary lenses. It explores numerous aspects of ethnicity and how it is linked to a range of contemporary political, economic and social issues at the global, regional as well as local levels. In a world where globalization has enveloped and transformed societies through economic and financial integration, social media networks, knowledge transfer, transnational travel, technology and education, there is a tendency to frame issues largely from the standpoint of economic, political and strategic interests of the dominant powers. Issues such as ethnic and cultural identity are often ignored partly because they are too complex to deal with. In this regard, the study of ethnicity is critical in delving deeper into people’s worldviews, perceptions of each other, relationships and sense of identification to help us uncover some of the deeper perceptions and meanings of social change as seen and shared by cultural groups as they adapt to the fast-changing world. To better inform ourselves of the complexities of ethnicity and relationship to contemporary global developments and challenges, an approach which is people-centered, balanced, comprehensive and research-based is needed. The multidisciplinary approach of this handbook provides conceptual and empirical narratives across different disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, political studies, cultural studies, media studies, literature, law, development studies and economics, to name a few. It includes comparative case studies from different parts of the world to enrich our understanding of the diverse experiences. The chapters focus on contemporary issues and situations while drawing from historical reflections and lessons. The idea is not only to illuminate the intricacies of ethnic identity, but also to provide innovative ideas to help understand and address some of the contemporary challenges associated with these in our world today.

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.