The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance

The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance PDF Author: Elena I. Campbell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253014549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
“A major contribution to the history of nationality, religious identity, and governance in late imperial Russia.” —William G. Rosenberg, coauthor of Processing the Past From the time of the Crimean War through the fall of the Tsar, the question of what to do about the Russian empire’s large Muslim population was a highly contested issue among educated Russians both inside and outside the government. As formulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Muslim Question comprised a complex set of ideas and concerns that centered on the problems of reimagining and governing the tremendously diverse Russian empire in the face of the challenges presented by the modernizing world. Basing her analysis on extensive research in archival and primary sources, Elena I. Campbell reconstructs the issues, debates, and personalities that shaped the development of Russian policies toward the empire’s Muslims and the impact of the Muslim Question on the modernizing path that Russia would follow. “Readable, original, and endlessly interesting, Campbell’s book deserves the very highest praise.” —Journal of Islamic Studies “Campbell’s book shows how profound official Islamophobia paradoxically led to the preservation of earlier confessional structures, grudging non-interference with the spiritual and social life of most Muslim communities, a restraining hand on the actions (if not the rhetoric) of Orthodox missionaries, and a certain uneasy toleration.” —Slavonic and East European Review “A major contribution to the understanding of Russia’s ‘Muslim Question’—past and present . . . Recommended.” —Choice

The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance

The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance PDF Author: Elena I. Campbell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253014549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A major contribution to the history of nationality, religious identity, and governance in late imperial Russia.” —William G. Rosenberg, coauthor of Processing the Past From the time of the Crimean War through the fall of the Tsar, the question of what to do about the Russian empire’s large Muslim population was a highly contested issue among educated Russians both inside and outside the government. As formulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Muslim Question comprised a complex set of ideas and concerns that centered on the problems of reimagining and governing the tremendously diverse Russian empire in the face of the challenges presented by the modernizing world. Basing her analysis on extensive research in archival and primary sources, Elena I. Campbell reconstructs the issues, debates, and personalities that shaped the development of Russian policies toward the empire’s Muslims and the impact of the Muslim Question on the modernizing path that Russia would follow. “Readable, original, and endlessly interesting, Campbell’s book deserves the very highest praise.” —Journal of Islamic Studies “Campbell’s book shows how profound official Islamophobia paradoxically led to the preservation of earlier confessional structures, grudging non-interference with the spiritual and social life of most Muslim communities, a restraining hand on the actions (if not the rhetoric) of Orthodox missionaries, and a certain uneasy toleration.” —Slavonic and East European Review “A major contribution to the understanding of Russia’s ‘Muslim Question’—past and present . . . Recommended.” —Choice

Russia's Entangled Embrace

Russia's Entangled Embrace PDF Author: Stephen Badalyan Riegg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501750127
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Russia's Entangled Embrace traces the relationship between the Romanov state and the Armenian diaspora that populated Russia's territorial fringes and navigated the tsarist empire's metropolitan centers. By engaging the ongoing debates about imperial structures that were simultaneously symbiotic and hierarchically ordered, Stephen Badalyan Riegg helps us to understand how, for Armenians and some other subjects, imperial rule represented not hypothetical, clear-cut alternatives but simultaneous, messy realities. He examines why, and how, Russian architects of empire imagined Armenians as being politically desirable. These circumstances included the familiarity of their faith, perceived degree of social, political, or cultural integration, and their actual or potential contributions to the state's varied priorities. Based on extensive research in the archives of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yerevan, Russia's Entangled Embrace reveals that the Russian government relied on Armenians to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. Analyzing the complexities of this imperial relationship—beyond the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians—allows us to study the methods of tsarist imperialism in the context of diasporic distribution, interimperial conflict and alliance, nationalism, and religious and economic identity.

ShariE a in the Russian Empire

ShariE a in the Russian Empire PDF Author: Sartori Paolo Sartori
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474444326
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book looks at how Islamic law was practiced in Russia from the conquest of the empire's first Muslim territories in the mid-1500s to the Russian Revolution of 1917, when the empire's Muslim population had exceeded 20 million. It focuses on the training of Russian Muslim jurists, the debates over legal authority within Muslim communities and the relationship between Islamic law and 'customary' law. Based upon difficult to access sources written in a variety of languages (Arabic, Chaghatay, Kazakh, Persian, Tatar), it offers scholars of Russian history, Islamic history and colonial history an account of Islamic law in Russia of the same quality and detail as the scholarship currently available on Islam in the British and French colonial empires.

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia

Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia PDF Author: Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080145476X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
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.

Culture and Legacy of the Russian Revolution

Culture and Legacy of the Russian Revolution PDF Author: Christopher Balme
Publisher: Frank & Timme GmbH
ISBN: 3732906620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The Russian Revolution of October 1917 was an event of global significance. Despite this fact, public attention and even research mostly focused on Russia and the other states that became part of USSR for many decades. The impact of these dramatic events on other parts of the world was neglected or not systematically explored until recently. And in analyzing the events, political history still dominates the field. This volume, which is largely based on papers presented at the third annual conference of the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, adds to this image some valuable perspectives by exploring the culture as well as the political and cultural legacy of the Russian Revolution. Three focal points are taken here: the revolution’s rhetoric and performance, its religious semantics, and its impact on Asia.

Imperial Russia's Muslims

Imperial Russia's Muslims PDF Author: Mustafa Tuna
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131638103X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.

‘Pre-Islamic Survivals’ in Muslim Central Asia

‘Pre-Islamic Survivals’ in Muslim Central Asia PDF Author: R. Charles Weller
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811956979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
The book traces the conceptual lens of historical-cultural ‘survivals’ from the late 19th-century theories of E.B. Tylor, James Frazer, and others, in debate with monotheistic ‘degenerationists’ and Protestant anti-Catholic polemicists, back to its origins in Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions as well as later more secularized forms in the German Enlightenment and Romanticist movements. These historical sources, particularly the ‘dual faith’ tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, significantly shaped both Tsarist and later Soviet ethnography of Muslim Central Asia, helping guide and justify their respective religious missionary, social-legal, political and other imperial agendas. They continue impacting post-Soviet historiography in complex and debated ways. Drawing from European, Central Asian, Middle Eastern and world history, the fields of ethnography and anthropology, as well as Christian and Islamic studies, the volume contributes to scholarship on ‘syncretism’ and ‘conversion’, definitions of Islam, history as identity and heritage, and more. It is situated within a broader global historical frame, addressing debates over ‘pre-Islamic Survivals’ among Turkish and Iranian as well as Egyptian, North African Berber, Black African and South Asian Muslim Peoples while critiquing the legacy of the Geertzian ‘cultural turn’ within Western post-colonialist scholarship in relation to diverging trends of historiography in the post-World War Two era.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe

Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe PDF Author: James Renton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137413026
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has evolved over time and space. The result is the uncovering of a previously unknown story in which European ideas about Jews and Muslims were indeed connected, but were also ripped apart. Religion, empire, nation-building, and war, all played their part in the complex evolution of this relationship. As well as a study of prejudice, this book also opens up a new area of inquiry: how Muslims, Jews, and others have responded to these historically connected racisms. The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.

Spiritual Subjects

Spiritual Subjects PDF Author: Lale Can
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503611175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of Central Asians made the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Traveling long distances, many lived for extended periods in Ottoman cities dotting the routes. Though technically foreigners, these Muslim colonial subjects often blurred the lines between pilgrims and migrants. Not quite Ottoman, and not quite foreign, Central Asians became the sultan's spiritual subjects. Their status was continually negotiated by Ottoman statesmen as attempts to exclude foreign Muslim nationals from the body politic were compromised by a changing international legal order and the caliphate's ecumenical claims. Spiritual Subjects examines the paradoxes of nationality reform and pan-Islamic politics in late Ottoman history. Lâle Can unravels how imperial belonging was wrapped up in deeply symbolic instantiations of religion, as well as prosaic acts and experiences that paved the way to integration into Ottoman communities. A complex system of belonging emerged—one where it was possible for a Muslim to be both, by law, a foreigner and a subject of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. This panoramic story informs broader transregional and global developments, with important implications for how we make sense of subjecthood in the last Muslim empire and the legacy of religion in the Turkish Republic.

Russia and Central Asia

Russia and Central Asia PDF Author: Shoshana Keller
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487594348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This introduction to Central Asia and its relationship with Russia helps restore Central Asia to the general narrative of Russian and world history.