This book covers the developing and important issue of the role and place of Islam in the increasingly complex dynamics of Russian politics. It is achieved by examining various aspects of Islam and Muslims in Russia from a multidisciplinary perspective. Islam and Muslims are currently at the forefront of popular culture, mass media and political imaginations in the age of the ‘Global War on Terrorism’. Frequently, these are for the ‘wrong’ reasons as they are not well understood, but rather stereotypically misrepresented, often for various political reasons. Russia is also highly stereotyped; the diverse and mysterious country is often misunderstood in terms of the communicated cultural, social and political images. This book is an attempt to expose and analyse the wealth in diversity of Islam and Muslims in Russia, a country where different religions have occupied the same political spaces, for better and worse, for many centuries. The content of this book is focused upon the contemporary social, political, cultural and identity contexts of Russia in terms of the interrelated dynamics and forces that are shaping the relations and place of Islam and Muslims in Russia today. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Religion, State & Society.

This book covers the developing and important issue of the role and place of Islam in the increasingly complex dynamics of Russian politics. It is achieved by examining various aspects of Islam and Muslims in Russia from a multidisciplinary perspective. Islam and Muslims are currently at the forefront of popular culture, mass media and political imaginations in the age of the 'Global War on Terrorism'. Frequently, these are for the 'wrong' reasons as they are not well understood, but rather stereotypically misrepresented, often for various political reasons. Russia is also highly stereotyped; the diverse and mysterious country is often misunderstood in terms of the communicated cultural, social and political images. This book is an attempt to expose and analyse the wealth in diversity of Islam and Muslims in Russia, a country where different religions have occupied the same political spaces, for better and worse, for many centuries. The content of this book is focused upon the contemporary social, political, cultural and identity contexts of Russia in terms of the interrelated dynamics and forces that are shaping the relations and place of Islam and Muslims in Russia today. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Religion, State & Society.

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.

Russia's Muslims, numbering some 15 million, constitute far from a homogeneous sociopolitical group. So, what does it mean to be a Muslim in Russia today? How is the image of Islam constructed, and how do the country's Muslims - and non-Muslims - perceive and react to it? These are the questions that gave rise to this book. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the authors explore in what ways, and with what impact, Islam in contemporary Russia has been shaped by the interactions of the Soviet legacy, local cultures and languages, and external forces. They also address the influence of Islam on Russia's current Middle East policy. Their work is a rich and distinctive contribution to enhancing our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of Muslim identity in post-Soviet Russian politics and society.

This richly detailed study traces the shared history of Russia and Islam in expanding compass - from the Tatar civilization within the Russian heartland, to the conquered territories of the Caucasus and Central Asia, to the larger geopolitical and security context of contemporary Russia on the civilizational divide. The study's distinctive analytical drive stresses political and geopolitical relationships over time and into the very complicated present. Rich with insight, the book is also an incomparable source of factual information about Russia's Muslim populations, religious institutions, political organizations, and ideological movements.

Moscow has the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe. In 2015, some 2 million Muslim Muscovites celebrated the opening of the continent's biggest mosque. One quarter of the Soviet population was ethnically Muslim, and today their grandchildren, living in the lands between Bukhara, Kazan and the Caucasus, once again have access to their historical traditions. But they also suffer the effects of civil war, mass migration and political instability. At the highest levels, Islam has been swept up into Russia's broader search for identity, as the old question of eastern versus western takes on new force. Dominic Rubin has spent the last three years interviewing Muslims across Russia, from Sufi shaykhs in Dagestan, new Muslim artists on the Volga and professionals in Kyrgyzstan to guest-workers commuting between Russia and Uzbekistan and Kremlin-sponsored muftis hammering out a new Russian Muslim ideology in Moscow. He discovers their family histories, their faith journeys and their hopes and fears, caught between roles as traditionalist allies in the new Eurasian Russia and as potential traitors in Moscow's war on terror. This story of Islam adapting in a paradoxical landscape, against all odds, brings alive the human reality behind the headlines.

A fascinating story of spiritual survival. The cultural and national reawakening that has accompanied the resurgence of Islam in Russia has contributed to the revival and renewal of Islamic thought throughout the Muslim world. The author explores how Islam vis-a-vis Russian Orthodox Christianity shaped national, political and cultural developments in the vast region of European Russia and Siberia. This volume thus presents an analysis of the history, development and future prospects for Islam in Russia based on exhaustive research of the primary and secondary sources as well as the author's own personal experience.