Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy - Hardcover

Kefeli, Agnès Nilüfer

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801452317 ISBN 13: 9780801452314

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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 Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli chronicles in Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia was the collective turn to Islam by many of the region’s Kräshens, 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 Kräshen 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 Kräshen 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli is Senior Lecturer at Arizona State University.

Review:

"Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia is significant for showing how small and politically unorganized communities such as the Krashens faced and created choices in their communal affiliations and how they ultimately were able to make varied choices based on specific circumstances. Agnes Nilufer Kefeli's thorough and imaginative use of sources is notable. She makes use of Russian official sources from the State Archives of Tatarstan and elsewhere, but she also consults a broad range of nonarchival Islamic sources, including Tatar-language Arabic-script popular literature. This makes the book highly original and important to both Russian history and Islamic studies."

(Allen Frank, author of Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia)

"Agnès Kefeli poses the fascinating question of how communitiesof originally animist belief, migrated back and forth between Islam and Orthodox Christianity over several generations, and how the two religions 'struggled' over these people, with and without assistance of state authorities. The account is multi-layered, based in deep and knowledgeable reading, but the exposition always lucid. Kefeli does not reduce. The key elements in play are: ethnic or proto-ethnic identity (very local but also a growing regional one), the operations of missionaries, the acts of high state officials (Catherine the Great in particular), and then, in unpredictable but intellectually intriguing development, faith based in knowledge, and knowledge requiring but also advancing literacy. The symbiotic character of that last relation is especially interesting."

(Citation for the 2015 Reginald Zellik Book Prize, ASEEES)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0801452317
• ISBN 13: 9780801452314
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312