Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: conversion, apostasy, and literacy

Abstract

Becoming Muslim in imperial Russia: conversion, apostasy, and literacy, by Agnes Nilufer Kefeli, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2014, 289 pp., US$52.50 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-801-45231-4Agnes Nilufer Kefeli's fresh, original, and comprehensively researched examination of baptized Tatar (Krashen) apostasy in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tsarist state represents a major advance for scholarship on the social and religious history of imperial Russia. Relying on a diverse array of archival sources, family histories, biographies of the Prophet, Sufi texts, and other genres of popular religious literature, this book treats the great Krashen apostasies, or movements to gain the state's permission to return to Islam spanning the period from roughly 1802-1905, as a site of communal identity formation and negotiation. This negotiation, Kefeli argues, took place in a realm of religious practice embracing Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and animist practices common among semi-nomadic steppe peoples.One of Kefeli's chief stated tasks is to dispense with certain historiographical straitjackets that have been assigned to the Krashens by Russian, Soviet, Tatar nationalist, and Jadidist historians over the past century. These narratives have too often characterized the apostasies as a footnote to other broader narratives: Krashens returned to Islam as part of a larger pattern of Tatar nationalist mobilization in the late Russian empire, or formed but one marginal component of a societal legal challenge to the Russian state's stifling authoritarianism. Kefeli departs from this approach by treating the Krashen apostasies as a formative catalyst for the emergence of Islamic modernism among Russian Muslims, and as a pivotal model for peasant responses to changing notions of citizenship promoted by the state and the Russian Orthodox Church in the decades after the Great Reforms. Kefeli restores the Krashen apostasies to their rightful place as a significant milestone in Russia's social, political, and religious history.The bulk of the book is devoted to recalibrating the scholarly analysis of conversion itself. Kefeli's great achievement is to reimagine conversion as a communal rather than individual decision. Through an intensive examination of socioeconomic groups (merchants, tailors), wedding customs, festivals, and a pathbreaking, refreshingly novel look at the sphere of underground female religious education and knowledge, the author demonstrates that debates about the falsity or genuineness of the Krashen communities' stated desire to return to Islam or remain Christian miss the point. The act of petitioning the state for recognition as Muslim or Christian marked a fundamental transformation in the constitution of Krashen communities, their relationship with the state, and their engagement with Muslim and Christian neighbours. Official responses were often a moot point. Instead of privileging the state's reaction to apostate petitions in her analysis of the Krashens, Kefeli focuses on the dramatic communal cohesion and reconfiguration of religious knowledge and authority that was required in order for Krashen villages to take the radical step of returning to Islam in the first place. …