Elena I. Campbell. The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance. Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli. Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy. Mustafa Tuna. Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788–1914.

Abstract

Muslims in imperial Russia have been studied for more than a century. Together with more recent scholarship in Russia and abroad, these works have produced a substantial body of literature focusing chiefly on the topics of Muslim resistance to Russian expansion, and controversies between Islamic “reformism” (jadidism) and “traditionalism” (qadimism). Of course, these problems were of great importance for specific Muslim regions in limited historical periods. But they do not exhaust all the diversity of topics concerning Islam in the imperial context. Moreover, both themes used to be approached according to misleading nationalist and modernist conceptions. Taking Islam and the Russian Empire for natural antagonists, such a vision relied on the Orientalist approach, representing Islam as a homogeneous and timeless entity opposing all non-Muslim cultures. The historiography of Islam in Russia has long been dominated by military-political and nationalist approaches. While the former described the history of Russian Muslim relations from the imperial center as a series of conquests, wars, and rebellions, the latter ignored empire and tended to substitute religious matters with national ones. New studies of imperial Russia’s Muslims look more at the interaction of Muslims with the Russian state and society and their changing religious identities.