Noah's Ark Landed in the Ural Mountains: Ethnic and Ecological Apocalypse in Tatarstan

Abstract

The place where Noah's ark landed still matters in Tatarstan. Before the French revolution, European theologians used the flood story in Genesis as an example of divine retribution and redemption. In modern Turkey, the creationist, Harun Yahya, has drawn on the work of American fundamentalists to prove that Noah's Ark landed in his native land–God's sign that Christians and Muslims should unite against scientific materialism and secularism, and that Turkey would play a special role in the return of all Turkic peoples to the bosom of Islam. In Russia, however, the famous Tatar nationalist writer, Fäwziyä Bäyrämova does not view the search for Noah's ark as a possible bridge between Muslims and Christians against Darwinism and secularism, but as a way to reintroduce the supernatural into Tatar political discourse and reassert ethnic Islam as the only principle of communal identity. Aside from drawing a new synthesis of past and current eschatological narratives, her new reading of Noah's story reflects the unique cultural challenges of a Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Christian and secular environment, very different from the Middle East.