Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the practices of private communication of Muslims at the eclipse of the Russian empire. The correspondence of a young Kazan mullah with his family and friends lays the ground for an analysis of subjectivity at the intersection of literary models and personal experience. In personal writings, individuals selected from a repertoire of available tools for self-fashioning, be that the usage of notebooks, the Russian or Muslim calendar, or peculiarities of situational language use. Letters carried the emotions of their writers as well as evoking emotions in their readers. While still having access to the Persianate models of the self, practiced by previous generations of Tatar students in Bukhara, the new generation prioritized another type of scholarly persona, based on the mastery of Arabic, the study of the Qur’an and the hadith, as well as social activism.
Highlights
This article explores the practices of private communication of Muslims at the eclipse of the Russian empire
Is it possible to know what the Muslims of the Russian Empire were talking about on a daily basis? I suggest that by turning our attention to ego-documents, we can discover the whole world of personal opinions as expressed in writing
Even the well-known personalities who did write theological or historical works still have a lot to offer our study of subjectivity, for their intellectual legacy usually conceals a plethora of ways in which the given individual acted in the personal domain
Summary
I suggest that by turning our attention to ego-documents, we can discover the whole world of personal opinions as expressed in writing Such an approach seems especially intriguing, as the current historiography of Islam in Russia tends to focus prevailingly on metanarratives such as theological and legal discourses, or on Muslims’ administrative relations with the state, leaving aside the whole spectrum of ways in which an individual could express her- or himself. I argue that by studying the various genres that usually do not make it into historiographical, theological, cultural, political and socio-economic studies, we are able to recover, at least in part, the world of a multi–voiced conversation on the matters that individuals of the past found most relevant in their everyday life Reading this vast body of texts can provide us a clearer, even if still very fragmented, view on the textures of horizontal communication among the Muslim citizens of the Russian Empire. The opposite is true: in the private realm we discover other, and more, forms of communication – including beyond the Muslim community – that have hitherto gone unnoticed
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