Russia’s Muslim Heartlands: Islam in the Putin Era by Dominic Rubin

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 43, 4, 2018 © The Maghreb Review 2018 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com DOMINIC RUBIN, RUSSIA’S MUSLIM HEARTLANDS: ISLAM IN THE PUTIN ERA, HURST & COMPANY, LONDON, 2018, 345PP. This empirically-driven book is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship on Russia’s Islam and Muslims. Unlike the prevailing mono-disciplinary studies it is guided by the author’s inter-disciplinary approach combining philosophy, sociology, religious studies and personal travelogue. To its special credit is the fact that it enables Russia’s Muslims and non-Muslims to participate directly in academic debate on the subject. The book is based on eighty five in-depth interviews with Russian and other Eurasian Muslims from a variety of ethno-cultural, social and professional backgrounds conducted during the period between July 2013 and January 2017. Most of them were made in Moscow, where Dominic Rubin currently lives, while others originated during short trips to the North Caucasus, Central Asia and some other localities within Russia. The author benefitted from his ‘semi-insider’ status at the Muftiate of the Russian Federation, which facilitated his access to some politically influential representatives of Russian ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ Islam, leading scholars of Islam and the Russian artistic beau monde The book’s structure reflects its main premise that since the collapse of the USSR Moscow, which is currently populated by over two million Muslims, has been the melting-pot of various ‘national Islams’ which originated from, or were forged during, the imperial Russian and Soviet periods. As such it has been in the process of transformation into the new centre of Russian and Eurasian Islam, eclipsing such traditional centres as Kazan, Derbent or Samarqand. According to Rubin, Moscow’s defining features as an Islamic melting-pot have been the theological Wasatiyya (or middle way), which presented a synthesis between Sovietised Islamic traditionalism, Salafism and Leninism; the supremacy of the Russian language as the new Islamic lingua franca and the language of prayer in Moscow’s mosques and prayer houses; and, consequently, the marginalisation of the Tatar language as the traditional language of Islam in Moscow. The main triggers of this transformation, the author argues, have been the so-called ‘Islamic revival,’ which began in the late Soviet period; the re-connection of ex-Soviet Muslim Eurasia with the global ummah; and the mass influx into Moscow of labour migrants from Muslim Central Asia and the Caucasus. 452 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS The book consists of eight chapters organised in five parts, each more or less centred on a particular ethno-national version of Russian Islam. It also includes a bibliography of English- and Russian-language secondary sources, suggested background reading and maps of the North Caucasus and Eurasia. The four appendices provide a detailed glossary of Islamic and Russian terms and names; information on the interviews and participants, the author’s definitions of ‘Soviet and post-Soviet secularism and post-secularism,’ and the differentiated meanings of the terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamic.’ Part One offers sketched biographies of several Tatar, Central Asian and Caucasian worshippers at the Cathedral mosque in Prospekt Mira, whose individual rediscoveries of Islam are traced throughout the book. Part Two focuses on various notions of Muslimness among Kyrgyz migrants and elaborates on the factors shaping these notions. In particular, it points to the widespread religious eclecticism among the Kyrgyz and their equal openness to Islam, Protestantism and other religions and belief systems, albeit it does not explain why this is the case. The second section of Part Two takes the reader to neighbouring Uzbekistan where it follows the life of one of Moscow’s Uzbek migrants and his extended family. It identifies the specific features of ‘Uzbek Islam,’ rooted in the latter’s deeper ‘Eastern-ness,’ fused with Soviet-ness, and the reasons for the Uzbeks’ particular hostility towards various manifestations of ‘foreign Islam,’ especially that emanating from Afghanistan. Part Three explores the Muslimness of Tatarstan’s Tatars who arguably epitomise quintessential Russian Islam because of their...