About: | Paolo Sartori |
Position: | Key Researcher |
Node: | Identities and Religions |
The plan of this case study is to historicise aspects of Muslim culture in Central Eurasia,from the fall of the Khanate of Kazan (1552) to the present. For five centuries, Muslim communities across this vast area experienced various forms of non-Islamic sovereignty and administration: imperial/colonial, Soviet atheist, and secular nationalist. Equally, Islamic institutions and religious practices deeply affected the institutional scaffolding and cultural life among Muslim communities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The proposed research takes a multi-pronged approach to the study of representations as well as manifestations of Muslim culture in early modern/modern Central Eurasia: (1) it will examine practices of information-gathering and knowledge production on the Muslim communities inhabiting the vast area encompassing Inner Asia, Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus from the formation of the Rus’ to the end of the Soviet Union. In doing so, it will undertake a history of the institutions and the bureaucrats who were behind the creation of the imperial and Soviet repositories that today preserve records about Islam and Muslim communities in Central Eurasia; (2) it will assess the effects of the different policies and ideologies that the Russian Empire and the USSR produced in the various encounters with Islamdom from the formation of Muscovy to 1991. It will do so by pursuing a comparative history of state-Muslim relations in Inner Russia, Siberia, Central Asia, and the North Caucasus; (3) it will test the resilience of Muslimness under the strain of aggressive policies of modernization and forced secularization by examining how Muslims living under imperial and Soviet rule deployed an Islamic episteme to make sense of their everyday life. To achieve this goal requires that one pursue a hermeneutics of the documentary apparatus produced by imperial and atheistic bureaucracies. Building on previous research, this project will bring into conversation archival sciences together with Islamic studies and imperial and global history, and contribute to TWG 4.