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Geistes-, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Anzeiger ‒ Zeitschrift der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 157./158. Jahrgang (2022/2023)
Geistes-, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Anzeiger ‒ Zeitschrift der philosophisch-historischen Klasse der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 157./158. Jahrgang (2022/2023)
No.:
157
Year of the volume:
2022
Issue:
1+2
1. Auflage, 2023
“Why study Soviet Islam in the first place?”, or “is Soviet Islam at all significant?” These are of course legitimate questions, for when studying the history of the Muslim world, the USSR is most certainly not the first place that comes to mind. We have tended in the past to think of the USSR as an atheist space where religion barely survived radical policies of modernization and social engineering. Even if it was indeed the case that the USSR devoted massive resources to eliminate religion, the Party-state nevertheless defended the notion of freedom of conscience enshrined in the Soviet constitution, a notion which offered citizens of all walks of life a normative framework allowing for an engagement with religion. This theme issue of the Anzeiger sheds light on life stories of Soviet citizens who pursued a path to attain self-perfection, a trajectory in pursuit of belief, temperance, and dignity, which was deeply informed by Islamic discursive practices. Taken together, these stories can be read as an epic and tragic narrative of resilience, resistance and subversion. Equally, they open up a new field of historical research for those who are interested in peeling away the layers of the Soviet civilization and discovering the various ways in which Soviet citizens fashioned themselves as Muslims. How and why did they commit themselves to uphold Islam in a violently secularist environment? And how did the Soviet state cope with Muslims’ forceful articulation of their faith? The notion that in the eyes of many Soviet citizens the USSR was an abode of Islam forms the framing device of this thematic issue of the Anzeiger – a device that helps us to think about how the atheist project of the Soviet empire ultimately failed, but also how it simultaneously helped shape the range of meanings of Muslimness under Soviet rule and in the first decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
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Why Soviet Islam Matters
In this essay I offer several reflections addressing the significance of Islam and its socio-cultural embodiments (i. e., Muslimness) for Soviet history. I argue that religiously-minded people – from earnest seekers to would-be self-improvers to believers of various stripes – were an integral part of the population of the USSR. Furthermore, I posit that the population included even larger numbers of people who perhaps were not seriously engaged in perfecting themselves in religion or even thinking consciously about the sacred, but who simply kept in reserve stories, practices and prescriptions derived from an Islamic episteme, which they could deploy in times of need. To rescue the voices of all these historical actors is key to understanding how, despite pursuing one of the most transformative projects of social engineering in human history, the atheist Soviet state failed to make its subjects less religious and, by extension, less human.
Keywords: Islam, Soviet Union, archives, religiosity, Muslim
Page 5 - 24 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/anzeiger157-1s5
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A Question of Texture. “Getting Religion” in a Bashkir Antireligious Text from the 1950s
This essay demonstrates that the renaissance experienced in the religious and literary spheres across much of the USSR after World War II influenced the field of scientific atheism as well. Through the prism of a remarkable article that appeared in the flagship Bashkir literary journal Literary Bashqortostan, it argues that a distinct type of antireligious writing, namely Muslim atheism, crystallized during the 1950s, combining the religious and the antireligious. Unlike anti-Islamic writings of the 1920s, this Bashkir piece brings in elements of texture, i. e., documentary and ethnographic snapshots of Muslim life. By extensively quoting Bashkir prayers and folk sayings, it offers an additional window on the history of Islam and atheism in the USSR. Viewing the piece as the product of a dynamic atheism that responded to the decade’s social climate, opens up the possibility of treating atheistic writing in Turkic languages as “religious” texts.
Keywords: Islam, Soviet Union, Bashkir, atheism, literature
Eren Tasar
Page 25 - 49 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/anzeiger157-1s25
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Copying Islam. Constructing a New Soviet Islam through the Re-production of Religious Texts in the South Urals
This article uses Soviet-era manuscripts to examine the transmission and transformation of Islamic knowledge in the Volga-Ural region from the late nineteenth century to 1991. From the 1930s to the 1980s, practicing Muslims in the Volga-Ural region preserved, read, and copied Muslim texts from the pre-Soviet period. Some of them used pre-revolutionary texts to assemble new miscellanies of Islamic knowledge. Over time, these miscellanies evolved into coherent religious guidebooks that expressed these Soviet Muslims’ understandings of what knowledge, beliefs, and acts comprised proper Islam, how one was to live in a Muslim way, and how one might gain a reputation for piety and religious expertise. This new Islam was not a remnant of a waning faith, but rather a complex, sophisticated system of beliefs, ethics, and practices comparable to twentieth-century Islamic movements.
Keywords: Islamic knowledge, Islam in the Soviet Union, Bashkir, Islamic manuscripts
Page 51 - 81 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/anzeiger157-1s51
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Documenting Kazakh Funeral Rituals through Material Life Indicators (1960s–1980s)
Discourses on religious life during the late Soviet period have enduringly been hyper-normative in Central Asian societies and continue to obliterate the wide spectrum of Muslim practices performed daily from the 1960s to the 1980s. To circumvent this rhetoric, the present article proposes to focus on material life indicators as an innovative method for documenting the intensity of ritual life. It particularly investigates the case of Kazakh funeral rituals. During the Soviet period, honoring the dead according to the ritual prescribed by Islam remained a continual social and moral imperative within Kazakh society. However, the forms of control, institutionalization and repression implemented under Soviet religious policy altered the ways in which funeral practices were conducted. In addition, the material dimension of the ritual performances (remuneration of officiants, organization of meals, etc.), which was an essential concern as well as a means of regulation for the authorities, represented a persistent challenge for Kazakh society. The management of cemeteries and the organization of funerals were imbricated with existing constraints of Soviet economic life, including its shortages and circumvention practices. They required the mobilization of significant resources by the communities. The capacity of families to conform to customs and their investment in increasingly ostentatious rites of prodigality was linked to their respectability. But such rites also hearkened back to the authority of the deceased, derived in particular from their social position within statutory Soviet hierarchies. Given these challenges, the symbolic, social and material space of death thus constituted a place where practices could be deployed autonomously and where Kazakh Muslims could be socialized to religion in the era of late socialism.
Keywords: ritual economy, Soviet Islam, informal economy, funeral practices, religious socialization
Isabelle Ohayon
Page 83 - 106 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/anzeiger157-1s83
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Transformation of a Mosque into a Shrine. The Role of Material Culture, Sacred Stories and a Female Shrine Keeper in Preserving Islamic Life in Soviet and Post-Soviet Kazakhstan
This paper analyzes oral narratives which developed around a mosque in northeastern Kazakhstan and the role that these narratives and the building of the mosque played in the resilience and survival of Islam in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. The mosque is in the village of Akkulsk not far from the city of Semey. It was built around 1905, was repurposed as a school and club under Soviet rule and subsequently was neglected in the later Soviet period when the inhabitants of the village of Akkulsk moved away. Despite its physical decay, people continued to treat the mosque building as a sacred object. I suggest that oral narratives played an important role in turning the Akkulsk mosque into a shrine as well as enabling its survival. The main protagonist circulating the sacred narratives is an elderly woman who had been a keeper of the mosque when everyone else in the village had left. The article explores how sacred narratives are interconnected with gender and female authority and with the collective memory of the former village community. This case helps us rethink the role of the mosque as a place of worship, the forms of Islamic religiosity in the post-Soviet period and the impact of Soviet rule on Islam in Kazakhstan.
Keywords: sacred narratives, post-Soviet Islam, Kazakhstan, material culture, female religious authority
Rozaliya Garipova
Page 107 - 135 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/anzeiger157-1s107
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New-Age Islam in Russia. Enchantment and Alternative Healing among the Volga Tatars
In the 1990s, the language of esotericism and holistic healing permeated Eurasian intellectual discourse as Volga Tatars discussed the place and the nature of Islam in their personal and communal experience. This interest in esoteric enchantment was far from being a Western import, but rather stemmed from a post-war reaction against Soviet rationality through the rediscovery of Russian esotericism, Eastern religions, shamanism, Sufism, and various forms of folk healing. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this interest in esoteric philosophy and New-Age healing practices intensified. For some, New Age became a tool for the routinization of Islam in their daily life; for others, it became part of the debate over what constituted orthodoxy in their community’s religious life. This article draws inspiration from recent anthropological research which conceives of New Age as an “interpretive frame” or “an inner grammar” that can influence or reconfigure traditional religiosity. Esoteric spirituality is an essential part of the Soviet and post-Soviet religious landscape that needs further investigation.
Keywords: Afterlife, alternative medicine, Death, ecology, education
Agnès Kefeli
Page 136 - 168 | doi: https://doi.org/10.1553/anzeiger157-1s136
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Edition:
978-3-7001-9447-7, Journal, softcover, 20.09.2023
Edition:
978-3-7001-9448-4, eJournal, PDF, limited accessibility , 21.09.2023
Edition:
1. Auflage
Pages:
168 Pages
Format:
24x17cm
Language:
English
DOI (Link to Online Edition):
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