For more than a decade, Islam has remained the focus of researchers in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Volga region. One of the latest publications on this topic was a collection of articles published based on the materials of the international conference on post-Soviet Islam, held on April 1-2, 2004 in Kazan. The book was published simultaneously in French and Russian ¹. In the latter case, it is

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Edited by R. Mukhametshin. Kazan: Master Line Publishing House, 2005, 251 p.

¹ The collection was created thanks to the professionalism and organizational skills of M. Laruelle and S. Peyvouse, who selected the authors ' team, provided translation of a number of articles from French to Russian, wrote an introduction and prepared a similar edition in French: Laruelle M., Peyvouse S. (Eds.,). Islam etpolitique en ex-URSS (Russie dEurope et al. Asie Centrale). P.: L'Harmattan, 2005. 338 p.).

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Special issue of the Kazan Federalist magazine (No. 1)². Despite the rather unfortunate, boring and cliched title, the collection stands out prominently among other works on Islam in Russia and Central Asia. What makes it different? First of all, a successful selection of authors who have already proven themselves with non-trivial research on the Volga region and Central Asia. Among them are the Kazan historians R. Mukhametshin and A. Khabutdinov, and the Moscow ethnologist S. Khabutdinov. Abashin, Tashkent Islamic scholars B. Babadzhanov and A. Muminov, American political scientist M. Olcott, French religious scholar S. Peyrouz [See: Islam de Russie, 1997; Islam in the territory of...; 1998-2003; Islam in Politics..., 2001; Islam in the post-Soviet space, 2001; Khabutdinov, 2001; Mukhametshin, 2003; Ascetics of Islam, 2003; Peyrouse, 2004].

The book shows quite well the modern "geography" and disciplinary situation of post-Soviet Islamic studies. The opening of borders and archives after the collapse of the USSR allowed Western scientists to engage in field and archival work in the former Soviet republics. Today, the study of Islam is shifting from the old imperial centers of the Soviet Union to the regional capitals, among which Kazan, Tashkent, Alma Ata, and Nizhny Novgorod are leading. Over the past ten or fifteen years, new schools have developed here, successfully competing with the old Oriental centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Among them, the French Institute for Central Asian Studies (IFEAC) in Tashkent, established in 1993, and the Kazan institutes, whose collaboration led to the creation of this collection, stand out. Along with classical Oriental studies, ethnologists, sociologists, and political scientists have recently become increasingly active in the field of Islamic studies. The object of their research was mainly Central Asia and the Volga region. The proximity of Chechnya and Dagestan still discourages most Western and Russian specialists from the Caucasus. The latter region is not represented in this collection either.

The interdisciplinary nature is one of the book's strengths. The proposed picture of the changes that are taking place with Muslims in the nation-states that emerged from the wreckage of the USSR has greatly benefited from the fact that representatives of not only different countries, but also different humanitarian disciplines took part in its creation. Leaving aside the current issues of Muslim radicalism and terrorism, the authors focused on insufficiently studied subjects of everyday relations between Muslims, the authorities and post-Soviet religious institutions. Even more important, in my opinion, is the attempt of the participants of the collection to move away from the orientalist cliches and stereotypes of the "cold war". Unlike orientalists, they do not reduce all the diversity of the Muslim world to a single book "classical Islam". Nor does the book exaggerate the role of Muslim resistance to Russia and the West, which is typical of Sovietists. According to M. Laruel and S. Peyrouz, the interaction of Islam and the secular state of the XVIII-XX centuries, the fruits of which were the post-Soviet national states and muftiats, was more important (p. 8).

Thematically, the collection is divided into four broad sections: Islam in national-liberal projects of the XXI century (I), Islam in nation-building and modern identities (II), politicization and secularization of Islam (III), and a new reading of local Muslim traditions (IV). Each block contains noteworthy articles. The most original works of S. Gradirovsky (Nizhny Novgorod) on the Russification of Muslim religious practices in the Volga region at the end of the 20th century (I); J. Radwani (Paris) about Muslims in the Russian census of 2002, E. Ponarin (St. Petersburg) and L. Sagitova (Kazan) on the paradoxes of nation-building among Kurds and Tatars (II); S. Peyrouz (IFEAC, Tashkent) on the union of muftiats and the Russian Orthodox Church against religious dissidents (III); S. Abashin, (Moscow) on women Sufis in late Soviet Ferghana and A. Muminov (Alma Ata) about the traditionalist leader of the Soviet era Shami-da-mullah (IV). The work of M. B. Olcott (Carnegie Endowment, Moscow) and B. Babadzhanov (Tashkent) provides a beautiful example of Orientalist criticism of unsubstantiated constructions of political scientists. The project of dialogue between the EU, Central Asian governments and the Islamic opposition that they dismantled and defeated [Seifert and Zvyagelskaya, 2004, p. 4]. 76-90] shows the danger of implementing such theories that are not supported by knowledge of the local texture and Islam.

² The journal is published 4 times a year. Chief Editor: R. Khakimov. Published with the financial support of the J. D. and K. T. MacArthur Foundation. The conference and this issue of the journal were prepared by the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (IFEAC, Tashkent), the Franco-Russian Center for Social Sciences and Humanities (Moscow), and the Kazan Institute of Federalism.

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The book under review raises a number of serious problems that have hitherto escaped the attention of scientists. This is primarily the need for systematic study and description of the Soviet prehistory of the modern Islamic upsurge noted by M. Laruel (p. 13). Among the promising research topics, her article highlights the problem of the transition of Islam from the public to the private sphere under the Soviet regime and the related individualization of Islamic knowledge and the crisis of Muslim authorities (p. 19). No less, if not more interesting, are the studies of particular subjects of post-Soviet Islam: the fate of Ulama and Sufis of the XX century, the transmission of Islamic knowledge in Muslim communities. They clearly show the relativity of the global binary juxtapositions of "official" and "parallel" Islam, traditionalists-Kadims and modernists-Jadids, which have been rooted in science since the Cold War. Sufism of the twentieth century, as S. Abashin rightly pointed out, did not have a single social organization within the framework of "fraternities", but always had a more decentralized and popular character than is usually assumed (pp. 227-230).

There are no books without flaws. The reviewed collection did not escape them either. The fate of twentieth-century Islam in all post-Soviet Muslim regions is still poorly understood. Many articles lack specifics. Some authors are poorly versed in the history of the regions they are considering and Islamic realities, so many mistakes have crept into the book. Here are the most serious of them. Speaking about the Muslim clergy and sects (passim, for example, p. 204), it is necessary to specify the specifics of the local use of these concepts. In Islam, in principle, there is neither one nor the other. Although in the late period of the Russian Empire and the post-war Soviet Union, attempts were made to create Muslim clergy within the framework of regional muftiats, they were not always carried out everywhere [Farkhshatov, 1999, pp. 67-72; Bobrovnikov, 2006, pp. 213-218]. One should not abuse the term "Sufi brotherhood", which only conditionally conveys the meaning of the Arabic term tariqa. As shown in the aforementioned article by S. Abashin, the term "Sufi brotherhood" often leads the reader astray, creating a false idea of the global underground networks of the Naqshbandi and Qadiriya fraternities, which Western Sovietologists are to blame for spreading.

There are many factual errors in the book. For example, the Andes of Northern Dagestan (p.86) are not "subgroups" of the Avars, but separate peoples united with them in the course of Soviet national reforms; the same can be said of the Kaitag and Kubachin people "consolidated" with the Dargins. As stated on page 21, "the Caucasian mountaineers converted to Islam during their struggle against the Russian Empire in the 19th century", but this is incorrect: in Dagestan and Chechnya they became Muslims in the 10th-16th centuries, and in Kabarda and Adygea - by the 17th-18th centuries. During the war, only a few Russian defectors converted to Islam. Movements for the purification of Islam from illegal innovations (vida') have been found on the borders of Russia since the 19th century. (p. 23), and much earlier. Here it is enough to recall at least the ulama Muhammad al-Kuduki (1652-1717) from Dagestan, al - Kursavi (1776/77-1812) and Utyz-imyani (1754-1835) from the Volga region who shared these views. Rida'ad-din Fakhretdinov performed the hajj not in 1927 (p. 38), but in 1926. Islam in the USSR was supervised by one All-Union Council for Religious Affairs (SDR). In 1943-1965, it was called differently. The SDR has no successors in modern Russia (p. 10, 143). The Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly (OMDS) moved to Orenburg not in 1797 (p. 127), but in 1796; the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) was founded not in 1941 (p. 94), but in 1943. Dagestan (p. 163).

This list could go on for a long time. Translators also had a hand in mistakes. Thus, on page 142, the non-Muslim Dhimmis, protected by Muslims, turned into mysterious "dhimmis" (from dhimmis in the French original of S. Peyrouse's article). One of the founders of the All-Union Islamic Renaissance Party, an Avar from the Dagestani village of Kudali, Akhmad-qadi Magomedovich Akhtaev (1942-1998), appears in the Russian translation of the French article by M. Laruelle as "Avar Ahmed-Qadi Aktaev" (p.176). In the footnotes to the collection, some men, for example S. Peyrouse ,are "travestied" into women. Almost all French quotes with diacritics are distorted.

Even more damaging to the book are some persistent cliches of the Soviet and colonial times, which it would be time to get rid of long ago. There are too many different "isms" among them, such as the notion of radical "Islamism" coined by 19th-century European orientalists and lavishly cited by French authors. Just as uncritically, many authors of the book use the definition of "traditional is" borrowed from the dictionary of Soviet ethnography.-

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lam". It is based on another orientalist view of the unchanging folk traditions that underlie the Tatar and other Muslim "civilizations". This thesis, if you believe the articles in the last section of the collection, is completely untrue. The anachronistic concept of "Islamic civilization" fits, perhaps, only into the curious concept of R. Khakimov's Euroislam, whose article with a witty comment by R. Mukhametshin is included in the first section, but has no direct relation to either Islam or modern Islamic studies. It is criticized by a number of authors of the collection, primarily B. Babadzhanov and M. Olcott. According to the authoritative opinion of the latter, the concept of Euro-Islam is popular among the overwhelming majority of traditional Muslims of Tatarstan and Russia as a whole... at the very least, it causes an ironic attitude, although some politicians may like it. Therefore... one gets the impression that R. Khakimov's ideas are rather political and opportunistic in nature, rather than based on knowledge of at least the basics of Islam and are unlikely to be accepted by the majority of Muslims" (p. 196).

This criticism, though harsh, is fair. At the same time, R. Khakimov's works deserve attention as a historiographical fact and a not uninteresting source that allows us to judge the disputes among the secular, mainly Tatar, intelligentsia of the XXI century. on religious and national-democratic identity. Similar debates occur in other post-Soviet Muslim republics, such as Dagestan. Khakimov's approach [Hakim, 2003] somewhat reminds me of the well-known Arab philosopher from Syria, Muhammad Shahrour [Shahrour, 1990; Shahrour, 2000] ^.3 Of course, Khakimov's knowledge of the Qur'an and other normative Islamic texts is much lower, as evidenced by the almost complete absence of references to Scripture in his works. At the same time, they are drawn together by the neoliberal interpretation of the Muslim faith outside of the actual Islamic coordinates. Both thinkers insist on independent study of the Qur'an from the standpoint of reason, and not from the Muslim tradition, taking into account the needs of the modern era. Both encourage Muslims to use the achievements of the West (pp. 31-33). Moreover, R. Khakimov expressed such ideas that are seditious for Muslim traditionalists more openly. These ideas, although not widely adopted, indicate the secularization of Muslim elites, making the picture of Islam today much more complete.

Summing up, I would like to note that the reviewed work makes a certain contribution to the study of Islam in the post-Soviet East. It shows the establishment of fruitful cooperation between post-Soviet and Western scientists, long separated by the ideological and political barriers of the Cold War, and the growth of Oriental studies schools in the former Soviet regions, mainly in Tashkent and Alma-Ata. The lack of uniformity in the views and approaches of the authors of the collection allows us to hope that the official politicized orientalism of past eras will finally be replaced by a more free scientific creativity. Despite the inaccuracies noted, this book should not be judged too harshly. In general, this is a bright and non-trivial study that reflects both the advantages and disadvantages of the current level of knowledge about post-Soviet Islam.

list of literature

Seifert A. K., Zvyagelskaya I. D. Reconciliation of Europe and Islam in Eurasia. 2004, N 5.

Islam in the post-Soviet Space: an Inside View / Edited by A.V. Malashenko and M. B. Olcott, Moscow, 2001.

Islam on the territory of the former Russian Empire: an Encyclopedic dictionary / Comp. SEE Prozorov. Issue 1-4. Moscow, 1998-2003.

Ascetics of Islam: the Cult of Saints and Sufism in Central Asia and the Caucasus / Edited by S. N. Abashin and V. O. Bobrovnikov, Moscow, 2003.

Mukhametshin R. M. Tatars and Islam in the XX century (Islam in the social and political life of Tatars and Tatarstan). Kazan, 2003.

Farkhshatov M. N. Muslim clergy // Islam on the territory of the former Russian Empire: an encyclopedia / Comp. and ed. by S. M. Prozorov. Issue 2. Moscow, 1999.

³ For the works of Muhammad Shahrour, see [Eickelman, 2001].

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Khabutdinov A. Y. Formation of the nation and main directions of development of Tatar society in the late XVIII-early XX century. Kazan, 2001.

Hakim R. Where is our Mecca? Kazan, 2003.

Shahrour M. Al-Kitab wa-l-Qur'an: qira'a mu'sirah. (The Book and the Qur'an: Informed Reading). Damascus, 1990.

Shakhrur M. Proekt manifesta moslemskoy deyatel'nosti [Draft manifesto of Muslim activity]. in Russian by L. Zorina. Damascus, 2000.

Bobrovnikov V. Islam in the Russian Empire // The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. II. Lieven D. (Ed.). Cambridge, 2006.

Eickelman D. Muhammad Shahrur and the Printed Word // ISIM Newsletter. Leiden. 2001, N 7, p. 7.

Islam de Russie. Conscience communautaire et autonomic politique chez les Tatars de la Volga et de I'Oural depuis le XVIIIe siecle / S. A. Dudoignon, D.Is'hakov, R. Mohammatshin (Eds.). Paris, 1997.

Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (Early Eighteenth to late Twentieth Centuries) I S. A. Dudoignon; Hisao, Komatsu (Eds.). London, New York, Bahrain, 2001.

Peyrouse S. La gestion du fait religieux en Asie Centrale: poursuite du cadre conceptuel sovietique et renouveau factice // Cahiers d'Asie Centrale. 2004, nos. 13 - 14.

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