The present volume “Islam with a Peaceful and Kind Essence”: The Discourse on Traditional Islam among Turkic Muslims of the European Part of Russia and Crimea brings together six contributions examining a dichotomy that, while not new in the history of Islamic societies, has acquired particular salience in the twenty-first century: “traditional” vs. “nontraditional” Islam. While the book does not advance a central argument, its main point is perhaps best summarized by a Crimean respondent quoted in one of the articles: “There are probably more sects here in Crimea than in a society of one hundred million people” (255). In the competitive religious sphere of contemporary Russia, Islamic organizations have deployed, and in some cases weaponized, the discourse of “traditional” Islam in disputes that often crystallize along generational lines.
The number of official mosques in Tatarstan increased from eighteen in 1985 to 1,531 in 2019, operating within the aegis of two competing muftiates (17). As of 2020, neighboring Bashqortostan boasted 1,173 official mosques, also divided between the successor to the Soviet-era muftiate and a newer “Bashkir” muftiate (214). Readers expecting Crimea's embattled Tatar population to have escaped the burn of clerical politics will be disappointed by the findings presented in El΄mira Muratova's excellent article: not to be outdone, the Crimeans also have two Islamic organizations. Until 2014, one was loyal to Ukraine's muftiate (led by a disciple of an Ethiopian shaykh, whose followers are known as “Abyssinians” [khabashity]), the other a younger and smaller affair. Both organizations, and their mutual disdain, have endured beyond Russia's annexation (254). The authors draw little attention to the fact that, in each case, an organization associated with one of the Soviet-era muftiates found itself challenged by younger religious figures often trained abroad, who formed their own organizations. As during late socialism, these youngsters found themselves labeled as “Wahhabis” by their Soviet-trained elders.
Historians of religion will not find the result surprising: there is no agreement on what, in fact, constitutes “traditional” Islam. In their article on Tatar intellectuals, scholars Leila Almazova and Azat Akhunova introduce readers to at least five religious and secular figures, each with his own definition of the term, ranging from a variation on folk religion, to an ecumenicism bringing Islam and Christianity closer to mutual understanding, to a “renaissance of medieval traditionalism and appeals to Sufism,” to a dynamic and adaptable interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) “that adheres to the views of the majority,” to a “multifaceted complex” emphasizing women's leadership, shemayil craftsmanship, and pilgrimage to the sacred site of Bolgar (66). Unsurprisingly, the Soviet legacy of Islamic education also informs the discourse. For example, the well-known Islamic scholar and public intellectual Damir Mukhetdinov lists “knowledge of political science and sociology” and fluency in at least five languages as core characteristics of a “modern” Islam (139).
A more straightforward conceptualization of the term comes from a contributor who chooses not to use it. Part tract and part polemic, theologian Damir Shagaviev's piece addresses the controversy surrounding the 2016 “Grozny Fatwa,” in which Islamic scholars from thirty Muslim countries (including Ahmad al-Tayyib, Grand Shaykh of Al-Azhar, the Islamic world's most prestigious university) and across Russia gathered in the Chechen capital for an international conference dedicated to denouncing Islamic extremism. Widely assumed to have been organized by the Russian government to counter Saudi influence and draw Muslim states such as Egypt closer to Moscow, the conference featured no small measure of acrimony, considering that the foreign participants, and even some of the Russian muftis in attendance, refused to sign the concluding fatwa. The author, one-time head of the Faculty of Theology at the Russian Islamic University in Kazan, attributes opposition to ignorance: “It was the reaction of simple-minded people who [only] know how to perform basic Islamic rituals, who lack substantial grounding in Islamic sciences” (76). The criticism got personal: “A certain Abdulla of Kazan” wrote a letter accusing the author of “creating a new Islamic sect that would foster division within the umma” (76). Shagaviev contrasts these detractors’ mudslinging with the main aim of the conference: to promote a concept advanced by an eleventh century theologian, Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi, “People of Sunnah and Consensus.” It consists of eight categories of Muslims rightly considered to hold Islamic authority, including jurists, scholars of Arabic grammar and syntax, Sufi ascetics, and pious folk (80). The implication is that fundamentalists, who reject the traditional schools of jurisprudence, as well as Sufism, are not Muslim, or at least this is how many perceived the conference. Shagaviev admits as much: “The negative reaction among some Muslims . . . stems from fear about a federal Russian prohibition of Wahhabism similar to bans in certain Muslim countries” (102). Curiously, the author fails to clarify that Baghdadi's inventory of authoritative figures would, by implication, exclude historical personalities lionized by the Russian state and its domestic Muslim allies from the purview of “true” Islam: modernists who also vehemently rejected madrasa education and Sufism. Notwithstanding editor Renat Bekkin's assurance that Shagaviev “ranks among the most original Islamic theologians in contemporary Russia” (8), the piece has a partisan flavor in the best clerical tradition.
Other contributions advance interesting arguments that certainly merit attention from specialists. Rezeda Saifullina-Ibragimova's article on Sufism in Tatarstan surveys different understandings of the term, while highlighting the popularity of the Cypriot Naqshbandi (some would say neo-Naqshbandi) Shaykh Nizam al-Hakkani (1922–2014) among Tatar businessmen. Zilia Khabibullina places Bashqortostan's Islamic scene in dialogue with nationalists whose heyday in the 1980s came to an abrupt end after 1991. As a whole, the volume constitutes a valuable document concerning the rich field of debate about “traditional” Islam in Russia over the past two decades, even if the reader comes away suspecting that “nontraditional” has become an uninspiring bogeyman and fitting successor to the qadimchi (traditionalist) epithet deployed by modernists a century ago.
