Islamic Leadership and the State in Eurasia


Book Description

The book presents the first integrated study of the relationship between official Islamic leadership (muftiship), non-official Islamic authorities, grassroots Muslim communities and the state in post-Communist Eurasia. It employs a history-based perspective and compares this relationship to that in both the Middle East and Western Europe.




Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia


Book Description

In the thirteenth century, the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire that functioned as a cultural 'clearing house' for the Old World. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated across Eurasia. The focus of this path-breaking study is the extensive exchanges between Iran and China. The Mongol rulers of these two ancient civilizations 'shared' the cultural resources of their realms with one another. The result was a lively traffic in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, from agriculture to astronomy. The book concludes by asking why the Mongols made such heavy use of sedentary scholars and specialists in the elaboration of their court culture and why they initiated so many exchanges across Eurasia. This is a work of great erudition which crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol empire.




The Muslim Eurasia


Book Description

The former Muslim republics of the USSR are struggling to strike a balance between the legacy of the Soviet regime and the revival of their own, traditional culture. This volume examines the religion, economy and demography of the areas as well as both internal and external relations.




Muslim Eurasia


Book Description

Muslim Eurasia (1995) looks at the Muslim states that came into being on the ruins of the Soviet Union, and their complex legacies of Russian colonialism, russification, de-islamicization, centralization and communism – on top of localism, tribalism and Islam. The interaction and contradictions within each category, and between them, form the essence of the struggle to formulation new identities.




The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History


Book Description

The book considers the political, institutional and cultural histories of the Qara Khitai.




Making Muslim Women European


Book Description

This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associations employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.




Democracy and Pluralism in Muslim Eurasia


Book Description

This book is devoted to the study and analysis of the prospects for democracy among the Muslim ethnicities of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), both those that have acquired full independence and those remaining within the Russian Federation. The nineteen Western academics and scholars from the Muslim countries and regions of the CIS who contribute to this volume view the establishment of democratic institutions in this region in the context of a wide and complex range of influences, above all the Russian/Soviet political legacy; native ethnic political culture and tradition; the Islamic faith; and the growing polarity between Western civilization and the Muslim world.




Imperial Russia's Muslims


Book Description

Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.




On the Threshold of Eurasia


Book Description

On the Threshold of Eurasia explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet "East" as a political, aesthetic, and scientific system of ideas that emerged through a series of intertextual encounters produced by Russians and Turkic Muslims on the imperial periphery amidst the revolutionary transition from 1905 to 1929. Identifying the role of Russian and Soviet Orientalism in shaping the formation of a specifically Eurasian imaginary, Leah Feldman examines connections between avant-garde literary works; Orientalist historical, geographic and linguistic texts; and political essays written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers. Tracing these engagements and interactions between Russia and the Caucasus, Feldman offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point not of the metropole but from the cosmopolitan centers at the edges of the Russian and later Soviet empires. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact that the Caucasus (and the Soviet periphery more broadly) had—through the founding of an avant-garde poetics animated by Russian and Arabo-Persian precursors, Islamic metaphysics, and Marxist-Leninist theories of language —on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.




Polymaths of Islam


Book Description

Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth. James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. Pickett reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone. Through a high cultural complex that he terms the "Persian cosmopolis" or "Persianate sphere," Pickett argues that an intersection of diverse disciplines shaped geographical trajectories across and between political states. In Polymaths of Islam he paints a comprehensive, colorful, and often contradictory portrait of mosque and state in the age of empire.