Methodological framework

On the methodological level, our goal is to describe and explain the workings of Muslim subjectivity in Russia, the multiple personal and communally-shared techniques of engagement with the available cultural repertoire; we try to disclose how Muslims made sense of their selves and the world around them. By cultural repertoire we understand the plethora of ideas and practices pertaining to the Islamic episteme potentially available in a given locality in a certain period of time. A perception of music, love, architecture, travel, legality and any other aspects of human life is part of this cultural repertoire. Understandably, individuals cannot access this realm in its entirety. To make sense of their lives they turn to certain models, the ideal types that embody a combination of elements selected from the broad cultural repertoire. To be a Muslim scholar (‘alim) means to pursue this level of abstract model with a culture-specific set of societal expectations, obligations and privileges. One step further is the concept of persona, i.e. a more concrete example of performing the ideal personal qualities. Individuals want to imitate those whose behavior, career, and even outlook they find attractive and successful. On the personal level, we find the messy world of uncertainties and an individual search of the self that results in a range of cultural practices in direct engagement with personas, models, and the broad spectrum of available options.

Subprojects

This methodological framework helps to hold parts of the project together. Each subproject engages with the various levels of Muslim subjectivity, identifying the workings between models of differing abstraction on the one hand, and the multiple forms of self-fashioning, on the other. Given the aims of the project, our team inevitably deals with aspects of the history of emotion and the materiality of religion.

• Within the project, Alfrid Bustanov writes a monograph on the history of Muslim individuality in imperial and Soviet Russia. After completing an edition of the outstanding memoirs of ‘Abd al-Majid al-Qadiri (1881-1962), a victim of Stalinist terror who managed to survive and write a history of his life (now forthcoming with Brill), Bustanov zooms out and intends to present a synthesizing work not focused on particular individuals, but covering the evolution of models and personas in the course of several centuries. In his subproject, Bustanov looks at the concepts of time and space as developed by Muslims of Russia with a special focus on the material and imagined aspects of the actual lived space (a recent article on the history of garden culture in Muslim Russia has been accepted by JESHO). Poetry, epigraphic inscriptions of gravestones, autobiographies, and private letters help to reconstruct the ways how Muslim individuals described themselves, their perception of love and death, their inter-personal relations, and, of course, their connection to God. In cooperation with Shamil Shikhaliev he has produced a study of legal plurality and scholarly traditions in the Volga-Urals of the mid-nineteenth century as well as an overview of the literary repertoire of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tatar manuscripts (both forthcoming).
• Shamil Shikhaliev devotes his time in the project to writing his opus magnum on the personal strategies of Magomed Said Saidov (d. 1985), a Daghestani Muslim scholar cum Soviet Arabist. The first chapter of the book is based on a wide repertoire of manuscripts produced in Dagestan, especially the Sufi literature. Shikhaliev has identified six models representing the versions of the ideal Muslim personality. Saidov’s archive is a gold mine for the study of everyday culture and emotions associated with the material world. A comparison of titles present in Saidov’s archive has uncovered a sharp contrast to the Islamic tradition in Dagestan: he clearly preferred themes that favor emotions. Manuscripts and books as emotional artefacts were crucial to the type of persona that Saidov was developing in himself.
• Galiia Muratova writes her PhD thesis on the history of Muslim visuality in Russia in the twentieth century. She looks at the collections of private photography that have survived in the personal archives in St Petersburg, Ufa, Kazan, and Penza region. Several hundreds of photographs tell the story of communication practices, emotion lexicons, bodily practices as well as a great variety of visual self-representations. More specifically, Galiia Muratova looks at the network of members of the Muftiate in Ufa between the late 1950s and early 1980s. This network was supported by the visual means and the exchange of photographs, accompanied by textual remarks. Judging from those archives, Galiia Muratova perceives the individual as a result of interactions between the inner self and an outer environment. If the Muftiate circles reflect the models of performances and their transformations for different generations of professionals, then the familial practices reflect the individual attitude towards the history of the family, and reveal the role of the archival keeping in the building of the personal story. 
• Mansur Gazimzianov’s Ph.D. thesis bears the provisional title The History of Muslim Autobiographical Writing in Russia. On the basis of his extensive fieldwork Gazimzianov suggests that autobiography as a genre appeared in Muslim literature only in the late nineteenth century. Diaries, chronicles, and memoirs were more popular when writing about life experiences. However, almost all these genres of personal writing decreased in volume after the 1920s. To explain why it happened, it is necessary to analyze the relationship between politics, literature, and economics. At the moment, Gazimzianov is completing a chapter exploring autobiography as a genre of Muslim literature. So far he has produced several parts of his thesis on individual autobiographical cases and on the life writing practices among Muslim women in imperial Russia.

Recent publications

• Alfrid Bustanov, “On Emotional Grounds: Private Communication of Muslims in Late Imperial Russia,” Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques, vol. 73, no. 4 (2019), 655-682.
• Alfrid Bustanov, Biblioteka Zainap Maksudovoi [The Library of Zainap Maksudova] (Moscow: Mardjani Publishing House, 2019).
• Daulatshah al-Ispijabi, Burhan al-zakirin. Dokazatel’stvo dlia pominaiushikh, ed. by Alfrid Bustanov and Evgeniia Nikitenko (Moscow: Sadra, 2020).

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