This research project proposes a new historical framework for understanding Russia’s place in the world. It seeks to reconsider the relationship between religion and modernity, by highlighting the role played by religious institutions, policies and ideas in the transformation and modernisation of the imperial and post-imperial state. Focusing, in particular, on Russia’s relationship with Islam it seeks to foster a reappraisal of the geopolitical significance of the long-term Russian interaction – through the Tsarist and Soviet eras – with its southern neighbours.
Although 9/11 and subsequent events have returned the politics of religion to the center of scholarly and public attention, much of the current debate remains influenced by questionable but long-established assumptions about religion’s place in the modern world. By modernity we understand a complex of historical trends, including the centralisation of administrative power, the abolition of privileged estates, the emergence of a religious/secular divide, the rise of a public sphere and mass politics through the press and improved communications, and state responsibility for literacy and mass education. Religion has generally been regarded by modernisation theorists and social scientists as a force on the wane, an aspect of traditional society and cultural irrationalism that would be marginalised by the triumph of secular modernity. Islam, in particular, has been – and to judge from current popular offerings is still – seen as one of the main factors retarding the modernisation of Muslim societies. As a result, scholars have been taken by surprise by the vitality and resurgence of political Islam, in the Middle East, central Asia, north Africa and Europe. It is now clear that our neglect of the historical roots of these movements and currents of ideas has hindered a fuller understanding of their newly salient role in world affairs.
Such an understanding needs to start with the institutionalisation of faith in the pre-1914 empires. Following the fragmentation of the older nomadic Mongol dominion over Eurasia, the Tsarist and Ottoman states emerged in the early modern era as rival sedentary imperia. In each, the royal family ruled in the name of a single faith, and this made the relationship between the dynasty, the bureaucracy and the religious leadership of critical importance in providing legitimacy and guaranteeing public order. No less important was state policy towards other, minority faiths. As the nature of the imperial state changed over time, so too did the terms upon which it interacted with religious institutions. In the mid-19th century, modernity was defined in terms of increased state management and organisation of religious communities; Tsarist reforms, like the contemporaneous Ottoman Tanzimat, created new officially-recognised forms of communal hierarchy and redefined notions of religious authority, orthodoxy and allegiance. The politics of religion was also a central battle-ground for domestic debate during the transition from empire to successor states: during and after the First World War, this was evident in Russia and Turkey as well as in many of their neighbours. There was keen debate about the public role of religion among Muslims and Christians alike: for both Lenin and Ataturk modernity was defined in opposition to religion, or in terms of limiting the power of religious institutions over social conduct, the law and education. But we need too to ask: how far were such radical ideas actually carried out in practice and what resistance was there to them? Elite policies need to be tested, in other words, against the social forces and popular attitudes they sought to recast.
The Russian and the Ottoman empires provide, however, more than cases for comparative analysis. Rather, their geopolitical rivalry across the wider Black Sea - extending all the way from the Ukraine and the Balkans to the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea - left its mark on both, and transformed world affairs over more than two hundred years. Through cultural exchange, economics and diplomacy, war and conquest, the two empires exerted a powerful impact upon one another. It was, for instance, Catherine the Great’s claim in 1774 to the right to protect the Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule that prompted the sultans to define a wider international role for themselves by laying claim to the caliphate. From the late eighteenth century, Russia had to manage the Ottoman-Tatar legacy it inherited in the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Danubian Principalities and Bulgaria; while the Ottoman state was irrevocably altered by the mass movements of refugees and displaced populations fleeing Russian rule, and by the ideas of Turkish nationalism and Pan-Islamism brought by Russian-educated Muslim intellectuals and thinkers. Orthodox pilgrims journeying from Kiev to Mount Athos and Jerusalem, like Muslim ‘ulama moving between Kazan, Cairo and the Holy Cities, inhabited a world whose intrinsic unity has been obscured by the arbitrary boundaries imposed by postwar academic area studies. We might also include prisoners of war, merchants, renegades, sailors, slaves and others who crossed the various cultural borders across the Black Sea. This project proposes to take Russia’s southern orientation seriously and to promote new research into the all-important religious factor within this.
We propose to concentrate our attention on a number of key issues and themes:
[a] relations between the state and religious institutions in the imperial age and after. The administration [esp of religious minorities]; religious self-government and communal authority; contestations over juridical and educational authority.
[b] Russian views of Islam and the Ottoman state; Muslim and Ottoman views of Russian power; Muslim and Orthodox conceptions of political sovereignty [including the Daghestani imamate; Russian Muslims and their allegiances; Orthodox Christians in the Balkans and Anatolia and their relationships with Moscow, the Church and the Tsarist state]; popular apocalyptic visions of future political dispensations, and definitions of orthodoxy/heterodoxy in Orthodoxy and Islam.
[c] Competing modernities in the transition from imperial autocracy to the 20th century ideological state. Changing views on religion; the fate of religious institutions, authorities and sacred places; anti-religious policies and the resistance to them. Continued practices of informal social negotiation over matters of faith. Nationalism, religion and the sacred.
Spearheaded by a new generation of scholars, much important work is underway in these and related subjects. Our objective is to seek through workshops and conferences to bring together researchers from the Russian and Ottoman/Turkish sides in particular, to facilitate further research through the publicising of new archival and documentary sources in this area, and to act as an entry-point in particular for US post-graduate students and others at the start of their careers into the important emerging field of study.
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