Living the good life: Muslim women’s magazines in contemporary Russia

Introduction

In recent years, Russia has become a flourishing market for products and services for Muslims. ¹ Along with halal grocery stores and restaurants, ateliers and hotels, radio stations and cosmetics, fashion bazaars and exhibitions, family recreation camps and health clubs, ² women’s magazines have become a media product on the market oriented toward Muslim consumers. These magazines usually have regional and content specificity, for example, while a Chechen magazine Woman’s Word (Slovo Zhenshini) discusses pressing issues that women face in the republic, a glossy magazine Aisha that is published in Bashkortostan focuses on the topics of beauty, health and domesticity. Despite the growing visibility of successful Muslim entrepreneurs (e.g. a young blogger and fashion designer Alexandra Golovkova), the development of infrastructure for Muslims in different parts of Russia (e.g. the reopening of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque in 2015 and the mushrooming of Quran classes for women ³ ) and the seemingly positive official rhetoric about Islam (e.g. on several occasions, President Vladimir Putin has emphasized the significant contribution of Muslim peoples to Russia’s national flourishing), the status of Muslims in the country remains precarious. Writing about Muslims in Western European contexts, Fatima El-Tayeb (2011) notes that ‘minorities are positioned behind the horizon of national politics, culture and history, frozen in the state of migration through the permanent designation of another, foreign national identity’ (p.xiii). Similarly, Nikolay Zakharov (2015: 140) argues that (ethnic and religious) minorities in Russia are seen as migrants, who do not and cannot belong. Their perceived fundamental and immutable difference is noted both in recent opinion polls that indicate that ‘61 per cent of Muscovites have a persistently negative reaction to the growth of ethnic diversity’ (Zakharov, 2015: 141) and in the racist statements of some Russian officials. For example, in an interview with the BBC, the former chief spokesman for the Federal Migration Service Konstantin Poltoranin said,

What is now at stake is the survival of the white race. This is what we feel in Russia. We want to make sure the mixing of blood happens in the right way here – not the way it happened in Western Europe, where the results have not been good. (Zakharov, 2015: 154)

Today, many Muslims in Russia face racial profiling, imprisonment and torture, discrimination and harassment and experience other forms of injustice, especially in light of political volatility in the Caucasus, intensified labor migration from the former Soviet republics and Russia’s military involvement in Syria. However, these issues do not affect Muslims of Russia equally. As scholars of intersectionality have illustrated, factors such as gender, race, class, age, ethnic, regional and national belonging have to be taken into account in our analysis of the status of (Muslim) subjects in a given context. For example, an ethnically Slavic woman who converted to Islam, comes from an upper middle-class family and resides in Moscow will probably have a different life trajectory than a Chechen woman, who lives in Grozny, comes from a poor family and whose brothers have been arrested on terrorism charges. Hence, scholars of Islam in Russia such as Guzel Sabirova and Elena Omelchenko (in Pilkington and Yemelianova 2003) invite us to examine the individual narratives and life trajectories of Muslim women and analyze them within the larger patriarchal context of post-Soviet Russia in order to delineate the different modes of being female and Muslim.

The archive for this article includes physical and electronic copies of Musulmanka (a Muslim woman) that was launched in Moscow in 2009 and Muslim Magazine that appeared in print in Moscow in 2012. By examining various articles, advertisements and opinion pieces, I ask what kind of subject is constituted and what modes of belonging and recognition transpire on the pages of these magazines. Drawing from Jasbir Puar, the first part of this article explores the theme of consumption that normalizes and assimilates a gendered Muslim citizen within the national body.

In dialog with Lauren Berlant (2011), the second section of this article examines the narratives of the good life that frequently ‘operate in proximity to normativity’ (p.14). The intimate juxta-political publics (Berlant, 2008) that flourish in these magazines endorse a model minority citizen, who adheres to dominant gender norms and relegates contentious politics of gender, class and racial privilege in Russia to the private domain. The final part of this article analyzes attachments to the larger Muslim world that are suffused with longing, optimism and nostalgia and operate through exclusions. I ask what these attachments demonstrate, what relationships they advance and what political stakes they have.

Methods

Women’s magazines have been analyzed from multiple perspectives. Some scholars have discussed the representations of women (Weiner, 1999; Zuckerman, 1998) and used discourse and visual analysis to question different modes of gender construction. Combining textual and ethnographic approaches, some theorists have drawn our attention to the issues of consumption and stressed the importance of audience research (Hermes in Carter et al., 2014; Frazer, 1987; Ytre-Arne, 2011), while others have been concerned with the questions of magazine production and industry organization (Gough-Yates, 2003). In this article, I analyze the discourses of two Muslim women’s magazines in Russia and examine the modes of national and transnational belonging that they project. Although the textual approach may seem conventional, its strength lies in its capacity to situate magazine discourses within the broader debates about gender, belonging and recognition and to see them in light of economic shifts in today’s Russia. This approach does not simply engage with disembodied texts – contributors to these magazines are also their readers and they simultaneously produce, consume, interpret, confirm and perhaps contest these discourses in their articles.

Conversations with the works of cultural studies theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Jasbir Puar attuned me to how intimacies, attachments and fantasies of belonging and sociality circulate through women’s magazines and interact with the broader social structures and discourses in Russia, thus constituting particular subjectivities. Berlant introduces useful concepts that helped me unpack the articulations of gender in a particular material context through the genre of glossy women’s magazines. Puar’s theoretical interventions elucidated how in glossy magazines precarious subjects express their desires for respectability and legibility through normative consumption and how race, class, gender and religion play out in these processes. References to diverse bodies of literature on gender, race and Islam in the post-Soviet context ground different segments of my larger argument.

I have worked with 17 physical copies and select online articles from Musulmanka published during 2014 (the period when I conducted my research) and with 5 physical issues of Muslim Magazine. I used open-coding to identify recurring themes, which included consumption, femininity and Muslim geographies. Then, I broke down materials from different textual fragments according to these themes. The analysis of the data uncovered underlying structures of meaning in these magazines (e.g. conspicuous consumption linked to prestige and status) and prompted me to read it in light of theoretical concepts such as belonging, citizenship, normativity and abjection and in the context of different pressures that Muslim minority subjects face in Russia.

Each issue of Musulmanka is devoted to a special topic (e.g. diligence, knowledge and fear of God), which is announced in the editor’s foreword, and the articles coalesce around it. The content of the magazine is generally structured around the following rubrics – ‘reports’ (e.g. life in Muslim countries), ‘personalities’ (e.g. conversations with Russian Muslim artists), ‘worldview’ (e.g. religious homilies), ‘society’ (e.g. discussions about education, work and social projects) and ‘our life’ (e.g. articles about women’s health, childrearing, shopping, tourism and relaxation). On the front page, readers can see a photograph of a successful Muslim woman (e.g. entrepreneur, designer and social worker), who was interviewed for the issue. Articles are accompanied by images (mostly portraits and photographs) that serve as visual illustrations to the theme.

A word from the editor also opens every issue of Muslim Magazine; however, themes are usually more abstract and revolve around sensuous experiences:

In this issue, we have added sunlight, warm colors and bright thoughts to the obviously monochromatic reality. We mapped out interesting routes, narrated different life stories, suggested how to create new looks … We did not forget [to include] useful information for those who are planning to go on hajj in the upcoming year. (Alexey Kusurgashev, 2013: 4)

Articles correspond to the themes, which are somewhat similar to, yet different from those in Musulmanka: ‘point on a map’ (e.g. stories about Muslim sites), ‘seasonal offers’ (e.g. materials about fashion and design), ‘interview’ (e.g. conversations with prominent Muslims), ‘practice’ (e.g. articles about halal, ethnic recipes and hobbies) and ‘cultural overview’ (e.g. events in the world of Islamic culture). Compared to Musulmanka, in Muslim Magazine, less emphasis is made on domesticity, yet its content and aesthetics suggest that women are its primary audience. The tropes of domestic bliss, female fashion, romanticized wanderlust and food recipes are interlaced with other gendered scripts (e.g. articles about male soccer players, respectable businessmen and male fashion), thus demonstrating that in the fantasy of the good life, each subject occupies a specifically defined place. Normative femininity that is articulated through proximity to the ‘right’ objects (e.g. husband, children and refined clothing) is bolstered by normative masculinity. There is a variety of images presented in Muslim Magazine – from slick advertisements of products and services to sharp photo-essays of Islamic places – that are similar to the images in Musulmanka in terms of content but different in terms of aesthetics.

Thus, putting these select archives in dialog with the works of popular culture and gender studies scholars and reading them through the discourses that circulate in the larger public sphere in Russia have offered a new perspective on gender, Islam and belonging in Russia.

Productive power of commodities

Muslim Magazine belongs to the genre of glossy lifestyle magazines that is published on high-quality shiny paper and cover topics such as cultural events, fashion and architecture, travel and leisure, interviews and special projects (e.g. Ramadan Book that includes Top 10 questions about Ramadan, healthy diet recommendations from Ramadan Doctor and world-wide halal recipes for Iftar Card; Katerina Perhova, 2012: 40–70 ). It comes out twice a year and has an electronic version, which features rubrics such as Faith, People, Clothes, Food, Places and Shopping. The magazine is not available at regular stores; therefore, readers can either order it online or purchase it at Muslim-owned businesses for 150 rubles (e.g. clothing stores). Muslim Magazine positions itself as a content provider for ‘a believer who leads an active lifestyle and appreciates comfort’. prior to the recent rebranding, the previous mission of the magazine stated:

Our readers are energetic and successful Muslims, who are inspired by expensive, sharp and practical things. The uniqueness of the magazine is in the blending of couleur orientale with European respectability, conservativeness with innovation, spirituality with pragmatism. This magazine is for those who appreciate the eternal, live in the present and are confident about the future. ⁴

Yearning for respectability that appears in articles about the latest fashion trends for Muslim women (Bagautdinov, 2013: 51–52), luxurious halal hotels one should visit after hajj (Alexey Kusurgashev, 2013: 28–29) or the latest iPhone apps for Muslims (Marat Shamsutdinov, 2012: 80–81) extends to Muslims of Russia a promise of inhabiting the privileged norms of consumption that are race, gender and class specific. ⁵ As Puar (2007) notes, precarious subjects are scrutinized along a continuum of activities that include consumption patterns and property ownership. Their ability to purchase status-conferring commodities and services (e.g. clothes, electronic gadgets, luxury and comfort) often ‘masquerades as a form of national belonging, mediates the humiliation of waiting for national love’ and allows for the recognition of difference that becomes assimilated into a form of similarity (Puar, 2007: 26–27). As Joke Hermes (2005) rightly points out, popular culture genres such as glossy magazines ‘allow us to fantasize about the ideals and hopes that we have for society, as well as to ponder what we fear’ (p. 3). Indeed, narratives about ethically consuming, reading, traveling and spiritually attuned (read ‘good’) (Muslim Safarov, 2012: 28) ⁶ present aspirations for respectability and contrast with the stigmatizing discourses about ‘a criminal migrant worker’ from Central Asia, ‘a primitive Muslim woman’ and ‘a fanatical Caucasian’ that proliferate in Russia. The representations of properly desiring and consuming Muslim subjects fold them into a particular type of gendered, racialized and class-marked normativity which is aligned with the aspirations of the middle-class Russian majority, ‘who have begun to construct their identity around their whiteness and in opposition to uncivilized and ungrateful labor migrants’ (Zakharov, 2015: 147).

Such representations also correspond to the broader state-propelled narratives of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ citizens. In his 2009 article ‘Forward, Russia!’, the former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stated that the future belongs to ‘the educated, intelligent, … “complex” person, who … does not need leaders … to make decisions for him [or her]’ (Morozov, 2010: 3). This ‘good’ citizen embraces ‘high culture’ (i.e. political and legal culture and the culture of civil dialog) and opposes ‘low culture’ (i.e. the culture of intolerance, irresponsibility and aggressiveness, which destroys democracy; Morozov, 2010: 3). Thus, Muslim Magazine presents adherence to the ‘best practices’ of citizenship expressed in ‘cultured’ behavior and sophisticated consumption as desired. However, it obscures vast differences in economic opportunities available to Muslims, depoliticizes growing social stratification and underestimates the sense of socio-economic volatility that characterizes today’s Russia. For example, an average monthly salary in November 2015 amounted to 33,800 rubles (US$480) (Vedomosti, 2015), ⁷ and wealth inequality remains drastic – ‘the top 10% of wealth holders own 85% of all household wealth in Russia’ (Shorrocks et al., 2014: 53). There is no official income breakdown along racial or religious lines available in Russia, but one could argue that ‘ethnicized’ citizens find themselves at the bottom of hierarchized labor structures. Zakharov (2015) concurs by stating that racialization ‘supports an unequal distribution of resources’ (p.158).

This ‘difference within sameness’ and ‘difference containing sameness’ (Puar, 2007: 54) that Muslim Magazine displays is manifested not only in aspirations for respectability and privileged consumption practices but also in the desire for upward mobility. Articles about how to do ethical and profitable business in Russia (Muslim Safarov, 2013: 50–51 and Patimat Gusaynova, 2013: 54–55) and ‘feel-good’ stories about Muslim women-editors, lawyers, photographers and designers (Georgiy Birger et al. 2015: 26–82) ⁸ position Muslims as productive and model minority citizens, who can be (and in some sense are) successfully incorporated into the white, androcentric, hetero-normative, Christian Orthodox and ethnically Slavic national public, suffused with resurgent nationalism and the depoliticizing discourses of tolerance. ⁹ Difference becomes sanitized, neutralized and presented as nonthreatening. For example, an article ‘A Muslim Woman at Work’ that appeared in the latest issue of Muslim Magazine advises women how to navigate the labor market in Russia that is largely hostile to practicing Muslim women. Here, are two recommendations that the author provides,

With the rightly selected wardrobe one can look European and simultaneously adhere to the tenets of Islam. Clad in [black] from head to toe (zachehlennaya, literally: ‘put in a case’), a Muslim woman looks like an absolute Martian on the streets of Moscow and projects a message ‘I am not like you’ … But a Muslim woman who follows the [Islamic] tradition and adjusts to the environment in which she lives, says ‘I am ready for a dialog’

Surround yourself with mentally and intellectually free people, and prejudices against you will seem like an unpleasant incident. To do this, however, you yourself need to reach that level [of mental and intellectual emancipation]. (Rahimova, 2015: 47)

These passages illustrate how the desire for upward mobility and national belonging through the productive participation in the labor market reinstates white privilege as normative (i.e. a European look as desirable), carefully manages difference (i.e. Bhabha’s (1984) ‘almost the same but not quite’) and downplays the consequences of institutionalized sexism and racism (e.g. discrimination as merely a ‘nuisance’). For the author of the article, it is ‘not surprising that many managers do not hire Muslim women, especially for those positions that require communication with clients. They are more concerned with efficiency and profitability’ (Rahimova, 2015: 45). Thus, she does not critically interrogate gender- and religion- or race-based discrimination in the labor market and its ties to patriarchy in Russia (Walby, 1990: 43–45).

To avoid ‘corporate slavery’, the author of the article suggests that Muslim women should embrace ‘such modern trends as downshifting, freelance and long-distance work’, which will allow them ‘to realize their potential’ and correspond to the tenets of Islam regarding women’s labor – ‘work should not take up all of woman’s time. She should give it to her family’ (Rahimova, 2015: 47). It is unclear whether the author considers housework as work, but the issues that occur when a woman combines ‘flexible labor’ with ‘mothering through precarity’ (Wilson and Yochim, 2015) are not addressed. It is important to note that the concept of ‘flexible labor’ is based on the idea of an ‘entrepreneurial subject’, who manages her life like a project and valorizes the notions of choice, autonomy and self-crafting. Although such employment may be suitable for some women, it obscures the ‘contingent’ nature of this labor, which does not guarantee a stable income and job security and makes the lives of many Muslim women even more precarious. This incitement to entrepreneurialism, positive thinking and self-work perpetuates a myth that the good life (i.e. upward mobility, equal access to economic and political opportunities, etc.) is available to everyone, if only she displays flexibility and savvy. ¹⁰

The author believes that the incorporation of veiled Muslim women into the labor force, especially into government and municipal sectors, would help ‘integrate them into social life, encourage interaction between them and society and blur the boundaries between the ummah and society’ (Rahimova, 2015: 47). Thus, only a productive minority subject could become a valid member of the nation, count on her inclusion into the national promise and live the good life. Through the ‘assimilative’ power of labor, she can ‘add up to something’ (e.g. national prosperity and cross-cultural dialog; Berlant, 2011: 3). This ‘something’ is the well-being and success of Russia, which depend on the ‘effective labor and achievements of everyone’, as President Putin noted in his 2015 New Year address. ¹¹

The next section of this article will analyze how inclusion into the national body takes place through the depoliticizing effects of intimacy that saturates the pages of Musulmanka. Narratives about femininity are legible within the national public sphere and relegate contentious politics of gender, class and racial privilege in Russia to the private domain.

Domestic hens and shaggy cats

In Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Lauren Berlant (2008) conceptualizes ‘femininity as a genre with deep affinities to the genres associated with femininity’ (p.3). Similar to soap operas and melodramatic novels, glossy magazines are a gender-marked product that ‘cultivates fantasies of emotional continuity and affinity among women’ (Berlant, 2008: 5). Intimate publics, Berlant (2008) states, ‘elaborate themselves through a commodity culture, are organized by fantasies of transcending, dissolving or re-functioning the obstacles that shape their historical conditions, and are flourishing in proximity to the political’ (pp.3, 8). In conversation with Berlant, I illustrate how the discourses that permeate Musulmanka magazine embrace femininity that is attuned to dominant gender norms and privatize gender, class and racial politics in Russia. Even the occasional rejection of such femininity is but a ‘part of the convention (and not a transgression) of the genre’ (Berlant, 2008: 4).

In our correspondence, the co-editor of Musulmanka Nasima Bokova stated that the magazine targets Muslim mothers, housewives and working women between the ages of 20 and 40. Print copies contain articles about childrearing, women’s health, personal and professional life, stories about prominent Muslim women and interviews with men (i.e. a column called ‘A Male Point of View’). The publishing house Sadra publishes two issues per year with the circulation of 3000 copies. The magazine is distributed in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan, Saratov and Dagestan and can be delivered by mail for 80 rubles. The magazine is privately financed. Its online version features articles by regular contributors that differ in terms of style and content. As the mission of the magazine states, the readers of and the contributors to Musulmanka are Muslim women, whose ‘thoughts and acts dismantle stereotypes and whose examples inspire and give strength’. ¹²

Much discussion that unfolds on the pages of Musulmanka focuses on the meanings of womanhood. Articles predominantly emphasize women’s ‘natural’ duties of childbearing and domesticity, and highlight the inspiring power of Islam in their personal lives. This is how one contributor sees the role of a Muslim woman in society:

Mothers shape the future of our community, the level of its morality and civilizational development. From mothers children learn important ideals and values. Mothers shape children’s self-esteem, teach them empathy and neither a baby-sitter nor a teacher can substitute a mother. Motherhood is not about ‘dirty work’ as some ‘happy’ childfree individuals may think. The power of Muslim women as mothers is so strong that even the enemies of Islam recognize it. Zionists are not afraid of women-ministers or businesswomen. Ayelet Shaked is afraid of Muslim housewives. (Sadr, 2014)

Narratives about gendered virtues such as patience, compassion and kindness celebrate normative femininity and foster bonds of reciprocity and intimacy between Muslim women. These ties became especially pronounced in the letters that readers wrote to Musulmanka to celebrate its fifth anniversary. In these letters, women expressed affinity with Muslim ‘sisters’ in Russia and abroad, welcomed new converts to Islam and emphasized the importance of articles about motherhood and family values. ¹³

The magazine articles that praise virtuous womanhood and condemn any manifestation of nonnormativity are legible within the ‘national politics of intimacy’ (Berlant, 1997: 7). In the last several years, the political life in Russia has become imbued with emotion: concerns with birthrates (Vsevolod Chaplin, 2015), virility and family values (Sperling, 2015), ¹⁴ criminalization of homosexuality, imposition of kinship with Slavic nations, popularization of charity discourses, ¹⁵ glorification of ‘heroes’ and denigration of ‘enemies’ (Interfax 2016), ¹⁶ and the celebration of religious orthodoxy (Kizenko, 2013), whiteness and essentialized masculinity–femininity as the signs of national belonging fuel the debates that unfold within the national public sphere. Thus, a contributor to Musulmanka Leila Natalia Bahadory presents normative femininity as desirable, natural and inevitable. In her article, she introduces two oppositional personalities – a family-oriented woman–hen and an adventurous woman–cat – and illustrates the indisputable advantages of the former:

It is not shameful to be ordinary, if this is your inspiring, protecting and caring ordinariness. [Had I not realized this and embraced Islam], I would have become a shaggy and lonely cat who cherished her illusory independence and ugly individuality. I would have continued to mock hens with a smirk that in fact concealed longing for homespun and ordinary happiness. (Bahadory, 2014)

Leila’s argument fits well with the contemporary gender order in Russia, which combines old Soviet policies that hailed women as ‘workers and mothers, token leaders and obedient cadres’ (Gal and Kligman, 2000: 4; Kay, 2007) and such new attributes as the reification of polarized gender roles and valorization of the private sphere as the primary domain of woman’s fulfillment (Zdravomyslova et al., 2009: 11). Just as the previous gender regimes, the current order promotes hyper feminized working women and upholds male privilege. Leila’s argument also corresponds to the vision of happiness as a form of world making, direction and orientation that are associated with some life choices and not others (Ahmed, 2010). In Russia, these life choices include first and foremost a heterosexual conjugal family with children at its center.

Berlant (2008) argues that ‘the power of a generic performance (of gender identity and genre) always involves moments of potential collapse that threaten the contract that genre makes with the viewer to fulfill experiential expectations’ (p.4). Indeed, articles such as Happy (Oh, God!) without Children (Medved, 2014) seem to represent a moment of potential failure to perform normative femininity. In her response to Leila’s article, another contributor to Musulmanka Fatima Anastasia Ezhova writes,

The outlook of a bourgeois woman-hen is limited to soft sleepers, knitted socks and the content of TV programming. Her life is built around procreation and filling her warm apartment with junk. She drags her husband into an infernal abyss. A graceful and affectionate woman-cat can save him. She is the lioness of God in miniature. (Ezhova, 2014)

It seems that here Fatima attempts to problematize the construction of domesticity-oriented femininity as natural and desirable or to propose a different framework within which the discussion could unfold. But these attempts collapse in the following lines:

A woman-cat helps her man feel strong and powerful. She has her personal space, thus, giving her man the time to realize his ambitions and projects. A cat raises little hunters and not biomaterial for a poultry farm. She opens up horizons in front of her man and does not destroy his masculinity in a musty suburban nest. There is no place for bourgeois lifestyle in Islam. The goal for each Muslim is to radically transform reality based on Allah’s laws and justice and not to attain cozy halal happiness. (Ezhova, 2014)

Although Fatima’s article cracks the fantasy of affinity among women and attempts to critique certain lines of privilege (namely, class), it fails to interrogate the reasons behind such a widespread ‘demand’ for domesticity-oriented femininity in contemporary Russia. Sex-based inequalities (e.g. patriarchy of the wage and structural violence against women), social stigmatization of unmarried women and women without children, promotion of childbearing, ¹⁷ high social expectations from and increasing vulnerability of working mothers (Bridger et al., 1996) ¹⁸ and normalization of sexism and racism against women of color ¹⁹ are neglected, depoliticized and relegated to the private domain. Such narratives continue to construct (Muslim) women as productive members of the nation via their primary duties as wives and mothers, while presenting men as the ultimate decision-makers and providers.

The final section of this article will illustrate how desire for national belonging expressed through the tropes of consumption and intimacy overlaps with attachments to the larger Muslim world. Although these attachments expand the possibilities of belonging, they are saturated with depoliticizing emotion and operate through exclusions.

Be-longing to the intimate Ummah

References to the ummah frequently permeate conversion narratives, interest stories and reminiscing or travelers’ notes that appear in both magazines. Below are the examples that illustrate different genres, which articulate these affective affiliations:

The city was covered in snow, but the light breeze brought the anticipation of spring. ‘Is there snow in Palestine?’ I wonder. I do not remember what sura I was reading that night, but I realized that the time had come. I performed ablution, put on a veil and in a trembling voice recited the shahada from a piece of paper. Hot tears of happiness and atonement were running down my cheeks and there was nobody around to share this event with me … That day I realized that Palestine was not only the land of all prophets, but the homeland of all Muslims, my homeland. (My italics; Safiullina, 2014)

These were beautiful November days of the 1980s. The trip to the South-East of Spain marked the end of our journey … Alhambra opened itself to me and I realized that I was standing among such beauty created by people whom God had endowed with a special gift. Who were these people? How does the idea of creation come about? Why did Alhambra become possible and why is everything here so inspiring and desirable for me, a woman from a different world and epoch? During that quiet morning in Alhambra I could not even imagine that in thirty years on a sunny morning I would touch a warm wall of Ka’aba and utter with all my soul ‘Allahu Akbar!’. (Mishina, 2013: 96)

As soon as I entered the first room of the [Shaki Khans] Palace, I felt that I got inside a jewelry box. All walls and ceilings were covered in gorgeous frescos. There was not a single place or corner that was not decorated with colorful eastern ornaments and fascinating images. They were a product of painstaking work and I am not sure if there is anything like this anywhere in the world! (Ragimova, 2011: 54)

Celebratory discourses about the Muslim community that are imbued with nostalgia, hope, affection, solidarity and compassion circulate in these magazines. As the examples above illustrate, vivid descriptions of tastes, sounds, smells, tactile sensations, landscapes and objects produce therapeutic effects against the contingencies of the present, connect multiple temporalities and geographies and reveal desires for transnational belonging. These frequently romanticized, intimate and sensuous affiliations are experienced and articulated in a ‘non-threatening’ way. Indeed, in Russia where conversion to Islam and connection to the larger Muslim world are viewed as potentially suspect (Dannreuther and March, 2010), the memories of (war-torn) Makhachkala where ‘milk was home delivered’ (Saleddin, 2013: 86) or the celebration of the ‘Chechen and Uzbek cuisines that peacefully coexist on the pages’ (Galina Babich, 2013: 58) of these magazines appear apolitical. Taking place at different transnational sites (e.g. traditional Islamic universities, magnificent mosques and luxurious resorts) and through various objects (e.g. keffiyeh, praying carpets and beads), the constitution of communal Muslim subjectivity is spatially dispersed yet is tied back to Russia. For example, what is called ‘a Russian hijab’ (i.e. a traditional shawl from Pavlopossadsk that Russian women used to cover their hair and shoulders) is incorporated into the discussion of different headscarf styles in the Muslim world (Kaysarov, 2012–2013: 38–39). These affiliations unequivocally include Russia into the global ummah.

On one hand, these affiliations map out a positive futurity that opens up new possibilities for belonging, kinship and even homelands that are seen not only as geographical places but also as an affective relationship. Thus, articles about protests against Israel’s occupation of Palestine in Moscow and donations from the Adygea Republic to Syrian refugees establish lines of solidarity against precarity, loss and impasse and reinforce the sense of Muslim community whose members are bound together. On the other hand, incitement to community through unity and festivalized diversity can lead to exclusions. As Miranda Joseph (2002) has demonstrated, communal narratives can be disciplining and often function to exclude people and legitimate racial, gender and class hierarchies. They can also stifle the ethical practice of critique as a mode of participating in and practicing community. Indeed, in the magazines, not much space is allocated to critical discussions about religious sectarianism in Russia, the plight of Muslim migrant workers from Central Asia or the issues that young Muslim men and women from a volatile region such as Northern Caucasus experience daily. Preferred affiliations are established with ‘successful’ and ‘prosperous’ Muslims who already enjoy the promises of the good life and with the Islamic geographies from which political and socio-economic issues are frequently ‘erased’.

In addition to exclusions and omissions, many articles operate through abstractions (e.g. Muslim women, Syrian refugees and Western values), contain assumptions (e.g. how a Muslim woman should look and act and what a Muslim family is) and exclude those who do not conform to these expectations, thus limiting the opportunities for imagining alliances across differences.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that Muslim women’s magazines Musulmanka and Muslim Magazine are sites, where a modern Muslim subject is constituted, articulated and enacted. This gendered minority subject becomes legible within the national public sphere through her ability to properly consume goods and services and to be productive in the Russian labor market. Citizenship is also bestowed upon her for her desire to perform ‘natural’ and ‘assimilative’ functions such as caretaker, homemaker and nurturer. The magazines rarely question the (unjust) ways in which Russian society is structured, thus implicitly endorsing the status quo. Yearning for respectability and national belonging is interlaced with the articulations of transnational affiliations. Suffused with powerful emotions, these narratives often operate through exclusions and frequently hold back the practices of communal critique.

This article sought to draw our analytical attention to discourses about Muslims in Russia, which permeate material objects such as women’s magazines. Affects and truths circulate through these objects that project particular scenarios of happiness and visions of the good life, create transnational bonds and make certain worlds possible. These objects should be viewed as a part of a larger assemblage of discourses, practices and encounters through which Muslim subjects are constituted as subjects of capitalism, gendered subjects, subjects belonging to the nation and ummah and so forth. Although I have argued that these magazines generally recycle normativity with a carefully articulated caveat, more research is needed to see whether these magazines could serve as spaces of transformative potentiality and critique.