Lived Islam in post-Soviet Russia: Officials,experts,and ordinary interpretations of Islam

The special issue edited by Di Puppo and Schmoller critically engages the nexus between normative discourses and what has been called in recent anthropological works ‘the everyday’ of Muslim life (Schielke and Debevec, 2012; cf. Fadil and Fernando, 2015). It does this by moving the lens of attention from the religious to the ‘secular’ sphere as the source of normativity. While these new works have invited us to scrutinise the complexities of Muslim life by pointing at religiosity as the source of normative discourses being contested by Muslims’ more complex, articulated, contradictory and not-necessarily-pious identities, the papers collected in the issue focus on the state’s and lay officials’ discourses in post-Soviet, self-declared secular Russia as the normative framework that defines much of the commitment and self-understanding of Muslims in the region. But they do more. They also show that far from remaining stalled in their own respective domains, normative discourses and ‘daily practices’ intertwine profoundly, as Muslims navigate through the normative dichotomies that are imposed on them by national and supranational global discourses. In the process, Muslims are not only importantly affected by dominant categorisations of a right and wrong Islam, but they are also able to bend these denominations to their needs, as they struggle to see their status as citizens belonging to a minority religious confession legitimised.

Although the editors deliberately opt for not taking a definitive stance on these recent debates in the anthropology of Islam, they seem to bend more toward former approaches – the so-called ‘piety turn’ (Soares and Osella, 2010) – at least inasmuch as they better serve the editors’ purpose of shedding light on secularism – however we define it (see more on this below) – as another source of normative imperatives no more and no less than religion. While they recognise that secularism in post-Soviet Russia is very differently understood than it was in Soviet times, in their view, it is still possible to ‘observe the tendency of continuing the regulation of the religious domain, for example through the concept of “traditional religions”’ (Di Puppo and Schmoller, 2020). I will come back to the centrality of the idea of ‘traditional Islam’ for many of the essays of this special issue later. For the moment, it is worth remarking that other authors whose work can be placed in the wake of the ‘piety turn’ have attempted to demonstrate that secularism does not simply consist in the power of the modern state to restrict religion to the inner individual sphere but, more sharply, in the power to constantly redefine the lines that separate the ‘religious’ from the ‘secular’ – and consequently establishing what shall be considered legitimate from what shall not (Agrama, 2012). In this perspective, the modern state and its actors are neither ‘secular’ nor ‘religious’ per se. Rather, their authority rests on the power they have to trace and retrace the line dividing these two domains at their own discretion.

Similarly, the post-Soviet state is anything but ‘secular’. As highlighted by several authors of this special issue, the Orthodox Church exercises a strong influence on the institutions, as well as on those public officials and intellectuals who regulate Islam in the country. Yet, most striking is not so much the allegedly religious character of the church’s imprint on the state, but how all these actors contribute to ‘naming’ Islam by way of classifying certain Muslim practices as ‘traditional’ and hence more appropriate and legitimate than others which are by the same measure disqualified. At this juncture lies the normative power of the post-Soviet state and its actors in tracing the contours of the discourse around Islam; a discourse in response to which Muslims are obliged to position themselves as they constantly fight for their legitimisation, whether they like it or not.

These more or less explicit attempts by the state, its designated officials and intelligentsia could be otherwise defined as attempts at domesticating Islam, in ways not very dissimilar to what has happened in large parts of the Muslim-majority world in around the last one hundred years. Governing Islam is the title of several recent publications (e.g. Hernández, 2018; Stephens, 2018) exploring the invasive policies that modern states have deployed to regulate the religious domain, and Islam in particular, by penetrating the administration of law and religious education with the main goal of promoting an understanding of the tradition that would not pose a threat to the nation and may eventually even foster the formation of loyal citizens. The case of Turkey and its Governorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı) is a prime example of such attempts. A state’s body that was instituted in early republican times by secular reformers, the Diyanet, has since served the goal of overseeing all religious affairs including training and assigning imams across the country. As such, the management of Islam has never been an exception or deviation from secularism in the Turkish case. Rather, it can be classified as one of its building principles and goals (Turner and Zengin Arslan, 2013).

However, a remarkable difference is that, if in Turkey, like in other Muslim-majority countries, the goal is often that of irradiating society with an ‘enlightened’ way of living the majoritarian version of Islam (whereas religious minorities are generally disregarded, as exemplified by the Alevis or other Shia minorities in the Turkish case), in post-Soviet Russia, secular interventions in religious matters are neither as centralised as they are in the Muslim world, nor do they have as clear a proactive goal. As illustrated in the contributions of the special issue, the initiative is often left to external para-state apparatuses and to a multiplicity of public actors who often align with a post-9/11 global rhetoric winnowing out the ‘good Muslims’ from the ‘bad Muslims’ in a context shaped by widespread diffidence, when not outright Islamophobia (Mamdani, 2002). The volume shows that, by contrast from what happens in the majority of Muslim-majority countries, in the post-Soviet region, several authorities have attempted to ‘securitise’ Islam by setting the limits that define which forms of Islam are legitimate and which are not. In this vein, the special issue aptly suggests that ‘secular power’ is not the exclusive domain of the state but is today entrenched in supranational logics and dynamics. As a religious minority, Russian Muslims have to remain within the lines of such stigmatising classifications, constrained as they are to take a clear stance in order to reassure the state and its actors that they do not represent a threat. In this perspective, secularism can also be understood as an epistemic condition with which religion, and in particular Islam, has had to come to terms in contemporary times. Such a condition is favoured by the erosion of the nation-state’s grasp on power, as well as by the penetration of supranational logics and discourses that is even more evident in contexts like post-Soviet Russia, where the ‘return’ of religion after decades of obliteration and self-censorship has offered fertile ground for what are perceived as more radical groups coming from abroad to take root.

While secularism as a source of normative discourses sets the contours within which Muslim actors can operate, the special issue, however, also points towards a different, and to a certain extent, opposite direction of analysis. In the eyes of the contributors, by setting certain limits, secularism also becomes a sort of strategic field within which Muslims can advance their agenda and see their rights recognised. In this vein, rather than completely discharging the ‘everyday’, the contributors re-read it through the more malleable notion of ‘space’ to carve out ground for human ‘agency’ vis-à-vis over-determining normative discourses. As declared by the editors in their incipit, indeed, the ‘everyday’ may remain a useful concept if it helps us to think about Muslim life beyond normativity and to keep in mind that human life is more complex than an overemphasis on dominant discourses would suggest. As such, the ‘everyday’ could be thought of as that interstitial space between institutional normativity and human creativity within which competing groups of Muslims position themselves not only vis-à-vis the authorities, but also in relation to other coreligionists. Indeed, the special issue points to how different groups of Muslims often also compete among themselves for hegemony at the local level by appropriating, rejecting, or reinterpreting normative discourses. There is variety and multidimensionality in the kind of responses that Muslim actors give to such discourses on the ground. Different kinds of Muslim identities emerge, each having its own degree of commitment, way of experiencing a pious life and conception of how strictly they should abide by Islamic models.

By struggling for the control of this dialectic field, Muslims in post-Soviet Russia jeopardise the linear and simplistic dichotomies traced by normative discourses. In this perspective, the ‘everyday’ can also be figured as the space of constant practice, negotiation and ambiguity where Muslims position themselves vis-à-vis official actors as well as other competing Muslim identities. ‘Traditional’ vs. ‘reformist’, ‘observant’ vs. ‘ordinary’, ‘local’ vs. ‘global’ Islam, ‘inner’ vs. ‘outer’ religious spaces are all dichotomies that are appropriated, re-signified, challenged or even openly contested by post-Soviet Muslims, as they locate themselves in the social camp. As they do so, Muslim actors internalise these categories, are shaped by them, but also eventually use them to carve out a space where they can enact their own specific identities.

The interplay of normativity and space as two poles of an open equation which local Muslims navigate to find their place in the world is found in all the contributions to the special issue. Kovalskaya offers a picture of the complexity on the ground in both Tatarstan and Dagestan by focusing on the normative category of ‘traditional Islam’. Interestingly, the author begins by remarking that such a category is not contained in any text or law in Tatarstan. Rather, it emerges from the instances of a large and diversified body of ‘experts’ on Islam who, solicited by a set of different public actors often associated with the Russian Orthodox Church, employ it to build an atavistic, imaginary ‘immaculate space’ of ‘historical heritage’ in which local Tatar culture and Islam have lived peacefully and perfectly integrated for centuries. Also the lay-directed council for religious affairs makes reference to this idealised past when it arrogates the right to scrutinise Islamic texts in circulation to check whether any ‘extremist’ instances appear. Instead, in the 1990s, local historians exalted Jadidism as the true expression of a Turkic or Tatar Islam which on the basis of its kinship with Turkish Islam they dub as ‘Euro-Islam’, that is, as a kind of Islam that is better suited for European (and hence Russian) culture than the Islam of the Arabs – something ironic given how Turkish people are ostracised in Europe. Finally, Tatar Muslim actors themselves oscillate between those who reject their association with Jadidism and those that, although Sufi, rely on Jadidist teachings. Making the case even more complicated is the fact that the situation looks turned upside down in Dagestan, where experts in the academic field as well as local Salafi circles contest the use of binary distinctions such as that opposing ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ Islam and both agree that such distinctions only serve political needs rather than reflecting the ‘religious’ reality on the ground. In either case, Kovalskaya illustrates in detail the state and the lobbies’ attempt at securitising Islam by tracing the confines of a ‘religious normality’, as well as the multiplicity of social actors’ reactions.

Yusupova brings in a micro sociological perspective to illustrate the modalities by which the normativisation of Muslim experience is reproduced by social actors themselves, as they clash for control of the physical space of the mosque. The author adopts a Bourdieusian approach to highlight the higher dose of ‘social capital’ owned by those ‘newcomers’ that in the mid-2000s relocated to the multi-ethnic village of the Volga region that is the subject of her study. Social capital can be translated here as the expression of the higher degree of resonance that their orthodox discourse full of references to the Qur’an possesses with a global tendency toward what Eickelman and Piscatori (1996) have called the ‘objectification of Islam’, namely the ability that is requested from today’s Muslims to comprehend and explain the minutiae of religious matters. Because of this better positioning vis-à-vis the dominant episteme of global religious discourse, the newcomers are able to set the rules of the debate and win it by playing the dichotomy of their ‘genuine Islam’ versus local and customary ways of being Muslim. The clash also overlaps with generational fractures that oppose the younger population to the elders of the village, but as the study aims to demonstrate, it cannot be reduced to them. The fact that local imams appeal to the notion of ‘traditional Islam’ to accuse these newcomers of radicalism is a good example of how normative distinctions can also be appropriated by local Muslims to win their dialectic battle against others, but it is no guarantee of success.

Like Kovalskaya, Gradskova too sheds light on the role of ‘experts’ – specifically of ethnographers, orientalists or specialists of ‘Eastern religions’ – in setting the contours of proper Muslim life. Yet, the author focuses on the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution by showing how these experts relied on pseudo-scientific discourse to orientalise the Muslim ‘inner other’ represented by the woman of the Volga region. While early socialist discourses on women’s emancipation were central in the revolutionary discourse, these were generally addressed to the urban women and par opposition to the women of the periphery, who were in turn pictured as being in need of civilisation and modernisation. The otherness of the rural woman was best epitomised by the veiled Muslim woman in ‘need of salvation’ (Abu-Lughod, 2002), with the end result that rather than a motor of emancipation, the Bolshevik discourse became one of double marginalisation for them. This case recalls similar dynamics in early Republican Turkey, when the emancipation of women, including their appearance in national competitions, became a symbol for the modernisation and secularisation of the country (Arat, 1997). Yet, Gradskova does not limit the analysis to the discourses of these lay experts and illustrates the multiple and variegated ways through which some Muslim public figures, who were in turn affected by secular readings of the tradition also coming from Turkey, defended the compatibility of Islam and modernity. For instance, besides Muslim politicians advocating the traditional role of Muslim women as mothers and educators of their sons, there were intellectuals such as Musa Jarulla Bigi who by tagging veiling as a cultural rather than a religious practice advocated for the inclusion of women in public life.

The impact of post 9/11 global representations of Islam reemerges in Benussi’s contribution, which shows how today’s Muslims in post-Soviet Tatarstan indulge local authorities by embracing the notion of ‘Tatar tradition’ in opposition to an emphasis on the Islamist idiom of the shari‘a. In parallel, Benussi also demonstrates that reform-oriented piety movements of the region ride modernist religious narratives of Protestant inflection, highlighting interiority as the locus of true and pure religious experience (Abenante and Vicini, 2017). This offers to an emerging Muslim urban bourgeoisie a religious path that is in tune with its intimate and existential need to rejoin a lost spiritual dimension. As aptly illustrated by Benussi, the internalisation of a religious sensibility goes hand in hand with a parallel process of externalisation of an ‘economic ethos’ that finds its expression in a growing halal market. It is in this space that an individualised path of Muslim cultivation is translated into a collective counter-public, which retains great potential for Muslim emancipation from normative discourses.

Instead, the impossibility by some other groups of Muslims to express such a potential is dramatically exposed in Oparin’s vivid account of the life of exploited Central Asian migrant workers in suburban Moscow. Through his ethnography, Oparin illustrates how the irreducibility of life experience of these people is manifested as jinn possession, from which they are able to heal only by passing through a personal experience of catharsis that involves not only the exorcist but also often the family, relatives and other social networks. In order to grasp the conundrums and the complex social dynamics that lie behind the healing process, Oparin calls for an ‘existential anthropology’. Such a methodological attitude is more predisposed to highlight the personal experiences and individual religious trajectories of local Muslims than both structural explanations that read possession as a manifestation of social alienation and normative-laden perspectives which view conversion as the automated response to religious prescriptions. In Oparin’s account, it is the personal, often painful, trajectory of individual experience that becomes the space where Muslim identity is constructed at the individual level and beyond any normative attempt at domestication.

Finally, Kaliszewska brings us back to the halal piety movement in Dagestan, whose most reform-oriented tendency has been explored by Benussi, by shedding light on the movement’s multi-layered and diversified nature and by presenting it as a form of moral resistance against a ‘system’ (sistema) perceived as profoundly ‘immoral’. Kaliszewska illustrates in detail how the space of Muslim economic activity constructs a ‘halal landscape’ that neither reflects the normative expectations of the state nor that of orthodox expressions of Islam emphasising the respect for shari‘a. In this configuration, the notion of ‘landscape’ allows the author to go beyond the vaguely and too broadly defined notion of the ‘everyday’ to point to an articulated web of relations linking a multiplicity of Muslim actors that operate in the halal sector mainly unconcerned by secular taxonomies. Rather than as a monolithic piety-oriented movement as in Benussi’s account, in Kaliszewska’s contribution, the halal landscape emerges as a much more flexible pattern of interaction and cohesion that links together both state and anti-state actors, Salafis and Sufis, humans and non-humans at the local and global level, and whose transformative potential lies exactly in the capacity of creating such trans-social connections.

This last contribution can also be taken as an incipit for further reflection on the issues and themes raised in the special issue. Going beyond the alternative between conformity or resistance to the dominant narratives about Islam, the ‘halal landscape’ invites us to think of Muslim life as a space of imagination and action that is able to reconnect the daily experience of Muslims with an alternative order of society that transcends any attempt at normative domestication. Rather than reproducing static oppositions between the levels of discourse and that of practice, it is to the mutual interactions between the two and to the alternative possibilities that are disclosed by Muslim life within and without overdetermined limits that we have to turn when investigating the multiplicity and diversity of Islam in Russia and beyond.