Burden of the Third Rome: The threat of Russian orthodox fundamentalism and Muslim eurasia

For contemporary Muslim public opinion, anxious to comprehend the revival of Orthodoxy and nostalgia for starina (old times), the growing radical Orthodox fundamentalism seems to indicate the return of anti‐Islamic Pan‐Slavism. The Neo‐Soviet National Liberals and National Communists are both opposed to the self‐determination of Muslims in Tatarstan, Boshkirstan, Chechnya, Crimea and Daghestan. They are also hostile to the Islamic revival ( al‐sahwa al‐islamiyya) in Central Asian Turkestan and Tajikistan. Their misconception of Islam is shaped by the long tradition of Russian messianism which is rejuvenated after every cyclical decline of Russian political authority. The success of Russian messianic nationalism lies neither in its selective historiosophy nor in its dialectic politics, but in the charismatic reasoning of the old geopolitical threats to the existence of Russians, demonized as the Islamic reconquest of Idel‐Ural (Musulmanskiye dvizheny na Volgu) initiated by the restoration of Pan‐Turkic Islamistan and the Muslim Commonwealth in Central Asia. Like other Russian philosophies of the past, modern Russian nationalism draws on a host of European thinkers and their ideas, but its context is governed by the fundamental notion of ‘Holy Mother Russia’ (Sviataya Matushka Rassieya) and its Byzantine paradigm of ‘the True Holy Church of Constantinople’. Influenced by the militant anti‐Islamic and anti‐Western traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, modem All‐Russian nationalism has become a new and dangerous chimera of economically and politically frustrated Russians. Revitalized Russian Orthodox fundamentalism is a real threat to the newly emancipated Islamic East, because the fall of Communist atheist tyranny did not eliminate the old threat of Russian Orthodox hegemony in the Russian Federation, Central Asia and the Caucasian independent republics. Invasion, occupation and military interventions in the Chechen Republic of Itchek‐eria, Azerbaijan and Tadjikistan, as well as the prospect of armed rebellions by the Russian separatist minorities in Kazakhstan, Daghestan, Ingushetia, Crimea and Tatarstan, explicitly demonstrate the nature of All‐Russian hegemonism at the end of the post‐postmodernist age. The geopolitical and cultural continuity of the Tsarist‐Soviet empire, regardless of the political and economic regime in Moscow, still determines Russian Islamophobia and animates an obsession with ‘national security’ among the rulers of the Kremlin, who attempt to improve Russia's strategic status by a re‐annexation of the so‐called ‘near abroad’ ( blizhnee zarubezhye) countries into the Russian‐dominated confederation of Independent States.     

Crafting mosque-state relations through community-service work: the case of Yardam mosque in Kazan,Tatarstan

ABSTRACT

This contribution examines a symbiotic relationship between the state, represented by local government officials, and a mosque through a case study of the Yardam mosque in the central Russian region of Tatarstan. What in 2002 began as a community service-based project at a small mosque in the outskirts of Tatarstan’s capital Kazan, grew into a charitable foundation and a rehabilitation centre for the blind and disabled, housed under a newly-built mosque. The foundation is able to maintain its large-scale operations by forging strategic partnerships with local elites – local government officials and entrepreneurs – and by ensuring that the mosque’s leadership supports ‘traditional Islam.’ In turn, the local government showcases the mosque as a positive example of traditional Islam in Tatarstan: peaceful, community-service-oriented, and loyal to the state. As such, Yardam serves as a ‘desirable norm’ for the state and a real-life lesson for religious organisations: to be successful, their vision, mission, and work must be aligned with those of the state. Ultimately, the case of Yardam illustrates how Russia’s religious policy with the focus on ‘tradition’ can shape ‘mosque-state’ relations at the local level.     

‘He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune’: Muslim Sponsors of Islamic Revival in Crimea

Abstract

The article examines the role that foreign Islamic organisations play in the whole process of Islamic revival in Crimea. Their role can be observed in every sphere of that process: support for autonomous Muslim communities; building of mosques; organisation of Islamic education; financing pilgrimage to Mecca. Despite their huge role, the presence of foreign Islamic organisations is often seen by national Crimean Tatar leaders as a threat to the unity of the people and even to stability in the peninsula. Foreign sponsors of the Islamic revival are often charged with fostering ‘radical’ Muslim organisations which are forming an Islamic opposition to the major Crimean Tatar national and religious bodies. To explain this ambivalence requires a more detailed analysis of the role of foreign Muslim organisations in the Islamic revival in Crimea. To achieve this, I propose to examine their role both through a quantitative analysis of their impact in the revival process and from the point of view of the Crimean Tatars themselves.     

Translating Islam into the language of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church

ABSTRACT

This contribution analyses the discursive strategies exercised by Russia’s state-appointed Islamic authorities. It draws on a linguistic corpus that consists of speeches and sermons by Mufti Ravil’ Gainutdin, the head of a major Muslim Spiritual Directorate in Moscow. A multi-levelled analysis shows that the mufti’s lexical and rhetorical choices correspond to the discourse of the Russian Orthodox Church elites. This affinity is a discursive strategy that allows Gainutdin to position himself as the authoritative leader of Russia’s Islamic community and to construct Islam as Russia’s ‘familiar’ and ‘traditional’ religion.     

Rebuilding a Confessional State: Islamic Ecclesiology in Turkey,Russia and China

Abstract

Religions are playing an ever more prominent role in the public sphere in the world today, and it hardly seems productive to examine religion–state relations from the traditional liberal standpoint of idealising the state's non-intervention in religious matters. In this article we examine the relations between Islam and the state in Turkey, Russia/the Soviet Union and China, using the concept of the ‘confessional state’. A confessional state tries to use not only its dominant religion but also minority religions of all kinds to mobilise wider groups of the population. In confessional states the relations between the state and bodies of clergy are federative, not master-subordinate. The core of the Ottoman confessional state was the millet system, while the ?eyhülislam managed the Muslim majority. The Russian Empire copied the ?eyhülislam and created the Muftiate. Neither the Qing Empire nor the Republic of China built a nationwide system of Muslim administration, so the People's Republic of China architected it from scratch, on the basis of its own communist idea of the ‘united front’. These confessional states were seriously damaged by Atatürk's secularism in Turkey, communist atheism in the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China. Later, leaders of these countries realised that secularism and communism could not monopolise the spiritual market of faith, and desperately needed to mobilise the nation, even with the help of traditional religion. They did not try to reintroduce confessional states on the lines of those which had historically existed, but tried to use religious congregations to mobilise the wider strata of the population. In this attempt, the three countries faced different challenges: Turkey suffers from the confessional homogeneity of the state; postcommunist Russia lacks a nationwide Muslim administration; and in China the Muslims do not have an autonomous clerical hierarchy.     

The Meaning of Pilgrimage (Hajj): Re-shaping the Pious Identity of Belgian Turkish Muslims

This article examines how Belgian Muslims of Turkish origin interact with the hajj (pilgrimage) and the meaning of the pilgrimage for Muslims living in Belgium. It focuses upon the space of pilgrimage rituals, identifies the motivations for the practice of the pilgrimage and attempts to explain how the ‘canonical meaning’ of the hajj, which is considered unchanging, is adopted in the new Belgian situation and how pilgrims regard it. The physical practice of pilgrimage constitutes an interesting area through which to depict how Belgian Muslims of Turkish origin experience the sacred journey that shapes their religious understanding and their identity. The article’s findings are based on interviews and observations in 2012 and 2014. The author visited mosques during hajj information sessions and spoke with imams, but the fieldwork was carried out among pilgrims who had visited Mecca for their hajj and ?umra..     

Contract governance of religious diversity in a German city-state and its ambivalences

ABSTRACT

This contribution discusses whether specific German policy instruments developed to govern relations between the state and religious communities are a decisive step towards legal equality or of limited impact when extended to non-Christian religious minorities. I research the effects of the 2012 ‘contracts’ concluded between the city’s government and the Muslim and Alevi communities in the German city (state) of Hamburg by drawing on academic research, analysing official documents and interviewing city officials and local politicians. I find that the contracts are a decisive step towards legal equality but bring with them shortcomings that show the limited impact of contract governance measured against the complex reality of (non-)religious life in contemporary societies.     

The True Confessions of a White Rawlsian Liberal: An Argument for a Capacities Approach to Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

This paper takes as its point of departure the constitutional talks in South Africa in the early 1990’s. I suggest that liberal rather than democratic values held a particular attraction to South African political philosophers like me. Taking the example of Rawlsian liberalism, I show how liberalism locates the normative anchors of legitimacy outside the democratic process and is content with a weak interpretation of political equality. As an alternative I sketch a capacities approach to democratic legitimacy drawing on the work of Sen and Nussbaum. In particular I argue that the capacity to participate in democratic practices is what grounds and legitimizes principles of democratic justice agreed to by citizens. I conclude by suggesting that South Africa’s democracy would have been stronger if the state had attended to the capacities of citizens to participate in the democratic process.     

Defining Muslims on the Afghan Frontier: T. P. Hughes and His Dictionary of Islam

ABSTRACT

Christian missionaries working in India in the nineteenth century made numerous important contributions to European and North American understandings of Islam. One such contribution was the Dictionary of Islam compiled by the Anglican missionary Thomas Patrick Hughes, who was serving in Peshawar on the border between British India and Afghanistan. Drawing upon sources such as collections of Hadith, he provided both brief definitions and some longer analyses of a wide range of aspects of Muslim beliefs, practices and history. However, his compilation was not entirely based on textual sources, but was also informed by daily contact with Muslims in and around Peshawar, particularly Maulavi Ahmad of Tangi. Hughes combined his interest in defining Islam with a passion for exploring and explaining Afghan culture and politics to his readership in Britain. Although situated on ‘the edges of empire’, Hughes nonetheless found himself at the centre of world events as the intrigue between Britain and Russia resulted in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Although located in what some considered a minor province on the periphery of the Muslim world, he nonetheless produced a major reference work on Islam that is still in print.     

Editorial

Abstract

After outlining its geographical horizons, this article goes on to survey the history of Islam, in Europe and the different profiles of the Muslim communities today in western Europe, the USA and the Balkans. It suggests that there are usually four phases in the development of these communities. The three main Western approaches to managing diversity are outlined, alongside the three most common models for the relationship between religion and the state. The politics of identity is discussed, addressing the question, ‘How can religious diversity be reconciled with shared citizenship?’, along with the crisis of leadership among Muslims in the West and the radicalisation of some Muslims. Muslim attitudes towards Christianity are described, as are church responses at both national and international level. Finally two further questions are addressed: ‘Can the churches act as an antidote to religious nationalism?’ and ‘Can Christians and Muslims together shape civic space for the common good?’     

Buddhism in Russia: challenges and choices in the post-Soviet period

This paper considers the position of Buddhism in contemporary Russia, with a focus on the three national republics where Buddhism is historically practised: Kalmykia, Buryatia and Tuva. I provide a brief overview of the history of Buddhism in each of the three regions. Turning to the current situation, I then review religion–state and intrafaith relations within Russia’s Buddhist republics. Of particular interest are the politics surrounding the pastoral visits of the 14th Dalai Lama to Russia. Since his last visit in 2004, the Russian government has consistently denied solicitations for visas for the Dalai Lama. I draw on interviews and focus groups conducted in Kalmykia and surveys from both Kalmykia and Buryatia to underscore the importance of such a visit both to Buddhists in these republics and to the larger Buddhist community in the Russian Federation. The paper concludes by reiterating the Dalai Lama’s opinion that Russia and Russia’s Buddhists will play a pivotal role in the development and preservation of Buddhism as a religious tradition.     

Political Authority,Practical Identity,and Binding Citizens

Abstract

Allen Buchanan (2002) argues that it doesn’t matter whether a state has authority in the sense of being able to create binding obligations for its citizens, so long as it is morally justified in wielding political power. In this paper, I look at this issue from a slightly different angle. I argue that it matters a great deal whether citizens relate to their state in an obligatory fashion. This is for two reasons. First, a fully morally justified state must be an efficacious state; it must be able to realise its values and make its rules stick. My contention will be that enduring stability can only be secured when citizens, or at least a significant proportion of citizens, are tangibly bound to regulate their conduct in accordance with a principle of obedience to just states. Second, it is only when individuals interact in the right way with the justification for state power that the state itself as a pervasive and coercive entity does not pose a problem for them as reason-responsive agents. In fact, under the right circumstances, submission to state authority can greatly enhance autonomy as it facilitates collective responses to challenges that individuals would struggle to overcome alone.     

Markets,Choice and Agency

John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness (2012) introduces several powerful arguments in favour of a novel and surprising thesis: the best way to realize Rawls’s principles of justice is a free market society, rather than the arrangements that Rawls himself believed would best promote justice. In this paper, I adduce three arguments against Tomasi. First, I suggest that his view rests on a faulty understanding of what constitutes conventional property rights. Second, I argue that many market solutions generate choices which are not valuable ones for the agent to have to make. Third, I show that many choices created by the market systems Tomasi favours create the illusion that citizens are making their own choices when in fact they are not. I suggest that taken together these three arguments are sufficient to defend Rawlsian institutional arrangements against Tomasi’s challenge.     

Islamic practice and state policies towards religion in post-Soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

What has the Russian state policy towards Islam been in the first two decades after the Soviet collapse, and how has it affected Islamic practice in the country? This study explores Russian state policies towards religion from 1990 to 2017 and discusses their impact on Islamic practice in the country. In the 1990s, relations between the Russian state and Islam (state-Islam relations) were accommodationist: the state granted unrestricted access in the Russian public sphere for all Muslim communities and allowed a wide range of Islamic religious practices. State-Islam relations in the 2000s became increasingly regulatory: the state assumed a more active interventionist role in the affairs of the domestic Islamic community in order to control religious practices of certain Muslim factions and to ensure privileged access in the Russian public sphere for state-approved ‘traditional’ religious organisations. This contribution reveals the dynamics of the Russian state’s attitudes towards the largest minority religion in the country in the first two decades after the collapse of the Soviet state. It also offers analytical insights on the dynamic nature of state-religion relations in other secular states with religiously diverse populations.     

Reply to Reynolds

Abstract

How should we read Foucault's claims, in his late work, for the relevance of ‘aesthetic criteria’ to politics? What is Foucault's implicit understanding of the nature of aesthetics and the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere? Would an ethics which gave a place to the aesthetic legitimize a politics of manipulation, brutality and aggression ‐ in short, a ‘fascist’ politics ‐ as some of Foucault's critics argue? In this paper, I examine key accounts of the fascist ‘aestheticization of politics’ ‐ from Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), to Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe's work on the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and the fascist theme of politics as the plastic art of the state. Through a discussion of Foucault's late work, the paper demonstrates the connection between Foucault's turn to ancient Greek ethical practices and his call for a contemporary renewal of the idea of ethics as an art of living. The aim of the paper is to show in what ways the ethico‐political position which is presented in Foucault's late work, far from contributing to a fascist politics, in fact provides ways of thinking about the relationship between the aesthetic and the political which avoid both mindless radicalism and totalitarian narcissism. In doing so, the key question is, ‘What's aesthetic about Foucault's “aesthetics of existence"?’     

Introduction: the image of Islam in Russia

ABSTRACT

Russia has a long, complicated and, at times, contradictory relationship with Islam and Muslims. Islam is classified as one of the ‘traditional’ religions, along with Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. Throughout Russia’s history across the centuries, the efforts by the state and Muslims to define their relationship have led to contradictory outcomes. This special issue grew out of a conference that took place in 2016, seeking to explore the complicated nature of the image of Islam in Russia from a multidisciplinary perspective. A collection of six contributions explore how Islam is viewed and projected in the public and media sphere in contemporary Russia, including state attempts to ‘manage’ the development of Islam, initiatives to transform the public image of Muslims and the charitable work of a mosque at the local level.     

From Mecca with tolerance: religion,social recategorisation and social capital

Does participation in mass religious rituals promote intergroup conflict or does it promote intergroup tolerance? We assess these claims by examining the effects of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca (the hajj) on sociopolitical views of Muslims in Russia’s North Caucasus. Participant observation during the hajj and a quasi-experimental focus group study of pilgrims and non-pilgrims produced paradoxical findings. While the hajj strengthened their ingroup pride as Muslims, the pilgrims came through as more outgroup-tolerant and prosocial than the non-pilgrims. We develop a synthetic theoretical solution: in high-identity-value, high-diversity common group settings social recategorisation and social capital become transitive – that is, inclusive views and social capital effects within an ingroup extend to outgroups. This means that intergroup conflict could be reduced by not only maximising contact across conflicting groups, but also by bringing together as many subgroups as possible within each conflicting group in settings where their common identity is positively affirmed in a non-discriminatory fashion.     

From Neither/Nor to Both/And: Reconfiguring the Life and Legacy of Shirdi Sai Baba in Hagiography

The paper focuses on two hagiographic texts about the Indian saint Shirdi Sai Baba: G. R. Dabholkar’s ?rī Sāī Satcarita (1930) in Marathi and B. V. Narasimhaswami’s four-volume Life of Sai Baba (1955–69) in English. A comparative study of these texts highlights a notable shift in the saint’s life story. Whereas Dabholkar describes a saint who is “neither Hindu nor Muslim,” Narasimhaswami emphasizes particular devotional testimonies to reconstruct Shirdi Sai Baba as a syncretistic figure who is “both Hindu and Muslim.” Narasimhaswami’s reconstruction also reveals a politics of compositeness, in which a dominant Hindu embrace contains a domesticated Muslim-ness.     

Self-Respect or Self-Delusion? Tomasi and Rawls on the Basic Liberties

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional (and important) ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument (the ‘greater wealth thesis’) in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when (and why) citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect.     

Birth as Labor and Natality

Abstract

While the embodied subject has become a crucial site of theorization in both the study of religion and feminism, the maternal subject has not yet received consideration. As double, divided in bodies and psyches, subject to partial deaths, opaque to itself, continuous and bounded, of double ontological and legal status, perhaps complexly racialized, perhaps complexly sexed and gendered, the maternal subject defies a liberal anthropology. This paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s work and reception as an important path for consideration of the political import of maternality. Arendt perpetuates a strong private/public distinction and locates maternality in the realm of labor and decisively outside the polis. Birth and maternality as apolitical labor drew strong criticism from Arendt’s first generation of interpreters. Yet this also articulates “flesh-and-blood” aspects of maternality in ways that now deserve greater consideration. Arendt’s famous notion of natality as the source of human newness has been received with enthusiasm by many feminists. I show that Arendt, in part because of the theological heritage of her anthropology of the creature, adopts a problematically disembodied notion of birth, one that effaces the maternal subject in the production of the politics of citizens.