The modernity of premodern Islam in contemporary Daghestan

This ethnographic essay investigates the relations between past and present forms of Islam in the north Caucasian Republic of Daghestan. Conversations culled from fieldwork in Daghestani urban and rural spaces are used to elucidate the cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity of life in this region. Ethnographies in a bookstore, a shrine to the Imam Shamil, and a scholarly archive in Makhachkala unfold against the historical background of Daghestan’s long-standing encounter with the Arabo-Islamic world. The essay explores how the post-Soviet turn to post-secular Islam represents an alternative to colonialism and a new way of making meaning in the present. It is intended as a contribution to Islamic studies, modernity theory, and post-Soviet Union area studies.     

Islam and modernity: Islamist movements and the politics of position

With the advent of modernity in the West and the resulting progress that has made Western countries more ‘civilized’ than their counterpart in the Muslim world, Muslim and Arab intellectuals have triggered the debate over the utility of religion in the development of the West. Some intellectuals think that it is only by rejecting religion that the West has achieved astounding progress, while others believe that progress has no connection whatsoever with religion. By implication, Islam is not against progress and will never be if it is properly understood. Islamist movements, with their different positions towards the West and its modernity, differ as well in their conception of Islam in this changing world that is dominated in their views by the West.

Luria in Uzbekistan: The Vicissitudes of Cross-Cultural Neuropsychology

If the material conditions of culture shape cognitive structures, as Luria and Vygotsky argued, the extraordinarily deep and rapid restructuring of historical forms (Luria, 1971, 265) in the Soviet Republics that followed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 provided a natural laboratory to determine whether processes of modernization changed traditional ways of thinking. This was the purpose of Luria's 1931 expedition to the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan in central Asia. Luria's initial reports attracted vitriolic criticism because he had allegedly belittled primitive Uzbeki culture. The lasting importance of the Uzbek expedition is its emphasis on culture as a determinant of cognitive processes that remains valid to the present: in 1984, Gilbert replicated Luria's field studies in South Africa with near-identical results. Yet current neuropsychology has been slow to recognize the need for culturally sensitive assessment.