Muslimischer Nationalismus im Russischen Reich: Nationsbildung und Nationalbewegung bei Tataren und Baschkiren, 1861-1917 (review)

In the past decade, the rediscovery of Islam in the states of the former Soviet Union has presented diverse challenges to the national narratives that form the cornerstone of the official ideologies of these new states. The collapse of borders has expanded the possibilities of re-integration into a broader Muslim world through travel, trade, study, and pilgrimage. Muslims from Moscow to Bishkek now enjoy wider access to alternative models of Islamic piety and community debated by Muslims elsewhere in the world. Early post-independence anxieties (or euphoria) about the re-activation of pre-revolutionary "pan-Turkic" networks have faded. But other transnational visions of Muslim solidarity, like utopias based on the construction of a global caliphate modeled on the earliest Islamic state-forms, dispute the most fundamental claims of state-centered nationalisms. This ferment has inspired underground opposition movements in Central Asia and has also affected the "national republics" within the Russian Federation, such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, where significant numbers of inhabitants define themselves as "Muslim," even as the meanings that they attach to this label vary. In response, state-sponsored historians have resorted to the Soviet strategy of domesticating the historical legacy of Islam by enclosing it in a national framework and selectively re-appropriating elements of the Islamic tradition as attributes of secular, national culture. ¹

Christian Noack deftly sifts through a vast amount of this Soviet and post-Soviet scholarship — as well as a variety of primary sources — to offer a different kind of challenge to these official narratives about Islam and the nation. The story that he tells in this thorough and original study of the Volga River and Ural Mountains region convincingly refutes one of the most fundamental premises of this nationalist mode of historical interpretation: the projection of Tatar and Bashkir national identities deep into the imperial Russian past. Noack reveals instead the emergence in the late 19th century of an alternative vision of the nation, based not on ostensibly immutable ethnic markers, but on an expansive and dynamic notion of Muslim identity.

"Muslim nationalism," Noack argues, transcended ethnic boundaries, uniting the varied peoples of the Volga-Urals region into an inclusive "imagined community" sharing common myths of origin and an understanding of this territory as a historical homeland. Taking aim at the teleologies of Soviet and Western approaches to the subject, he criticizes the conceptual "Tatarization" of this national movement as well as the tendency to view religious identities as "pre-modern" and "transitional" phenomena, which inevitably give way to more "modern" forms of national identity. By his account, Muslims did not have to become wholly secular to become national; in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they reinterpreted various aspects of the Islamic tradition as core elements of a national identity and the primary focus of their political loyalties. Though wary of normative European models of nationalism, his conception of "nation-building" retains the evolutionary time-frame posited by this scholarship. Like Miroslav Hroch, Noack contends that nationalism hinges on the necessary fulfillment of "social preconditions" and progresses through distinct phases until it reaches the stage of a mass movement. ² Indeed, for Noack the "mobilization potential" of nationalism distinguishes it from ethnicity, making national movements "both the product and cause" of social and political mobilization (24—25).

Among the preconditions of Muslim nationalism, Noack identifies a range of social, economic, and institutional changes initiated by the tsarist state in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The entry of large numbers of Muslims into the merchant estate and administrative reforms that standardized the legal...