Devout Societies vs. Impious States? Transmitting Islamic Learning in Russia, Central Asia, and China, through the Twentieth Century ed. by Stéphane A. Dudoignon (review)

552 Рецензии/Reviews Michael ROULAND Stéphane A. Dudoignon (Ed.), Devout Societies vs. Impious States? Transmitting Islamic Learning in Russia, Central Asia, and China, through the Twentieth Century (Proceedings of an International Colloquium Held in the Carré des Sciences , French Ministry of Research, Paris, November 12-13, 2001) (=Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, 0939-1940, Band 258) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2004). 296 p. Summaries, Glossary, Index. ISBN: 3-87997-314-8. This collection of articles drawn from a scholarly conference in Paris in 2001 effectively brings together twentieth-century Islam in Russia, Central Asia, and China into a cohesive tome that reveals the region’s interconnections. This compilation successfully takes advantage of new academic approaches seeking to undermine the nation-based discourse and suggests the need for a better methodology to confront the divisive tendencies of Islamic, Soviet Central Asian, and Chinese studies. Stéphane Dudoignon forwards the moniker of “Northern Eurasia” to unify the regions surveyed, but this seems relatively superficial. More notably, this work exposes the fact that much more research is needed and that even a common use of terms and spellings continues to elude scholars on the region. The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals with “‘High’ and ‘Popular’ Culture” and the second raises the issue of “History and Memory.” The editor briefly mentions that the cleavage between “ritual” and “learned” Islam provided the inspiration for the first section, a point never revisited significantly in the text. Nevertheless the articles themselves reflect little bearing on these categories and they would have been better discarded. Ultimately, the work centers on the larger question of the transmission of Islamic education and culture in a broad regional space during the twentieth century. This is already a huge task unnecessarily complicated by other markers. The first section begins with Tomohiko Uyama’s article, “‘Devotion to the People’ and Paternalistic Authoritarianism among Qazaq Intellectuals , from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1917.” Uyama describes the problem of authority in the relations between intellectuals and society. In a self-defeating manner , the discovery of populist ideas among the Kazakh intellectual elite (narodniki) conflicted with their oratorical affectations, which reinforced paternalism. Despite their failure, Uyama confirms the importance of the Kazakh intelligentsia’s effort to incorporate native religious and 553 Ab Imperio, 2/2005 cultural values into their colonial system of beliefs. In an even less successful case of adapting local cultural values to new hegemonic ideologies, Rafyq Mohammatshin’s “The Tatar Intelligentsia and the Clergy, 1917-1937” explains the crisis of spiritual consciousness between Islamic believers and nonbelievers through a detailed examination of Tatar intellectual sources in the early Soviet period. In his view, Moscow’s centralism ultimately overwhelmed Tatar efforts to cultivate their own cultural synthesis of Islam and Communism. In another description of local responses to centralized dictates, Bakhtiyar Babadjanov ’s “Debates over Islam in Contemporary Uzbekistan: A View from Within” surveys the theological schism within the Uzbek ulama that emerged in the 1970s between “modernists” and “conservatives” as a response to state-sanctioned Islamic education and to greater access to the Islamic world. This schism took on a new significance following independence and the subsequent re-Islamicization of the Uzbek population, who understood the religion as more than a source of cultural and historical identity. The complex synthesis of Islamic and Communist ideals at the local level was not unique to the Russian and Soviet imperial experiences. In her “Brothers and Comrades: Muslim Fundamentalists and Communists Allied for the Transmission of Islamic Knowledge in China,” Leila Cherif-Chebbi asserts that the Chinese Communist Party has long supported the Islamic fundamentalist movements of “New Religion” and Ikhwan (Muslim Brothers) for their opposition to the Japanese invasion , teachings of modernity, and comprehension of the importance of education and propaganda.Although there have been several clashes between the two groups, the success of their relationship depended on the ability of Chinese fundamentalist groups to work within the highly centralized and politically intrusive state system. Echoing this theme in “Chinese Muslim Women: From Autonomy to Dependence,” Elisabeth Allès argues that the autonomy of the women’s mosque among Hui Chinese is now being challenged by increasing fundamentalism in the region. As Chinese Muslims...