Studying Sufism in Russia: From Ideology to Scholarship and Back

Interest in esoteric and mystical aspects of Islam in present-day Russia and its Soviet and tsarist predecessors is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The article starts with a critical discussion of Aleksandr Dugin ’s (b. 1962) interpretations of Sufism in his ambitious intellectual project Noo...

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Главный автор: Knyš, Aleksandr Dmitrievič 1957- (Автор)
Формат: Электронный ресурс Статья
Язык:Английский
Проверить наличие: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Опубликовано: 2022
В: Der Islam
Год: 2022, Том: 99, Выпуск: 1, Страницы: 187-231
Другие ключевые слова:B Islamic Studies
B Aleksandr Dugin
B Marxism-Leninism
B Sufism
B racial theory
B Russia
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Итог:Interest in esoteric and mystical aspects of Islam in present-day Russia and its Soviet and tsarist predecessors is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. The article starts with a critical discussion of Aleksandr Dugin ’s (b. 1962) interpretations of Sufism in his ambitious intellectual project Noomachia: Wars of the Intellect [and] Civilizations of Borderlands . The author then compares Dugin ’s conceptualizations of Sufism with those of several Russian writers who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century and whose portrayal of Sufism and its followers is similar to Dugin ’s in some important respects. These ideologically driven constructions of Sufism stand in sharp contrast to the self-consciously objective scholarly ones (to the extent that was possible) that emerged in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century within the Russian academic and teaching institutions specializing in Eastern religions, languages, and cultures. The author argues that Russian academic conceptualizations of Sufism mirrored those of the fin-de-siècle German Islamology ( Islamforschung ) and then proceeds to examine the profound changes in Russian attitudes to Sufism, and Islam generally, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the rise of the Soviet state that based its legitimacy on the Marxist-Leninist concept of history with its pervasive atheism, materialism, and emphasis on class struggle. It shaped Soviet-era academic and nonacademic approaches to Sufism until the mid-1980s, when Soviet scholars began to question the Marxist-Leninist certainties of the previous six decades.
ISSN:1613-0928
Второстепенные работы:Enthalten in: Der Islam
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1515/islam-2022-0008