Michael Kemper’s research while affiliated with University of Amsterdam and other places

The present article analyzes the recent fatwa production by two of Russia’s major muftiates, the traditionalist Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Republic of Tatarstan ( DUMRT ) in Kazan and the modernist Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Russian Federation ( DUMRF ) in Moscow. The author investigates the methodologies that Russia’s muftis follow when elaborating fatwas, and the global links that surface from their source bases. DUMRT ’s taqlīd , or imitation, of elements of the Ḥanafī school of Islamic law is contrasted with DUMRF ’s program of ijtihād . DUMRF ’s claims to ijtihād, wasaṭiyya and minority fiqh are tested by the analysis of controversial fatwas about marriage, conversion, and divorce in Russia. This paper introduces the term “signature fatwa” to denote fatwas that are meant to demonstrate the particular identity of a given muftiate, and that serve as a tool for its political positioning vis-à-vis the Kremlin, other fatwa-producers, and the Muslim communities. The present contribution addresses scholars of Islam in Eastern Europe as well as students of Islamic law in Muslim minority situations, including in the European Union.

Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941 prompted Stalin to stop the brutal repression of Russia’s confessions. One reason to do so was to please his new ally, the United States, which had been very critical of the persecution of Christian congregations in the USSR; and a relaxation of anti-religious propaganda was also a means to counter Nazi propaganda. At the same time, the downscaling of anti-religious policies responded to a spontaneous rise in religious activities among the Soviet citizens, and in particular among Red Army soldiers who witnessed the horrors of the front. Instead of wasting resources in the repression of religiosity, the USSR decided to establish institutions that would control and channel the activities of the congregations, and used their leaders for patriotic propaganda to strengthen the population’s morale. This process is well researched with regard to the re-establishment of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate and the re-opening of churches. Jeff Eden now offers a book that gives us a comprehensive discussion of what this new policy meant for the Muslims of the USSR.

Particularly in the last decades, due to the rapid development of theoretical perspectives across disciplines, the notion of gender has evolved into an umbrella term that today refers to a broad array of themes: from gender-defined social behaviour to sexual and reproductive rights and to matters related to control over one’s body. Following major trends in the humanities and social sciences, also the field of Islamic studies has been contributing to the ongoing scholarly discussion on gender. Two recent volumes that focus specifically on gender issues in Muslim societies (Duderija et al., 2020; Howe, 2020) have marked the expansion of the field, away from dealing primarily with topics related to Muslim women and femininity to a cautious but firm engagement with a broader spectrum of gender-related themes.

This article studies the work of the Moscow-based Syrian academic scholar Taufik Ibragim. Originally a Marxist historian of Islamic philosophy and kalām , after the end of the ussr Ibragim became one of Russia’s most authoritative scholars also of the Qurʾān and the Islamic tradition more broadly. Since the mid-2000s, Ibragim has publicly propagated the concept of “Qurʾānic humanism”, which is meant to demonstrate the tolerance of the Qurʾān and the humanist character of Islam in general, against Islamic extremism and stagnation in Muslim thought. In his opposition to the dominant political “traditionalism” in Russia’s Islamic landscape, Ibragim links back to the heritage of the Tatar Muslim educational and religious reformers (Jadids) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without reference to any other contemporary Islamic thinker, Ibragim advocates a reform of Islam to adapt it to the conditions of modern Russia. His interpretations appeal to Russia’s academic elite, as well as to the Jadid-oriented muftiate of the Russian Federation ( dumrf ) in Moscow, which until recently propagated Ibragim’s concepts against the vague “traditionalism” that other muftiates in the Russian Federation claim to follow. But his insistence on a rational approach to the Qurʾān and his challenging of the authority of ḥadīth have brought Ibragim the enmity of many conservative muftis and Muslim theologians in Russia, and Islamic reformism is under increasing attack.

Nathan Spannaus’ monograph, based on his 2012 dissertation, examines and contextualizes the Arabic-language writings of Abū Naṣr al-Qūrṣāwī (1776–1812), a Tatar scholar of Russia’s Middle Volga/Kama (‘Bulghār’) region. Qūrṣāwī gained notoriety for his rejection of taqlīd and his call for ijtihād in issues of Islamic law, as well as for his theological treatises and commentaries in which he disputed some mainstream assertions of Māturīdī kalām. The central legal issue of the time centred on the night prayer (ʿishāʾ), which is traditionally performed at the start of complete darkness; but if there is no darkness, such as in Russia’s northern regions in summer time, must Muslims then drop the night prayer? Qūrṣāwī defended the ʿishāʾ in the summer nights by arguing that God’s general prescription of five daily prayers stands above secondary regulations as to when exactly this fifth prayer has to be performed; as he argued, the determination of the correct time for this prayer is a matter of personal ijtihād, as long as this quest is performed according to a sound methodology. In the field of theology, the major bone of contention in the Volga-Urals was the conceptual relationship between God’s dhāt (essence) and His ṣifāt (attributes like knowing, seeing, hearing, creating). The attributes express God’s relation to the world; the world is created; are the attributes then also created, that is, other than God’s eternal essence? Here Qūrṣāwī defended the standpoint that the relation between essence and attributes as described in the Qurʾān and ḥadīth must be accepted as beyond our comprehension, and that any assumption on their multitude, their distinctness from each other, and their anchoring in time must be avoided; such speculation can only lead Muslims into heresy and unbelief, for it violates Islam’s basic concept of tawḥīd.

Originally published in French in 2013, Bougarel’s book presents a clear and concise political history of Bosnia-Herzegovina since the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the relation between Islam and national identity in the discourse of Bosnian Muslim elites. In particular, the book analyses the history of the country’s Islamic institution—the Islamic Community headed by a Mufti, the reis-ul-ulema—and the positions of its major Islamic thinkers. While the Bosnian Croats and Serbs developed strong national ideologies linked to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, respectively, and enjoyed backing from what became Croatia and Serbia, the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) had difficulties in formulating a national identity that could serve for building a nation state; traditional religious or local/regional identities prevailed. To make up for this deficiency, so Bougarel argues, the Muslim elites used to seek protection for their communities from the subsequent ‘empires’ that ruled over the area—the Ottomans, Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Croatian Ustaša regime and the Third Reich, and eventually Tito’s Yugoslavia. In the late 1960s, secular Yugoslavia gave up the implicit expectation that at one point the Bosnian Muslims would decide to identify as either Croats or Serbs (or ‘Yugoslavs’), and recognized the existence of a ‘Muslim’ nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it however tried to detach from the religion of Islam and from other Muslim nationalities in Yugoslavia. In the absence of strong national institutions, the Islamic Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina became a proxy institution for the emergent Muslim nation. When Yugoslavia fell apart, a group of former ‘pan-Islamic’ dissident intellectuals established the Party of Democratic Action (SDA) that organized the defence of the Muslim-populated parts of BiH against Croat and Serb attacks and ethnic cleansing, and dominated politics in the Muslim parts of BiH. The SDA employed the Islamic Community to present Islam as the major cornerstone of what they now called ‘Bosniak’ identity (as opposed to ‘Bosnian’, which would also encompass the other two major nationalities in BiH), to build a Muslim national entity while at the same time calling for the preservation of a multinational Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the face of war and genocidal violence, the outside forces that they now put their hopes on were partly the Muslim world (for fundraising and circumventing the arms embargo), and, more consistently, the UN, the United States, and the European Community/EU. The Dayton Agreement of 1995 established peace at the cost of cementing the national delimitation between the entities of BiH, of protecting the respective political, military and economic networks that came to power in the war, and of making the return of refugees almost impossible. Since the late 1990s political pluralism eliminated the monopoly of the SDA in the Muslim part of BiH, and religious pluralism—including the intrusion of ‘Neo-Salafism’ and ‘Neo-Sufism’—challenged the dominance of the Islamic Community in religious matters.