Studying Islam in the Soviet Union
Author | : Michael Kemper |
Publisher | : Amsterdam University Press |
Total Pages | : 27 |
Release | : 2009 |
ISBN-10 | : 9789056295653 |
ISBN-13 | : 9056295659 |
Rating | : 4/5 (53 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: Annotation. Our image of Islam in the Soviet Union has changed a lot in the last three decades. During the Cold War period, Western observers were mainly driven by the question whether Islam - and above all the Sufi brotherhoods with their male disciples - could become a political and military threat to Moscow's rule in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Russian scholars, by contrast, regarded Sufi sm as a threat because the Sufi shrines attracted a mainly female audience; these women would transmit the 'superstitions' of Islam to their children and contribute to the dominance of Muslim traditionalism - a kind of Soviet subculture that seemed to be resistant against atheist education. As shown in the lecture, Western and Soviet researchers made the same methodological mistakes; and today we often repeat these mistakes when stereotyping Islamic 'fundamentalism'. This title can be previewed in Google Books - http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9789056295653.