This volume comes in five main sections. First, the authors cover basic demographics. They reject claims that up to two million Muslims live in Ukraine (P. 12), preferring an ethnicity-based approach that amounts to simply adding together all the “traditionally Muslim” ethnic groups from the 2001 census. According to this method, there are precisely 436,467 Muslims in Ukraine, or 0.9% of the population; a figure considerably lower than the estimated 7% in France or 3% in the UK. The obvious twin flaws in this method are that it assumes all members of designated ethnic groups are practicing Muslims, while ignoring the possibility of conversions from outside – converts amongst disaffected youth being a noticeable phenomenon in the West. Admittedly, all the evidence points to low levels of such conversion in Ukraine, as it does indeed potentially involve a double identity shift, both religious and ethnic. Nevertheless, the authors say little about the phenomenon.
According to the authors’ methodology, more than half of Ukraine’s automatically designated Muslims are Crimean Tatars, 248,193 to be precise, of whom 245,000 live in Crimea. Ukraine’s second main group are Volga-Ural Tatars, numbering 73,304, whom the authors link as a group with the 4,253 Bashkirs, who mainly live in the Donbas. The two form a “traditional” migrant labor group, subject to assimilation in recent years (there were 87,000 Volga-Ural Tatars in 1989). The rest are mainly Soviet Muslims, especially Azerbaijanis and Uzbeks, though there are forty ethnic groups in all. The 2001 census was largely taken before Ukraine’s new “non-traditional migrant” population from Africa and the Near East began to grow.^[1]
In the second section, the authors outline the main Islamic organizations in Ukraine and their ideologies. The DUMK (Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Crimea) is an elective body linked to the Crimean Tatar Qurultay. The DUMU (Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Ukraine) is its all-Ukrainian equivalent, established in 1992. The DTsMU (Spiritual Center of Muslims of Ukraine) is based in the Donbas, where it was founded in 1994 by the alleged Volga Tatar gangster Akhat Bragin, aka “Alik the Greek,” who met an untimely death when he was blown up by a bomb in the football stadium of his club, “Shakhter” Donetsk. A political party, the Party of Muslims of Ukraine, was set up by the DTsMU in 1997, but after disappointing results it was folded into the Party of Regions in 2006. This reviewer would have liked to know more about a possibly murky history of what appears to be a clannish organization.
Ar-Raid (“Forward”) is a coalition of some ten social organizations registered in 1997.^[2] Radical international groups have a much smaller presence in Ukraine, but Hizb ut-Tahrir (the “Party of Liberation”) has operated in Crimea since the late 1990s, where it has gained a small niche attacking the “collaborationist” and “secular nationalist” Qurultay, and since 2003 agitating against the US role in Iraq, which is backed by Ukraine. A handful of madrassas operate in Crimea, with the authors counting 180 students at their time of writing, although interestingly 40 of these were women.
The third section looks at ideology. The DUMU represents “official Islam,” although it is led by a Lebanese citizen, “Sheik” Ahmad Tamim, the self-styled “Mufti of Ukraine,” who dutifully condemns all manifestations of “Wahhabite” extremism. Ar-Raid is not officially radical, but is a proselytizing organization campaigning against the “decadent” West, Ukraine included. As a result, the Islamic University in Donetsk was subject to de facto closure in 2003.
The authors do not spell this out, but “official Islam” in Ukraine may be a hollow shell, even compared to its equivalent in Russia. Before 1991, Muslim organizations tended to be all-Soviet. Since 1991, they have been forced to build in Ukraine from scratch. The “Russian Islam” movement based in Ufa can at least draw on the traditions of the local Jadidist movement of the late Tsarist era. The authors do not say much about “Ukrainian Jadidism” where it might be expected to be strongest, namely in Crimea. Again, this is presumably because the Qurultay/Medzhlis was originally established as an anti-Soviet nationalist movement.
The fourth section is far too long. It seeks to provide a broad analysis of identity politics, which could be found in any general study. It even spills over into the first two parts of the final section. By the time the weary reader gets to the substance of the authors’ discussion of “discourse,” this relatively short book has only a scant thirty pages remaining. Nevertheless, the authors make some interesting remarks about Ukrainian conceptions of Islam. First they define a “folkloric scheme” based on popular memories (including folk ballads or dumy) of “war” and “slavery.” It therefore “represents the Muslim and Islam exclusively through the prism of [Ottoman] Turkey, whereas the ‘exotic’ model is based on material from the Near East and Central Asia” (P. 169). Popular stereotyping of the cruel and sinister Muslim is still supposedly strong. The authors are skeptical about the second “exotic” model, arguing that Ukrainian Orientalism was never as strong as its nineteenth century Russian counterpart. Many modern Ukrainian historians would, however, be shocked by their casual dismissal of the leading Ukrainian Orientalist Anatol/Ahatanhel Kryms’-kyi (in a footnote on P. 168). Nor do they really discuss Gogol’s famous theory that Ukrainian Cossack identity was primarily formed out of its ambiguous contact with the “East.” The section on modern discourse could have been the most interesting section of the book, but is again disappointingly short (Pp. 186-194).
In general, the book contains much interesting material, but has some major lacunae. Interested readers can also consult another recent contribution by Alexander Bogomolov and Serge Danylov, which gives some of the same information in English.^[3]