Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.

SUMMARY:

The paper is based on the author’s research in different archival collections containing documents in Russian and various Oriental languages relating to North Caucasian Muslims. The paper presents an attempt to critically rethink the advantages and disadvantages of the so-called Archival Revolution in the post-Communist period. More than fifteen years have passed since the opening of the archives of the post-Soviet space, yet these years did not produce a serious shift in understanding of Islam and Muslim communities under Russian rule. This situation points to a methodological crisis in Russian Islamic Studies. This crisis arises from the continued domination of misleading approaches of the Cold War period. Most scholars still concentrate on official Russian-language sources featuring a hostile attitude toward Islam and viewing Muslims as eternal enemies of the Russian state. The voices of Russia’s Muslims are fundamentally neglected or misunderstood by contemporary historians, who rely on sources produced by tsarist and Soviet officials. In order to capture these voices scholars should turn to Arabic sources and evidence emanating from local Muslim communities in imperial and early Soviet Russia. These sources may be found in central state and private archival collections. They comprise a vast body of official documents and narrative materials that shed light on the inner life of Muslim communities and their relationship with the state. In view of these variegated archival collections, it appears that the history of Islam and Muslim communities in Russia should be represented through the model of entangled history. Knowledge of written Islamic sources in the Arabic language or script is essential to this entangled history. Yet, Arabic was just one medium in an intricate and constantly changing hierarchy of oral and written languages used by Muslim subjects in the Caucasian borderland of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Various types of first-hand sources present conflicting stories, yet also complement each other. Their comparative synchronic analysis allows for a more complicated, more credible and more dynamic picture of Muslim life at a local or micro-historical level. Bobrovnikov also points out that the archival sources dealing with nineteenth and twentieth century Russian Muslims of the Caucasus borderland are scattered all over the world. This article presents archival findings from the collections of Dagestan and Bulgaria. In Sofia there is a rich collection of Ottoman legal records and financial documents many of which pertain to the history of the nineteenth century Muslim emigration (muhajirun) from the Caucasus and other regions the Russian Empire. Drawing on these sources, Bobrovnikov shows the importance of further studies on a variety of themes: the conceptual languages of state documentation of Islam; the construction and/or perversion of social and political meaning in the process of translating official documents pertaining to Islam in a multilingual milieu; authors and actors of Islamic discourse and activism in the Russian Caucasus; the criteria and underlying ideological messages of statistics; and the role of oral histories in local Muslim discourse concerning Islam and the Empire.