ENGLISH

Studying Islam in the Soviet Union (Vor Rechtsgeleerdheid)

By Michael Kemper

Book information

Year
2009
ISBN
9056295659, 9789056295653
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
327 kB (334642 bytes)
Pages
26\27
Topic
Education
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

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'.

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