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Like other majority Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union, the republic of Dagestan, on Russia's southern frontier, has become contested territory in a hegemonic competition between Moscow and resurgent Islam. In this authoritative book the leading experts on Dagestan provide a path breaking study of this volatile state far from the world's gaze. The largest and most populous of the North Caucasian republics, bordered on the west by Chechnya and on the east by the Caspian Sea, Dagastan is almost completely mountainous. With no majority nationality, the republic developed a distinctive system of calibrated power relations among ethnic groups and with Moscow, a system that has been undermined by the spillover of the wars in Chechnya, Wahhabi and Islamist recruiting efforts targeting youth, and Moscow's reassertion of the 'power vertical'. Underdevelopment, high birthrates, transiting pipelines, and the rising incidence of terrorist violence and assassinations add to the explosive potential of the region. Authors Ware and Kisriev combine analysis of the dynamics of domination and resistance, and the distinctive forms of social organization characteristic of mountain societies that may be applicable to other areas such as Afghanistan. They draw on decades of field research, interviews, and data to offer unique perspective on the civilizational collision course under way in the Caucasus today.

This book, based on extensive original research in the field, analyses the political, social and cultural implications of the rise of Islam in post-Soviet Russia. Examining in particular the situation in Tatarstan and Dagestan, where there are large Muslim populations, the authors chart the long history of Muslim and orthodox Christian co-existence in Russia, discuss recent moves towards greater autonomy and the assertion of ethnic-religious identities which underlie such moves, and consider the actual practice of Islam at the local level, showing the differences between \"official\" and \"unofficial\" Islam, how ceremonies and rituals are actually observed (or not), how Islam is transmitted from one generation to the next, the role of Islamic thought, including that of radical sects, and Islamic views of men and women's different roles. Overall, the book demonstrates how far Islam in Russia has been extensively influenced by the Soviet and Russian multi-ethnic context.

This book presents two extraordinary texts - The Shining of Swords by Al-Qarakhi and a new translation for a contemporary readership of Leo Tolstoy's Hadji Murat - illuminating the mountain war between the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus and the imperial Russian army from 1830 to 1859. The authors offer a complete commentary on the various intellectual and religious contexts that shaped the two texts and explain the historical significance of the Russian-Muslim confrontation. It is shown that the mountain war was a clash of two cultures, two religious outlooks and two different worlds. The book provides an important background for the ongoing contest between Russia and indigenous people for control of the Caucasus.

For Putin and for Sharia examines what it means to support sharia in twenty-first-century Dagestan, where calls for an Islamic state coexist with nostalgia for the days of Stalin's rule and Mecca calendars hang alongside portraits of Putin. Confronting existing narratives about sharia, terrorism, and anti-terrorism through ethnographic fieldwork, Iwona Kaliszewska looks at the beliefs and practices of Dagestani Muslims, revealing that the pursuit of sharia can assume a range of forms from sweeping visions of an Islamic state imposed through violence, to minor acts of everyday resistance against injustice, to attempts to restore the security and stability once afforded by the Soviet state. In For Putin and for Sharia, Kaliszewska challenges the official dichotomy of Muslims as supporting either the political underground or state authorities and deconstructs the Salafi/Sufi division between the so-called reformists and traditional Islam.

The increased importance of the religious factor, which influences various aspects of social life, has made it relevant for current academic research. The interrelation of this factor with the political history of Russia makes it one of the most complex and priority areas in the confessional policy of the State, and provokes the rethinking of Russia’s policy in the national regions. The issues related to the relationship between official authorities and Orthodox organizations in polyconfessional regions with a predominance of Muslim populations, particularly in Dagestan are of particular interest for us. The absence of historical interpretations on the history of Orthodox organizations in the transitional and post-Soviet periods makes the stated subject topical for identifying and introducing into scientific circulation a specific material that regional studies can provide. Proceeding from the above, in the proposed paper for the first time in regional historiography we’ve made an attempt to consider the transformation processes in the socio-political situation in the country during the transitional and first decade of the post-Soviet period (1985-1997) and their influence on the development of the Orthodox religion, Christian believers and clergy in Dagestan. We’ve made conclusion about the latent process of religious orthodox revival in the republic against the background of the general spiritual crisis in the country during the transitional period of history, conditioned by the continuing policy of “state atheism”. Atheistic worldview of governing bodies often influenced the process of building relationships with religious organizations and was characterized as “ambiguous”. Religious renaissance in the first half of the 1990s in Dagestan had its own local features, due to the deterioration of the socio-political background of the republic and was accompanied by factors that adversely affect the position of Orthodoxy here. Authots’ contribution: O.B. Khalidova is responsible for the idea, literature review, data interpretation, paper compilation and edition; G.F. Gebekov has carried out the analysis and intepretation of sociological poll data.

The five chapters of this volume focus on the complex and tumultuous events occurring in Russia during the five months from May through September 1999. They sparked the Russian invasion of Chechnya on 1 October and vaulted a previously unknown former KGB agent into the post of Russian prime minister and, ultimately, president. The five chapters are devoted to: ? The intense political struggle taking place in Russia between May and August of 1999, culminating in an incursion by armed Islamic separatists into the Republic of Dagestan.? Two Moscow terrorist bombings of 9 and 13 September 1999, claiming the lives of 224 Muscovites and preparing the psychological and political ground for a full-blown invasion of Chechnya.? The so-called Ryazan Incident of 22 September 1999, when eyewitnesses observed officers of the FSB special forces placing a live bomb in the basement of an apartment building in the town of Rzayan.? The detonation of a powerful truck bomb outside of an apartment house in Buinaksk, Dagestan, on 4 September 1999, which took the lives of fifty-eight innocent victims.? The explosion on 16 September 1999 of a truck bomb in the city of Volgdonsk in southern Russia, which killed eighteen persons and seriously wounded eighty-nine.

Despite the escalating terrorist actions, there is no polarized constellation in the Islamic politics of Dagestan. Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) officers regard the corrupt Dagestan authorities to be significantly responsible for the massive conversion of youths to terrorism, and began to contact with moderate Salafis to isolate the “forest brothers” (armed Salafis) in 2010. Exploiting the FSB's soft strategy, secular intellectuals requested to reform the Muslim Spiritual Board of Dagestan by electing a legitimate mufti. Having seen the incompetence of intra-Sufi opposition (non-Avar sheikhs) in the War on Terror, the Spiritual Board jumped on the bandwagon of dialog strategy in 2012. The secular authorities of Dagestan, indifferent to intra-Muslim politics, limit their activities to the call for dialog between the secular authorities and the forest brothers. In this way, political actors hijack the master narrative of the “War on Terror” and these narratives are imported to local politics.

This book, based on extensive original research in the field, analyses the political, social and cultural implications of the rise of Islam in post-Soviet Russia. Examining in particular the situation in Tatarstan and Dagestan, where there are large Muslim populations, the authors chart the long history of Muslim and orthodox Christian co-existence in Russia, discuss recent moves towards greater autonomy and the assertion of ethnic-religious identities which underlie such moves, and consider the actual practice of Islam at the local level, showing the differences between \"official\" and \"unofficial\" Islam, how ceremonies and rituals are actually observed (or not), how Islam is transmitted from one generation to the next, the role of Islamic thought, including that of radical sects, and Islamic views of men and women's different roles. Overall, the book demonstrates how far Islam in Russia has been extensively influenced by the Soviet and Russian multi-ethnic context. List of figures and illustrations Acknowledgments Note of transliteration Glossary Introduction Part I The Public Face of Islam 1. Islam in Russia: An Historical Perspective 2. Islam and Power 3. Official and Unofficial Islam Part II The Private face of Islam 4. Islam and the Search for Identity 5. Practising Islam: Rituals, Ceremonies and the Transmission of Ethno-Islamic Values 6. Islam in Multi-Ethnic Society: identity and Politics 7. Narratives of Gender among Russian Muslims Conclusion Timeline References Index