Studying Islam in the Soviet Union

Download or read book Studying Islam in the Soviet Union written by Michael Kemper and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.