What is Islamic about reform among Muslims and what is not? How can we differentiate reform within an Islamic paradigm and a paradigmatic shift from the Islamic tradition to something else in a Muslim community? How do we establish the connection between reform as an intellectual or scholarly project and the translation of that project into social reality (or, in some cases, the absence of such a translation)? This article addresses these questions in the context of the Volga-Ural region in the late Russian Empire, where reformist Muslims attempted to reform existing Islamic educational institutions, particularly the religious seminaries called “madrasas,” as a means to modernize the region's Muslim communities. Educational reform initiatives among Volga-Ural Muslims originated within the framework of Muslim networks and institutions. Yet, especially after Russia's Revolution of 1905, reform in a number of prominent madrasas came to be characterized by various non-religious and at times even anti-religious influences emerging from the globalization of Western European modernity. Consequently, in these madrasas, education and the overall student experience turned into a secularizing process, and Islam as a religious system lost its weight and appeal for many students, who then engaged in a reform movement that evolved beyond an Islamic paradigm.

No abstract

No abstract

Imperial Russia's Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia's Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.

At the Vanguard of Contemporary Muslim Thought: Reading Said Nursî into the Islamic Tradition Mustafa Tuna The Kurdish-origin Turkish scholar of Islam Said Nursî's (1878-1960) system of theological contemplation (tafakkur) innovatively expands the limits of Muslim religious thought from within the Sunni Islamic tradition. It incorporates aspects of the Muslim creed that scholars of dialectical theology (kalam) have conventionally substantiated based on textual evidence as opposed to rational proofs, such as resurrection or the existence of angels, into the realm of rational argumentation. And it bolsters the place of contemplation in Sufi practice, if we understand Sufism (taṣawwuf) in its broadest sense as seeking excellence through knowledge of God (maʿrifat Allah). As such, Nursî stands at the vanguard of contemporary Muslim thought. More than half a century after his death, however, Nursî also remains a "famous unknown." 1 His name evokes wide reverential acknowledgement among world Muslims as a rare great scholar from post-Ottoman Turkey but without a sustained engagement with the intellectual content of his oeuvre, Risâle-i Nur Külliyatı (The Epistles of Light Collection). Besides Şerif Mardin's pioneering study from 1989 and Coling Turner's recent The Qur'an Revealed, 2 English-language academic publications on Nursî's life and works primarily comprise solicited contributions to conferences and edited volumes sponsored by his followers in Turkey. There are 1 To borrow a recent description of another similarly influential but underappreciated thinker from the tenth century,