Our research cluster, Muslim Lives in a Shifting World, seeks to reexamine the tumultuous period around the collapse of the Soviet state through the experiences of Muslims, the largest religious minority in the former Soviet space. By examining Muslim lives in the region from the 1970s to the present, we shed new light on the diversity of lived experiences in a multiethnic, multireligious society during a period of change and transition.
With participation from a transnational network of scholars, we seek to highlight and analyze underexamined sources that reflect the diversity of Muslim identities and lived experiences in this period. This two-year multidisciplinary project will bring together scholars across international institutions and career stages, with the goal of publishing a two-volume open access handbook of peer-reviewed scholarly articles. The contributions in the first volume will analyze the Muslim press and other published collections, while the contributions in the second volume will examine archives, unpublished sources, and special collections on Muslim lives in this period. It will be available to scholars as well as general readers and will support multidisciplinary research, teaching, and learning.
This project is guided by three interconnected research questions:
What new conceptual frameworks can we develop to capture and critically examine the diversity of social structures, institutions, histories, and discourses that have shaped and were shaped by Muslim experiences and activism in Eurasia?
How did Muslim communities in Eurasia engage with the broader cultural and socio-political developments at the local, national, and international levels?
How does broad, multilingual, and cross-disciplinary awareness and analysis of published and unpublished sources chronicling Muslim lives in Eurasia during this tumultuous period enrich scholarly understanding of the region's recent history, the contemporary Muslim world and intersecting Muslim identities, and the role of ethnic and religious identity in times of transition?
Especially from the 1970s on, the Soviet Union saw the emergence of a wide variety of countercultures, an increase in transnational intellectual exchanges, and a desire to nurture and reexamine dormant or new-found identities as individuals and communities. Instead of studying Muslims in isolation, we seek to position them within broader socio-political developments during this period. By doing so, this project will bridge the 1970s with the period of significant reforms and the emergence of independent states. While it is primarily situated in the field of Eurasian Islamic Studies, the interconnectedness of Muslim lives with historical and contemporary events in the (former) Soviet space as well as globally, makes this project inherently transnational and interdisciplinary. We will therefore approach this period of great change with a diverse group of participants constituting historians, religious studies scholars, ethnographers, librarians, archivists, and sociologists to shed light on the wide range of experiences and responses of Muslim communities.