Seminarium IEiAK: dr R.Turaeva, Islam and Politics in Russia, Transformation of Muslim spaces in Moscow

The lecture will shed light into the institutional innovation of Muslim networks focusing on political, economic and social integration of Muslims residing in Moscow. Ethnographic accounts of daily struggles of Muslims living in non-Muslim countries such as Russia contributes not only to the literature on Muslim migrants in non-Muslim societies but also to the debate on transformation of post-Soviet Islam and Islamic movements in post-communist countries. Transnational Muslim networks connecting Muslims in post-communist countries with Arabic world is still a young understudied field.

Conflicts of interests within the state administration of Islam as well as among post-Soviet ulama and the question of power of authority within the political leadership in Islam offer important insights into the current state of affairs within political Islam in Russia. The main argument of the lecture is that institutional innovation within Islamic movements in post-communist countries shall be understood in the light of historical past of these countries (Soviet Islam) and Saudi economic influence in the post-Soviet period complicated with the Russian strict state control over Islam (both on ideological and security level) in the last two decades. This argument will offer the basis to take an innovative approach on Islamic activism, Islamic governance, education, Islamic economy and health care.

Bio:
Dr. Rano Turaeva is a habilitating candidate at the Ludwig Maximilian University and an associated researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle Saale in Germany. She is currently working on the second book on Migration and Islam in Russia. She has been writing on the topics of migration, entrepreneurship, informal economies, gender, border studies, identity and inter-ethnic relations among many other topics which she published in such journals as Central Asian Affairs, Central Asian Survey, Inner Asia, Communist and post-Communist studies, Anthropology of Middle East among other journals. Her book based on her PhD thesis is out with Routledge in 2016 under the title `Migration and Identity: the Uzbek Experience`.