Islam in Russia

Ravil Bukharaev

'It has the same historical quality as those great oral epics "Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons" is a remarkable document: a prose poem, fully historical, that is part tribute and part manifesto for this people without a history. Bukharaev - poet, historian, broadcaster, translator - sees himself as a voice. "Islam in Russia" is a history with a teleology, one that hopes to engender the future of the Tatar nation in its telling.' - The Moscow Times

• The dawn of glory; Bolgar the great in pre-Islamic times; the delegation from Bagdad; Islam takes root; the Mongol onslaught; enter Moscow, Kazan versus Moscow - Olug Mukhammad and the Moscow princedom; Islam in the Kazan Khanate; international connections and cultural liaisons; the grandeur and fall of one civilization; Moscow as a third Rome; Islam underground - Islam beheaded; new type of non-urban Islamic civilization; forceful Christianization; progress under pressure; Catrine the great, struggle for ideologies - Christian missionaries and Islamic scholars; return of cultural grandeur; strange phenomenon of Islamic extremism; jadidism as a religious and anti-clerical movement; Russian madrasses, arrested development - bolshevist revolution and Islam; effectively banned; called by the state; Islam after Stalin; Perestroika; epilogue - which way to go.