Russia's Islamic Tradition is Older than Orthodoxy

Five years after author Mark Batunsky died in exile the first comprehensive monograph on Islam in Russia has been published. Gasan Gusejnov attended the book presentation at Lew Kopelew Forum in Cologne, Germany

photo: Progress – Tradition Publishers, Moscow
Mark Batunskij

​​In Lew Kopelew Forum at the Neumarkt square in Cologne, a very special form of dialog with Islam took place on the evening of October 23. The occasion was a special book presentation, acknowledging a scholar whose life and work combined Germany, Russia, and the Islamic world in a strange way. The name of the author is Mark Batunsky.

Born in 1933 in a Jewish family in the Ukraine, he was evacuated to Uzbekistan in 1941. In Tashkent Batunsky trained his scholarly perception as an attentive observer of both the Soviet oppression of Islam in Central Asia and the tradition of resistance that tenaciously fought against this pressure. Batunsky was later resettled in Moscow, where in the 1970s and 1980s he became one of the leading Soviet scholars on Islam. After the political changes in the late 1980s he moved to Germany, where he died in 1997.

Divided Perception of Islam in Russian Society

Batunsky's list of publications is long. And yet his main work, Russland und Islam (Russia and Islam), a three-volume study of how Islam was perceived by the Russian state and Russian society, had to be published posthumously, five years after his death. It is notable that the researcher spent the last four years of his life not in Russia, but in Germany.

Thus the event in Lew Kopelew Forum in Cologne was not only honoring Batunsky; it was also an attempt to present his findings in a relevant context. His Russian publisher Boris Oreshin (Progress – Tradition Publishers, Moscow) identified a special quality of Batunsky's work by commenting on the tragic contradictions in the perception of Islam in Russia.

Oreshin commented that on the one hand Batunsky analyzed the rejection of Islam by large segments of Russian society, yet on the other he devoted many pages of his study to the high degree of acceptance of Islam in Russia. At a time when society is painfully wrestling with religious conflicts, Oreshin continued, it is particularly helpful to view Batunsky's book as evidence that at least the beginnings of a dialog with Islam can be recognized in today's Russia.

The Kopelew Forum also invited a colleague of Batunsky, Gerhard Simon, a German political scientist and historian for Eastern Europe. According to Simon, who had met Batunsky in the 1990s in Cologne, it was first and foremost Batunsky's integrity that allowed him to integrate his experience in Uzbekistan into his scholarly work instead of letting his knowledge be uncritically misused in the service of ideological propaganda.

Russia's Islamic Tradition is Older than the Orthodoxy

Batunsky was fascinated by both the strength of Islam and the diversity in the perception of this religious tradition in Russia. Batunsky's interest kept coming back to the underestimation of Islam's powers to mobilize. Also, the connections between Islam and Russia are more far-reaching than is generally assumed. The Islamic tradition in Russia – a country regarded as orthodox by the West – is several centuries older than orthodox Christianity there.

Nevertheless, the political virulence of Islam remained unheeded for decades. As Batunsky's widow Eleonora – who had rescued the manuscript for the present edition—explained, Batunsky had forewarned the Soviets many times, both before the imminent victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and before the catastrophic consequences of the Soviet army's invasion of Afghanistan. Batunsky's widow added in passing that it was the colonial war in Chechnya, shamelessly disguised as a defensive war against Islamic terrorists, that drove Batunsky out of Russia.

Russia's Great Expert on Islam is a Jew

The interweaving of the political and the personal in Batunsky's life is fascinating. As a Soviet Jew he wrote a book in Germany about Islam and how it is perceived in Russia. A Russian publisher produced the three-volume work.

And at the presentation of the book at Lew Kopelew Forum in Germany, a German participant asked, "How did Russian Muslim scholars react to such an important contribution to mutual understanding?" Some had indeed commented on the manuscript, but all were too busy playing a political game, according to Eleonora Batunsky. In such games the scholar Mark Batunsky was always fighting a losing battle.

Gasan Gusejnov

© Qantara.de 2003/2005

Translation from German: Alison Brown