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This article analyzes the causes and consequences of Islamophobia in the Russian Federation following the story of the Russian ban on the works of a scholar of Islam from Turkey, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878–1960), despite the overall positive reception of his ideas and followers by Russia's Muslims. It positions Russia's existing domestic anti-Muslim prejudices, which evolved in the contexts of the Chechen conflict and the influx of migrant workers from culturally Muslim former Soviet republics to cosmopolitan Russian cities, against the background of the post-9/11 global fear narrative about Muslims. These Islamophobic attitudes in turn informed and justified anti-Muslim policies in Russia, as the Russian state, following broader trends of centralization and illiberalization in the country, abandoned the pluralist policies toward religion of the early post-Soviet years and reverted to the late-Soviet model of regulation and containment in the past two decades.

После российского завоевания Волго-Уральского региона в XVI веке местная мусульманская элита была практически уничтожена. В условиях отсутствия политически активной элиты исламские ученые стали фактором, объединяющим мусульманское население региона. В отличие от крестьян и сезонных кочевников, редко выходивших за пределы собственных деревень или торговых городов, ученые в поисках знаний много путешествовали. Во время своих путешествий они устанавливали прочные связи с другими студентами и учеными. Расселившись после окончания учебы по региону и занимая должности деревенских имамов, они поддерживали сложившиеся контакты благодаря родственным узам, переписке, суфийским братствам и богословским дискуссиям. Некоторые ученые также участвовали в более масштабных мусульманских ученых сетях, как правило, охватывавших территорию от Мавераннахра до Османской империи. Таким образом, исламские ученые стали социальным слоем, связующим между собой волго-уральских мусульман на уровне регионального мусульманского домена, одновременно интегрируя это региональное сообщество в трансрегиональный мусульманский домен. ; When Russian forces occupied the Volga-Ural region in the sixteenth century, they nearly eliminated the local Muslim nobility. In the absence of a politically active nobility, Islamic scholars kept the region's Muslim inhabitants connected as a larger community. This population of agricultural peasants and seasonal nomads rarely ventured beyond the vicinity of their villages or market towns, but scholars traveled extensively to pursue knowledge. As they traveled, they forged lasting connections with other students and scholars. When they graduated and dispersed through the region as village imams, they maintained these connections through kinship ties, letters, Sufi associations, and theological debates. Some of them also engaged in a broader network of Islamic scholars that extended primarily from Transoxiana to the Ottoman territories. As such, they served as the glue that held Volga-Ural Muslims together in a shared world, a regional Muslim domain, and they integrated this regional community of believers further into a transregional Muslim domain.---*This article is adapted from (Tuna, 2015, pp. 18-36).

AbstractThe Kemalist leadership of early Republican Turkey attempted to transform the country's Muslim populace with a heavy emphasis on secularism, scientific rationalism, and nationalism. Several studies have examined the effects of this effort, or the "Turkish Revolution," at the central and more recently provincial levels. This article uses first-hand accounts and statistical data to carry the analysis to the village level. It argues that the Kemalist reforms failed to reach rural Turkey, where more than 80 percent of the population lived. A comparison with sedentary Soviet Central Asia's rural transformation in the same period reveals ideology and the availability of resources as the underlying causes of this failure. Informed by a Marxist–Leninist emphasis on the necessity of transforming the "substructure" for revolutionary change, the Soviet state undermined existing authority structures in Central Asia's villages to facilitate the introduction of communist ideals among their Muslim inhabitants. Turkey's Kemalist leadership, on the other hand, preserved existing authority structures in villages and attempted to change culture first. However, they lacked and could not create the resources to implement this change.

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.

"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"--

In 1913, an article in a Russian missionary journal compared two "very typical representatives" of Islamic studies in Russia: İsmail Bey Gaspıralı (1851–1914) and Nikolai Ivanovich Il'minskii (1822–1891). Nothing could better symbolize the two opposing points of view about the past, present and future of the Muslims of Russia in 1913. Il'minskii was a Russian Orthodox missionary whose ideas and efforts had formed the imperial perceptions and policies about the Muslims of the Russian empire in the late Tsarist period, while Gaspıralı was a Muslim educator and publisher whose ideas and efforts had shaped the Muslim society per se in the same period. Il'minskii, beginning in the 1860s, and Gaspıralı, beginning in the 1880s, developed two formally similar but inherently contradictory programs for the Muslims of the Russian empire. Schooling and the creation of a literary language or literary languages constituted the hearts of both of their programs. Besides their own efforts, both Gaspıralı and Il'minskii had a large number of followers that diligently worked to put their programs into practice among the Muslims of Russia. As a result of the inherent contradiction of these programs, a bitter controversy developed between what we may call the Il'minskii and Gaspıralı groups, which particularly intensified after the revolution of 1905. In this article, I will discuss the underlying causes and development of this controversy by focusing on the role of language in the programs of Gaspıralı and Il'minskii. Then, I will conclude my article with an evaluation of the legacies of these two individuals in their own time and beyond.

AbstractClimate change and the COVID‐19 pandemic posed significant challenges for Ankara city in Turkey. The city authorities have taken a number of strategic and operational measures to improve water security. This paper explores the linkages of regular forces such as climate change and disasters, as well as disruptive forces like pandemics, sudden shocks, and actions needed to overcome the resulting challenges. Based on 13 key informant interviews with a semi‐structured questionnaire and literature review, the existing water security situation is explored in relation to climate change and the impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Ankara is still behind in terms of climate‐related adaptation practices and management. Financial resources are inadequate, so policy measures like neighborhood‐level responsibility‐sharing frameworks, resilience integration into existing policies and involving local people in policymaking, and developing capacity building for local government can help to ensure Ankara's water security.