Т. 1. «Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность»

Asia and Africa: their Heritage and Modernity. Vol. 1 335 Секция IX. Источниковедение и историография ислама в России Historiography of Islam in Russia Bustanov Alfrid (EUSPb, St Petersburg; UvA, Amsterdam) Muslim Letter-Writing in Late Imperial Russia This paper scrutinizes horizontal communication of Russia’s Muslims by means of private correspondence. This is an almost untouched terrain of history spoken by the actors of Muslim communities. I am interested in what we can discern from the many lapidary accounts that came down to us in letters of various forms. Who was supposed to write and read letters?What the Muslims of Russia were writing about to their close friends and relatives? What did they deem crucial in their everyday life and the world that they saw around them? How was a good Muslim letter to be written and how should it look like? Most importantly, what is absent from the private correspondence? Is there something that Russia’s Muslims wanted to hide or simply did not care about? It was to answer these questions that I embarked upon a journey through several hundreds of private letters dating from the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, which miraculously survived in two academic archives in St Petersburg and Kazan’. Both collections, numbering almost a thousand files from particular outstanding families, reveal stable communication of people fromKazan and the surrounding villages. These precious sources entered the archives in the aftermath of anti-religious repressions and the destruction of many private archives of Muslim scholars across the former Russian Empire in the 1930s. It is important to note that the preliminary description of these files had been conducted by the bearers of the prerevolutionary Muslim literary tradition, namely the journalist Muhammad-KarimSagidov and the philologist Zainap Maksudova, who either knew those who figured in correspondence in person or were acquainted with them from manuscripts that the latter wrote or possessed. This journey into the world of private correspondence has also an ambition in the field of social history: I intend to explore the cluster of learned people who often escape