XXXI Международный конгресс ИИСАА. 23–25 июня 2021 г. Т. 2

Россия и Восток. К 100-летию политических и культурных связей новейшего времени. Т. 2 231 Круглый стол: «Источниковедение и историография ислама в России» with Islamic teaching and respect for authority, especially as regards Islamic law ( fiqh ). Unlike the Christian Reformation, this reform movement did not challenge received dogma or theological doctrine (with some important nineteenth-century exceptions, such as the Babid and Baha'i movement in Iran and Ahmadiyya in India). At the same time, it tried to create space for socio-political ideas of Western origin: notions of intellectual progress, political liberty and institutional democracy, including ideas of nationhood — though not in the nineteenth-century European sense of nation state, but as umma , the nation of all Muslims, united on a religious basis as a collective political subject. The tension between conservatism and reform may have limited radical modernisation in some quarters, but even so, many Islamic reformers were personally or ideologically connected to anti-colonial forces and promoted a modernised Islam as a challenge to Europe's colonial dominance and Western hegemony in general. There are clear parallels between Gasprinskii’s novel 1 and the rich traditions of utopian thought from Plato through to Thomas More and beyond. AlthoughWestern utopian writings were far from monologic, Eastern utopias developed their own path under the influence of Islam. But in utopian thought East and West crossed paths, partly through a shared debt to Plato and Neoplatonism. These intersections find early expression in the treatises of Abu Nasr al-Farabi (872–950 CE): Ara Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila [ The Virtuous City ] and Kitab tashil as-Sa‘adah [ The Attain- ment of Happiness ] FromAlmoravidAndalusia, we also have The History of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓ n by the polymath vizier Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (c. 1105–1185). This allegorical tale, consid- ered the first philosophical romance, represents a ‘one-man utopia’ of learning and enlightenment; just like Gasprinskii’s inhabitants of Dar al-Rahat, the protagonist, an autodidact, abandons his secluded life in his quest for wisdom. The romance was well-known in the East and in Western Europe during the early modern period and Enlightenment 2 . Whether or not Gasprinskii was familiar with these medieval writ- ers, his affinities with their rationalist outlook are worth noting. More contemporary are parallels with two Islamic feminist utopias, Sultana's Dream and Padmarag by the Bengali writer and political activist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932). The first emphasises women's equality and science's role in advancing the cause of social progress. Both emphases are found in Gasprinskii's work; the publication of Sultana's Dream in 1905 roughly coincided with the second serialised version of 1 Gasprinskii, Ismail. Frengistan Mektupları, in Tercuman, 25 January 1887–21 April 1889; English edition: French and African Letters, trans. by Azade-Ayse Rorlich. Istanbul: ISIS, 2008; the newest Russian edition Polnoye Sobranie Sochinenii Ismaila Gasprinskogo, ed. by Rafael Hakimov, 2 vols. Simferopol: Institut Istorii imeni Sh. Mardzhani Akademii nauk Respubliki Tatarstan, 2016, pp. 19–133 (French Letters), pp. 134–204 (Misterious Country) 2 Ben-Zaken,Avner. Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqẓan:ACross-Cultural History ofAutodidacticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011..