Volume 53, Number 20 · December 21, 2006
Islam: The Russian Solution
By Orlando Figes
For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
by Robert D. Crews
Harvard University Press, 463 pp., $29.95
Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security
by Shireen T. Hunter with Jeffrey L. Thomas and Alexander Melikishvili, and with a foreword by Ambassador James F. Collins
M.E. Sharpe, 566 pp., $94.95; $38.95 (paper)
Muslim leaders today like to boast that Islam arrived in Russia before Christianity. Muslims brought their religion to Russia from the Arabian peninsula in the first centuries after Muhammad, long before the arrival of Christianity among the pagans on the Eurasian steppe. By the end of the first millennium, when the pagan prince of Kievan Rus' converted to Byzantine Christianity, there were substantial Muslim communities in the Caucasus region between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, in the Volga River valley, and in Central Asia, the Urals, and Siberia. The Mongol hordes adopted Islam during their long occupation of Russia between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and many of their Tatar tribesmen remained there when the Golden Horde was pushed back to Mongolia.
Review, 4202 words
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