The book presents the first integrated study of the relationship between official Islamic leadership (muftiship), non-official Islamic authorities, grassroots Muslim communities and the state in post-Communist Eurasia. It employs a history-based perspective and compares this relationship to that in both the Middle East and Western Europe.

In the thirteenth century, the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire that functioned as a cultural 'clearing house' for the Old World. Under Mongol auspices various commodities, ideologies and technologies were disseminated across Eurasia. The focus of this path-breaking study is the extensive exchanges between Iran and China. The Mongol rulers of these two ancient civilizations 'shared' the cultural resources of their realms with one another. The result was a lively traffic in specialist personnel and scholarly literature between East and West. These exchanges ranged from cartography to printing, from agriculture to astronomy. The book concludes by asking why the Mongols made such heavy use of sedentary scholars and specialists in the elaboration of their court culture and why they initiated so many exchanges across Eurasia. This is a work of great erudition which crosses new scholarly boundaries in its analysis of communication and culture in the Mongol empire.

The former Muslim republics of the USSR are struggling to strike a balance between the legacy of the Soviet regime and the revival of their own, traditional culture. This volume examines the religion, economy and demography of the areas as well as both internal and external relations.

Muslim Eurasia (1995) looks at the Muslim states that came into being on the ruins of the Soviet Union, and their complex legacies of Russian colonialism, russification, de-islamicization, centralization and communism – on top of localism, tribalism and Islam. The interaction and contradictions within each category, and between them, form the essence of the struggle to formulation new identities.

This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: • How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. • How associations employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. • And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.

Drawing together Indian and Iranian Muslims with Christian missionaries, Hindu nationalists and Japanese imperialists, this book brings to life the local sites of globalisation that transformed Muslim religiosity through the long nineteenth century. Nile Green evokes terrains of exchange that range from the Russian empire's borderlands to the Indian princely states and the car factories of Detroit. He casts a microhistorian's eye on the religious productions that spilled from these many sites of contact. Whether looking at imperial evangelicals and Iranian language-workers, or Indian Muslims and Yogi masters of breath control, each chapter unravels local forces of religious contact, competition and exchange. Green draws on a huge range of materials, from Indian magazines for African Americans to Muslim Japanology; from Urdu tales of ocean-going saints to the diaries of German missionaries; from Bibles in Tatar to the first Arabic printed books. Challenging perceptions of an age usually identified with the unifying ideologies of Pan-Islamism and nationalism, his book reveals more muddled human terrains in which Muslims defended, reformed and promoted in an increasingly connected world. Terrains of Exchange presents not only global history from the bottom up but global history as Islamic history.

On the Threshold of Eurasia explores the idea of the Russian and Soviet "East" as a political, aesthetic, and scientific system of ideas that emerged through a series of intertextual encounters produced by Russians and Turkic Muslims on the imperial periphery amidst the revolutionary transition from 1905 to 1929. Identifying the role of Russian and Soviet Orientalism in shaping the formation of a specifically Eurasian imaginary, Leah Feldman examines connections between avant-garde literary works; Orientalist historical, geographic and linguistic texts; and political essays written by Russian and Azeri Turkic Muslim writers and thinkers. Tracing these engagements and interactions between Russia and the Caucasus, Feldman offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity, and anti-imperialism from the vantage point not of the metropole but from the cosmopolitan centers at the edges of the Russian and later Soviet empires. In this way, On the Threshold of Eurasia illustrates the pivotal impact that the Caucasus (and the Soviet periphery more broadly) had—through the founding of an avant-garde poetics animated by Russian and Arabo-Persian precursors, Islamic metaphysics, and Marxist-Leninist theories of language —on the monumental aesthetic and political shifts of the early twentieth century.

This volume explores some of the many different meanings of community across medieval Eurasia. How did the three ‘universal’ religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, frame the emergence of various types of community under their sway? The studies assembled here in thematic clusters address the terminology of community; genealogies; urban communities; and monasteries or ‘enclaves of learning’: in particular in early medieval Europe, medieval South Arabia and Tibet, and late medieval Central Europe and Dalmatia. It includes work by medieval historians, social anthropologists, and Asian Studies scholars. The volume present the results of in-depth comparative research from the Visions of Community project in Vienna, and of a dialogue with guests, offering new and exciting perspectives on the emerging field of comparative medieval history. Contributors are (in order within the volume) Walter Pohl, Gerda Heydemann, Eirik Hovden, Johann Heiss, Rüdiger Lohlker, Elisabeth Gruber, Oliver Schmitt, Daniel Mahoney, Christian Opitz, Birgit Kellner, Rutger Kramer, Pascale Hugon, Christina Lutter, Diarmuid Ó Riain, Mathias Fermer, Steven Vanderputten, Jonathan Lyon and Andre Gingrich.

The book considers the political, institutional and cultural histories of the Qara Khitai.

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.