From Moscow to Mecca: Entangled Soviet Narratives of Pilgrimage in the Unlikely 1965 ḥajjnāme of Fazliddin Muhammadiev

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Vladimir Bobrovnikov

Yayın yılı:

2023

Yayıncı:

BRILL

In April–May 1963 the Tajik writer Fazlidddin Muhammadiev, a member of the Communist Party and atheistic propagandist, performed his first and only hajj in the company of 17 Soviet pilgrims. This journey resulted in an autobiographical novel In the other world or a tale of the great hajj (1965) that was republished multiple times as a Soviet best seller in Tajik, Russian, and other languages. It is a unique, detailed, emotional, though sometimes blasphemous, Soviet pilgrim’s account. This paper examines Muhammadiev’s novel in terms of entangled narratives of the pilgrimage from Central Asia to Mecca proposed by Communist propagandists, academic Orientalists, and Soviet Muslim officials in the Cold War period when Islam was partly legalized in post-Stalinist Russia. It shows continuity and ruptures between Orientalist discourses of Islam in late tsarist and Soviet Russia, and sheds light on individual and collective religiosity of post-war Soviet Muslims.

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