Ijtihad into philosophy: Islam as cultural heritage in post-Stalinist Daghestan

Abstract

Starting in 1960, authors of various Daghestani nationalities initiated a re-evaluation of the role of Islam in the history of Daghestan. An important historical personality to draw upon was Muhammad al-Quduqi, a Daghestani Islamic legal scholar of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Quduqi was known for his sympathies towards ijtihad (Islamic legal reasoning by analogy) and for his call to replace customary law by Islamic law. This article studies how Quduqi was brought back into Soviet discourse in 1960, and how his advocacy for ijtihad was subsequently interpreted in Marxist terms as a quest for philosophy, rationalism and progress, with secularizing terms drawn from the discourse of Daghestani Jadids of the 1920s and 1930s. A comparison is then made with Soviet Tatarstan, where Marxist historians constructed a similar autochthonous trajectory of Tatar-Islamic progress and enlightenment. In both cases, Islamic concepts were taken out of context and used for the construction of a secularized national Muslim cultural heritage (miras) that would prepare the ground for socialism – with the difference that in Daghestan, this Muslim Mirasism was multi-ethnic in character.

Keywords:

• Daghestan
• Islamic law
• Soviet Union
• Mirasism
• Tatarstan

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Shamil Shikhaliev (Bochum/Makhachkala) and Dr Rebecca Gould (Singapore), who provided me with some of the sources used in this article and made important suggestions and corrections to a previous draft. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewer for several suggestions.

Funding

This article was written in the framework of the project The Legacy of Soviet Oriental Studies, funded by the Dutch Scientific Organisation [Grant number 360-52-110].

Notes

1. On political ethnic balancing in Daghestan (with a focus on the post-Soviet period), see Ware and Kisriev (2010).

2. At that time, the Central Research Institute for Languages and the Writings of the USSR Peoples.

3. The predecessor of today's Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography in Makhachkala.

4. Interview with Amri R. Shikhsaidov, Makhachkala, June 2011 (A. Bustanov, M. Kemper).

5. St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Arkhiv vostokovedov, fond 123, opis' 1: Moscow Congress of Orientalists 1960, delo 3 (organizational committee sessions), fol. 123.

6. Nadhir's work was only published in 2004; see Durgili (2004).

7. Also, an English version was distributed (Saidov 1960), based on the Russian one.

8. Formulations here are from the Russian text.

9. One of these is Jamaladdin al-Qarabudaghi (Karabudakhkentskii, d. 1947), the author of several historical works. My gratitude to Shamil Shikhaliev for this reference.

10. This is al-Maqbali (1985).

11. Abdullaev (2007, 7) claimed that in 1963 only one prominent Daghestani, Magomed Gamzatovich Gamzatov, had stood up in defense of Abdullaev's ‘new approach’.

12. Abdullaev (1963, 7) expressed his gratitude to Khashaev. Khashaev was Daghestan's state attorney during the Red Terror, Daghestan's people's commissar for justice (1938–41), deputy chairman of the Daghestani government (1941–43), then again state attorney (1943–47), and Daghestan's representative at the RSFSR Council of Ministers. In subsequent years (to 1971) he was a major organizer of historical research in Makhachkala. Khashaev's academic publications focused on ʿadat documents.

13. Here and in the following rendered as ‘Magomed Kudutlinskii’.

14. Abdullaev here refers to the work of Alqadari (1894–95) in Russian translation (Gasanov 1929, 147).

15. With reference to Ali Kaiaev's manuscript, Tarajim ʿulama’ Daghestan, 53.

16. That is, pagans; this is a reference to Gasanov (1929, 147).

17. A reference to Krachkovskii's article (first published in 1938) ‘Dagestan i Iemen’ (Krachkovskii 1960, 581).

18. A reference to Kaiaev's Tarajim.

19. A reference to Kaiaev.

20. Abdullaev's ‘shirak’ seems to refer to Arabic ishraq (illumination).

21. Here Abdullaev refers to a manuscript in the institute's library, allegedly a commentary on Fusus al-hikam (which would be by Ibn ’Arabi, not Suhrawardi). Abdullaev suggests that this commentary was produced by Quduqi (or that Quduqi at least provided critical marginal notes to this commentary).

22. A reference to Gasanov (1929).

23. ʿAli ibn ʿAbdalhamid al-Ghumuqi al-Daghistani, Tarajim ʿulama’ Daghistan, IIEA (Makhachkala), fond 25, inventory 1, unit 1 (no. 1678), 62 folios; here fol. 53. Orazaev (2014, 58), in his Russian translation of Kaiaev's entry on Quduqi, reads ‘renouncement’ (tejerrüd) in place of ‘renewal’ (tejeddüd); this makes little sense.

24. On Jadidism, see Kanlidere (1997) for the Volga area; Khalid (1998) for Central Asia; Kemper and Shikhaliev (2012b) for Daghestan.

25. Interview with Shikhsaidov, June 2011. One book that could not be published was Ghazighumuqi's (1997).

26. See e.g. Navruzov (2012); Shikhaliev (2009); Abdurakhman (2002).