Exploring the Historiography of Muslim Communities in Central Asia

Dear Colleagues,

While comprising a substantial body of the literature, the scholarly work on Islam in Central Asia remains divided across numerous disciplines and subfields, including anthropology, history, religion, and philology; Chinese, Islamic, and Russian and Soviet Studies; and medieval, early modern, and modern studies. These disciplinary, thematic, and chronological divisions continue to complicate efforts to chart transformations in Central Asia’s religious life across the longue duree.

The present Special Issue seeks to address this unsatisfactory state of affairs by inviting contributions interrogating the historiography of Muslim communities. Taking in the period from 1700 to the present, the volume proposes two questions. First, how have Central Asians expressed the history of their religious traditions? Second, how have outsiders described Central Asia’s these traditions?

The field for addressing this topic is wide open; possible research questions could include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

1. What “counts” as a historiographical tradition in the context of a region featuring tremendous diversity in terms of economic, political, and social organization and great variety in terms of organized education?
2. Relatedly, what are the implications in the Central Asian context of treating hagiography or epigraphy as forms of historiography?
3. What are the origins of discourses of normativity that position Central Asians as “inferior” Muslims? Do they predate the modern period, and if so, in what ways?
4. How has the importance of Arabic in the historical consciousness of Central Asian Muslims changed over time, or has it remained the same?
5. How do sacred genealogies of kinship and lineage, including those tied to physical landscapes, reinforce or complicate Central Asians’ articulations of local, regional, and global history?
6. How do global ideological templates frequently applied to the study of Central Asian Islam (e.g., communist, capitalist, Islamist, neoliberal) by scholars within and without the five republics change as a result of their encounter with the region? Does Central Asia have a contribution to make to these global frameworks?
7. The oft-cited chasm separating approaches to the study of Islam in the academic traditions of Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia and in the West and Japan has yet to be examined critically. In what ways are these two discrete traditions? Where do they overlap or depart from one another? And why?
8. How have the notions of shari’a and adat, as well as the relationship between the two, changed over time? Have changes to the use of these terms in the 20th century matched the patterns observed in non-communist parts of the Islamic world?
9. How have Central Asia’s non-Muslim communities, including eronis, Jews, Ismailis, and Orthodox Christians, developed their own historiographical traditions grounded in communal understandings of time and place? How have these traditions been shaped, or not shaped, by the Islamic context of Central Asia?
10. In what ways are historiographical traditions of Muslimness “religious?” What constraints and opportunities does the use of this term by contemporary historians entail?

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200–300 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editor, Dr. Eren Tasar ([email protected]), or to the Assistant Editor of Religions, Ms. Margaret Liu ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo a double-blind peer review.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Eren Tasar
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Muslim
• historiographical tradition
• Islam
• Central Asia