La 4^e séance de l’Atelier Eurasie centrale 2024-25 du GSRL à l'EPHE aura lieu le mardi 28 janvier 2025. Elle se déroulera de 11h00 à 13h00, à l’Humathèque du campus Condorcet, 10 cours des Humanités, 93300 Aubervilliers (métro Front populaire), en salle 3.05 (troisième étage) — et en ligne via le lien : https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/92220345292?pwd=2yclF7ZmfNjSGOVNAODSxQLcQBEuMn.1 (code d'accès : KV5V5k).

Les personnes ne disposant pas d’un badge du campus sont invitées à demander un passe à la réception.

Nous y recevrons Leila ALMAZOVA (ZMO, Berlin, participante du programme ANR RedGold), qui interviendra sur le thème :

Hagiographic experiments in the (post-)communist worlds, 17: The memory of Imam Valiulla Yaqupov (1963–2012) in Tatarstan, between religion and ideology

 After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Volga Tatar society experienced the emergence of new Sunni Muslim religious leaders, educated by late-Soviet imams. One such figure, Valiulla Yaqupov (1963–2012), achieved rapid fame by his activism (as mosque imam, madrasa restorer, successful publisher and academic historian). Until his assassination in 2012, he was also an influential Vice-Mufti of the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation. Advocating ‘traditional Islam’ (i.e., as this religion developed on the territories of the Russian Empire and the USSR), Yaqupov fought both Islamic Integralism and Liberalism. So doing, he made a lot of enemies but his violent death brought about more consensual assessments of his career and legacy.

The Muftiate of Tatarstan, especially, played a decisive role in the construction of his memory as a continuator of Soviet-time imams — through yearly conferences, commemorative volumes and a museum dedicated to him at the Apanay Mosque of Kazan, where he served as imam. The political authorities of Tatarstan were not left behind: their Antiterrorist Commission released a documentary film on the divine in 2022. Institutional media, the academic intelligentsia and the social networks participated, too, in a complex memorial process. Against an overall background of internecine conflicts within Russia’s Muslim community and of ideological mobilisations of Islam, this process has been shedding light on post-Soviet literary hagiographic experiences and on their reflection of contradictory views of Islam as religion and ideology in present-day Russia. 

Leila Almazova, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Centre of the Modern Orient (ZMO), Berlin. In 2002, she defended her PhD dissertation on ‘The concept of man in Tatar philosophy in the early 20^th century’. In 2010–11, she was Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan and, from 2012 to 2016, Executive Director of the Resource Centre for the Development of Islamic Education and Islamic Studies, at the Volga Region Federal University in Kazan. In 2017, with a grant from the Republic of Tatarstan she started at the University of Michigan her habilitation work on Post-Soviet Islamic education in Tatarstan. Her research expertise is in the history of Islamic philosophy, of Islamic education and of Islam in Russia.

Au plaisir de vous retrouver à cette occasion,

Stéphane Dudoignon, Agathe Guy, Léo Maillet, Lina Tsrimova