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I'm your host, Arrukyuran. And today I will be interviewing Alfred Bustanov on his new book, Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia, the Memoirs of Abdul Magid al-Qadri. The book was published in 2022 by real publishers and it tells rather a dramatic story of Abdul Magid al-Qadri, a Muslim individual born in Kazakhstan and brought up in the rise Muslim environments of the South Warals. Dr.
Bustanov is an esteemed assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and the principal investigator of the European Research Commission project titled Mind the Muslim Individual in Imperial and Muslim Russia. With his expertise in the field of history and I would have assumed Islamic studies, Dr. Bustanov has published extensively on the past and present of Islam in Russia, including the history of Muslim subjectivities and Soviet Orientalism. I think Dr.
Bustanov really deserves to be congratulated on finding this memoir and we'll talk about that in a second and also very able to translate it. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Bustanov. It is truly an honor to have you here with us.
Thank you, Arrukyuran. It's a pleasure to be here at X4, having me. Thank you. I guess before delving into the discussion about the book, could you please give our listeners a brief introduction to yourself and your background for us to really get a better sense of what experiences have shaped your current research?
Sure. Well, I was born in Omsk, which is a city in Western Siberia and I'm the first generation of Siberian Tatters who, yeah, lead in the sea because all of my ancestors lived in the villages of the region and our family comes from the environment of Sajibin Buharans. So those individuals who traveled from multiple places of central Asia in the 17th century and the 18th century to Sajibin, towns and villages to spread Islam and to do trade. So this is my ancestry and the history of the family and what I saw back in the village probably made quite an impact on me and I wanted to be a historian since my early on.
I received my degree from the history department at Omsk University. There I started to learn Arabic and became interested in manuscripts because it was our habit at the University to go to annual expeditions to the remote areas where the Tatters lived and already back in 2005 during my first expedition of this kind, I encountered, yeah, Arabic script manuscripts in the field and that was really an emotional experience for me shocking how we would say. So I remember myself looking at these books feeling that this is something like part of me and but I don't understand anything and nobody around me understands anything. So people just keep them as a holy object and they still continue their occult practices related to these things but nobody could really read them and tell the story and since then, since that year and since that day when I first saw these things these books and subjects and we mainly ladies who kept the manuscripts I decided for myself that I have to yeah devote my life even though it sounds weird but I decided to devote my life to the study of these histories and stories that surround the manuscripts.
So that was a long story afterwards that I can see with my travels and with the real estate, talking to people, collecting these manuscripts, studying them and learning languages, trying to understand what's going on out there and I wanted to get a supervisor somewhere who could be who helped me with writing a thesis on these things. In Omsk we had a group of ethnographers who were interested in my work but couldn't really help me with the contents of manuscripts right in the books which is also Sabyo-Eun-Town. I got to know an established colleague of mine also on the Sabyo-Eun-Town, a big village with years and years of experience of field work among the Sabyo-Eun-Town and our collaboration grew into true friendship but I continued my journey looking for the supervisor in Kazan and in Sabyo-Eun-Town, at one time I consulted a rentalist such as Sabyo-Eun-Town and Sabyo-Eun-Town and asked them to be my supervisors but they told me that they were too old, they were in their 80s already at that time and one of them told me that you better look in Europe and indeed by some miracle I got a fellowship back in 2008 in Germany to study German language and there I asked our colleagues in Germany just you know sends our rounds emails asking who is interested in the history of Islam in Sabyo-Eun and they told me that maybe Michael Kemper, Mihail Kemper who only started but at that time he's a change-changer of the University of Amsterdam he might be interested so with some five euros in my pocket I went to Amsterdam met Kemper there and yeah that was the story of the start of a long story of our collaboration and friendship and indeed to then I became part of the research research project on the history of soil tarantulas which was not exactly Sabyo-Eun-Town, or that's a history or anything close to it but I'm really grateful that I could join this project because it really gave me insights on the conceptual thinking about the history of Islam in Eurasia more broadly so I wrote my first book on the history of Orientalism in sohid-kazakstan and the way how their historical image changed over the Soviet era from the complete nobody population that was the predominant image of these people into the urban settlers which was done thanks to archaeological investigations and the study of peculiar studies of written sources so yeah that's kind of a very extensive narrative of my life but this is just the way how I gots where I stand now and this is I find your story really fascinating and I guess your current project is also very much related to the project mind can you tell a little bit about the project mind sure well at some point I had to leave the University of Amsterdam simply because my contractors B students was over and I went to kazan for the first time because after receiving my doctoral certificate and degree I thought well now I have to apply my knowledge for the study of the real thing so the biggest collection of Islamic manuscripts in Russia is located at the University Library in Kazan and I entered the library simply as a labyrinth with very small salary and maybe I could have just stayed there for the rest of my life but a year after in 2014 I received an invitation to be a professor, a professor of Islamic studies at the European University of St. Petersburg so there I developed my interests further and since I heard many times in St.
Petersburg stories about life writing and the study of the documents and Soviet history and the way how the Bolsheviks wrote their autobiographies in the 1930s I remember Eagle helping being around all the time and other important colleagues who studied subjectivity and looking at their fascinating work and comparing that to my own field notes and the manuscripts I thought well why don't we study Muslim subjectivities and I developed this idea further and identification for the ERC and by some miracle life received this studying grant for five years of depth study of Muslim ead documents and autobiographies and even private archives in Russia so we have Shani Shrij Khalif, our esteemed colleague as a postdoc who has finished now here's a wonderful masterpiece on the private archive and personality of Muhammad Sayid Sayidov who was the founding father of Ehrlich studies in Dagestad. We also have two PhD students Galia and Mansoor Galia is writing a PhD on the history of Muslim visuality in Soviet times and draws on several huge photophotographic archives that she discovered and Mansoor is writing his thesis on the history of Muslim autobiography in the late 19s and early 20s century so in our work we are trying to make this shift from legal history and social history that was more widespread among the Indian scholarship before towards the personal history of an individual history of Muslims in the region. Today more attention to motions and the worldview. I really want to tease out the things you have mentioned here about this project as it is very kind of closely related to the project that this book aims to do which is really bringing up from the discussions about Muslim subjectivity in Soviet Russia which is why I want to move forward and ask how did you find this memoir of the Majid al-Qadari and perhaps you can talk a little about Vinette Osmanov who is the co-author of this book but unfortunately could not join us today.
Yeah I mean how was the process of finding translating and writing this book? Yes well first of all we are grateful to Vinot Osmanov for discovering this manuscript in the private archive of Zokra Valuova in Uftinova so Zokra Hanum is a fourth generation, not the third generation after Al-Qadari so her mother was the daughter of Al-Qadari and it is Zokra Hanum who is now keeping the actual manuscript and some photographs that are left from the altar and there was some personal connection between Vyadabi and Zokra Hanum and seeing my interests in Soviet history of Islam was known to Vyadabi and our colleagues so he showed me the manuscript and asked whether I'm interested and maybe we can do something together and indeed we did so you can see the book and the translation. Honestly at the beginning when studying to read the book the manuscript I didn't realize its importance I thought okay yet another pilgrimish account you know the usual sometimes boring stuff that we already know about mostly its traveling and this international international inter-regional connections and networks and activity you know these catch wars that we already got used to thanks to the work that is already out there and I thought well well what can we contribute by studying this particular piece but then when I saw more and more of Al-Qadari's telling about his feelings how he experienced really the world around him and how he described his life through the lenses of the Quran and the verses of the revelation and his religious way of describing himself and explaining what was going on at every stage of his life I was getting more and more interested and thought maybe how to think about this manuscript and this life story how to contextualize it and maybe there are similar sources out there and well translating the book into English I thought well maybe I should write a separate book on the memoirs and publish the memoirs separately with some commentaries but eventually I ended up combining the two because I thought if I do these two separate volumes then it might take forever because first of all the memoirs their contents is bigger in itself than what I have to say about them you can go into details about the hodge the pilgrimage literature the worldview the networks ofism and many other things so that it might say you know it might be projects for much longer time than it took me and actually the publication process to be four years focusing on the together with writing the introduction and the presentation all that so I thought maybe it's better to just give the readers the text with some contextualization and then I follow up with articles and maybe another book that will show the richness of other similar sources that are out there in the private archives and which show this multiple multiple voices that are out there not only of male such as Abdukadari Abdu Majidakadari himself but also female voices the keepers of these archives in the 20th century and those women who wrote diaries in autobiographies themselves and composed private archives so this is something for the future but with the memoirs of Akbar Akbarari we really see and can feel the experience of a person who as you told us indeed had a very traumatic experience of living and then late imperial and early saw the times. I'm pretty sure at this point our listeners are really interested in who is this personality and your approach to studying this person who is really based on some sort of historiographical anthropology where you really put forward the perspective emotions and feelings of people being studied and even in your book you kind of emphasize this importance of their quote vernacular forms of self-expression and I really find the memoirs extra ordinarily interesting that it gives us the schulimps of Muslim cosmic life and their point of view of their Soviet Russia and I think this is something of a rare study and we'll come to that question later on.
That being said why don't we talk about Abdukadari himself where was he born what kind of personality did Akbarari embrace in his life story? That's right well he tells everything about it in his book first of all he as you told us already he was born in the context of the environment of the Kazakh land and its nomadic population in the eastern part of the Kazakh step. His father was a teacher as they refer to him, the teacher of the Hopi on Kids and he also traveled in the area and eventually when Abdukadari was born they decided to settle in a steadily bush which is a part of Muslim settlement in South Europe. I've been there several times it's quite a beautiful place which is now part of Vashkiria, Vashkotistan, the autonomous republic in Russia and what was really cool about this place before the 20th century is that for a long time this was a regional center of Sufism of Maghbandi Amujadidiyya with the roots going back to Bukharah and Kabu.
So that was really a Sufism place and the Maghidakadari writes in his book about his personal relations with the families of Ishan's the Sufi masters in this place and he also had a teacher from Yabaktow, another Sufi center nearby in the Kazakh step and we see that in his earlier career or in his early life he was really closely connected with Sufi leaders, Sufi authorities but as many of his contemporaries he I don't want to say became hostile but he took distance from the Sufi roots and the Sufi profile. He wanted to do his own thing and at a certain point he claims that he wants to go to Medina, the Radian, to memorize the Quran and to experience the place where the Prophet lived. So he brought some money and went on to Haj and stayed in Medina for several years, received their certificates of jazas in under recitation which also became quite a fashion in those days I want to say because before the early 20th century it was not that fashionable among Muslims of Russia to go to the Near East for study, Bukhara and other Central Asian sounds and places were more popular and this also tells us about the shift in cultural orientation. I write about it in the book and some other articles building mainly on the observations by Alan Frank on the rise and fall of Bukhar and prestige for Muslims of Russia and this is kind of the continuation of the story.
So when the Bukhar and prestige clients by the late 19th and early 20th century what is it that they discover then comes my book and actually I described this type of personality that I've been my jibakadai really wanted to embrace and I use the concept from literary studies the concept of persona to talk about two forms of self-expression that I read in his memoirs. So first of all he writes about himself as a kali so the professional reciter and specialist in the in the Quran and this is what he really wanted to be. He consciously went to Medina to reach the status and to go back to Russia and to recite the Quran and be the embodiment, leading embodiment of the holy word and that explains a lot why he tells the story of his life through the lens of the Quran so that's one part of his self-image. Another part of his self-image or type of his self-image is Masilum that is someone who was unjustly treated by the government and he spent 15 years of his life in prison in multiple labor camps through St.
Salafi in the north and then near Tashkian in the south. So in the 1930s Al-Kadai had to go to Salafi in the north and in like 40s he was imprisoned near Tashkian and spent some 10 years in prison. So all the main reasons I believe for Al-Kadai to write this book of Nemours was he's attempt to leave after himself through history of his life because as I said initially he wanted to be a kari he wanted to be a reciter of the Quran and he wanted to do something good for his community and to be a pious Masil. But because of the repression because of his unjust handling of himself he couldn't complete his mission and couldn't develop his initial persona and that's why this book shows the two stories, two sides of his life, one full of hope and another one personal drama and strategy that he experienced out there and actually I believe this is one of the few rare and certainly the most extensive narrative of Masilum clergy in prison.
So he describes in detail what he did, how he moved around well in labor camps, how he was treated and things like that. So again it's quite everything what he says is really emotional and he provides details all the time on the way how he lost friends, whom he knew before they were in the guild and what he's writing though striking is that even though he says it's a sad story that he had to do with the Stalinist professions and that he got many friends there, he says that first of all it is the will of God, it wouldn't be otherwise. And the second thing is that he says well yes I had to go through this dramatic situation but I do not blame the government, I do not blame the service system because in the end it's okay because my family is in peace, all my kids receive their education, they have their good jobs and everything is fine. So basically he writes this lines, the final lines of his book in 1955, 1956 already after the death of Stalin and I mean on the one hand you can say oh he was afraid of being punished if he criticizes the government but please this is a narrative in the Arabic script title and even his the sentence is immediate, the sentence would unable to read the book even though he addresses the audience in his manuscript, from time to time he says oh the reader or he says the villagers will learn from my book this in that or my family will appreciate me writing this but in fact there was not much of audience for this book after the death of al-qaddi himself and which is also peculiar because in in Mariam's autobiography we see that she was really she didn't he she didn't refer or use the information from from the manuscript and she even mis-conceptualized the memoirs as his remittances on his Gulak experiences only, so there was a whole note on the book by Mariam where she said this is a new nik or a diary by her father on the Gulak experiences which is not really accurate it is not a diary because it was written after his release from prison and it is a book that rather explains his life and and tries to do something of the sort of rehabilitation but from his own perspective not that much of a personal rehabilitation but rehabilitation all the kind of worldview that he himself and his generation used to have okay as a kind of worldview that had unfortunately very little to do with with the cultural models that were familiar to even his daughter so it's interesting that you're saying that there's there wasn't really no audience I mean was it some sort of like this relief what was the purpose of writing and I mean what cultural social or even religious context is assumed or established in the memoir that's a great question because in many cases beyond the European or westernized environments writing about yourself is not that widespread in a way they are not all immediate recognizable genres of life writing that we could simply say oh this is autobiography as we know it from the European context of the 19th century or things like that and I can imagine that there were many people in the Soviet Union and also in the Russian Empire who could have told us many things about their lives and it was it was worth it but they decided to keep silent not because they were afraid or something but simply I was not customary or they did something else they were poetry for example or they would collect manuscripts and those manuscripts would mirror their personal interests and experiences but with al-qadari and some other people of his generation it became more common so that some of them wrote diaries such as Glamjana al-Barudi for example he wrote diaries or Alia Kargnashawa wrote diaries and and women's senses about her life in the late 19th century eastern part of the Kazakhstan and for al-qadari in a way at that time it was already custom an available model and a genre of writing that was okay to kind of literary frame that you could use to talk about yourself so that is what's right of it and another you really felt the need because I also believe yes that the psychological inside of it is also there right the treatments in the sense of telling to your imagine imagined audience all the pain that you felt inside but still what is what we have to keep in mind in this sense is that any book of the sword is not simply a sum of facts and we shouldn't I guess simply refer to these autobiographies and remain the senses for facts or historical facts that happened sometime in the past but rather it is more interesting to see just to take the subjectivity seriously and listen to their heart in the way and try to understand in what way they're writing subjectively about their own past and one example how this can be done is the growing realization in scholarship that biographical dictionaries that we have on the biographies of scholars in in Russia composed by such individuals as Isaac Rodinov, Habadina Marjani, Moratranzi and others are also not some objective collections of truth but rather the battlefields and competitive narratives of interested groups who try to do construct their own vision and legitimate their respective lineages and groups that of of elites and to really cement their authority.
Those of you who might be interested in such a view on the biographical dictionaries you can see the recent word by Daniel Ross or book the Data Empire as well as some recent articles by Michael Kemper who is now working on the English translation of the third and fourth volumes of AFR that is masterpiece the biographical dictionary by Isaac Rodinov where you can see the subjective quickness by the author of biographies that he wanted to include, exclude, edit, portray in a certain way, highlight in a manner that he found appropriate due to his vision of Islam from the time in place where he where he belonged. It seems you're really kind of doing this historiographical and methodological intervention instead in these ego documents. What is the conceptual framework of this book and you've also kind of showed or compared it into this like a battlefield? What models Abil Majit al-Qadadi he had in mind when kind of structuring the book of his life?
Oh yes, I told you once that the memoirs are bigger than what I have to say about them. At the same time our project, mind project on Muslim individuality is bigger than this particular case. For the project we at some point ended up with a conceptual scheme with four stages, a conceptual framework that we are applying in study of multiple cases in life writing and ego documents. Let me tell you what it is.
It is also part of this book and you can find it in some of my other writings. First of all we have this the highest level of abstraction which we call the cultural repertoire. It is everything all possible ways of being and writing and thinking that were available theoretically to individuals at a certain point of time and place. Everything that was before and Korean also at that time.
Sufism, philosophy, Russian schools, multiple languages, writing, hearing, dancing, occultism, whatever, all the possible forms of existence and thinking that were out there. And you can imagine that of course nobody can exercise with all of this cultural repertoire simultaneous. If you have to decide, you have to make choices. And also objectively you cannot have access to all of it.
Things do not survive. Things can be represented in certain forms that the audience perceives as outdated, backward, not like the language, not the language and things like that. But still, the highest level of abstraction is out there. For the second, more concrete is at the level of models.
That is the fashion of being a certain type of person. For example, at some point the legal vision of Islam and legal subjectivity, the legal subject because more fashionable and more operative than any other version than esoteric subjectivity or sufi forms of subjectivity and others. These models, they change over time. They are stable in the sense that they last maybe for several generations.
But then they can also be replaced by others. They can be marginalized. One of the examples is the shift that I already referred to, the shift from the Persianate models or popular in the 19th century by the cultural models from the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. And then the proliferation of modernist European models.
In a way, our treatment of models of subjectivity is also in the town to go beyond or depart from the binaries of traditionalism and modernism. So we change the analytical vocabulary and reach it by some new insights. So then we have the third level of abstraction, which is even more concrete, is the concept of persona. And I have already exemplified it with al-qadari.
So someone is using templates. The concrete, concrete templates. What is it that I want to be? Or what is it that I want to use as a mask for myself and leave a trace of me in history in this form?
Together with Shami Shari, we have recently written an article on another Muslim individual. And Jan Al-Barruti was a movie and an established scholar in Kazan in the early 20th century. And in our article, we demonstrate how his persona changed over time, doing his life. So as I told you, if the models are more durable and they last for generations, there's a lot of change over time within one's lifetime.
The same thing with al-qadari. And with al-qadari, we see how first in the initial stages of his life, he really invested into the Bolharan prestige, the Central Asian prestige of Sufism and high learning of Hanafi jurisprudence on all this. But then after his trips to the Near East, he changed his persona and tried to build a personal archive in the library. And even a collection of each other's educational certificates that would portray him as a scholar of international renown, who collected knowledge, fashionable in the later period of taste time.
That is, hadith, scholarship, the recitation of the Quran, some legal regulation and expertise in theic. So as I told you, during his lifetime, there was a change from one persona to another. And we can see the traces, but even the traces, but the concept of how one wanted to appear in the eyes of a few generations in the way how these individuals arranged their personal archives and even separate items. So here at this stage, we go down to the fourth layer of subjectivity, the self.
It is the messy reality and uneasiness that one feels when one is encountered with his or her own life experience. So you can imagine how difficult it is to find a balance in multiple experiences that people go through, especially in those two-night days, how to bring fragments together and make sense out of them. And basically on the level of the self, often we do not see any attempts actually to of self-construction. If self-construction goes on the level of persona, there is the portitude where someone stands as an image.
But on the level of the self, you see, just the complexity of everyday life and messiness and multiple elements going being enforced. And your question, what models were of importance to cuttries, sense of the self? I thought you already, a study brush was a wonderful space. Actual setting was also important here for Sufi models.
One could feel it and what could experience Sufi models out there. And what is cool also cool about Al-Kadadis memoirs is that there, it makes references all the time to graveyards and inscriptions on grave stops. Luckily, Veneros Manov, Michael Co-author, is a historian of Muslim graveyards in Russia. And we shared many sources about it and spent many hours talking about history of Muslim graveyards.
And this part of history, full of Sufi connotations, is heavily present in Al-Kadadis memoirs. Even though he can read his text as a reference modernist account in a sense that it is written in the frame of Eurocentric style, or genre of memoirs and autobiography. But still, the cultural elements that are out there, they are truly genuine in the way, showing what was out there in terms of objects and ideas that surrounded al-Kadadis at that time. I think at this point, I really want to dig into this idea of self and the spatial and temporal imagination that Muslims have.
So why don't we talk a little bit about this Muslim cosmic world? You kind of mentioned in the book is really what matters is the sense of time that the Muslims of Russia have developed over centuries. And you also mentioned that in the book that this idea of time was partly in a dialogue with imperial time frames. What does Abdul Manov, or such memoirs, tell about the sense of time these Muslims had?
What is the perception of time in their logic and the cosmic world? For me, the best illustration or metaphor for this kind of perception of time in space is the manuscript calendars. Calendar is from the 18th century, where you can see tables with three calendars being present. So first is hejidli calendar with Ramadan being there and all the festivals, the relevance to Muslims.
There, I can see table you see the Russian calendar, which is referred to as Miladi, the Christian calendar with some Christian festivals included, as well as the Iranian calendar also being there. So you can imagine that people actually lived in three chronologies at the same time, and that was meaningful for them. And you can see how systematically relevant this was for a long time when we see double tariq, that is the mentioning of date, in manuscripts as well as the gravestone inscriptions. So those people who left those inscriptions would put both the Miladi, the Christian, as well as the Muslim one.
So this double chronotope to the term is really a feature of leaving in the imperial setting, which also coincides and goes hand in hand with a special experience and special concepts. What I mean by that is, on one hand, favor ideas of spaces that were perceived genuinely Islamic, such as the concept of garden, boj, right, boj, boj, boj, boj, boj, boj, boj, and I've written an article about that in those listeners' words that can check it out. Or the fact that even in the 18th century, and right up to the 1930s, the era of Stalinist repressions, many Muslims in Russia imagined themselves leaving in the vilayat of Razan. So they wouldn't, sometimes they would say that the place where they leave is such and such a government, referring to the Russian administrative division.
But often they also say that this or that book was written in Razan vilayat, and there were also Dabogas, districts within this territorial division, or they were also referenced to Javalistan, the lands of mountains, that is lands on the right bank of the Walker River, and one can wonder what kind of Razan in the Russian Empire, what is it, right, and if we trace the history of the term, then we can see that already in the 15th and 16th century, this was the way how Muslims refer to the city of Kazan, and how they conceptualized the Muslim space of it, and they continuously imagined themselves leaving in this Muslim environment, associated with the Persianate cultural models, and the idea of this region being the Muslim frontier. So, and associated with the tradition of Gaza and Kazavat, so it was part of this story, okay. So this double character of self-fashioning, when we leave at the same, we leave not just in the Russian Empire, in the government, in government raids, and according to you, the accepted chronology, but we leave in multiple special settings, simultaneously, and we also leave simultaneously in several chronologies, and what this provides in individuals on the level of the self is that you can play with it for your efforts. It is just a definition of performance.
You can put in some writings, you can pretend to be, to leave in a completely pious environment, pretend that you are part of Caliphate or something like that. It is the perception that is shared by some scholars who insist on the autonomy of Muslims in Russia. In some other sources, the same person can portray himself or herself as really embedded and invested into imperial structures, and our task as researchers is really to see how these multiple layers work together, and how this Muslim subjectivity proved to be stable and effective for not only just survival or struggle, you know, this is not a binary, it is a historiographical binary that we often come across. The fate of Muslims is either to struggle with the colonial environment or to be Muslim or to be integrated, which is actually not only about Muslims in the past, but part of the contemporary narratives about migration and the place of Muslims in the West.
You kind of really have, analyzing the self, you bring up these complexities in the book and in other works of yours, and which is why I have proposed to kind of avoid this simplistic or easy classification of Adri in this case, as a Muslim reformist or a jettitus. And yes, while these modern templates or conveniences, such as newspapers or trains, were part of his life, you're resisting this memoir exclusively through the modernist lens, which is why it brings me to the question like how do we fall short when we label certain Muslims or certain Muslim actors in Soviet Russia in the turn of the century in a simplistic manner as this? Right, thank you for this question. I mean, I tried even to avoid the discussion of jettism, and all of that in the book because you can easily do so.
You can say, oh, this is a memoir of a jettit, because it is about travel. It mentions a lot of newspapers and whatnot, the role of fresh rich and being part of the modernist projects in all possible ways. But I'm trying to say that there are so many other things that can be brought up from the narrative and the individuality of these people is so much richer and more interested and touching emotionally. That, I mean, it would be a shame to just reduce it to the discussion of modernist.
And in a way, I perceive my work, not only the publication of this particular book, but also my exhibitions and my public lectures and working with the keepers of private archives as a decolonial practice. So I'm trying to find ways of speaking and doing scholarship other than just following the modernist models and frames, and also providing the contemporary listeners, readers, consumers of the cultural artifacts with alternative views on history, because especially for the populations of the former Soviet Union, there is this terrible, overwhelming influence of the single modernist, Soviet nationalist interpretation of history. When all of this, all of the past and present is organized according to Kuregiz, Tatar, Kazakh, whatever national forms, and here I refer back to my dissertation and book, Soviet Orientalism, Soviet Orientalism in Central Asia, well, I mean, if we are to go forward, we have to just recognize that first of all, our history is much richer than these simplifications and national rules, national limitation, and that the past and present can also be much richer than only the Soviet models of self-expression and historiography. It is here that I find really the social relevance of my work and this particular book as well, because, in a way, the main audience of our publication is the family of Al-Kadri, who finally received access to the book that they kept for many years.
They hear the voice of their grandfather and they can finally learn what he wanted to say about himself. And truly, Al-Kadri's narrative remains the only eyewitness account of an educated Muslim who kind of endured this Stalinist repression, and even more so far, it seems no Muslim-live narrative from late Imperial Russia has been made accessible to an international audience. So this is such an extremely important work, and we really thank you for that. And the memoir itself is remarkable because it really offers a very rare glimpse into this psychological state of Muslims in the Soviet Union, in one with an interest in Soviet history, Muslim subjectivity, or in general, I would even say, mechanics of memoirs should definitely read this book.
And we are grateful to have had Dr. Alfred Busanov on our show today to share his expertise and insights of this book with us. Before we wrap up, Dr. Busanov, we would like to ask you the traditional question that we always ask our guests on New Books Network.
What is your upcoming project? What are you currently working on that our listeners might be interested in? Yes. In fact, I have something to share with you because I go forward with my project of decolonizing knowledge about Islam in Russia.
And I'm now writing a book on the history of state archives, state manuscript collections in Russia, it is book in Kazan, in the 20th century. And I want to show the stories of objects that made their way to these libraries and want to show all the complexity of this archival landscape that we have to really keep in mind and really be aware of when we start any research into the history of Muslim cultures. Because if we simply perceive archives as sources of information, then we do not understand why these objects ended up in the places where they are today and what politics and what kind of violent events or ideologies and agendas and subjectivities made these things accessible or marginal and invisible even for the contemporary researchers. So this is something that you will hear from me more in the upcoming years.
That sounds fascinating. Thank you once again for making this work. Even though with eight hours time difference, I know it is getting late there in Amsterdam. Good luck with your work and looking forward to reading more from you.
Once again, this is Aruki Rancosé and this was Alfred Busanov on his new book, Muslim Subjectivity in Soviet Russia, the memoirs of Abdul Magid al-Qadri. Thank you for listening and have a lovely week.