Third RedGold Workshop – Literature and Spirituality in the (Post-)Communist Worlds
Progressivism for Souls?
Literature and spirituality in the (post-)communist worlds
Third Annual Workshop of the ‘RedGold’ ANR Programme, Condorcet Campus, 28–29 April 2025
Bâtiment Recherche Nord, Room 5.001, 9.30–13.00 AM, and online at:
https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/94754690193?pwd=oq6McNJIk4caQaFKcasQCQan4vLqai.1, code 2Ka0pA (28 April)
https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/98077030181?pwd=ANteob9TWhP0QXfpavfaW0AGxZKlYi.1, code Nd2yMx (29 April)
Summaries
Leila ALMAZOVA (ZMO, Berlin) & Rezeda SÄFIULLINA (independent researcher)
Muslim gnostic motifs in Volga Tatar oral poetry
(through materials from ethnographic expeditions of the 1960s–90s)
Since the late Soviet period, the Institute of Language, Literature and Art at the Academy of Sciences of Tatarstan (a national republic of the Russian Federation) has collected and partially digitalised Vol-ga-Tatar Muslim oral poetry and musical tradition produced and reproduced from the 1960s to the 1990s. In this corpus, religious poetry is dominated by spiritual chants known as mönajat (‘supplications’, a term of Arabic origin), which express moral and ethical themes. Although Muslim gnosis (Arabic ʿirfān), conveyed by Sufism, is not the primary focus of mönajat, certain compositions reflect elements of Sufi culture. Key themes include divine light, divine love, the quest for truth and the figure of Prophet Muhammad as a guiding light. More recently, since the 1990s, popular Tatar singers have been incorporating mönajat into their repertoires, and competitions of spiritual chants are regularly hosted in Kazan and other cities of the Middle-Volga Region. This apparent resurgence raises issues — notably: which aspects of Sufi traditions and gnostic motifs have survived Soviet antireligious policies, and how can their present-day reinterpretations be considered a revival? More precisely perhaps: in which conditions could Muslim high culture continue to evolve in Soviet time, however confidentially, before transforming into a now thriving performing art? Answering these questions may allow us to shed light not only on the discussed phenomenon of cultural ‘resilience’ in and after the USSR, but also on the changing spiritual landscape of Volga-Tatar society, from Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ to our days.
Daniela CAMPO (University of Strasbourg & GSRL, Paris)
Elder Chan masters and religious transmission in post-Mao China:
Buddhist meditation instructions as medium for life experiences and historical accounts
Delivered orally often in a singularly incisive and colloquial style, some modern Buddhist sermons in-tended to guide practitioners offer a complex and articulate repertoire of instructions for meditation and historical memories, legends of Buddhist patriarchs and current events, Buddhist stories related to local history and personal recollections (including significant episodes in a monk’s career, the relation-ship with his master, spiritual experiences, sensitive incidents. . .). Often recorded and transcribed by followers then published as booklets, in the second half of the 20th century Buddhist meditation instructions seem to have become a privileged mode for some elder Buddhist masters to disclose their inner selves and to transmit to disciples a Buddhist cultural and historical heritage, while guiding them in religious practice. This transmission effort must especially be seen in the context of the religious reconstruction of the post-Maoist era.
Stéphane DUDOIGNON (CNRS/GSRL, Paris)
Memory and spirituality in Soviet Uzbek literature:
Since the late 1930s
The history of Soviet literatures, in the most diverse languages, can be characterised, notably, by the neighbourhood of different — though closely intertwined — spheres and scales of activity, and equally varied categories of authors, distributors and readers, from the most official to the most informal. From the late 1930s, the memory of the transformations of the late Tsarist and early Soviet pasts has been tending to occupy more and more room, in a range of genres that included the more and more popular historical novel and personal memoirs. Besides, while the writing of contemporary history remained often confined to ‘the congresses of the CPSU and the electrification of the countryside’ (Marc Ferro), academic philology was working to promote cultural continuities. In the Uzbek SSR, despite the ruptures induced by Stalinist terror, this trend resulted in a valorisation of the 19th-century Islamic reform and the early-20th-century jadīdī (‘Modernist’) currents, as well as a nostalgia — more of less explicit, depending on the level of public exposure — for the independence movements of the revolutionary period in Russian Turkestan (as well as of those of the 1930s–40s in East Turkestan). This paper will focus, in particular, on the memoirist work of ʿAlī-Khān Tūra Sāghūnī (1885-1976) and on his intellectual milieu in Tashkent, before and after the catastrophic earthquake of 1966, and on their role in the gradual rehabilitation of Central Asia’s Turkic Islamic past, cultural and political.
Valeriya GAZIZOVA (Ruprecht-Karl University of Heidelberg & GSRL, Paris)
Revelatory modes of scriptural creativity among Russia’s Buddhists:
Dynamics of transmission, performance and transformation since late the Soviet period
Based on textual materials and ethnographic observations among Mongol Buddhists and the wider Russian field, the talk argues that one vivid legacy of the ‘Soviet century’ has been a proliferation of scriptural practices centred on revelatory experiences and involving incomprehensible codes. This has become prominent among bottom-up grassroots movements and in emergent gendered trends facilitated by the transformation of women’s religious roles under the communist suppression of religious institutions and restriction of practices. The talk will demonstrate this dynamic by addressing the ‘underground’ transmission of ritual texts from Kalmyk ex-monastics to their female apprentices during the Soviet period and the subsequent development of gendered scriptural creativity and performance. At the same time, a revelatory mode of production and distribution of texts and teachings is becoming a development strategy for some of the largest institutions on the ex-communist Buddhist scene. A special lama-oracle in the Ivolga monastery, in Buryatia, receives and decodes daily messages from the ‘imperishable lama’ Dashi Dorzho Itigelov (1852–1927), whose preserved corpse was exhumed 75 years after burial and has become a focus of pilgrimage for people of different backgrounds from all over the continent. To what extent have these emergent practices of generating spiritual texts — aimed at the reconstitution of ethnoreligious continuity disrupted by the Soviet suppression — been inspired by Tibetan missionaries and time-honoured traditions of scriptural revelation (known as ‘treasures’) that were not historically typical of the Kalmyk and Buryat Buddhists, and what other possible influences can one discern?
Thomas LOY (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Old vs new?
Mordekhay (Muhib) Bachaev (1911–2007) and Soviet Bukharan Jewish literature
This paper will introduce Mordekhay ben Hiyo Bachaev (Muhib) and his first literary steps in the newly founded USSR. As a young employee of the Bukharan Jewish newspaper Roshnoi [‘Light’] / Bayroqi Mihnat [‘The Banner of Labour’] and with his first volume of poetry (Bahār-i surkh [‘Red Spring’], 1931), he took up the long Judeo-Persian literary tradition and continued it in the new era. Under the ideological guidelines of Soviet cultural policy, the new secular Bukharan Jewish literature (poetry and prose) aimed at spreading Soviet ideas and ideology among the Persian-speaking Jews of Soviet Central Asia. The young Soviet state promoted Bukharan Jewish intellectuals and authors and printed their works in journals and as independent publications in large print runs. At the end of the 1930s however, state support for this ‘national minority’ stopped entirely, and its leading representatives were persecuted and imprisoned. This lecture centres on the questions of what this new Bukharan Jewish Soviet literature looked like, what models it was based on and how it differed from them.
Nils MARTIN (EPHE/GSRL, Paris)
Taliban tarānas:
Militant mobilisation and Sufi heritage in Afghan oral culture
This study analyses the role of the Taliban tarāna (song) in the structuring of a militant imaginary and their anchoring in a Sufi tradition reinterpreted for political purposes. It is based on the hypothesis that these songs, beyond a propaganda function, mobilise gnostic referents borrowed from the Sufi vocalised dhikr (ceremony of invocation of the Divine) and hagiographic catalogues or stories (manāqibs) on the virtues of a saint or group of saints, thus sacralising the Taliban’s struggle. Widely popularised during the anti-Soviet jihad of 1979–89, tarānas have established themselves as a key tool of mobilisation, articulating religious fervour and political commitment in a framework respectful of the ban on music. Their rhythmic structure and symbolism recall Sufi devotional practice, notably through the exaltation of holiness (walāya, lit. ‘friendship’ with God) and of martyrdom (shahādat, lit. ‘testimony’ of a struggle’s righteousness), while raising ideological tensions around intercession (shafāʿa: a notion heretical per se for many Sunni Muslim religious scholars). In the digital space, these songs have been participating in the formation of a transnational Taliban sphere, capturing a young audience in search of transcendence and historical legitimacy. They are also part of an approach to historicising the national narrative of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, establishing parallels between contemporary jihad and the resistance of the Sufis of a glorious Islamic past.
Achille RAJOLA PESCARINI (DREST & L’Orientale, Naples)
How Sufism became a national phenomenon:
Some reflections on two Qazaq Sufi communities
The nationalisation of religion is a well-known sociopolitical phenomenon throughout Central Asia’s states, where specific forms of Islam — the region’s most widely practiced religion — have been im-posed from above, since independences in 1991, through institutional channels. Among the latter, organisations created on the basis of the Soviet-time ‘Spiritual Board of the Muslims of Middle Asia’ have been arbitrarily adopting or excluding confessional particularities, in order to better fit with the nationalisation policies of the post-Soviet states. Even Sufism, concerned primarily with the spiritual dimension of Islam, and far from the ethnic and social subdivisions of society, did not escape this strategy of differentiation. With the aim of unification with the Divine, Sufism had been initially organised into sometimes competing, in fact often overlapping ‘paths’ (Ar. ṭuruq, sing. ṭarīqa) endowed respectively with diverse genealogies, doctrines and practices. Since the dissolution of the USSR, however, Sufi communities and traditions have been co-opted from above and mutated as parts of new heritages. Over the years, at the same time, spontaneous attempts have appeared from below to nationalise their local gnostic traditions. During fieldwork in Qazaqstan, the author has identified two different expressions of this phenomenon: on the first hand, the Jahriyya, a Sufi network which manifests itself as an outcome of a vernacular Qazaq Islam, and on the other hand the transnational Naqshbandiyya Mu-jaddidiyya Ḥusayniyya. The paper aims to reflect on these changes in contemporary Central Asia’s Sufi traditions, through a study of these two distinct cases.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Red Gold (April 17, 2025). Third RedGold Workshop – Literature and Spirituality in the (Post-)Communist Worlds. RedGold. Retrieved May 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13rlf