Опубликовано в журнале Неприкосновенный запас, номер 6, 2002
DEBATES ON POLITICS AND CULTURE
NZ №6(26) deals with political Islam, Russian statehood, and the visual rhetorics of otherness, among other topics.
The Liberal Heritage section features an essay by the late philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner on Post-Traditional Forms in Islam. Gellner reviews the structural similarities between Muslim societies across the world, before going on to present two interesting cases where Muslim communities have successfully adapted to modernity.
This is immediately followed by a number of articles on Islam and Politics. The section opens with an interview with Alexei Malashenko, Russia’s foremost expert on Islam, about the current state and prospects of Islamism across the world, as well as developments in the religious and political life of contemporary Russian Muslims. Next comes an article by Marietta Stepanyants, an expert in Islamic thought, on the use of Islam by the political elites of several Russian regions (Ethno-Confessional Processes in Contemporary Russia: Islam). The current West European debate about the future of political Islam is presented in argumentative pieces by Gilles Kepel (Towards a “Muslim democracy”?) and Bassam Tibi (Is Islam a political religion?). The section is garnished with brief definitions of central concepts in Islam.
Columnist Alexei Levinson devotes his Sociological Notes to the consequences of October’s hostage crisis in Moscow (The Theatre of Horror). In the Culture of Politics section, Valery Tishkov, Russia’s foremost anthropologist, reflects more generally on The Socio-Cultural Nature of Terrorism, arguing that the roots of this phenomenon are to be sought not in “civilisational conflict” or even economic hardship, but in perceptions of poverty and alienation, often engineered by intellectuals and the media.
Our second thematic section is devoted to Debates on Russian Statehood. It features a Correspondence between historians Larry Wolff, author of “Inventing Eastern Europe”, and Alexander Yanov, a specialist on Russian nationalism. They discuss the nature of Russia’s European identity, and whether Russia’s exclusion from Europe was brought about by Western intellectuals or by Russian elites. This is followed by an exchange between Russian philosopher Alexander Akhiezer (How Different Are We?) and British political theorist Axel Kaehne (Reply to Akhiezer) on possible lessons to be learned by Western political philosophy from the history of Russian statehood, following up on Kaehne’s article in NZ №23.
In Politics of Culture, literary theorist Svetlana Boym casts a critical eye on The PR Style that has been so pervasive in Russian intellectual discourse over the past few years, reducing debate to a search for advertising strategies.
The Morals and Mores section presents two complementary snapshots: German documentary director Jan Buth’s reflections about his stay in Iran (A Change of Perspective) and e´migre´ Turkish photographer Mehmet U╛nal’s account of his difficult but successful career in Western Germany (Turks in Germany: Workers and Unemployed).
Next comes a section on Visual Representations of Otherness, which features two articles about recent films on the Chechen wars (Oksana Sarkisova’s Tell Me Who Are Your Enemies… and Galina Zvereva’s A Man’s Job), followed by an article by art critic Vassilina Allakhverdiyeva on the Syrian photographer Shirin Nishat, whose photos are used in this issue of NZ.
In the final instalment of his column Myths and Symbols, Andrei Zorin casts a look back on five years as our regular author (The End of a Conversation).
The New Institutions rubric presents the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, and our Review of Journals, written by Katarzyna Gawlicz and Marcin Starnawski, is devoted to Poland. Under the heading New Books, political scientist Dina Malysheva examines Russian oriental studies experts’ studies of Islam and the Muslim world of the CIS, followed by a number of reviews of recent books on Islam.