Introduction

As shown in Parts I and II, the nature and specific forms of Islamic authority and leadership across Eurasia have historically been defined by three major factors. First was the early arrival of Islam in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Volga region and its particular fusion with distinctive indigenous cultures, rooted in the Iranian and Bulgar civilizational heritage and, in the mountainous Caucasus and parts of Central Asia, with local ‘adats. An outcome of this fusion was the proliferation of Ṣūfīsm in the northeastern Caucasus and Central Asia. The second major factor was the inclusion of most of Eurasia in a sequence of nomadic Turkic and Turco-Mongol empires resulting in the prevalence in the Volga-Urals, Central Asia and the north-western Caucasus of Ḥanafī madhhab of Sunnī Islam and the emergence of regional forms of Ṣūfī Islam intertwined with Tengrism, animism, shamanism and other nomadic beliefs and customs. By contrast, the Iranian Safawid rule over the southern Caucasus accounted for the dominance of Shī‘ī Islam among the peoples of present-day Azerbaijan. The third factor was the separation of the Muslims of Eurasia from the ummah because of the region's inclusion within the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century and, later on, in the Soviet Union. The imperial Russian and Soviet periods were responsible for the formation of a distinctive Russian/Soviet official Islamic leadership represented by statecontrolled muftīs and other registered Muslim clergy who coexisted or overlapped with folk imāms, Ṣūfīs and other unregistered Islamic authorities. Most importantly, due to comprehensive Sovietization, Islam to a large extent was dissolved within particular secular national cultures, and the Muslim clergy and other representatives of Muslim leadership ceased to play a notable social and political role. In Central Asia and the north-eastern Caucasus, however, there remained a few ‘ulamā’ and Ṣūfī sheikhs who operated underground and who ensured the perpetuation of Islamic knowledge among a small number of followers.

In 1991, the demise of the USSR and the collapse of official atheist and internationalist ideology triggered a return of Islam into the public domain. Muslim Eurasia witnessed the emergence of a new type of Islamic leadership, both within the muftīatebased structures and outside them.