Ibn Khaldun in the Russian-speaking world: rethinking civilisational aspects of Islam

Abstract

For more than one hundred and fifty years Central Asia and Russia have existed as a common political-geographical niche. But this "commonness", established by military intervention of the Russian Empire in 1860 into the Bukharian Emirate, has had, with few exceptions, a very vertical military relationship between categories of society. Although intercultural identity as a core of Islamic civilisation has been legitimised in the Qur'an as a condition of social welfare, this type of thought was ignored after the October Revolution and was marginalised from Russian-speaking scholarship. Now when Russian as an official language of the post-Soviet period is becoming the lingua franca of the present CIS, fast-growing interest for Islamic thought is coming back to the centre of the human sciences. A rethinking of the social philosophy of Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), as an outstanding representative of Arab thought, promotes the process of improving the legitimacy of diverse societies and cultures that are interconnected by common complex realities of the world. In rethinking Ibn Khaldun studies in the scholarship of Russian-speaking sphere of the former Soviet, one should recognise and experience a crucial change of approach to Arab thought which is important in realising the further perspectives of inter-regional relations. But nowadays the process of crucial change has come a long way from the strong persecution of Islamic-thinking people at the eve of the last century after the October Revolution; this change was a strategy for building international scholarly community and intellectual solidarity after World War Two although, in Islamic studies it was narrowed by the methods of Western orientalism. Now that the Russian-speaking sphere is gradually releasing itself from the ideological impact of the past, the prestige of Islamic studies in the Russian world is slowly revitalising. Since a diversity of cultures of Russia and Central Asia were forced to co-exist in one linguistic sphere, both regions have consequently passed all the periods of inner dynamics. But compared with the Russian world, Central Asian scholarship as originally Islamic and thus, bilingual and trilingual, could be more productive in actualising Arab, Persian and Turkish sources by recognising and studying those aspects which were absent in their own inner dynamics. This is a very hopeful project. But that project can not be one-sided. Although Tajik scholarship is more actively turned to Iranian publications, while Uzbek and other Turkish-based languages have close scholarly contacts with Turkey, their cooperation have not been limited only to East-East projects. Bridging the gaps of human sciences and official policy have to be multidimensional because the rising influence of clerical and power-sharing structures on social and political movements are traditionally the same in Russia and Central Asia.