Prof. Dr. Klaus Buchenau

Russia has a centuries-long history of Christian-Muslim coexistence, which is known to specialists in the field but rarely used to gather comparative knowledge on secularities worldwide. What makes the Russian case interesting from a Western perspective is that in Russia, Islam exists under the domination of a Christian majority, and has existed since the 16th century. Since then, Muslim-Christian relations and the relationship between Muslim populations and the state have gone through several phases. The Putin era now witnesses an ideological fixation which cherishes a conservative consensus of “traditional faiths” as a pillar of the russkij mir. Russia thus claims to have found its own conservative diversity management, which stresses the common ground of traditional faiths, meaning esteem for forefathers, established social hierarchies, or individual sacrifice to the collective. My research will first reconstruct this contemporary Russian narrative, especially in connection to Islam. Then, I will ask in how far this narrative is an adequate representation of reality, using the Volga Tatars with their centuries-long history of coexistence with Russians as the main example. Does the Eurasianist idea of Christian-Muslim harmony, so dominant in today’s Russia, correlate with the history of coexistence? How do the people concerned, i.e., Russians and Tatars living together in the Volga region, recognize this narrative? Are there alternative models of coexistence that have been excluded from the official canon of Putinism? Last but not least, what does “secularity” mean in such a society?