The MIND team has been working with several large private archives, digitized them and prepared for online publication. Our extensive fieldwork has allowed us to identify the most important cultural elements that have been regularly evoked in the self-conceptions of Russia’s Muslims, mainly in the 19th and the 20th centuries.
The MIND project has been a great succes. Please find below an overview of the most important output of our team:
- The MIND project was primarily based on hitherto uncatalogued and largely unused private archives; it is from these private collections that Bustanov and his team drew most of their sources. Next to the individual items preserved in these collections, also the history of these private collections themselves – their genesis, transmission, and transformation over time – was a central part of the project. In that respect Dr. Bustanov’s 2019 Russian-language book on Zeinep Maksudova’s private library was pathbreaking; in this monograph, Bustanov not only gave an overview of the collection itself but also investigated the ways how the female owner Maksudova (1897-1980) worked with the individual items (by copying them or commenting upon items), ordered the library, added new material, and catalogued the items. With this work Bustanov made the history of Tatar private book culture in the Soviet era comparable to the growing amount of studies that we have on private collections elsewhere, in particular in Soviet Dagestan. Dr. Bustanov developed the exploration of private archives and of personal inheritances of books also in a number of articles that he published in the English, Russian and Tatar languages.
- Dr. Bustanov published several source editions of items from private archives, each with important research introductions and encompassing notes and apparatuses. One of these source editions is the Tatar Quran translation composed by Abdalbari Isaev (1907-1983; Mufti of Soviet Russia 1975-1980), a work that was hitherto practically unknown and preserved only in one manuscript. Dr. Bustanov investigated Isaev’s personal engagement with the Quran and the translations into other languages that Isaev had at his disposal but also studied Isaev’s use and adaptation of the modern Tatar language, in the Soviet era, for rendering the Holy Book.
- Another source edition carried out by Bustanov concerns a Sufi treatise from the pen of a Tatar scholar of the early 18th century, Dawlatshah al-Isfijabi, titled Burhan al-Dhakirin. Sufism is the mystical path that, while insisting on strict discipline towards the Sufi master, fosters the personal encounter with God; engagement with Sufi literature is therefore per se an important element in the investigation of Muslim subjectivity. The work Bustanov edited in book form is the earliest Sufi treatise from the Volga-Urals that we know; its publication is a milestone for the exploration of the history of Sufism in Russia and the USSR.
- Diaries were another exemplary source for subjectivity studies into which Dr. Bustanov made important inroads. Together with a colleague he edited the diaries of ‘Abdalmajid al-Qadiri (1881-1962), who in his private notes formulated his experiences of education, suffering and piety in late imperial and Soviet Russia. It is in this volume, in its Inroduction, that Bustanov formulated his thoughts about Muslim subjectivity as a phenomenon in the most comprehensive way. This volume appeared with the prestigious academic publisher Brill, in open access format.
- In several of his articles Dr. Bustanov explored the power of poetry, including prison poetry from Muslim inmates of the Soviet forced labor system Gulag. This was a completely new field that allowed, again, for comparisons with poetry composed in other languages and under similar circumstances. In other publications, in article form, Dr, Bustanov explored the issue of Muslim subjectivity in Muslim garden culture, and eventually in Muslim occultism. This was, to the best of my knowledge, the last major discovery that Dr. Bustanov worked on, and that he hoped to develop further.
- Dr. Bustanov’s versatile scholarship was also crucial for the work of the post-doc in the project. The post-doc applied Bustanov’s concepts of subjectivity to the Muslim heritage in Dagestan; his focus was on the Muslim manuscript collection of Magomed-Said Saidov (1902-1985), the doyen of Soviet Arabic studies in Dagestan. Like in Bustanov’s work, the focus of the post-doc's engagement has been on the study of emotions, on the one hand, and on Muslim scholarship, on the other. The library and archive of this Soviet scholar offers an intriguing merger of the local Dagestani Islamic tradition and Soviet empirical scholarship. The first version of the post-doc's completed book manuscript is under contract and will appear soon.
- The project also conducted a number of workshops, summer schools, and book presentations, plus one manuscript exhibition, in various places such as Istanbul and Kazan/Russia. Importantly, the team also comprised two PhD students. One PhD project has been on the link between the visual and the textual in Muslim private archives; she has made wonderful use of photographic collections and albums from private archives of Muslims in Russia, and established how in the Soviet era, annotated photographs of Muslim actors replaced the by-then almost defunct genre of Muslim biographies. Here again the focus is on emotions and expressions of private relations, including by the exchange of photographs with annotations. The other PhD project has included pioneering work on the genre of Muslim autobiography, that is, on ‘writings on the self’ that were meant for circulation and publication. Here the topic of Muslim subjectivity in a non-Muslim state is being explored by focusing on how autobiographers described and evaluated their childhood, their education period, and their encounters on travels abroad, including for study and pilgrimage.
