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Dissertation Information for Agnes Kefeli-Clay

NAME:
- Agnes Kefeli-Clay

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Arizona State University (USA) (2001)

ADVISORS:
- Stephen K. Batalden

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Frederick C. Griffin
- Uli Schamiloglu
- Philip M. Soergel

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Krashen apostasy: Popular religion, education, and the contest over Tatar identity (1856--1917)

Abstract: Located on the frontier between Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy, the baptized Tatars of the Russian Empire, the Kräshens , provide an excellent field for exploring the ways that both colonizers and colonized used education and religion to forge new identities. In the late nineteenth century, the Kräshens, descendants of Muslim, nominal Muslim, and animist Volga Tatars who had converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity before 1800, were subject to several great experiments in education. Muslim Tatars sought to win them for Islam and Orthodox Russians struggled to keep them from apostatizing from Christianity to Islam.

Before the 1917 revolution, several cultural systems, including popular Orthodoxy, mystical Islam, animism, and Islamic modernism, competed for allegiance in the middle Volga. Educational policies and practices emerged from a heated debate between Muslim mystics, Orthodox missionaries, Russian state officials, and Islamic modernists. The Kräshens' contested world provides a unique window on popular knowledge of Islam and Christianity. Although officially Christian, many of the Kräshens began turning en masse to Islam throughout the nineteenth century. Alarmed by these apostasies from Christianity, Orthodox missionaries and Russian bureaucrats investigated these movements and left a valuable record that reveals much about how Muslim Tatars used traditional primary education to spread their faith.

The success of Islam among the Kräshens shows that there was a well-developed dynamic system of Islamic primary education rooted in a Muslim thaumaturgical tradition. This highly successful educational system, based on mystical Sufi stories of the prophets, was then challenged by the church, the state, and Tatar reformers, called jadids. First, the church set up its own system of Christian education to protect baptized non-Russians from Islamic proselytism. Second, in the 1860s, Russian state attempted to create an empire-wide system of education to form good Russian citizens. Finally, in the 1880s, jadids introduced their own educational reform that used European practices to teach a rationalized Islam purified of the thaumaturgical emphases that characterized the traditional primary Qur'anic school. To launch their reforms, the jadids were obliged to ally themselves with Russian enlightened representatives of the local and regional landed councils (the zemstvos). This dissertation shows how primary education developed among the Kräshens and Tatars; it also demonstrates how educational systems helped to construct religious and ethnic identities.


MPACT Scores for Agnes Kefeli-Clay

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-05-04 18:13:28

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Students under Agnes Kefeli-Clay

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None