TY - GEN

T1 - From Moscow to Mecca:

T2 - Entangled Soviet Narratives of Pilgrimage in the Unlikely 1965 Hajjnāmeh of Fazliddin Muhammadiyev

AU - Бобровников, Владимир Олегович

N1 - Bobrovnikov, Vladimir. From Moscow to Mecca: Entangled Soviet Narratives of Pilgrimage in the Unlikely 1965 Hajjnāmeh of Fazliddin Muhammadiyev // Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca / Ed. by Marjo Buitelaar and Richard van Leeuwen. – Leiden: Brill, 2022. – P. 221–241 (в печати, 1,8 а.л.), https://brill.com/view/title/62113

PY - 2023/1/9

Y1 - 2023/1/9

N2 - In the USSR hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia was resumed on the wave of relative liberalization of the Soviet policy toward Islam in 1944–45 with a longer policy change in 1953–91, but the traditional genre of ḥajjnāme disappeared already in the early Soviet times. There is but one exception to this rule. In April-May 1963 the young Tajik journalist Fazliddin Muhammadiev from Dushanbe made a journey with a group of Soviet pilgrims from Tajikistan to Moscow, then to Khartoum and Jedda, and eventually to Mecca and back. During the trip he kept a diary, which he turned into a novel under the title Dar on dunye (In the other world) and published it first in Tajik in 1965. Later it was translated into multiple languages, including Russian. It was the only hajj account to be published in the Soviet Union. Using archival sources, contemporary responses, and memoir accounts, in this chapter I discuss the insights that a discourse analysis of the text provides with regard to hajj narratives in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The research was guided by the following set of questions: How far does the novel reflect the writer’s personal experience of performing the hajj ritual? Is Muhammadiev’s fictional diary reliable enough to evaluate late Soviet religiosity as a whole? What written and oral evidence did the author base his account on? Did the novel contain any religious blasphemy? What role, in this respect, did translation play from Tajik into Russian and other languages? How did readers respond to the publication of the novel?

AB - In the USSR hajj pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia was resumed on the wave of relative liberalization of the Soviet policy toward Islam in 1944–45 with a longer policy change in 1953–91, but the traditional genre of ḥajjnāme disappeared already in the early Soviet times. There is but one exception to this rule. In April-May 1963 the young Tajik journalist Fazliddin Muhammadiev from Dushanbe made a journey with a group of Soviet pilgrims from Tajikistan to Moscow, then to Khartoum and Jedda, and eventually to Mecca and back. During the trip he kept a diary, which he turned into a novel under the title Dar on dunye (In the other world) and published it first in Tajik in 1965. Later it was translated into multiple languages, including Russian. It was the only hajj account to be published in the Soviet Union. Using archival sources, contemporary responses, and memoir accounts, in this chapter I discuss the insights that a discourse analysis of the text provides with regard to hajj narratives in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The research was guided by the following set of questions: How far does the novel reflect the writer’s personal experience of performing the hajj ritual? Is Muhammadiev’s fictional diary reliable enough to evaluate late Soviet religiosity as a whole? What written and oral evidence did the author base his account on? Did the novel contain any religious blasphemy? What role, in this respect, did translation play from Tajik into Russian and other languages? How did readers respond to the publication of the novel?

KW - Soviet pilgrimage

KW - travelogue

KW - historical fiction

KW - Islamic discourses

KW - Cold War

KW - Fazliddin Muhammadiev

UR - https://brill.com/view/title/62113

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/df89da06-56cd-3c88-b603-bc9ff72919ca/

U2 - 10.1163/9789004513174_011

DO - 10.1163/9789004513174_011

M3 - Conference contribution

SN - 978-90-04-51317-4

T3 - Leiden Studies in Islam and Society

SP - 221

EP - 241

BT - From Moscow to Mecca:

A2 - Buitelaar, Marjo

A2 - van Leeuwen, Richard

PB - Brill

CY - Leiden

ER -