Red Army Prayers and Homefront Lyrics

This chapter offers a rare glimpse of Muslim devotional life in the war era and the immediate postwar years, drawing on sources such as Islamic war poetry, veterans’ remembrances, eyewitness reportage, Soviet agents’ dispatches, and letters to and from Muslim Red Army soldiers. It argues that it is possible to reconstruct not only some aspects of religious change that were particular to the war era but also to trace these changes into the postwar years. In other words, this chapter proposes that the war era is a turning point not only in Soviet religious policy—as many have previously argued—but in Soviet Muslim life more generally. These changes include the flourishing of Soviet Muslim poetry (much of it devoted to wartime experiences) and the increasing level of women’s participation and leadership in ritual life.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reviews the two stories told in the book about Soviet Muslims in the Second World War: one about the devotional life of Muslim citizens, including soldiers, their families on the home front, and local religious leaders; the other about state dynamics. Regarding the effectiveness of Soviet religious propaganda during the Second World War, it offers summary thoughts connecting the resurgence of devotional life in wartime, the widespread perception that religiosity was now permitted by the state, and the state’s ambiguous, ineffectual approach to shaping religious policy. The chapter then places the book in the context of other studies of Islam in the Soviet Union.

The Setting

This chapter describes how in the 1920s to 1930s, the Soviet state attempted to eradicate religion by targeting the most visible forms of devotional life. Tens of thousands of religious elites were arrested and executed; holy objects were seized; and churches, mosques, and synagogues were converted into granaries, warehouses, and museums of “Marxist-Leninist Scientific Atheism.” Meanwhile, Soviet populations were inundated with anti-religious propaganda, as local branches of the state-backed League of Militant Atheists proliferated. The chapter goes on to show how in the war years, however, religious repression ceased. The arrest and execution of religious figures was almost entirely curtailed. A pivotal moment came in 1943, when Stalin invited three Metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church to a late-night meeting in Moscow and offered them a “new deal,” allowing for unprecedented religious freedoms.

Monastic Narrative Practices

Stories comprised the very fabric of devotional life and institutional identity in medieval European monasteries. The monastic habitus encouraged the reading, glossing, composition, and performance of many different kinds of narratives, and the religious men and women who took these tasks to heart became, in a sense, living books. This chapter describes three fundamental ways in which narratives shaped the medieval monastic experience in the Latin West: first, by promoting particular models of holiness; second, by creating a textual basis for coherent, resilient communal identities; and third, by defining boundaries, albeit flexible and permeable ones, between religious communities and the outside world. Each of these narrative functions represents a rich vein of recent scholarship on medieval monasteries as devotional and textual communities.

Ginān as Tafsīr Literature: The Exegetical Dimensions of a Tradition

The Ginān tradition form a special place in devotional and religious life in the Shia Imami Ismaili Tariqah. Ginānrecitations are ubiquitous in Ismā’īlī devotional life; played in homes, cars, and recited in Jamatkhana on auspicious religious occasions. Ginān recitation likewise comprise a central element of the congregational life of the Shia Imami Ismaili community within Jamā‘atKhāna. The vast corpus of the Ginān literature has long formed part of the spiritual heritage of the South-Asian Ismā’īlī community, and especially in Sindhi, Khoja and Gujarati South Asian communities. This study uses the genre of the Ginān to critically engage the boundary frameworks that can be considered tafsīrliterature and argues that the ginānic narrative are not only communal ‘liturgical’, but highly exegetical and theologically complex examples of a Subcontinent vernacular Shī’ī exegetical tradition.

Divine Creation

The Triune God created everything there is ex nihilo. This represents a move beyond Scripture but compatible with Scripture. This doctrine is not just a fitting exegetical and theological decision based on Scripture, but is a true judgment. Because God is a transcendent agent and given the kind of attributes God has, God can create the world ex nihilo. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo was hammered out in the patristic period in opposition to Gnosticism. This doctrine is compatible with the findings of science, but theology should not adopt an apologetic enterprise against the advances of scientific, empirical inquiry. It is important for a balanced devotional life and applies across the board to everything that exists, including angels. It allows also space for the development of natural theology and for efforts to provide a credible theodicy in the face of moral and natural evil.

Signs and Gestures

Early contact between native peoples and Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and missionaries was mediated by signs and gestures with mixed success. Visual symbols by themselves often conveyed the wrong message or none at all. Religious iconography would occupy a central place in the devotional life of the Mexican church. But from the first encounters with Caribbean islanders through the use of images of the Virgin Mary to Christianize pagan space, to the experiments with pictorial catechisms and sermons illustrated by scenes of heaven and hell, the Spanish learned that visual codes needed to be combined with verbal communication to reveal their meanings.