Russian Islamophobia: From Medieval Tsardom to the Post-Soviet Man.

The medieval and modern Russian experience with the Muslim world has been systemically marked by Islamophobia. Yet, few scholars have written about the longue durée expression of Russian Islamophobia (Bennigsen 1983, Tlostanova 2010). In this paper, I chart a genealogy of Russian Islamophobia from medieval Tsardom to modern Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Russia has been long marginalized in global analyses of Islamophobia, and is often not included in analyses of Western Islamophobia. Russia has long been considered a partner in Western civilization. As a predominantly white and Christian-led historical territory situated on the Eurasian continent, Russia has for centuries been viewed and viewed itself as a type of eastern Spain and the heir to Christian Orthodox Byzantium. Like the Mediterranean front of southern Europe bordering the Muslim world, Russia's borders with Asia are lineated across the expanse of Islamicate civilization in Eastern Europe, the Caucuses and Central Asia. The first systemic antagonisms between Russian and its Muslim neighbors began in the medieval period. This early form of Islamophobia under white Christian Russian empires later transformed and intensified during the Soviet and Post-Soviet periods. The later manifestations of Islamophobia came with new logics, especially those tied to systems of secular governmentality from within the modern nation-state model. This paper highlights these time periods and argues that they signify a cohesive and consistent form of longue durée Russian Islamophobia which shares much in common with other renditions of Islamophobia emanating from the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]