For Putin and for Sharia examines what it means to support sharia in twenty-first-century Dagestan, where calls for an Islamic state coexist with nostalgia for the days of Stalin’s rule and Mecca calendars hang alongside portraits of Putin. Confronting existing narratives about sharia, terrorism, and anti-terrorism through ethnographic fieldwork, Iwona Kaliszewska looks at the beliefs and practices of Dagestani Muslims, revealing that the pursuit of sharia can assume a range of forms from sweeping visions of an Islamic state imposed through violence, to minor acts of everyday resistance against injustice, to attempts to restore the security and stability once afforded by the Soviet state. In For Putin and for Sharia, Kaliszewska challenges the official dichotomy of Muslims as supporting either the political underground or state authorities and deconstructs the Salafi/Sufi division between the so-called reformists and traditional Islam.
Table of Content
Prologue: Pizza with Shakhidkas
Introduction: Sipping Coffee to the Sound of Gunfire
1. Political and Social Instability in Dagestan
2. Torture, Exorcisms, and Checkpoints: Experiencing the ‘Fight against Terrorism’
3. The Resurgent Importance of Islam in the Everyday Life of Dagestanis
4. Wahhabis, Tariqatists, and ‘New Muslims’
5. Sharia: Thinking beyond the (Secular) State?
Conclusion
About the author
Iwona Kaliszewska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She is the author of numerous publications and is Codirector of The Strongwoman, a documentary about a Dagestani female wrestler.
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