Making Muslim Women Political : Imagining the Wartime Woman in the Russian Muslim Women’s Journal Suyumbika

• Main Author: Danielle Ross
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université de Provence 2017-10-01
• Series: Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/remmm/9891

Abstract This article uses the Kazan-based Muslim Women’s journal Suyumbika to follow the transformation of Muslim reformers’ views on the modern Muslim woman. While much of the scholarly literature on religious, cultural, and education reform in Russia’s Muslim communities has viewed the change in women’s roles to be a decades-long process, this article argues that in the brief period of the Great War, the ideal vision of the Volga-Ural Muslim woman underwent more profound changes than it had in the previous decades. Through news articles, historical fiction, and calls to community service, the male and female writers promoted an image of a politically and socially-active woman, who would do her part for the war while being a virtuous Muslim. In this way, the Great War served as a period of transition between women’s cultures of the imperial and Soviet periods. This article is based, among others, on primary sources published in Suymbika between 1914 and 1917 as well as Tatar-language books of the pre-1917 period.