A Red Golden Legend ? Muslim Hagiographic Experiences in the USSR and Popular Democracies – RedGold

A blind spot research, the study of sainthood in the (post-)communist world unveils unknown aspects of areas exposed to quick and diverse mutation in the name of one ideology. In connection with the brutal demographic engineering of the short 20th century and with the labour migrations of past decades, territories, communities have come to light, many now sanctified as elements of revaluated religious legacies. Practiced from ex-Yugoslavia to the PRC, Islam reflects the unity and the diversity of this phenomenon. The project’s aim is to cast light on the hagiographers’ reap-praisal of the short 20th century and analyse the respective contributions of the protagonists of the hagiographic process, within gendered distributions of the religious work. Revisiting Jacobus de Varagine’s 13th-century Legenda Aurea, it will approach sainthood in action in societies character-ised by both communist pasts and religious pluralism, with special interest in Islam in comparative prospects (with Orthodox Christianity and Chinese religions, notably).

Oftentimes, nascent cultures of sainthood have come together with the locally produced historiog-raphy of territories deeply transformed since the 1920s. As a result, hagiographic experiences evidence the sainthood of holy men (more rarely women) active locally during the short 20th century. Giving large room to the vitae of modern saints, local histories highlight the role of religion in coping with totalitarianism. In countries where heirs of communist parties still hold power, they suggest the permanence of religious custom under communist rule and the role of saints in the preservation of cultural heritages. In the former USSR as in China, two combined tendencies are observed, apparently opposed. The first is a feminisation of religion, entailed by the key roles played by female protagonists in transmitting spirituality in long periods of repres-sion of public religiosity. The second, the transformation of hagiographic as a result of the states’ manipulation.

What does such a feature tell us of the globalisation that has followed the end of the Maoist period and the opening of the Iron Curtain? Several facts observed since the late 1970s/1980s have triggered the project’s reflexion. The first lies in the materiality of Muslim hagiographic experiences in the former East Bloc. Such classical features of textual hagiography as multiple-level meanings and the usage of rewriting are reflected in traditions on modern saints. In few decades, transpositions of mediaeval ideals-types have been deviated by the cultivation of new models. Here, tensions between contradictory social demands are sharpened by the pressures exerted, on Muslim cultures of femininity and masculinity, by the local dictates of the ‘struggle against terrorism’ and by new waves of antireligious campaigns (as in Tajikistan since 2009) or new religious regulations (as in China since 2016).

The project’s first hypothesis is of the specific structuration of the Muslim hagiographic experienc-es in the former USSR and popular democracies. Characterised by a wide variety of historical experiences of communist domination, the unity and diversity of this cultural area will be revealed through the varying impacts, on hagiographic experiences, by peculiar combinations of borrowings from Islamic and communist cultures. Second postulate: the specificity of the Muslim hagiographic experiences in the (post-)communist world will be highlighted by the reasons for the special combination of feminisation of the religious field with the occultation of women in the Muslim hagiographic processes. The project’s third hypothesis is of an articulation between, on the first hand, post-WWII massive population resettlements, followed by mass labour emigrations in the 1990s–2000s, and on the other hand the sanctification by the Muslim hagiographic process of human groups and territories born of this succession of migrations.