Russia and the world of Russian Islam

The publishing house Medina presented the work by one of the major Islamologists of Russia, professor of the Institute of the Eastern Countries, Robert Landa: “Russia and the world of Russian Islam.” The book is characterized by professional and de-ideological approach. Robert Landa told VK about his book.

- “Russia and the world of Russian Islam” is not your first work on this topic. So what made you revisit it?

- The fact that this topic is still timely. In 1995, I wrote a book “Islam in Russian history”, but it had a more modest purpose: to provide a historic basis for papers dedicated to contemporary aspects of this topic. I wanted to show that all this didn’t start today or yesterday, that all these modern problems have deep historic roots. After this book appeared it had a lot of responses, some of them rather critical and disappointing. So I decided to continue my efforts in this field. The problem is as urgent as it was back then.

This new book was finished in 2008, but it had to wait for 3 years to be published – now it doesn’t matter if you take up urgent matters or not, no one would publish your book right away unless you have money. So I had to wait for three years, but I believed in eventual success. And the “Median” publishing house and our Muslim public helped made this edition possible.

- But in the preface to your book you say that you are far from politics. How did you manage it?

- I tried… of course, it is possibly not 100% politics-free in the section dealing with today’s issues. But I tried to be as objective as possible. I tried to keep my initial idea intact: to bring Russia and Russian Islam closer together. Of course, today the situation is far from that. And I mention it in my book. I say that the outcome depends on whether or not our people understand the importance of this problem. It depends on the policy the state will choose. It’d totally up to us. The field of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations demands constant attention and care.

I believe that there are a lot more factors that bring us together than those tearing us apart. But we’ll have to work hard to make unity win.

VK