“Pan-Islamism” and “Pan-Turkism” in Russian socio-political discourse from the late 19th through the first third of the 20th centuries: methodological reflections

The article aims to develop methodological tools capable of presenting an explanatory model of the relationship between the concepts of “pan-Islamism - pan-Turkism” within the framework of Russian power discourse. The analysis of historiography and texts from historical sources makes it possible to assume the existence of the concept sphere “pan-Islamism - pan-Turkism”, which is an ordered set of generalizing units of thought reflecting and interpreting global phenomena depending on the knowledge, individual experience, specialty, and social status of a native speaker. For the first time in Russian historiography, an attempt is being made to comprehensively analyze the intellectual genealogy of the concepts of pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism using a dynamic model of the conceptual sphere. To understand the essence of the interaction of these concepts each other, this model analyzes the historical evolution of the definitions of “pan-Islamism” and “pan-Turkism”, which formed a significant part of the Russian power discourse of the late 19th - first third of the 20th centuries. Exploring the intellectual genealogy of these terms within the framework of Russian power discourse, the authors state the irreducibility of both concepts to one, their non-identity. The analysis of published and archival materials containing interpretations and assessments of these phenomena by Russian elites of different political spectrum confirms the thesis that the elements of this conceptual sphere are in dynamic interaction with each other, when under the influence of a combination of socio-political circumstances one of them could dominate, but not displace the other from the power discourse. It is concluded that the correlation of concepts within the “pan-Islamism - pan-Turkism” conceptual sphere itself is influenced by a set of objective circumstances related to the development of ethnic consciousness of peoples, the specifics of the historical development of the Muslim Ummah and its regional parts, and the worldview of Muslims themselves. The formulations proposed by imperial, anti-Bolshevik and Soviet political leaders in relation to these phenomena largely echoed: there was also distrust of the ideas of the community of “Muslim” peoples, the similarity in the characteristics of the formation of national identity within the framework of the cultural reformation of Volga-Ural and Crimean Muslims, the emphasis on the special role of the Volga-Ural Tatars in this process, the secondary nature of pan-Turkism, and the intertwining and mixing of concepts to the point of indistinguishability. It is proved that the proposed research approach, the “conceptosphere” model, allows a more objective look at the assessments made by those who generated expert knowledge, managerial approaches towards Russian Muslims and Islam in general in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods.