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This presentation will focus on the Azerbaijani-Armenian relations in Georgia regarding the role of religion and religious networks in the context of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Georgia was not directly involved in the 2020 war, but its geopolitical position and presence of Azerbaijani and Armenian minorities made the country vulnerable to the consequences of the conflict. Both during the war and after the ceasefire agreement was signed, religion and religious leaders played a considerable role. Brubaker calls religion a “key diacritical marker” which separates Armenians and Azerbaijanis (Brubaker 2013 cited within Tonoyan 2018). Some Armenians tend to present the war as a conflict not only between two states but also between Christianity and Islam relating it to the massacres of Armenians that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Ottoman Empire. This position is legitimized by Catholicos Karekin II, as a defense in the face of rising political Islam (Yemelianova 2017). Turkey’s active support for Azerbaijan during the 2020 war fueled the atmosphere regarding the role of religion in the conflict. Controversies over the role of Turkey were also discussed by Sunni and Shiite religious leaders in Georgia as the latter questioned the Turkish involvement in the Azerbaijani internal affairs. Besides, there were various initiatives regarding humanitarian aid i.e.: the Armenian church with a help of the Javakhk NGO organized collections of funds and goods for soldiers fighting on the front line, and later for refugees. The religious symbols were displayed at the pro-war demonstrations organized by both parties in Georgia, and religion was significant in a certain moral, political, and ethical context, as well as in the specific conditions of Georgia. There was also an attempt of promoting interfaith dialogue such as the inter-confessional collective prayers for peace in Karabakh held every Saturday in one of the churches in Tbilisi during the 2020 war.

This presentation will be based on field research conducted during the 2020 Karabakh war in Georgia and between 03-09 2022.

Yemelianova, G. (2017),” The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict in the Context of Muslim-Christian Relations”, Islamic Solidarity, Caucasus International, 7.2.

Tonoyan, A. (2018) “Armenia-Azerbaijan: Rethinking the Role of Religion in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict”, [In] Religion, conflict, and stability in the former Soviet Union Migacheva, K., Frederick, B. eds. the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif.

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Despite the transformations that the epic “Manas” underwent during the 20th century, Soviet anti-religious policies failed to disenchant it. Today, traditional bards continue to believe that their commitment to recite the epic is a sacred obligation that comes down from a transcendent Elsewhere – the World of Manas. Before acquiring the gift of reciting the epic, every bard encounters Manas or his companions in dreams or visions. Typically, the spirits from the World of Manas unequivocally order their this-worldly interlocutors to recite about the life and deeds of the famous warrior. While the bards do not doubt the divine nature of “Manas,” there is an increasing disagreement about the theological essence of the epic. More specifically, the question of whether “Manas” is an Islamic or a shamanistic tradition has been intensely debated by bards, academics, religious leaders, as well as lay people. The proposed paper focuses on this debate by engaging with two contemporary bards – Kamil Mamadaliev and Talantaaly Bakchiev. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan and extensive conversations with these bards, I shed light on the workings of Soviet secularity and the ways in which it conditions contemporary disagreements on the origins and content of “Manas.”

According to all major versions of the epic, Manas is an explicitly Muslim hero fighting against aggressors-unbelievers – the Kalmaks and the Chinese. While traces of shamanism are noticeable in every version, the epic clearly divides the world into Muslims and unbelievers, placing these key Islamic categories at the centre of its narrative arc. Increasingly, however, some bards downplay the Islamic dimension of the epic, arguing that “Manas” is shamanistic in nature and manifests a non-Islamic essence of Kyrgyz spirituality. To be clear, the controversy is less about the content of the epic – even the most vocal critics of Islam don’t deny that it is full of Islamic concepts – and more about whether to define it as inherently Islamic or shamanistic.

My interlocutors, Kamil and Talantaaly, represent two conflicting positions regarding “Manas” – one suggests that “Manas” cannot be understood other than being an Islamic tradition, while the other argues that Islam is only a superficial narrative layer covering the epic’s shamanistic core. The paper interrogates these opposing views, arguing that the disagreement between these bards is located within the problem-space of post-Soviet secularity and is profoundly conditioned by Soviet history.

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This paper focuses on Islamic shrine pilgrimage in contemporary Kazakhstan and why shrine pilgrims tend to be predominantly women. In Kazakhstan, shrines are an esteemed legacy of Sufism and, after targeted repression and institutionalization during the Soviet era, are emerging as an important site of nation building. However, despite its historical and contemporary importance, most studies on Islamic shrine pilgrimage have overlooked a crucial aspect: the predominance of women as shrine pilgrims. In Kazakhstan, women are often the majority of shrine pilgrims, and yet few studies focus on why Islamic shrine pilgrimage is particularly popular among women, and none specifically examine gendered shrine pilgrimage in the modern Kazakhstani context. In this paper, I look into two dynamics prevalent in modern Kazakhstani shrine pilgrimage which, I argue, can explain why the practice is consistently female predominant. The first dynamic is how pilgrims come in two analytical categories: pilgrims with urgent motivations, such as those who make pilgrimage specifically to ask for a child, and pilgrims with general motivations, such as those who enjoy history or ask for general wellbeing. The second dynamic is how Kazakhstani shrine pilgrimage is dominated by two major groups of pilgrims: specialized tour groups called ‘caravans’ that only pilgrimize shrines, and which overwhelmingly consist of female pilgrims, and family pilgrims, which also tend to consist of more women than men. I ask how these dynamics originate from within Kazakhstani history and society and how they precipitate in female dominated shrine pilgrimage in Kazakhstan. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Aisha Bibi shrine in Taraz, south Kazakhstan in the summer of 2021.