Philosophical Issues in Quranic Exegesis in 19th-Century Bashkiria: Toward a Question

In the first third of the 19th century, a number of Turkic-language treatises devoted to the interpretation of se­lected fragments of the Quran (Turkic: Häftiyäk Šärif, ‘Noble Seventh Part’), most frequently used in individ­ual and collective religious practice, were compiled in the Russian Ural-Volga region. Although none of the interpreters set philosophical goals in the modern sense or identified themselves as philosophers or thinkers, addressing the most fundamental of Islamic texts, which underpins virtually all aspects of Muslim culture and the worldview of Muslim societies, in itself signifies a direct or indirect, conscious or unconscious engage­ment with issues that can be considered philosophical. Whatever method of interpreting the sacred scripture an interpreter chooses, they inevitably confront the ultimate questions of existence and the need to formulate rational answers to them. The very nature of their engagement with these questions and the way they resolve them – or avoid them – is quite revealing for the history of ideas, both within a limited region and in the con­text of the entire Muslim world. Although a number of authors and research teams have addressed the history of philosophical thought among the peoples of the Russian Ural-Volga region (primarily within the context of constructing a history of the “national” philosophy of the Bashkir and Tatar peoples), and have also inter­preted Quranic exegesis in the context of cultural history, literary history, and postcolonial studies, they have not previously been the subject of a proper philosophical analysis. This article represents the first attempt to introduce two eponymous interpretations of one-seventh of the Quran, created in Bashkiria between 1805 and 1829, into the scholarly discourse of Russian philosophy.