Description:

Allen J. Frank is an independent scholar living in Takoma Park, Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. in Central Eurasian Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1994. He has published widely on the history of Islam in Russia and Central Asia. His works include Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia (Brill, 2001), Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia (Brill, 2012), Saduaqas Ghïlmani, Biographies of the Islamic Scholars of Our Times, co-editor, (IRCICA, 2018), Gulag Miracles: Sufism and Stalinist Repression in Kazakhstan (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2019), and Kazakh Muslims in the Red Army (Brill, 2022).

The lecture explores the ways deforestation, broadly defined, affected the religious life of indigenous non-Russian communities inhabiting a large portion of European Russia that forms a distinct Central Eurasian historical region. These communities, located in some of the most extensive forests in Europe, shared an indigenous religious tradition centered on the sacralization of trees and especially sacred groves. Russian missionary efforts, as well as broader efforts to exploit the timber resources of the region and the indigenous inhabitants, engaged in various sorts of deforestation. Maintaining the older religious relationship with these forests by Christianizing and Islamizing these features of indigenous religious life became key factors in resisting Russification, retaining social cohesion, and maintaining the older relationship with the forest.