Bayram Balcı – Kitap tanıtımı – 12/10/2017

With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, a turning point in the life of local societies, Central Asian and Caucasian countries adopted a different look at their history and identities. At the same time, as a consequence of their entering into the globalization of ideas, various Islamic trends have come to Central Asia and the Caucasus, nourishing the Islamic revival that had already started in the context of glasnost and perestroika. In this new context and with the independences gained with the end of the Soviet Union, new Islamic cooperation started between local Islam and various Islamic trends, official or private, from Turkey, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent, the four regions that had been bound to Central Asian and Caucasian Islam before the Russian and Soviet dominations. Bayram Balci’s book seeks to analyze the channels of diffusion of these new Islamic influences and their interaction with local Islam in the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus. With exceptional knowledge of the field and its history, Balci examines how post-soviet regimes reacted to these new Islamic influences, and to what extent local Islam has been transformed by these new Islamic trends.

Bio: A researcher at CERI Sciences Po, Paris, Bayram Balci holds degrees in political science and Islamic studies. His Ph.D. examined Turkish Islamic movements and their missionary activities in the post-soviet sphere. Balci was director of the French Institute for Central Asian Studies, Uzbekistan (2006-10). A visiting scholar at Carnegie, Washington DC (2011 and 2014), Balci’s research focuses on Islam in Turkey, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.