The Promiscuous Life of a Genre for the Dead: The Marthiya as an Instrument of Community Construction in Muslim Russia

This article explores how the Islamic elegiac genre of marthiya can shed new light on the social and cultural history of the Muslims of Russia’s Volga-Ural region in the late imperial period (1870s-1917). The marthiyas enjoyed great popularity across geographical, ethnic, and factional lines as a medium for asserting and affirming social bonds and expressing collective identities. Volga-Ural marthiyas reveal the links between Sufism and Tatar national history-writing, demonstrate the interrelation between Sufi literature and Muslim revolutionary culture, and point to historical figures and groups that were left out of the evolving Tatar national historiography.