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The Islamic Factor in the Crimean Tatar National Movement in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

The Crimean Tatars (or ‘k’’rym tatarlar’ in their own language) are the indigenous people of Crimea. In the Middle Ages various Turkic-speaking groups of settled populations and steppe nomads merged to form one nationality with its own identity, culture, faith (Islam) and state (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries this was the Crimean ulus (province) within the Golden Horde and from the mid-fifteenth century the independent Crimean Khanate). The Crimean Tatars have a linguistic affinity with a group of nations including their nearest neighbours (the Turks), some peoples of the Caucasus (Azeris, Kumuks, Karachai, Balkars, Nogai) and peoples living further north and east (Volga Tatars, Bashkirs and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Siberia). It can plausibly be argued that all these peoples share a Turkic culture; the ideologists of Panturkism even claim that a huge country called Turan once united all the Turkic peoples of Eurasia. The sense of a common Turkic identity is reinforced by the fact that most (although not all) of the Turkic peoples in the ‘Turan’ area have been Muslims for centuries and in this respect are clearly distinct from their Slavic neighbours. In the late nineteenth century the Crimean Tatar cultural leader Ismail Gasprinsky enunciated the classical formula of Turkism ‘dilde, fikirde, işte birlik’ (‘unity of language, thought and action’). Despite this sentiment, however, in the twentieth century each Turkic people in the area, great or small, acted independently; coincidences in nomenclature (like ‘Crimean Tatars’ and ‘Volga Tatars’) should not mislead us about the fact that these are all separate nations with their own distinctive histories (see Tatary, 1998; Kozlov and Chizhova, 2003). Today (2007) there are some 280,000 Crimean Tatars in Crimea. There are a further 200,000 in the areas to which the Crimean Tatars were exiled in 1944. A spokesman for the national movement estimates that there are between two and five million Crimean Tatars in the diaspora, most of them in Turkey, where they settled after enforced emigration from the Russian Empire over a period of more than a century (from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries); but precise figures here are impossible to establish because censuses in Turkey and the Central Asian republics of the former USSR do not identify Crimean Tatar nationality. The main challenge to the Crimean Tatar nation over the last six decades has been revival after what arguably amounted to genocide in the mid-1940s. A quarter of all Religion, State & Society, Vol. 35, No. 3, September 2007