For Putin and for Sharia

For Putin and for Sharia examines what it means to support sharia in twenty-first-century Dagestan, where calls for an Islamic state coexist with nostalgia for the days of Stalin's rule and Mecca calendars hang alongside portraits of Putin. Confronting existing narratives about sharia, terrorism, and anti-terrorism through ethnographic fieldwork, Iwona Kaliszewska looks at the beliefs and practices of Dagestani Muslims, revealing that the pursuit of sharia can assume a range of forms from sweeping visions of an Islamic state imposed through violence, to minor acts of everyday resistance against injustice, to attempts to restore the security and stability once afforded by the Soviet state. In For Putin and for Sharia, Kaliszewska challenges the official dichotomy of Muslims as supporting either the political underground or state authorities and deconstructs the Salafi/Sufi division between the so-called reformists and traditional Islam.

Iwona Kaliszewska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. She is the author of numerous publications and is Codirector of The Strongwoman, a documentary about a Dagestani female wrestler.

Kaliszewska's book is a fine piece of scholarship and an engaging read due to the author's vivid style.

Iwona Kaliszewska's book is a fine piece of scholarship and an engaging read.

For Putin and for Sharia is a fine ethnographic description of a part of the Caucasus that has received little attention from Western scholars. Throughout the book Kaliszewska takes the perspective of her interlocutors toward the state and its actions against citizens. This is not only brave, as she is confronted with violence and the state security apparatus for doing so, her approach also uncovers the controversial world of Salafi-oriented Muslims.

Bruce Grant, New York University, author of The Captive and the Gift:

Kaliszewska presents wonderfully written, vivid scenes of a world that has remained largely unknown to many outside it. The book covers over fifteen years of travels through the southern Russian republic of Dagestan, earning the evident respect of a variety of men and women who have otherwise come to distrust all but their closest circles in a world filled with violence.

Georgi Derluguian, New York University Abu Dhabi, author of Bourdieu's Secret Admirer in the Caucasus:

This is one of the most original empirical studies of Islamists movements in their social context to appear in the last decade. The book plunges us into the distant and little-known social realities behind the news headlines.