Report
(Un)known Islam in Ukraine: The History of Islam in the Territories of Ukraine from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Century
About this report
Abstract
A history of Muslim communities in the territories of Ukraine from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first — first under the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union, and after 1991 in independent Ukraine. Drawing on private and state archives alongside interviews with community representatives and with the state bodies responsible for religious policy, it traces how Muslims preserved, transformed, and passed on religious identity through formal, informal, and often underground structures.
Outside the well-documented history of the Crimean Tatars, the Muslim presence in Ukraine has attracted little sustained scholarly attention, though traces of it reach back to the eighth century. This monograph addresses that gap, following Muslim communities across three successive states — imperial, Soviet, and independent — and across the changes in religious policy each of them imposed.
Its method is the reason it matters to the Panel’s work. Rather than reading these communities through legislation alone, the study works from private and state archives together with interviews conducted among community representatives and among officials responsible for religious policy. That combination makes visible what registration records cannot: the informal and underground structures through which religious identity was actually carried when formal ones were closed. Institutionalized Islam, the book argues, has existed in Ukraine since the late nineteenth century — unofficially, and at times underground, after 1951.
The book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence in the ZMO-Studien series of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. Its author, Denys Brylov, is a co-founder of Dialogue in Action, a Ukrainian organization building dialogue between faith-based and secular communities, which announced the English edition on its Facebook page.