Eren Tasar:
"Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli's fresh, original, and comprehensively researched examination of baptized Tatar (Kräshen) apostasy in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tsarist state represents a major advance for scholarship on the social and religious history of imperial Russia. Relying on a diverse array of archival sources, family histories, biographies of theProphet, Sufi texts, and other genres of popular religious literature, this book treats the great Kräshen apostasies, or movements to gain the state's permission to 'return’ to Islam spanning the period from roughly 1802–1905, as a site of communal identity formation and negotiation. This negotiation, Kefeli argues, took place in a realm of religious practice embracing Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and animist practices common among semi-nomadicsteppe peoples."
Citation for the 2015 Reginald Zellik Book Prize, ASEEES:
"Agnès Kefeli poses the fascinating question of how communitiesof originally animist belief, migrated back and forth between Islam and Orthodox Christianity over several generations, and how the two religions 'struggled' over these people, with and without assistance of state authorities. The account is multi-layered, based in deep and knowledgeable reading, but the exposition always lucid. Kefeli does not reduce. The key elements in play are: ethnic or proto-ethnic identity (very local but also a growing regional one), the operations of missionaries, the acts of high state officials (Catherine the Great in particular), and then, in unpredictable but intellectually intriguing development, faith based in knowledge, and knowledge requiring but also advancing literacy. The symbiotic character of that last relation is especially interesting."
W.G. Moss:
"This is an excellent book for scholars and advanced students interested in Imperial Russia's Christian-versus-Islamic struggle among peoples (primarily Tatars, but also others, such as the Chuvash, Maris, and Udmurts) in its Middle Volga region. The book's subtitle indicates its main focus, which is based on fieldwork and extensive archival and other research (indicated in copious footnotes and bibliography). The role of literacy, education, women, Tatar modernists, and the reaction of the Russian government and Orthodox Church also receive special attention. Kefeli (Arizona State Univ.) demonstrates that the apostasy of tens of thousands of Kräshens (Tatar Christians) and others was much more complex than previously acknowledged."
Rozaliya Garipova:
"In this much-needed and fascinating study, Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli unravels a story of the Kräshens, baptized Tatars who apostatized in masses throughout the long nineteenth century. How and why this became possible are the central questions of this book. Kefeli skilfully shows that the apostasy movements were products of spiritual battles, conscious missionary efforts, competing religious influences, agency and religious education.The book is richly illustrated and contains useful maps of the Middle Volga. It is highly recommended for students and scholars of Muslim communities of Russian and Eurasia, Sufism in Eurasia, and modern Islamic history."
Allen Frank, author of Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia:
"Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia is significant for showing how small and politically unorganized communities such as the Krashens faced and created choices in their communal affiliations and how they ultimately were able to make varied choices based on specific circumstances. Agnes Nilufer Kefeli's thorough and imaginative use of sources is notable. She makes use of Russian official sources from the State Archives of Tatarstan and elsewhere, but she also consults a broad range of nonarchival Islamic sources, including Tatar-language Arabic-script popular literature. This makes the book highly original and important to both Russian history and Islamic studies."
Adeeb Khalid:
"The Volga basin in what is now Tatarstan has been a frontier zone between the Slavic-Christian and Muslim-Turkic worlds in Eurasia for over a millennium. It provides an ideal locale for a fruitful study of religious traditions and their interactions, but very few scholars in the world have the necessary linguisticand disciplinary skills to do justice to the subject. For this reason, Agnes Kefeli's book is a tour de force. She brings tobear on her analysis a mastery of sources in Russian and Tatar, a keen understanding of popular religion and religious change, and a solid command of issues of empire."
Eileen Kane, Connecticut College:
"This book is timely, given the growth of Islam in Europe due to immigration and conversion and renewed debates about the Krashen apostasies in Tatarstan today. Kefeli's book provides deep history to this current situation, and reminds us of the persistence of tsarist-era history into the present."
Madina Zainullina Goldberg:
"Agnès Kefeli's book vividly recreates the dynamic cultural world of the indigenous people of the Middle Volga region on the eve of the advent of modern education, and it places the nineteenth-century Kräshen apostasy movements within the context of ethnic and religious diversity and multiplicity of available identities. Kefeli's work underscores the shifting religious and cultural boundaries among the communities located on the fault line between Islam and Christianity and demonstrates the ways in which the interaction between the two shaped and continues to shape identities in theVolga-Ural region and Russia at large. Historians, scholars of religion and literature will greatly benefit from this rich, imaginative and impeccably researched book."
