Understanding the role that Islam plays in both the private lives of Muslims and the public politics of state, nation, and security in post-Soviet states is vitally important for both intrinsic reasons (how do people in these states construct meaningful lives?) and for policy reasons (to what extent is it correct and necessary to view politicized Islam as a potential threat to domestic, regional and international stability in these regions?). Robert Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev's new volume on Dagestan, a constituent state unit of the Russian Federation that shares an internal border with the Chechen Republic and external borders with Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Caspian Sea, reveals through its title an appreciation of the importance of “the Islamic factor” in this region. The book itself, however, while providing a useful chronicle of Dagestani politics in the post-communist period, and serving as a beneficial introduction to the most important political and social problems of this incredibly ethnically diverse republic (including the “Islamic Resistance” of the title), is less helpful for more specialized students of religion and politics, who might be seeking a more focused study of how “Islam” is lived in private lives and how it functions in public venues in the North Caucasus.

The authors frame their discussion of contemporary Dagestani politics by pointing out that the history of this territory, home to 14 “officially recognized” ethnic groups, many of which are themselves composed of multiple sub-groups, can largely be explained as the clash of “two competing approaches to social organization” (2). The first, “vertically-derived,” worldview evolved from the “alpine geography” of the Caucasus, whose forbidding peaks and isolating valleys led to the development of fiercely localist, parochial, but also proto-democratic political cultures among the peoples of Dagestan, wherein each djamaat (local group of villages) governed its own affairs (9, 17–23). The second, horizontally-oriented, worldview takes the form of the universalizing imperial frames employed variously by both Russian agents in their Tsarist, Soviet, and now post-Soviet guises, and by political Islamists seeking to homogenize the North Caucasian cultures by their incorporation into a regional, Islamic state (9).

The authors work their way quickly through the early history of Dagestan, pointing out that it took over 1000 years from the time of the first Arab forays into the region in the 7th century for Islam to become the dominant religion in this western region of the North Caucasus. They explain the 19th wave of “Islamic Resistance” in the region, led by Imam Shamil, as a rebellion against the Russian Imperial policies that turned “formerly democratic highland societies “ into “little tyrannies propped up by the Russian military” (17), and point out that even at this early date there were significant conflicts between Shamil's vision of Islamic-based resistance to Russian rule and local understandings of Islamic law and practice (including the question of how sharia law should related to adat, the customary law of the village communities) (17–22).

The authors briefly address the radical changes introduced by the atheistic Soviet regime, and then move to describe the fragile ethnic peace that (surprisingly) evolved in Dagestan following the collapse of communism, using the theory of consociationalism in a fruitful way in these explorations (although the long descriptions of various elections and administrative maneuverings in Dagestan will likely test the patience of those readers who are not familiar with the basic ethno-geography and history of the region). Chapter five, devoted to “The Islamic Factor: Revival and Radicalism,” will be of most interest to students of religion and politics. The authors lay out the reasons that “Wahhabism,” the term used locally in Dagestan to refer to any more generalized salafi approach to Islam, was eventually able to win the allegiance of, in their estimates, about 10 percent of the republic's population (98). The authors urge us not to see Wahhabism as merely “hijacking a great religion” in the region, but rather to “appreciate the social and political bases” for its appeal, which include the acute ideological void left by the demise of socialism, the corrupt and incompetent performance of local religious and political elites, and the historical tradition of a having a “repressed, religious opposition” in the region (91–95).

The authors also point out the key role played by the evolution of the nationalist movement in neighboring Chechnya into an alliance with international jihadist forces in provoking violent clashes in Dagestan between the salafis on the one hand and local villagers backed by Russia's internal security (OMON) troops on the other hand in the late summer of 1999. Ultimately, they conclude, these efforts at creating a broader Islamic state in the North Caucasus backfired, leading the vast majority of Dagestan's citizens to reaffirm their loyalty to the Russian Federation, to traditional sufi and non-salafist forms of Islam, and to a secular form of government in Dagestan (128–129). The authors conclude their analysis by arguing that Russia's current recentralization policies in the region threaten the ethnic peace and religious moderation that largely characterize Dagestani politics when the region is left alone. Ultimately, the volume provides a useful introduction to the politics of this important and complicated republic; it is of less appeal to specialized students of Islam and politics.