Until very recently Islam and Russian history remained in two separate compartments.  Russian history meant the history of Russian proper and Russians and did not include the study of other nationalities.  In fact, however, Russia has always been a diverse entity and it became even more diverse as it conquered borderlands during its empire building phase.  Nonetheless, very little scholarship has explored the development and spread of Islam in Russia.  Only in the last several years have scholars begun researching groups such as the Crimean and Volga Tatars and the influence and development of Islam in Russia.  Several books discuss the Mongols in Russia and their impact.  Most recent scholarship concentrates on 19^th and 20^th century Russia, not on the early origins period.

State religion of any variety came fairly late to Russia.  Only in the reign of Vladimir (980-1015) did Russia acquire its formal state religion.  The legendary account says that Vladimir decided that Russia needed a state religion and examined all the possibilities,  meeting with representatives from the various groups.  He supposedly decided against Islam because “drink is the joy of the Russians” and against Judaism because it stood for a stateless people.  In adopting Byzantine Christianity, Vladimir made a choice to join ranks with Byzantium rather than with the Muslim state of the Volga Bulgars or with other Muslim groups to the south and southeast.  Nonetheless, Islam and Islamic peoples surely existed in medieval Russia.  This paper will explore some of the (scanty) scholarship on who these people were and what their influences and contacts with the majority Orthodox Russians might have been.

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