The article is an introduction to this issue’s section “Entangled His‑ tory: Muslims and the Others in Russia and Abroad”. It articulates the foundations of the historiographical approach named “Entangled History”, as seen by the author (who is also the compiler of the section) and the authors’ team, and examines the new meaning this approach has acquired in the context of recent calls for the “decolonization” of historical research, especially in the field of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES). “Entangled History” is seen here as an extension of, but also as an alternative to, the straight‑ forwardly understood “decolonization”. It carries a decolonizing pathos in the sense that it uncovers the functions and relativity of dominant narratives and deconstructs them. At the same time, the agents of domination are considered here not within dichotomous constructions, as “decolonization” is often seen, but in the space of the diversity of cultural forms and practices, and such agents themselves appear to be different in different situations. Intercultural entanglements, which acquire a crosscutting role in history, appear much more complex than binary “interactions”, and the historical context is constructed as flexible, fluid, and multilayered. Thus, the proposed approach makes it possible to more vividly reveal the historical dynamics of the communities under study, its multidimensionality and multilinearity, and demonstrates the artificiality of the search for “autochthonous”, “pure” historical conditions. Simultaneously, this complex vision of history retains an ethical dimension.

The paper looks at the perception of history in the discourse of two modern Islamic reformers — Shihab adDin Mardjani and Muhammad Rashid Rida — through an analysis of how both authors used the ideas and texts of the first Muslim history theorist Ibn Khaldun. The author concludes that the historical argument is deeply rooted in Islamic thought as a selfrenewing tradition (tadjdid), which in different periods of time refreshes an authentic Islamic spirit liberating it from “illegal innovations” (bid’a) and thus preserving its purity. The appeal to rational and critical historical knowledge enabled reformers to deconstruct a history of Muslims and revise historical memory, which is similar to the revision of Islamic law through idjtihad. The logic of the historical argument provided Muslim authors with a general conceptual base and a common language for discussions with European Orientalists. Islamic modernists defended historical subjectivity of Islam and its progressive role in the history of human civilization. The language of academic history enabled them to criticize the real history of Muslim peoples and Islam as a religious system. Hence comes the argument of in favor of reforms — literally “corrections” (islah) based on the primordial historical essence of Islam as they viewed it. Appeal to Ibn Khaldun allows Muslim reformers to discover an authentic source of historical rationalism that helped them adapt Western scientific ideas in the Islamic context. Yet, in interaction with these ideas, they developed their own new conceptual apparatus. The historical and sociological theory of Ibn Khaldun was the link with which European science could be connected to the Islamic historical tradition. A new understanding of history was based on the same idjtihad method. In this light, the categories of “progress” and “development” were naturally described as a return to the initial tradition, and thus modernism inevitably worked as a discursive form of fundamentalism.

Historians see the emergence of Turkmen national identity as a result of activities by local progressivists inspired by the Jadid literature at the beginning of the 20th century. According to this vision, the progressivists proposed a program of homogeneous and “mechanized” educational system aimed to fill the concept of “nation” by unified and standardized meanings. However, there are several opponents for this vision. They argue that before the local intellectuals accepted the modernist concept of “nation”, the Turkmen community was already unified by a concept of ethics and social relations. The basis for this centrality of ethics was orthopraxy. This article focuses on the historical narratives written by mullah Hojaly Myratberdi ogly. He served as a secretary of the colonial administration of the Transcaspian region. By addressing the Islamic hagiographical discourse, he described the paths of some key local personalities who were the examples of piety, commitment, and servanthood for Turkmens. Can modern-day historians consider those narratives as the ethical basis for the local communal order? Was Hojaly a unique collector of those stories? Why did he publish several stories in the newspapers of the local colonial administration? Were those tales in demand by the following generations of the Turkmen intellectuals? By analyzing the context of Hojaly’s activity, this article argues that at the beginning of the 20th century the Turkmen polymaths (such as Hojaly) tried to collect the knowledge about their community to preserve and transmit it to following generations. To do so, they used the established infrastructure for knowledge exchange created by the colonial administrators. In their turn, the local orientalists analyzed those stories by using the positivist claim for demythologising local knowledge. Hence, they reinterpreted those texts by changing their meanings from ethics to culture. Therefore, the translation of those texts and methodological search by the following generations of Turkmen intellectuals created the conditions for transition from orthopraxy to the modernist concept of “national culture”.

Based on the authors’ fieldwork carried out in Southern Dagestan in 2021–2023, the article investigates the emergence of a new holyfool saint venerated as miracle (karamat) worker. In the post-Soviet Muslim hagiography, this type is different from those of Arab missionaries who converted Dagestani highlanders into Islam in the early Middle ages, shahid martyrs of jihad warfare, Muslim scholars and Sufi masters, who dominated the cult of the saints in the Eastern Caucasus until the beginning of the twentieth century. This article studies the case of sheikh Waghufbuba Ismailov (1894–1972) in the Lezgin village of Lutkun. For the last 30 years he turned from a littleknown local saint (awliya’) into the third most venerated character in the Muslim hagiography of Southern Dagestan after the 40 legendary Arab shahids in the town of Derbent known as Kyrkhlar, and sheikh Pir Suleyman in the holy mountain of Shalbuzdag and in the abandoned sacred village of Lgar-Pirkent. By its type, Muslim holy-fools are close to the new saints from various religious groups, appeared in the post Soviet space, including the Shiite sheikh Mir-Movsum-agha, better known as the Baku “Boneless Saint,” Et-agha (1883–1950), and Orthodox blessed elders like Matrona of Moscow (1885–1952). To date, the Lutkun holy-fool has not yet been studied. The article proposes a “thick description” of the two holy places related to Waghufbuba. The focus is made on the entangled narratives in his cult — popular Islamic, Sufi, Soviet and national. The cult’s epistemology, formation and dissemination are examined. The research relies on interviews, epigraphy, handwritten primary sources, photo documentation, as well as Internet blogs in Lezgin, Arabic and Russian.

The article frames socialism in the USSR as a discursive regime and examines how it was changing in the late Soviet years. Using the life story of Akhmadzhon Adylov, the Uzbek manager of a Soviet agrarian company, I demonstrate that in the 1980s this regime under‑ went an ideological transformation, one of the forms of which was the criticism of Central Asian socialism as the Other. Analyzing various official narratives of Adylov’s successes and crimes, I illustrate how placing Central Asia within the socialist project was a pillar of the universal idea of “socialist progress.” I also show how participation in the Soviet modernization project was seen differently in Central Asia and how the local elites used the vocabulary of progress to negotiate with the Center new ways to transform the local economy and strengthen their decision-making agency. I show how the orientalist critique of the inadequacy of Central Asian socialism, including the repressions during the notorious “cotton affair” in the 1980s, triggered the ideology shift and the attitudes toward socialism as such.

The article analyzes the culture of sexuality among the Muslims of Inner Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as the archival practices that have marginalized the related texts. The article sheds light on the circulation of erotic poetry composed by the mujaddidi shaykh ‘Abd ar-Rahim al-UtizImiani. If the audience in the first half of the 19th century shared the poet’s sense of humor and the metaphoric language of sex and cuisine, by the late 19th century these initial meanings had been lost. In Soviet times, the secular ethics shied away from sex in Islam and did not regard it a suitable topic of discussion. The article surveys Muslim sexuality beyond al UtizImiani’s poem and provides its critical edition next to the first Russian translation.

The article discusses the features of the transition and registration of Russian subjecthood of Muslims of Siberia and Dagestan. The preserved texts of the Russian oath of allegiance and the Turkic texts of oaths are analyzed. The author concludes that up to the second third of the 18th century the Russian subjecthood of Muslims on the Siberian and Caucasian frontiers of the empire could be temporary, periodically renewed through new oaths or canceled, and did not exclude the oath to the second and sometimes to the third power. Legally such subjecthood and the oaths were hybrid.

In the nineteenth century, the territorial formation of the Russian Empire was completed. In each of the regions of compact settlement of Muslims, the application of the Sharia law had some differences due to belonging of Muslims to various madhhabs, their level of social development, and the policy of the authorities. In the district of the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly, Sharia norms regulated personal status rights, a number of aspects of which were defined by general imperial laws that replaced some provisions of the Islamic legal system. A new stage in the unification of imperial legislation came with the draft of a new Civil Code completed at the beginning of the twentieth century. The article shows how during the Russian Revolution of 1905–1907, various opinions on the use of Sharia norms of marriage, family and inheritance were expressed by Russian conservatives, liberals, and the radical Tatar youth. In their petitions, Muslims called for the concentration of all religious issues in the hands of the religious administration, including the Waqfs, which meant their legalization within the Orenburg district. The requirement of religious and cultural autonomy also meant the abolition of the usual practice of applying to a secular court, and some other practices.

Following the revisionist approach of the last decade, this article invites to further contextualize the nature of changes in Russian Muslim communities in late imperial Russia through the analysis of the religious discourse of the bilingual Russian Muslim “Perevodchik Terjiman” newspaper. This newspaper was published in two languages, Russian and so called common Turkic, from 1883 to 1918 in Bakhchysarai by a prominent Russian Muslim educator Ismail Gasprinskii (1851–1914). By comparing its parallel Russian and Turkic narratives, we explore how the “Terjiman” represented Islam and Russian Muslims for Muslim and non-Muslim audiences and how it correlated with the representations of their status in late-imperial Russia. As in his argumentation both in Russian and Turkic Gasprinskii used quotations from the Quran and Hadith, it seems that newspaper’s editors, from one hand, sought to speak the same language as their target audience (Muslims) and thus convey their views in a more comprehensible way, and on another hand, emphasized the cultural otherness of Muslims in the Empire.

The anthropological study of Islam is one that has been plagued by problems of definition. What exactly are we studying? Local practices, universal texts and standards of practice, or something else entire‑ ly? At the heart of the question is how anthropologists define Islam. This paper reviews the major trends in the anthropological study of Islam and then suggests plausible theoretical directions for the future. It touches on issues surrounding Orientalism, the “Great and Little Traditions” paradigm. It moves between theoretical considerations and “on the ground,” lived examples.

A growing body of anthropological research has turned to study Is‑ lam as a discursive tradition that informs the attempts of Muslims to live pious and moral lives, the affects and emotions they cultivate and the challenges they pose to a liberal secular ideology. While this turn has provided direction for a number of innovative studies, it appears to stop short of some key questions regarding everyday religious and moral practice, notably the ambivalence, the inconsistencies and the openness of people’s lives that never fit in the anthropology of Islam. To find ways to account for both the ambivalence of people’s every‑ day lives and the often perfectionist ideals of good life, society and self they articulate, I argue that we may have to talk a little less about traditions, discourses and powers and a little more about the existential and pragmatic sensibilities of living a life in a complex and of‑ ten troubling world. By broadening our focus to include the concerns, practice and experience of everyday life in its various moments and directions, we may eventually also be better able to make sense of the significance of a grand scheme like Islam as such.

This article critically examines recent calls by anthropologists to focus on what they call “everyday Islam”. We locate this new literature within two tensions central to anthropology: first, its dual commitment to humanity’s heterogeneity and commonality, and second, its dual imperative to account for dominant social structures and individual resistance. We argue that the concept of everyday Islam emphasizes one side of these paradigmatic debates, highlighting the universality of humans and emphasizing opposition to norms. We then take up the distinction this literature makes between everyday Muslims and Salafi Muslims. We suggest that a reinvestment in everyday Islam ends up discounting the validity, reality, and ontology of those framed as Salafi Muslims and invalidates ethnographic inquiry into ultraorthodox Muslim life. Even as scholarship on everyday Islam attempts to expand the anthropology of Islam, then, it restricts the field instead by demarcating anthropology’s proper object of study in a very narrow way.

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of conversion to Islam in Russia, as well as the discourses formed around it. We examine the context of the emergence of this phenomenon in the 1990s and trace the dynamics of the formation of the image of Muslim converts as “dangerous”, as well as identify the reasons for the related discourse of securitization. Using the tools of corpus linguistics, we describe some of the linguistic strategies that shape the dominant discourse about Muslim neophytes in Russia. Finally, drawing on a series of interviews with Russian Muslim converts taken in 2010–2014, we analyze how the dominant discourse on Islam influences the self-presentation of Muslim converts and how their strategy of depoliticizing religious identity is constructed.

The article examines the practices of marking urban space as “Islamic” by Muslims and non Muslims. The purpose of the study is to test the hypothesis that “religious” spaces are perceived by city residents as forming a border situation between “their” and “foreign” cities, and the idea of this border is supported by both Muslims and non Muslims. It is assumed that labeling an area as “Islamic” provokes symbolic conflicts over the “right to the city”. Belonging to Islam is considered by local residents as a marker of an expansive “alien” space, which has the ability to transform the surrounding territories into similar ones. In urban narratives, the factor of belonging to Is‑ lam leads to competition between various urban subjects. For example, between representatives of Muslim communities and residents of houses close to religious sites or “migrant” infrastructure, also often labeled as “religious”. The study is based on semi-structured interviews and observations on the territory of the Irkutsk mosque and in the surrounding areas. It has been established that by producing religious space, Muslim activists, migrants and “indigenous” Muslims label urban objects as Islamic. They place advertising signs with religious symbols and Arabic inscriptions, include sound effects, change the style of buildings from secular to Islamic, etc. These considerations, in turn, legitimize for Muslim activists the “right to the city,” which in this case is expressed in the establishment of new rules in the form of religious ethics for all actors included in the context of a given space — Muslims and non Muslims.

How can a culture based on principles of openness and inclusion be formed in an organization? We will study the experience of the team of Insafhazrat, the imam-khatib of the regional mosque Ihlas (sincerity). The basic values of the leaders of the mahalla (community) served for constructing closed relationships among fellow believers and creating corporate culture with the elements that are characteristic of efficient innovative market companies. Under the new conditions, with the use of modern means of communication and social networks, the mosque has quickly accrued the status of a spiritual, social and cultural center, going beyond local boundaries. The article presents the results of the Ihlas’s mosque parish organizational ethnography which relies on Edgar Schein’s conceptual framework of theory of organizational culture. According to Schein’s theory the deciphering of organizational culture phenomena should be carried out by “slow” qualitative research methods in three stages, corresponding to the three levels of the organizational culture formation model: artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions. We then relate some elements of this mosque’s corporate culture to the so-called “green” ideal type within the typology of the Clare Graves’s spiral development theory.

The article examines the religious practices of Ingush women who are adherents of the KuntaKhadji Kishiev, a Chechen sheikh of the Kadiri tariqat. The focus of attention is the Kadiri ritual of loud rejoicing (zikr jahr) practiced by Ingush women since the late 19th century. This zikr is practiced by the female adherents of the sheikh in Chechnya, Dagestan and Georgia. The article deals with Ingush practices only: a comparative analysis would require more field research due to the lack of published works on this topic. The description of zikr practices represents the forms of spiritual life of Ingush women. The historical circumstances of when and why women were given the chance to participate in the loud zikr are shown, as well as the motives driving women, their age and social composition. The paper also examines how the practices were changing across times and how political processes influenced women’s religious activity. The article addresses a wider meaning of the loud zikr in the society as a whole. The author concludes that the recent reIslamization affected the age and composition of female participants in Sufi practices and makes a sort of disappointing prediction: if the current negative attitude towards female religious practices does not change, it is possible that they will cease to exist in the coming years.

In this article I identify the main topics of discussion of politics in the Muslim online community on the material of the most popular social networks among Russian Muslims. The studied material al‑ lows us to make an assumption about the dual nature of these discussions. The first discursive strategy is related to the articulation of specific values during the discussion of political events, such as: ide‑ as of social justice or antiglobalization. The second discursive strategy aims at building a digital community around particular Islamic activists. Using the example of Russian-speaking Salafi bloggers, we describe the situation when a political biography is used as symbolic capital, which does not require additional verbalization in attracting subscribers.

This text gives and overview of the book colloquium “Reading Islam, Understanding Muslims” launched in September 2022. Through the lens of the past ten workshops, an attempt is made to assess the contribution of the discussions to the development of current knowledge about Islam in Russia, as well as, more importantly, to the development of a community of scholars who are in one way or another concerned with Islam in their research. The review shows a methodological value of discussing the concepts of the sociology and anthropology of Islam.

The review is focused on the analysis of Dietrich Jung’s approach to the sociology of Islam. Two fundamental works under Jung’s supervision are discussed, starting with a theoretical model by Jung and his coauthors and looking at its implications for the existing sociological research. The authors analyze the internal homogeneity and consistency of this theoretical model. The main argument of the article is the fact that Jung’s elaborated theoretical model does not necessarily correspond to epistemological and methodological foundations of various studies included in the collective works edited by Jung. This fact is demonstrated, in particular, by analyzing the methodological framework of the articles included in the book “Muslim Subjectivities in Global Modernity”.

The review examines two approaches to the study of Muslim subjectivity on the example of recent works in the field. The first approach is realized in the framework of the methodology of the history of ideas, while the second turns to the methods of sociology and anthropology. In the first case, the main attention is directed to texts and discourses, and the crucial method is hermeneutics, which is used to extract knowledge from texts about the ways in which the subject is constructed. In the second case, the focus is on social practices and interactions and their internal structure. Nevertheless, both of these approaches are linked by a common intellectual genealogy, dating back to Michel Foucault and his reflections on the subject as an entity that simultaneously constructs itself and is constructed externally by government power.

The review discusses the methodology issues related to the study of state-religion relations in Renat Bekkin’s recent monograph. The book looks at the institution of muftiyats and Muslim organizations as elements of the Russian state system, analyzed through the concepts of the economics of religion and neoinstitutional economics. A critical analysis of this methodology demonstrates the value of its heuristic potential, which, however, cannot be admitted as universal and sufficient when applied to the sphere of religion. The limitations are connected with underestimating the interests and resources of both religious organizations and individual believers; a limited value of applying the market model to Russian state-religious interactions; and the lack of a general description of the political economy model in the book under review.