The believers in Islam living in the Russian Federation are conventionally divided into two groups: autochthonous and immigrants. The first group includes Tatars and Bashkirs inhabiting Tatarstan, Bashkiria, the Volga Region, southern Ural, Siberia, and Moscow. The second Muslim zone in Russia is the northern Caucasus. Migrant Muslims are mostly incoming from neighboring states, former republics of the USSR. Their presence in Russia is based on economic grounds. Along with the abovementioned ethnic Russian Muslims, there are also Russians of Slavic origin, who have converted to Islam for various reasons. 

The article discusses the motivations of Russian (Slavic) females converting to Islam. The analysis is based on the quantitative and qualitative content of messages posted on two web forums: Evimturkiye.com, in a thread entitled Change of confession. I adopted Islam; and forumok.ru, in the thread A woman in Islam. The author makes an attempt to answer the question of why Russian women convert to Islam.

The religious freedom resulting from the democratic transformation in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s created an opportunity for Muslim people living there to develop their own culture, educational system and administrative structure. Islam has also become one of the four traditional religions of Russia. The process of the “Islamic Renaissance” in Russia has led the Muslim community, in particular the Tatars, to look back and take advantage of the historical experience and achievements of Tatar theological thought in order to utilize it in the process of building the identity of Russian Muslims. 

In recent years, the most visible element of this process has been an attempt to rethink the concept of Jadidism – the reform movement among Muslims in the Russian Empire at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the most important figures of this movement was Musa Jarullah Bigiev, a religious scholar, politician, and writer. His works relate to fields such as Islamic jurisprudence, politics, history, law, and economics. The article aims to outline the political thought of Musa J. Bigiev, as expressed in his most significant work Alphabet of Islam, written in 1920.

The aim of this article is the description of the religious, cultural, social, and political situation of the Crimean Tatar Muslims both living in Crimea and outside of the Russia-annexed territory of Crimea in mainland Ukraine. The Crimean Tatar Muslims in mainland Ukraine may be divided into two categories, those who lived there before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and those who settled there after – internally displaced persons from Crimea. In the case of the latter, one significant reason behind their migrations is persecution against them on religious grounds. Members of the Islamic communities related to the Salafi version of Islam as well as followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir either fled from the annexed peninsula or were harshly repressed by Russian law enforcement authorities. The mainstream group of the Crimean Tatar Muslims are adherents of Sunni Islam and Hanafi Madhab. The latter is also the main Islamic religious community in Russia, which is recognized as a legitimate form of Islam by the Russian government. However, the Hanafi Crimean Muslims are also being pressured by the authorities in occupied Crimea. The leader of their religious organisation, the Crimean Muftiat, Mufti Emirali Ablayev had to declare his loyalty to the Russian state.

The aim of the article is to analyse the relations between the discursive Islamic tradition and the national policy implemented in various forms by the Palestinians. I will use in this analysis the notion of the Islamic discursive tradition of Talal Asad, which emphasizes the importance of the relationship between power and knowledge. I will show how the Palestinian nationalist movement influenced the perception of the role and significance of religious tradition, and how it is experienced and practiced in different ways. Works by John O. Voll, Daniel M. Varisco, Dale F. Eickelman, James P. Piscatori and Armand Salvatore show how the current understanding of the relationship between Islam and politics is dependent on Western, top-down assumptions and political projects, and how these have distorted understanding of the processes taking place in the so-called Muslim world. My aim is to go beyond these erroneous assumptions and to reinterpret the Palestinian experience of shaping the relationship between religion and politics.

The issue of creating spaces dedicated to religious activities and that of the establishment of particular sections for Muslims at public cemeteries might be viewed as a single one. While researching mosques, one needs to accent the multi-functionality of the premises. The final shape of the interior and the exterior of the buildings can be understood as a result of internal and external influences. In the case of the establishment of cemetery fields, the observation of the processes of expert solutions is important. In both issues the need of community organisation is displayed. Furthermore, the long-term construction of “otherness” in the European public space is in question. The discipline of Comparative Religious studies retains the possibilities to analyse the results of the research of Muslim communities and compare them with other examples (e.g., Jewish communities, small Christian churches or new religious movements). Thus issues concerning Islam can become a part of the wider discourse concerning secularisation and the deprivatisation of religion in Europe. The paper contributes to this discussion by pointing out the interconnection of needs of the Muslim population and manifestation of uniqueness in public space. 

Researchers of Islam in the West have noticed that imams working since the 1950s in Western Europe or the United States assume far more responsibilities than their counterparts in traditional Muslim societies. Consequently, further research had to identify and specify the types of imams who perform their service in the West – their most complete typology is the one developed by Niels Valdemar Vinding. However, besides Finland where the Muslim Tatars have lived since the nineteenth century, the classification does not include imams from areas inhabited by the indigenous Muslims. 

This study is an attempt to check if the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars living in Poland who have had their imams for centuries would fit into Vinding’s typology and if this typology also would work in a diachronic perspective. Literature on the subject was the basis for the research into the situation of imams in the past. Interviews with representatives of particular Muslim organizations served as the basis for the research into the present-day situation.