Articles

This paper investigates the role of the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity in the deployment of Russian state family policy since 2006. It argues that the holiday is emblematic of a cooperative, rather than synchro- nous, relationship between church and state in the promotion of pronatalism and so-called “traditional family values,” and highlights the ways in which public discourse around the holiday intentionally obscures internal contradictions within the dominant family ideologies of both institutions.

Whereas a political market has developed in Western Europe in which negative clichés about Islam and Muslims are in demand, in Russia this market has not appeared. There are two reasons for this: the “autochthonous” nature of Islam in Russia and the specific features of the current political system. Due to these two factors, public articulation of negative attitudes toward Islam and Muslims is hampered and par- ties with an openly Islamophobic agenda are unlikely to emerge. At the same time, Russia is experiencing tensions similar to those in Western European societies.

This round table addressed the question of research methodologies for those trends now observable in the Islamic world, as well as conceptual approaches for understanding current developments there. Such frameworks as Islamic reformation, a neomodern age, and the search for a political Islamic identity were proposed. Participants did not agree about the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity. Some of them considered fundamentalism as potentially a modernist movement, and others saw it only as antimodernist and archaic.

This article is devoted to the origin and development of the propagandist ideology of Russian-language jihadism. It develops the idea that the jihadism in Russia should be considered not so much in the context of the Islamic issue or as a result of the influence of foreign countries, but rather as an example of post-Soviet radicalism, formed on a native ideological and intellectual base.

This article is devoted to problematizing the research focus of academic literature on Islamic reformers in the Russian Empire. Studies of the late imperial period typically devote most of their attention to modernity. Jadidist reformers are considered the key protagonists and engines of history.

The movement of Muslim reformism appeared in Dagestan in the early 20th century. The reformers aimed to develop Islamic thought and law in line with the new realities. There were three forms of this movement. The first group of scholars proposed reforming only the Islamic educational system, while supporting the tradition of the Shafi’i legal school. The second group of reformers went further and advocated expanding the framework of the Shafi’i legal school as well as the reform of education.

This article explores the analytical value of “Islamic Reformation” as a concept for analyzing the current situation in the Islamic world. It compares different approaches to religious reformation, including those applied to the Protestant Reformation. Delineation of the characteristics of reformation makes it possible to demonstrate that current tendencies in the Islamic world are quite similar to those that occurred during the Reformation and that some groups of Islamic fundamentalists can be considered as the driving force behind this new reformation.

This article explores the history of official “religious” travels to and from the USSR in the period of 1943 to 1985. The main sources are the documents of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The study analyzes how the trips were prepared and realized, how and why people from various religious confessions were sent abroad and invited to the Soviet Union, and other related issues. The author distinguishes the following types of official missions: diplomatic, recreational, educational, religiousfunctional, and pilgrimage.

An upsurge in Orthodox anti-ecumenical criticism in 2016 has raised the question of the current state of ecumenism. Examining this topic, the author describes a new form of ecumenical activity associated with the emergence of conservative Christian alliances in defense of traditional values. This “conservative ecumenism,” or “Ecumenism 2.0,” differs from the “classical ecumenism” that arose in the early twentieth century and that continues to be represented today by the World Council of Churches and other ecumenical institutions.

This article is devoted to the wide set of practices of coercion and punishment of saints via their images that are well documented in the Catholic world from the early Middle Ages to the Early Modern period.