The study of Muslim political activism in 1905–1907 in Russia has been fruitful topic of research in the last 30 years. However, the scholars are generally focused on intra-Muslim dynamics or Duma activities of Muslims. The present study attempts to contextualize this process in a broad imperial context through discourse analysis of relevant materials.
There was not a homogeneous system of governing an estate-based, multi-confessional population of late-imperial Russia. Given this system, the field of public politics in the scope of the First Russian revolution (1905–1907) revealed the existence of at least two related but heterogeneous tendencies, which included the struggle for socio-political and national rights. The representatives of the national movements, such as Ittifaq, were seeking to combine these tendencies in their programs. On the national question, Ittifaq’s program reflected the existing system of governance, advocating the preservation but substantial expansion of the partial autonomy that Muslims had already enjoyed in the previous period. What was new in their demands was the desire to broaden the conditions of social mobility for wider range of Muslims by granting them the access to power of governing the Muslim population. In turn, the struggle between the «new» and «old» Muslim elites implied the elimination of estates restrictions. These demands were out of the national field but of socio-political one. Thus, there was a common interest between national groups and all-Russian political parties (in particular, the Kadets), which struggled to restructure the imperial political system from an estate-based to a civil society and needed the broadest possible body of electors, including national minorities. However, «Coup of June 1907» questioned the political union of the Kadets with the Muslims, significantly reducing the representation of both groups in the 3^rd–4^th State Dumas by introducing a new electoral law.

The research undertakes an examination of the prominent Dagestani scholar Nazir ad-Durgili Altuni (1891–1935) with a particular focus on the evolution of his views on Sufism and reformism. The paper is grounded in an analysis of the intellectual legacy of the scholar, comprising manuscripts of his works and select correspondences. The case of Nazir ad-Durgili Altuni is intended not only to describe the intellectual quests of a specific ‘alim, but also to demonstrate the dynamism and diffuseness of the intellectual field in Dagestan. The authors aim to highlight the ephemeral nature of the still frequently encountered tendency in academic research to artificially divide Islamic intellectual currents into constructed groups, such as Qadimis and Jadidism, progressive and traditionalist, and so on. The case of Nazir ad-Durgili demonstrates the hybridity of views and ideas characteristic of Islamic intellectuals, who are constantly seeking and interacting with the changing ideological landscape in Muslim communities in Russia and the world.

In this paper, I consider Muslim online coaching in Russia, trying to determine how new neo-liberal subjects are constructed. Considering the case of “Trillionaire” project by the imam of Moscow’s Memorial Mosque Shamil Alyautdinov, I identify specific linguistic strategies used to construct an image of a “successful/harmonic” Muslim. This image serves as a central motif in the discourse of Muslim coaching. While the project primarily focuses on financial well-being, it is a comprehensive ethical program, where financial stability is viewed as a natural consequence of pious behavior. Online coaching based on Protestant activist ethos turns out to be a new way to entrain the Muslim subject—the “new” modernized Muslims as well as imam-coach as a new type of religious authority – that combines neo-liberal values of entrepreneurship and self-help with Islamic virtue. I discuss several factors that make this project highly in demand among contemporary Muslims based on cultural consumption argument and the convenience of secular translation of Islam within the global neo-liberal agenda.

Because of the difficulty anthropology continues to face in relinquishing its secular vestiges, field encounters with not-immediately-perceptible reality, the realm of God, the invisible, and the otherworldly have usually been removed or deemed insignificant in anthropological accounts. In dialogue with the ontological turn and other recent developments in anthropology, in this article we introduce the special section on Muslim ontologies by advocating for a more profound reconsideration of the role that the encounter with other modes of knowing in the field might have for the discipline. Proposing to include transcendence, the divine, and invisible realities in a reflection on anthropological knowledge, we foreground vertical knowledge as a mode of approaching knowledge that centers on the human ability to transform and experience the self in ways that also correspond to different modalities of perceiving reality.

This article is a review of George Quinn’s book, The Holy Bandits of Java, which examines the current state of Islam in Indonesia through the life stories of revered eccentric saints. The author sees Java’s holy sites as pockets of localized culture, harking back to the island’s pre-Islamic past, disappearing under the blows of orthodox Islam. Each chapter is devoted to a particular saint and, on the basis of his hagiography, discusses issues related to modernity: ecology, religious authority, the “invention of tradition”, etc.