This book covers the developing and important issue of the role and place of Islam in the increasingly complex dynamics of Russian politics. It is achieved by examining various aspects of Islam and Muslims in Russia from a multidisciplinary perspective.
Islam and Muslims are currently at the forefront of popular culture, mass media and political imaginations in the age of the ‘Global War on Terrorism’. Frequently, these are for the ‘wrong’ reasons as they are not well understood, but rather stereotypically misrepresented, often for various political reasons. Russia is also highly stereotyped; the diverse and mysterious country is often misunderstood in terms of the communicated cultural, social and political images. This book is an attempt to expose and analyse the wealth in diversity of Islam and Muslims in Russia, a country where different religions have occupied the same political spaces, for better and worse, for many centuries. The content of this book is focused upon the contemporary social, political, cultural and identity contexts of Russia in terms of the interrelated dynamics and forces that are shaping the relations and place of Islam and Muslims in Russia today.
The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Religion, State & Society.
Introduction: the image of Islam in Russia
Greg Simons
1. Islamic practice and state policies towards religion in post-Soviet Russia
Bulat Akhmetkarimov
2. Discussions about indigenous, national and transnational Islam in Russia
Kaarina Aitamurto
3. Religious political technology: Damir Mukhetdinov’s ‘Russian Islam’
Michael Kemper
4. Translating Islam into the language of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church
Gulnaz Sibgatullina
5. Constructing the image of Islam in contemporary Russian print media: the language strategies and politics of misrepresentation
Sofya Ragozina
6. Islamic masculinities in action: the construction of masculinity in Russian visual culture about the Chechen wars
Erik Vlaeminck
7. Crafting mosque-state relations through community-service work: the case of Yardam mosque in Kazan, Tatarstan
Liliya Karimova
Biography
Greg Simons is Associate Professor with the IRES at Uppsala University, Sweden; at Department of Communication Sciences and a Leading Researcher at the Business Technology Institute at Turiba University, Riga, Latvia; a leading researcher at the Humanitarian Institute of Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia.
