Парадоксы изучения современного ислама в России

Государство, религия, церковь в России и за рубежом. 2018. Т. 36. № 1. С. 310–322.

Bobrovnikov V.

This paper is critical comment of a Russian Islamicist to the recent issue of the journal State, Religion and Church in Russia and Worldwide devoted to the interdisciplinary study of contemporary Islam in Russia and abroad. Basing on his rich experience of archival and fieldwork among the Muslims in Russia's North Caucasus the author discusses strong and weak points of contemporary scholarship of Islamic reformation. The focus is made on current academic narratives and languages of analytical description. The topics of resistance, modernization and reformation of Muslim societies seem to be exaggerated in them. They do not exhaust all the diversity of problems related to Islam in the modern context. Moreover, these themes used to be approached according to misleading conceptions dating back to the colonial and Cold war periods. The author argues that the narrative of Islamic reformation proposed by Irina Starodubrovskaia is inappropriate to the study of contemporary Muslim societies. It failed to establish interdisciplinary dialogue and was rejected by most experts. Instead, he proposes to seek alternative and not so essentialist explanatory models that should pay more attention to Muslims as active actors in the globalized modern world, their religious discourses, practices and social networks.

Keywords: модернизация, modernization, междисциплинарный подход, modernity, исламоведение, metanarratives, метанарративы, interdisciplinary approach, модерность, Постколониальные исследования, языки описания, description, Islamic studies, мусульмане в России, Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies, Muslims in Russia