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Practices and Views of the Central Asian Mullahs in Eastern Siberia
In this chapter, I shall be looking at the five Central Asian mullahs with whom I enjoyed the
closest contact during my fieldwork in Irkutsk, South-Eastern Siberia. Two of these men are Kyrgyz,
three are Tajiks. Each has a complex and multi-vector migration biography, his own relationship with
the imam and the rest of the Muslim environment, and his own personal spiritual trajectory. These
five mullahs—the main heroes of this study—are far from being the only Central Asian religious
experts in the Irkutsk area, much less the only Islamic authorities. However, they proved to be the
most visible and involved in the everyday religious life of the agglomeration. The biographies of these
mullahs, their practices and ideas, and their positions in the Muslim environment are similar in some
respects and different in others. These differences best illustrate the diversity of forms of Muslim
authority that have developed and continue to be constructed in the migration environment.