Introduction: Normative orders and the remaking of Muslim spaces and selves in contemporary Russia

Lived Islam and normative discourses in Russia

The study of Islam in Russia is confronted with normative dichotomies that have been established on an official level, in particular that between ‘traditional Islam’, understood as a ‘local Islam’, and ‘non-traditional Islam’, perceived as a ‘foreign Islam’. The existence of these normative discourses on Islam can be brought in relation to state attempts to domesticate and govern Islam from above in European countries (Aitamurto, 2019; Bowen, 2004; Braginskaia, 2012; Di Puppo, 2019; Humphrey, 2009; Sunier, 2014). In contrast to European attempts to create a national Muslim clergy, however, the presence of official Muslim representation has a significant legacy in Russia that traces back to Catherine the Great. The Muslim population in Russia is constituted to a large extent by autochthonous Muslims (in the North Caucasus, the Volga-Ural region and Western Siberia) and has further grown in size with the recent arrival of Muslim migrants from Central Asia.

The presence of normative concepts surrounding Islam thus complicates the discussion on the religious orientations adopted by various Muslims in Russia. On an official level, the major division in Muslim communities is portrayed as that between a foreign Islam (often understood as Salafi Islam) and a local, ethnic, traditional Islam. In reality, however, the Islamic religion is lived and experienced in a variety of ways by Muslims in Russia, who exhibit varying degrees of commitment to religious practice, various ways of practicing it (religious pilgrimage, adhering to a halal lifestyle, etc.) and various conceptions of the extent to which Muslims should adhere to religious precepts.

The existence of state-approved categories that seek to define how Islam should be lived in Russia draws attention to the question of secular power and state–Muslim relations since the fall of the Soviet Union. As Agrama (2012) observes, the domains of the secular and of the religious cannot be thought of as two bounded and separate realms. Furthermore, secularism does not only correspond to the separation of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’, it also refers to the constitution of religion as an object of regulatory intervention and constant management by the secular state (Agrama, 2012: 24). Beyond this distinction, Agrama (2012: 27) defines secularism as a questioning power, ‘a set of processes and structures of power wherein the question of where to draw a line between religion and politics continually arises and acquires a distinctive salience.’ The power of normative categories defined by the modern secular state resides not in their normativity, in the norms to which they refer, but in the fact that they are constantly questioned and redefined (Agrama, 2012: 29). Thus, the categories of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional Islam’ in Russia have the effect of permanently raising the question of which religious forms are legitimate without referring to a clear normative content. Another argument advanced by Agrama (2012) can help to illuminate a certain continuity between Soviet policies towards Islam and the contemporary regulation of the religious domain in post-Soviet Russia. Agrama (2012: 33) points to the fact that instead of enforcing the separation of religion and politics, secularism makes religion an object of politics, whereby distinctions between religion and politics are incessantly blurred as soon as they are drawn. Religious claims are thus viewed as potentially political or personal in nature to the extent that any use of religion for political purposes is perceived as inauthentic (Agrama, 2012).

Accusations of inauthenticity and of using Islam for political and personal gain are often encountered in post-Soviet Russia. In Soviet times, Islam was understood in terms of an ‘ideology’ that would soon be replaced by a national awakening (Frank, 2001: 10). Not only specific religious forms but ‘religion’ itself was delegitimised as a historical category. At the same time, certain religious forms, such as a reformist Islam, were viewed as more compatible with Soviet modernity, although these forms of Islam are today paradoxically perceived as ‘non-traditional’ in Russia. When thinking of normative discourses on Islam in Russia and the way in which we should approach them, it is necessary to interrogate the nature of secular power and what it does. Following Agrama (2012), we can think of the normative power of secularism less by reference to the actual norms it seeks to enforce than by examining the way in which it constantly raises the question of the legitimacy and ‘authenticity’ of forms of religiosity.

Recent debates in the sociology and anthropology of Islam have centred on the relevance and usefulness of the concept of ‘everyday Islam’ as a scholarly approach to studying Muslim lives. Everyday Islam scholarship (Abenante and Cantini, 2014; Marsden, 2005; Schielke, 2009; Debevec and Schielke, 2012) has emerged as a critique of what has been identified as an overemphasis on pious Muslims, ethical self-cultivation (Hirschkind, 2006; Mahmood, 2005) and ideals of perfection in religious conduct. In the words of Fadil and Fernando (2015), who provide a critique of this scholarship, the everyday Islam approach can be understood as an attempt to attend to the incoherence, doubts and inconsistencies in ‘actual’ Islamic practices, beyond the ideal of adherence to Islamic norms. ¹ In their critical engagement with the concept of ‘everyday Islam’, Fadil and Fernando (2015: 64–65) point to the fact that the notion of ethical self-cultivation in the works of Mahmood (2005) and Hirschkind (2006) allows for the provincialisation of secular concepts, categories and attachments by making secularism and secularity an object of inquiry. These observations draw attention to the fact that secular lives cannot be understood simply as natural. Indeed, one effect of secular power is its ability to make certain religious lives appear potentially extraordinary or in need of legitimation. If we think of the debate on everyday Islam when considering the normative discourses on Islam currently at work in Russia, normativity appears to be more connected to secular power than to religious ideals of proper Islamic conduct, even though the Russian state cannot be considered ‘secular’, as Kovalskaya (2020) and Vicini (2020) point out in this issue. Hence, categories such as ‘traditional Islam’ may be perceived as disconnected from the way in which certain Muslims live their lives and understand the Islamic religion. Two contributions to the issue (Gradskova, 2020 and Benussi, 2020) point to the disciplinary power of the Soviet state, which aimed to create new secular subjects, for example through the emancipation campaigns analysed by Gradskova. Benussi portrays an elder generation in Tatarstan, which initiated what later became a halal boom and for whom retirement signified a relinquishment of the model of the good, secular Soviet citizen. Secularism in contemporary Russia is naturally very different from secularism as atheism in Soviet times; nevertheless, we can observe a persistent tendency to regulate the religious domain, for example through the concept of ‘traditional religions’ and the use of the label ‘sect’ to define certain religious movements (see Kovalskaya, 2020).

The debate on everyday Islam points to the relevance of studying Muslim lives through the lens of notions of ambiguity, uncertainty and even failure. At the same time, certain scholars have drawn attention to the possibility of creating yet another dichotomy by opposing the domains of normativity to that of the ‘everyday’ (Deeb, 2015). Furthermore, the everyday can be associated with secular life (Hirschkind, 2014), which obscures the extent to which secularism ultimately also exhibits a normative and disciplinary potential. This special issue aims to show how normative discourses and everyday life do not correspond to separate realms but are rather interwoven in the way Muslims constantly negotiate between the ambiguities contained in their lives and both religious and secular normative expectations.

De-secularisation and the (re)appearance of Muslim spaces

The process of secularising religious spaces in the Soviet Union was evident in the desecration of mosques, which were converted into libraries, factories and storage spaces. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, new Muslim spaces that reveal the different facets of Islamic life in Russia have (re)appeared.

In her contribution on Soviet emancipation campaigns, Gradskova discusses how the Bolsheviks viewed Islam (through the prism of certain dichotomies) as ‘backward’, in particular through the image of the ‘Muslim woman of the East’. The project of emancipation was one of releasing the Muslim woman from her alleged seclusion (zatvornichestvo), which was represented as her confinement to the narrow domestic space or the ‘female world’ (zhenskii mir), ‘the world of domestic animals and crying children’. In this imagery, Muslim women were seen as ‘closed off’, hidden from public view, not only through their confinement to the house and household activities but also through their covered bodies. The emancipation of the Muslim woman was portrayed as a fight against this seclusion – one that would allow women to enter the bright space of Soviet modernity. New spaces that were created for the ‘emancipated woman’ included clubs and courses to teach women skills to be used in agricultural work and various handicrafts. Schools and libraries were also used as new spaces of this sort, as were nurseries, which reveals the extent to which the new spaces of modernity remained partially gendered. As Gradskova notes, nurseries also represented the extent to which the new spaces entered into by Muslim woman were associated with science and hygiene. The Soviet emancipation project sought to draw a clear line between tradition or religious backwardness and modernity. Hence, it did not consider debates on women that were being held within Muslim communities and among Jadid scholars, who viewed Islam as compatible with modernity.

In his discussion of the halal boom in Tatarstan since the fall of the Soviet Union, Benussi also refers to the process of relegating and confining Islam to certain narrow spheres in Soviet times. Religion existed in those spheres that were associated with ‘backwardness’ or the ‘female domestic domain’ such as rurality, the household and old age. The existence of these spheres shows that although the Soviet atheistic project sought to clearly demarcate the lines between modernity and religion (viewed as ‘tradition’), certain Muslims experienced these boundaries as fluid in the sense that they cultivated different, but simultaneously held, identities. As Benussi notes, older Tatars experienced their retirement as a relinquishment of the dominant model of socialist personhood. The retreat of religion into the privacy of family life allowed for the cultivation of different selves to the extent that it did not prevent participation in the public sphere.

If we think of the process of de-secularisation since the fall of the Soviet Union in terms of the (re)creation of Muslim spaces, we can ask what de-secularisation means in post-Soviet Russia. Is de-secularisation experienced as deprivatisation, re-enchantment, ‘Islamisation’ or the ‘halalisation’ of different spheres? Looking more closely at what Muslims in Russia live, experience and perceive as Muslim space(s), we can further ask how these spaces are formed, how they emerge and how they are maintained. Can they be seen as ethical realms? Do these spaces open up to sacredness, to an encounter with the divine? Do they alter the way in which Muslims experience their selves? How are they related to the cultivation and emergence of particular Muslim identities? Furthermore, we can also ask how these spaces, as ethical realms, are related to other realms. Can Muslim spaces be seen as counter-spaces?

If we consider the halal landscapes in Dagestan studied by Kaliszewska (2020) and the halal infrastructure developing in Tatarstan (Benussi), we find that in both cases, these spaces facilitate religious conduct. As noted by Benussi, they allow for the extension of religious observance beyond the private or domestic sphere. By facilitating an Islamic way of life, halal spaces such as those built by Dagestani entrepreneurs can also be seen as a counterpoint, as an alternative to spaces that are viewed as ‘non-ethical’. Nevertheless, these ‘non-ethical’ spaces, in relation to which halal landscapes form a counterpoint in Dagestan, cannot be clearly associated with a secular realm and may be different for each Muslim. In general, they are associated with the notion of ‘sistema’, a corrupt system of ties that arose in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. Halal landscapes form a more moral realm compared to what are perceived to be social ties and practices related to corruption. At the same time, Kaliszewska uses the term ‘halal landscape’ to indicate that these landscapes are unique to each individual and not clearly separated and bounded to the extent that they are formed through various networks in which clans may also play a role. The networks formed on the basis of halal businesses do not encompass observant Muslims exclusively, as non-observant Muslims and non-Muslims are also part of their clientele. The degree to which a halal business network encompasses other types of networks will depend on each entrepreneur. Certain practices (such as the consumption of alcohol on the business site) are excluded from these spaces, while other practices (such as daily prayer) will be accommodated. Certain temporal boundaries are also part of the halal landscape, such as those formed by daily prayers and Muslim celebrations, and these will dictate the relationship between entrepreneurs and clients. Non-Muslim or non-observant clients have to enter another temporality, while observant clients can perform their ablutions and prayers in the halal shop, which then becomes an extension of the religious space of the mosque or the domestic space. In certain businesses, it is the entrepreneur who accommodates secular temporality by ‘making up for prayers later’. The Islamic temporality thus unites halal entrepreneurs and may demand of certain clients that they adjust to it.

While the halal landscapes of entrepreneurs share common elements, the different ways in which they are realised point to the centrality of individual religious trajectories in post-Soviet Russia. Each halal landscape is unique and interwoven with other realms. The example of Dagestan shows that the understandings and experiences of Islamic ethics are contextual. The meaning of the Islamic term halal goes beyond the notion of ‘what is permissible’ in the Dagestani context as it refers to the ‘avoidance of deception and usury, promotion of honesty and observance in the workplace, payment of zakat as well as knowledge about these issues’. Halal spaces not only facilitate religious conduct – allowing Muslim people to live their religion in diverse circumstances – but also form an alternative counter-space to what is perceived as an immoral economic and legal system. In the emic understanding of halal, honesty does not concern state laws and paying taxes (a secular legal order) as this order is not perceived as ‘just’ or ‘moral’. At the same time, as noted above, halal landscapes do not represent a rejection of or distancing from the secular order, as the networks formed in halal entrepreneurship also include non-Muslim and non-observant clients and entrepreneurs.

In Oparin’s ethnography of migrant healers (Oparin 2020), the purified spaces formed by the recitation of the Quran and exorcisms practiced by the mullah also represent an alternative to impure urban locations that can be associated with city life. Interestingly, however, the space that is formed is only temporal; it exists for the purposes of exorcism and must be accommodated to the daily life of migrants; thus, even the backseat of a car on a Moscow street or a construction site can be an Islamic space of healing. The creativity with which migrant healers and patients integrate exorcism practices into their urban lives reveals the novel ways in which Islamic spaces have been incorporated into Moscow’s landscape. Islamic healing practices transform space, revealing the dynamism and inventiveness involved in inscribing onto an impure city landscape a ritually purified space, even if only a temporal one. ² Oparin’s ethnographic work alerts us further to the centrality of the notion of space for Muslim migrants in large Russian cities to the extent that they constantly face its scarcity. Scarcity of space is not only a problem for Muslim, religious spaces (for example the lack of mosque space in Moscow) but also a daily reality faced by migrants more generally, many of whom share single rooms in the capital’s suburban apartments. In these adverse conditions, which characterise Moscow’s urban infrastructure, Muslim spaces are thus formed temporally; rather than being fixed, they can exist, for example, in the time of prayer.

Muslim spaces and Muslim selves

What is the connection between Muslim spaces and the formation, emergence and cultivation of particular Muslim selves and identities? Just as halal spaces and landscapes are interwoven with other realms, Muslims in Russia inhabit various identities and forms of personhood. As Henkel (2007) notes in his study on the location of Islam in Istanbul, Muslim spaces, practices and ways-of-doing possess an evocative power, reminding the believer of the Islamic tradition. Muslim spaces thus transform being to the extent that a Muslim physical infrastructure will remind the Muslim believer of God and of his/her religious duties. When considering the transformation that Muslim interiors effect on the believer in Istanbul, Henkel (2007) also observes that his Muslim interlocutors transform their beings only in part and retain different identities to the extent that their lifeworlds are not entirely Islamic. The same can be said of Muslims in Russia, who evolve in different, not clearly separated spheres.

Furthermore, Muslim spaces will act in different ways on the believer depending on how s/he relates to the Islamic tradition. The nature of Muslim spaces will change with the experiences and perceptions of Muslim believers. Thus, pilgrimage sites are not clearly associated with the Islamic tradition by members of the halal movement studied by Benussi in Tatarstan. Pilgrimage sites, where saints are buried, do not have the same evocative power for them as they do for Muslims who believe in and experience the blessings radiated by these sacred places. In these manifold ways of conceiving of and experiencing a similar space, we find that boundaries that may exist within Muslim communities and may or may not reflect dominant discursive dichotomies occasionally result in spatialised divisions. These divisions, which become more visible by playing out in specific places, are particularly salient in the mosque space. Indeed, the mosque space can become a site where various forms of prayer co-exist and where differences with regard to prayer performance become visible. Thus, Islamic prayer has become increasingly ‘policed’ in mosques in Russia, where imams have voiced disagreement with the forms of prayer adopted by certain mosque attendees. The Islamic prayer is officially performed in accordance with the Hanafi madhhab for Volga-Ural Muslims and with the Shafi’i madhhab for most North Caucasus Muslims. Hence, the mosque becomes a site where prayers are corrected for various reasons, not only as a result of a particular ‘orthodoxy’ but also because some Muslims may be seen by other mosque attendees as novices lacking knowledge of Islam. Mosques in Russia often display boards indicating proper Islamic dress, and many offer guidance on how to perform the Islamic prayer, the Hanafi madhhab prayer in the case of mosques in Moscow and the Volga-Ural region. Three contributions to this special issue (Yusupova, 2020; Benussi, 2020; Oparin, 2020) examine different approaches to the mosque space and the possible disputes or disagreements between believers that may arise in this setting. In Yusupova’s study of the mosques and mahallahs in a Tatar village, a conflict erupts in a mosque when a Muslim newcomer corrects the prayer performance of a young man from the village. The study reveals how mosques are also places of religious authority, where a particular religious ‘orthodoxy’ may be enforced. The study also shows how Muslim believers in Tatarstan may reproduce certain discursive dichotomies when facing different views of the religion. They frame the conflict by reference to the categories of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ Islam while remaining vague on the exact religious behaviour or religious understandings that belong to these categories. ³ In his ethnography of healing among Muslim migrants in Moscow, Oparin shows that Central Asian mullahs have to negotiate their access to the mosque space, the administration and leadership of which is performed by Tatar religious officials. The Central Asian mullahs thus perform Quran recitation beyond the walls of the mosque. As visible and public religious spaces, mosques may become formal settings in contrast to more ‘informal’ or ‘non-official’ (and often more hidden) settings, for example the urban sites in which migrant mullahs perform healing. Central Asian migrants have thus expanded the notion of Muslim space and Islamic knowledge beyond the institutionalised religious space of mosques and Islamic educational establishments. Oparin reveals the presence of boundaries that separate more informal Islamic spaces constituted by healing practices or halal networks from the formality of mosque settings (see also Turaeva, 2019). The necessity of negotiating access to the mosque and its exclusion of certain practices or individuals shows how the conceptual boundaries that are formed in official discourses are materialised. At the same time, it reveals the vagueness of these normative divides and the way in which Muslims circumvent and redefine them. Hence, the urban exorcism practices of Central Asian mullahs can be viewed as ‘popular Islam’, as folk traditions and thus as ‘traditional Islam’, but they still appear to be beyond the scope of what is considered state-approved Islam. As Oparin relates, certain imams in Moscow mosques have expressed scepticism towards these rituals. Certain mullahs, however, have found a way to legitimise or ‘formalise’ their Islamic knowledge by pursuing an education at official Islamic institutes as a way to protect their religious practices from possible questioning by state organs.

In the context of Tatarstan, Benussi further studies different views and experiences of the Muslim sacred space formed by the mosque, exploring how the older generation views mosques as sacred spaces to be entered into with deference while his halal Muslim informants take a more relaxed approach. These differences in the perception and experience of sacredness in relation to space also point to the different ways in which Muslims in Russia relate to the self. These different experiences of sacredness also show that de-secularisation can take different forms, understood by some as re-enchantment and by others as the kind of deprivatisation process studied by Casanova (1994).

In the analysis of different conceptions and experiences of the Muslim self, we encounter a notion of space more in the sense of the inner realm (Benussi) or of the connection of embodied practices and bodily experiences to an otherworldly realm (Oparin). To approach these different facets of the Muslim self, we can refer to Charles Taylor’s distinction between the pre-modern ‘porous’ and the modern ‘buffered’ self (Taylor, 2007; see also Abenante and Vicini, 2017 on the inner self in the Islamic tradition and modern discourses). As evidenced in Benussi’s discussion of the ethical work on the self, performed by representatives of the halal movement, the reformist understanding of human existence caused both a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between God and believer and a shift towards individualism by stressing moral self-formation. This new Muslim self, differed from previous Islamic identities, which were more deeply embedded in communal structures, due to its inward-looking and self-reflective tendencies. The influence of these changes on the rationalisation of the religious sphere is difficult to overestimate. In their everyday lives, individuals from halal youth circles are not seriously impacted by the apparitions and manifestations associated with the invisible realm. In its boundedness, this alternative Muslim self is not conceived as permeable to the influence of otherworldly beings. The above characterisation demonstrates the extent to which it differs from a notion of self, perceived mostly in relational terms. At the same time, Oparin’s ethnography of Muslim migrants who live modern, urban lives complicates the understanding of the ‘porous self’ as ‘pre-modern’.

In the exorcism practices analysed by Oparin, we find an association between the inner, purified state of the mullah and the ritual space opened up through recitation of the Quran. The pure inner state of the mullah allows him to create a purified ritual space and to perform the work of expelling jinns from the patient by transforming his/her inner state. Ultimately, the patient will heal only if s/he submits to the power of God and adheres more strictly to Islamic religious conduct. His/her state as an observant believer will keep jinns at bay. In the case of exorcism, we find a clear correspondence between inner and outer space to the extent that purity is the condition that allows the work of exorcism and the transformation of the patient to be performed. A mullah may be weakened when he is in an impure environment; he may be unable to purify it and thus to perform the necessary healing. The study of exorcism practices reveals the centrality of religion as a means of giving strength to migrants living in alien environments.

The same correspondence exists in the self-cultivation techniques employed by the halal Muslims studied by Benussi. Their inner space is a battleground for the fight against animal instincts (the nafs) that need to be tamed and controlled, but unlike those who seek the help of exorcists, they do not struggle to shake off the influence of evil forces. The outward equivalent of inner space is public space, where they move freely without feeling obliged to hide their religious disposition. The halal landscape, we might say, encompasses both public and inner space, with the physical body dividing both spheres. To gain the upper hand in the struggle that takes place internally, the body becomes an object of measures intended to increase one’s discipline in religious (prayer and other practices) and secular (physical training) terms.

Conclusion

The ethnographic studies in this issue raise the question of how the relationship between Islam and secularism is being reconfigured in post-Soviet Russia. The ethnographies of Benussi and Oparin reveal the different facets of de-secularisation. In Benussi, we see the persistence of the religious experience as lived in an inner realm and the concomitant return of religion to the public sphere (also in a material sense) with the halal boom. In Oparin’s contribution, we witness a process of re-enchanting the world through the ritual purification of certain urban sites and interaction with the otherworldly. The existence of an otherworldly realm also draws attention to the ongoing process of the (re)sacralisation and (re)creation of Muslim spaces through pilgrimage rituals (see Di Puppo and Schmoller, 2019a, 2019b).

Several contributions to the issue explore the tradition–modernity divide through which Islam was framed in the early Soviet period (Gradskova). The studies of halal Muslims (Benussi), Muslim migrants (Oparin) and Dagestani entrepreneurs (Kaliszewska) reveal different facets of the modern Islamic lifestyle, in which Islam is accommodated to the demands of secular and urban lives. Oparin shows how modernity (or a modern outlook) does not prevent the migrant patients he encounters from seeking forms of healing that would be considered ‘traditional’. They do not experience these rituals as a return to a world of traditions; instead, these visits to the mullahs appear to be integrated into their lives as urban migrants in Moscow. At the same time, the healing rituals reveal an ambivalent view of modern life, as certain sites that form the background of the lives of some of these migrants (such as nightclubs) are understood as particularly propitious for jinns. The halal entrepreneurs in Dagestan may adopt a market competition logic when growing their businesses, for example by using the Islamic religion as a way to transcend clan obligations when hiring a fellow observant Muslim instead of a relative, who may drink at work. The Dagestani halal entrepreneurs further redefine what it means to be a good Muslim by creating halal landscapes, which, however, should not be viewed as simply opposed to a secular order.

The different ethnographic studies in this issue show that Muslims continue to create spaces that allow them to live the ambiguities that are present in their daily religious lives. The process of becoming Muslim is not a simple transition from one realm to another; it involves the coexistence and overlapping of different worlds and different selves. Muslim lives in Russia are composed of different modes of being, for example in the networks formed by halal entrepreneurs and in the coexistence of different modes of healing, traditional and modern, in migrant lives. Instead of appearing as a straight line that guides Muslim believers away from the ambiguities and uncertainties of modern life, for example by clearly separating halal religious spaces from other non-halal spaces, we find that Islam in Russia is lived more in terms of accommodating the ambiguities that are inherent in these constantly evolving religious experiences and trajectories. As a result, Muslims in Russia live their religion with creativity, dynamism and inventiveness, interweaving different spaces and carving out new ones so as to reconcile their evolving religious paths with both Islamic and secular normative expectations.