Between the spaces: Experts on Islam in Russia

Introduction: Secularity, Islam and experts

The Russian Federation is defined as a secular space, or, to be more precise, a ‘secular state’, by its Constitution. ¹ The Russian term used in legislative documents and public discourse – svetskii – is closer by its etymology and its use to the word laic, as the counterpart of ecclesiastic. In recent academic writings, the loanword with the same root as the word secular – sekuliarnyi – is being spread. This vocabulary and legal definitions are partly inherited from Soviet legal tradition and partly from American and European legislation (Verkhovsky, 2008).

Starting from the end of the 1990s, the secular character of the Russian state has been questioned by a certain group of political actors, on the one hand, and by academic scholars, on the other. One of the main reasons for this was the growing political activity of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the adoption of the law ‘On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations’ (1997), where some religions are mentioned to the detriment of others. Some scholars even developed the thesis of desecularization in Russia (Karpov, 2013; Luehrmann, 2005).

This debate on distinction between the secular and the religious in contemporary Russia cannot be understood without analysing the role played by Islam and Muslims in public discourse. Avoiding a too broad interpretation of the term identity (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000), this article is focusing on the categories shaped by experts regarding Muslim identity, in relation to secular and religious spaces. I argue that these categories are highly inspired by academic and expert knowledge produced in spaces considered as secular institutions by default, such as universities or the Russian Academy of Science.

The relation between the religious and the secular is articulated through the activity of various actors. State institutions elaborate legislation and religious policy, which can differ according to topic and to the participants in the process. Religious organizations activate their resources to contribute to elaboration of norms, policies and public opinion. However, this article will focus on the field of expertise (Eyal and Buchholz, 2010), a space of mediators between state and believers; public intellectuals and specialists invited to give their opinion.

To analyse the production of Muslim categories by secular actors, I will focus on experts on Islam in Russia, i.e. the producers of knowledge on Islam solicited by public institutions and religious organizations. Though the notion of competence is important for a common definition of an expert, I will stress the pragmatic dimension of expertise where expert knowledge is used for action (Delmas, 2011). This impact is possible in the context of various situations of expertise (Trépos, 1996), and I will focus on three types of situations: (1) court expertise for tribunals during the trials on ‘religious extremism’; (2) expertise for commissions on religious literature, consultation of governmental representatives and religious organizations and (3) public expertise for media. Various actors are invited for these activities, and I will analyse their different profiles in the first section. Most of them have an academic background, but there are also experts working in public institutions or in jurisprudence.

In this article, I will focus on experts who do not make up a part of the Orthodox clergy or Muslim establishment. However, I take into account the epistemological risk of this division, because many actors may cherish a religious conviction. Furthermore, as we will see in the first section, some profiles are situated between the secular and the religious professional fields and challenge the boundary between them. Indeed, many experts on Islam engaged in religion and their views are influenced by different religious institutions, Orthodox or Muslim (Kovalskaya, 2017). The link to Orthodoxy gives us an interesting path to analyse the expertise on Islam in Russia, insofar as Orthodox expertise may be used not only by secular institutions, but by Muslim actors as well.

In this paper, we will take the notion of expertise in its broader definition without restricting the discussion to the narrow, professional meaning of this term, i.e. expertise of court cases in a legal context (Shterin and Dubrovsky, 2019). However, it is precisely this kind of expertise, which is crucial to the construction of the reputation of expertise on religion in general. Indeed, invited by prosecutors or by advocates, experts’ contributions constitute part of the file and can be used as a justification of court decision. In the cases where different experts express contradictory statements, the trial is generally conducted accusingly, as it happened in the case of a trial on supposed members of the Hizb al-Tahrir organization in 2016. Many trials on religious topics provoke public debates, which express a certain public resistance towards general religious policy.

As already stated, the contemporary understanding of secularity in Russia is formed by the Soviet tradition of interpreting the secular. If the Soviet Constitution (1924) only mentions the separation of state and church as a characteristic of the Soviet state, the practical realization of religious politics went beyond the neutrality of the state towards religious organizations and intervened into the life of religious institutions, subjecting numerous believers to physical repression, including a large number of Muslims. The knowledge on Islam and on religion in general has been influenced by the official approach of scientific atheism conceptualized in the 1960s (Shtyrkov, 2010; Smolkin, 2018).

The use of academic knowledge by political actors is not specific to the post-Soviet period and space. Soviet authorities were already interested in developing academic arguments for their politics as well as analogous actors in other political systems (Dudoignon, 2014; Said, 1979). Still, expertise and experts are post-Soviet notions, which developed in the context of a re-emergence of religions in public space and the necessity for the state to deal with religions in public. This public component is crucial for the analysis of the relation between the state, experts and believers (Casanova, 1994) in the context of the Russian version of secularity.

On the other hand, the visibility of Islam is related to the activity of experts and to the public expertise in general. Of course, this activity is not the reason for the higher visibility of Muslims after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, it defines, to a certain degree, the way Muslims are represented in the public sphere and even how they represent themselves to the non-Muslim other. Indeed, some of these experts, such as Renat Bekkin, have a rather prominent voice in the media.

Through the analysis of the expertise of Islam, we can also see that the relation between the state and Islam is not the same as the relation between the state and Russian Orthodoxy. The latter is the dominant religion having important administrative support and maintaining a concurrent relationship with secularism as it is understood by Russian anticlerical circles; proposing an alternative conception of society. Muslim organizations, on the federal level in particular, limit their goals to obtaining certain public support and trying to construct a good image of Islam (Alekseev, 2004). This is because of important links between the expertise of Islam in post-Soviet Russia and the official struggle against religious terrorism, largely associated with Islam. Therefore, the Orthodox Church has resources to challenge the idea of secularity in Russia, at least as it is perceived by a part of non-Orthodox actors. On the contrary, the association of Islam with security issues limits the margins of Muslim activity, which is maintained within the confines of secularism. This imbalance concerns the universalistic ambitions of these two religions where Russian Orthodoxy pretends to offer some common values for all citizens of Russia and proponents of Islam, on the contrary, limit themselves to regional issues or, in some cases, to the Russian Muslim world and ‘ethnic Muslims’.

Analysing this post-Soviet case, we should not exaggerate the specificity of the post-Soviet expertise of Islam. Of course, this space and this period have their particularities linked to recent Russian history and the character of its evolution. At the same time, we observe similar processes in other parts of the world. The growing presence of Muslims in Europe and in the United States is accompanied by the construction of Islam as the object of expertise (Marzouki, 2011). In Russia, these processes are accompanied by the domestication of Islam where the latter is considered an object of governance (Aitamurto, 2019; Braginskaia, 2012). In many cases, the expertise of Islam is directly related to the question of secularity, as in the hijab debate in France in 2005 (Marzouki, 2011) or to security issues (Stampnitzky, 2001). If we continue the question put by Kaarina Aitamurto (2019: 209) on ‘who has the right to speak for the community’ to define ‘national Islam’, we will modify it this way: Who has the right to justify the existence of ‘national Islam’ outside the community? How does this external intervention deal with the distinction of the religious and the secular space?

Experts on Islam as mediators between state and Muslim organizations

The analysis of experts’ profiles tells us a lot about the basis of the expertise of Islam, its conceptual potential and communication styles used for expertise. Having an idea of this intellectual diversity is necessary to understand different strategies of expertise and the core of the relationship between academic community, state and religious representatives. It also helps us to answer the question: who forms the knowledge on Islam, used by the officials and spread by the media? I will approach the diverse and heterogeneous expert community in three segments, based on the idea of their main symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1976).

The first segment is formed by experts with a public profile, which is defined by their direct relation to the state. This profile is represented by state officials working for secular institutions specializing on religion on the federal and regional levels. An official working for a committee on religious cults is a typical example of this expert type. Having their background in scientific atheism (for the Soviet generation) or public management (for the post-Soviet one), these experts have obtained a practical knowledge of religious issues. In other words, like other experts, these workers of state councils have their interactive expertise (Collins and Evans, 2007) in religion. It means that they are able to discuss religious issues with believers without practicing any religion themselves. At the same time, these officials have the legitimacy to solicit academic experts to give their opinion if a local council on religious issues needs some more detailed information. These experts thus have a double role of expertise customers and expertise producers.

Besides the officials of councils on religion, there are other types of experts who function within the state segment. Even if experts construct their profile criticizing the state activity, the state segment still attracts them because the state is their main interlocutor. International Crisis Group, a subsidiary of which existed in Russia up to 2014, could be considered an example of this type of expert. Even if the announced goal of the Crisis Group was ‘working to prevent wars and shape policies that will build a more peaceful world’ ² and is not directly linked to religion, the actors of the group de facto became experts invited to talk publicly about religious issues, in particular in the North Caucasus. Being within state agencies or against, these experts appeal to the state approved vocabulary of ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ Islam and are closest to the function of mediators between state and Muslim organizations.

The second segment is represented by academic specialists on religion who participate in the construction of expert knowledge on religion within secular academic institutions. These experts mostly do research and teaching and are punctually invited to give their opinion or write an expert judgement. In post-Soviet Russia, such experts are represented by specialists on Islam with the background of an orientologist (following Dudoignon, 2014, I prefer this term to orientalist), a historian or an ethnographer or by specialists of religious studies, partly with a background in Soviet scientific atheism. Some of these experts have a certain visibility in the media, but their effective impact passes through the consultation and expertise provided for the officials and the courts.

Experts who are religiously oriented constitute the third segment. In most cases, they are lay and do not have any clerical position inside a religious organization, even if some of them can combine their lay position with a job paid by a religious institution. Experts of this group explicitly express this religious orientation, allowing us to label them as religiously committed actors. Well-known representatives of this group of experts include the executive director of the Centre for Human Rights of World Russian People’s Council Roman Silant’ev and the professor in ‘sectology’ of the Saint Tikhon’s Orthodox University Alexander Dvorkin. Both are members of the State Council of Expertise of Religion (Kovalskaya, 2017).

Although all these experts participate in the knowledge construction on Islam on different levels, each profile has its own history and evolution. The ‘state’ profile and the ‘academic’ one both have their respective equivalents in the Soviet period. The former was represented by the plenipotentiaries for religious affairs dependent on the Council for religious affairs and the latter by specialists on scientific atheism and religions (Anderson, 1994) as well as orientologists. The pro-confessional expert profile is a post-Soviet phenomenon. Indeed, even if an open manifestation of religious engagement became possible in the late 1980s, officials manifested their interest in engaged confessional knowledge only starting with the mid-1990s.

As part of this paper, studying the experts’ profiles is interesting for us from two points of view. First, the experts’ changing itineraries and backgrounds themselves show the blurring of the border between the secular and the religious. This process does not automatically confirm the desecularization thesis, but it rather questions the relevance of the religious/secular opposition. If the Soviet state limits the possible pool of experts to specialists that explicitly manifest their anti-clerical position, the post-Soviet officials’ preferences slide to experts with hybrid profiles. Several specialists on religion with explicit Orthodox engagement and positions within the ROC became quite well known through the national mass media. Some of them received a promotion in official structures on religious affairs. For instance, the above-mentioned Roman Silant’ev who is one of the most media-recognizable opinion makers on Islam works as professor at Moscow State Linguistic University and director of the Human Rights Center of the Russian People’s Council, an organization with a nationalist agenda created by the Moscow Patriarchate. With a dual status of academic and employee of the Moscow Patriarchate, Silant’ev applies the methods of the school of Orthodox missionaries to the study of Islam. In particular, he analyses the religious fact through the notion of sect, which he considers scientifically appropriate: ‘Christianity could have been a sect … if it were not the true religion’, we hear him say in an interview from November 2012. The missionary potential of Silant’ev came to the fore during the writing of the book Guide of Islam for Christian missionaries, published by the diocese of Ekaterinburg (Silant’ev et al., 2016).

In 2009, this expert entered into the Expert Council for State Religious Studies Expertise of the Department of Justice. The Council was conceived in 1998 as a consulting structure composed of academic specialists on religion, but starting from 2009, it included many religiously committed actors. The new chief of the Council, the above-mentioned Alexander Dvorkin, known for his sect-struggling ambitions, is a professor in the St Tikhon Orthodox University. ³

Blurred profiles became called for on the local level as well. Lawyers engaged in the monitoring of religious affairs expertise have highlighted the participation of Orthodox priests in the local expertise on religious extremism, Muslim cases included (Pchelintsev, 2009; Zagrebina, 2012). At the same time, in the regions with a Muslim majority, local authorities can work closely with Islamic experts. This is the case of Makhachkala (Dagestan) where an imam with theological education has been the main expert of the local Committee for Religious Affairs, indicating whether a piece of religious literature contains an extremist background. ⁴

Consulting the state is not the only function of these and other experts. They also play an important role in knowledge transmission in two directions: from believers to the state and from the state to believers. Sometimes, this secular knowledge has an impact on refinement of every-day categories, such as traditional Islam, maddhab or waqf. According to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, experts on Islam accompany the process of objectivation of a new political reality of Islam (Berger and Luckmann, 1971).

Challenging the border between the secular and the religious: The religious construction of a secular vocabulary

Expertise on religion deals directly with the classification of religious phenomena. In post-Soviet Russia, the classifying of religions on a legislative level started already at the beginning of the 1990s in reaction to the opening of borders for foreign religious organizations and the arrival of various Christian missionaries as well as an emergence of new religious groups within Russia. At that time, the ROC participated in the conceptualization of religious difference, especially between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox religious organizations, and its realization in the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations (1997), although it is important to mention that the final version of the Law of 1997 reflects an intense debate between pro-Orthodox and secularist actors and unites the claims of both sides, even if it may seem contradictory (Fagan, 2012).

This federal Law of 1997, but also some local laws, such as the Law on Missionary work in Belgorod region (1996, 2001), are still both stressing the role of Orthodoxy as a normative religion. This distinction between Orthodoxy and other Christians is reflected in numerous recent affairs where different Christian churches, alternative Orthodox churches included, are accused of being extremist organizations. In June 2015, for example, the leader of one of the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church situated in Gatchina, St Petersburg region, was interrogated by the local Office of the Public Prosecutor on the matter of being extremist and fomenting hate towards the ROC.

Many secular experts still insist on the necessity of categorizing religious organizations according to a religious criterion and thus distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ religions. In most cases, these are conservative and/or pro-Orthodox authors specializing in new Islamic movements. An expert from the Belgorod Committee for Religious Affairs told us that it was important for him to classify the new religious movements in order to distinguish them from the ‘cultural religion’. ⁵ This distinction between a ‘cultural religion’ and the others is transferred towards the analysis of Islam where new or alternative groups are labelled as ‘non-traditional’.

If we analyse the transfer of secular knowledge into the religious field in a detailed manner, we should first mention the concept of traditional Islam, which is the basis of contemporary norm construction in Russia. The notion of ‘traditional religions’ or ‘traditional Islam’ entered the vocabulary of Russian politics and religion at the end of the 1990s. Used in political vocabulary, the term traditional refers to the already mentioned 1997 law, which refers to certain ‘respected’ religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism) and Russian Orthodoxy, whose historical role is recognized separately. Yet, the term traditional is not mentioned in this law nor in any legislative act that followed it (Kovalskaya, 2013). Nevertheless, much used in the political and administrative discourse, the term now becomes customary in the management practices of religious associations and concrete believers (Di Puppo, 2019). This diffusion is due, at least in part, to the introduction of the notion in the speech of the experts who made a broad interpretation of it. The first public use of this term regarding Islam is ascribed to Mufti Talgat Tadjuddin (Akhmetkarimov, 2020). Still, the introduction of the term by a religious leader should not lead us to the idea of a religious meaning for it. This use of a word promoted by the Soviet state during the post-war period can be mostly explained by Tadjuddin’s Soviet background and less by his religious affiliation.

The development of the religious norm by the experts is very strongly related to the idea of a place, a locality. Although the Orthodox Church does not need to prove its traditional status in Russian space, pro-orthodox actors draw much attention to its links with the Russian world and Russian lands. Specifically, when the 1997 law ‘On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations’ was promulgated, the presence of such a religious association on Russian territory for at least 15 years was considered an essential criterion for granting it the status of ‘religious organization’ enjoying the freedom to exercise its faith and tax exemptions.

The situation is different for Islam. The official tendency to promote the ‘traditional Islam of Russia’ is in contradiction with the diversity of Islam actually practiced in the regions. For example, in Tatarstan, the majority of Muslims are followers of the Hanafi maddhab, while in the North Caucasus, the Shafi’i maddhab is more widespread. Rinat Nabiev, who served for several years as an expert and then director of the Council for Religious Affairs in Tatarstan, considers that ‘every Islam has an ethnic component’ which serves as a ‘base for traditional Islam’ as it was described in the ‘Encyclopaedia of Islam in the European East’ (Nabiev et al., 2004).

This academic definition is transferred into the religious field by a Tatar imam in his own way. The imam is Doctor of History, and he is sensitive to academic argumentation. At the same time, he completes the definition by religious meaning:

I will defend traditional Islam, because it is a heritage that was not developed by accident, it is related to a mentality, a geographical situation, a historical heritage. Islam in its present form has allowed people to survive and keep their religion. This one is self-sufficient, it does not need to be changed, one does not change a religious practice, a faith. ⁶

The current court expertise of religion follows the same pattern. An expert (PhD in History and Theology) regularly asked by the FSB on the issue of extremism thus formulates the criterion of distinction between traditional and non-traditional Islam: ‘I treat this question from the inside of Islam. [Traditional Islam] is the one that has always existed on this territory, the Hanafi madhhab. In Chechnya, it is the Shafi’i madhhab that is traditional’. ⁷ As a specialist in heterodox movements in Islam, this expert is not hostile to representatives of non-traditional Islam. Nevertheless, his expert opinion serves as a basis for security services for the exclusion of certain religious groups from the legal standard.

Even the most committed secularists with a Soviet Atheism background, who are generally opposed to current religious policies, nonetheless support the position of the authorities on the need to fight against influences from abroad. For instance, a well-known Dagestani sociologist considers that ‘the Dagestani Wahhabis have appeared, visibly, under an external influence. People came, like Khattab, ⁸ to organize themselves into armed bands supported by Arab money’. The same researcher will also defend the existence of a Salafist tradition peculiar to the North Caucasus. ⁹ The majority of experts express their distrust concerning religious education received abroad. The criterion of local space is extremely important not only to define a local tradition, but also to label religious organizations as foreign and extremist.

This secularized narrative on Islam and its standard practice in Russia partly has religious connotations. A large number of secular experts refer to Orthodoxy as a model to follow in the religious field. As a Tatar media expert told the author of these lines, ‘the Tatar clergy have learned a lot from the Orthodox’, and this particularity would allow them, in fact, to coexist with the Russians. ¹⁰ Muslim representatives adhere to this idea. As one of them said in the Moscow Islamic College, talking about Muslim educational activities: ‘we follow the Orthodox Christians’ way, as brothers and sisters. ¹¹ Official Muslim representatives aim to emulate the ROC as an institution with an important administrative capital.

In particular, we can feel this religious impact in the field of vocabulary (Kemper and Bustanov, 2012). As the sociologist Leokadiia Drobizheva put it, ‘even the judiciary (in connection with the Pussy Riot trial) began to use the ecclesiastical lexicon in their proceedings’. Orthodox religious vocabulary has been circulating since the turn of the century between disciplinary and thematic fields. An expert from the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies gave as an example the mufti Farid Salman, credited with having ‘introduced the orthodox lexicon’ into the Muslim vocabulary.

Sometimes, the religious and secular sources of secular experts’ vocabulary are intertwined. After the fall of the USSR, producers of academic knowledge about religion in Tatarstan became interested in the issue of Tatar Jadidism. This term is used to refer to the modernist movement among Turkish-speaking Muslims of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary definitions of Jadidism vary from a reforming movement in the cultural field to the reformism of Muslim law. After the fall of the USSR, Jadidism became the synonym for a Turkic or Tatar Islam in political circles. Presented as a soft Islam, this Turkic Islam is supposed to demonstrate a nonviolent Islam compatible with modernity. The peculiarities of Jadidism are interpreted through the ethnic factor.

In addition to this ethnicization of Jadidism, many historians insist on the Europeanness of the Tatars and their difference from Arabs. The argumentation of this belonging goes through its potential for enrichment and the rejection of Wahhabi austerity, in particular by ‘making business’ and leading a ‘wealthy’ life. Jadidism is thus presented as less ‘religious’ and more ‘secular’ or as more compatible with a secular, modern society. On the basis of his research on Tatar Jadidism, the head of the Marjani Institute of History, Rafael Hakimov developed the notion of Euroislam, which meant an Islam adapted to contemporary life in a non-Muslim environment, in the Russian Federation, perceived as a European state. In his essay ‘Where is our Mecca? Euroislam manifesto,’ Hakimov points to Europe as a source from where Tatars ‘drew wisdom and knowledge’. Hakimov justifies the creation of Euroislam by the Jadid tradition and, in particular, by interpreting in his own way the work of the Tatar Muslim thinker Abd an-Nasir al-Qursawi on interpretation of the Quran – ijtihad. Indeed, for Hakimov, the very broad interpretation of ijtihad understood as ‘an open, critical and progressive attitude’ is the basis of a modernized Islam, Euroislam.

However, this branch of academic knowledge on Islam was not successful among Tatar Muslims. The current Mufti of Tatarstan, Kamil Samigullin, claims Tatar qadimism (or traditionalism) as traditional Tatar Islam. His position corresponds to the widespread search, in Muslim religious circles, for an alternative to Hakimov’s neo-Jadidism. Still, we observe the attempts to question the strong difference between Jadids and Qadimis in post-Soviet Tatarstan, in particular by a Muslim thinker Valiulla Iakupov (Bustanov and Kemper, 2013: 832; Di Puppo and Schmoller, 2020), but also by some contemporary ‘religious political technologists’ (Kemper, 2019). On the other hand, Di Puppo and Schmoller (2020) mention the Sufi sheikh Zaynulla Rasulev who used a Jadid curriculum in his madrasa. These examples show us that the Jadid heritage is still solicited as a legitimating category, in spite of neo-qadimist tendencies.

What do regions tell us about expertise on Islam? Tatarstan and Dagestan compared

As said above, experts on Islam play the role of mediators between the state and Muslim organizations, translating secular into religious categories and vice versa. Still, this general trend should be questioned at a regional level. Indeed, the differences between regions with a Muslim majority play an important role in nuancing the analysis of expertise on Islam.

‘Islam of Russia’ promoted by accredited Muslim authorities from the Volga region and Moscow, and by pro-Orthodox experts, makes little room for the particular currents and practices of the North Caucasus. In Dagestan, it is the Shafi’i madhhab that dominates, with a very important presence of Sufism. Religious and secular experts have developed there an interpretation of what local Islam is that does not claim to be a Russian Islam. This Dagestani version is not imposed from a hegemonic centre, in ethnocentric terms, as from Moscow or Kazan for more northern regions. On the contrary, the emphasis here is on both the local and the international. ¹² To promote a Dagestani brand of traditional Islam, the chairman of the Dagestan Committee for Religious Affairs preferred to invite a Qatar-based theologian of Iraqi origin, Ali al-Qaradaghi to make a speech. His choice was justified by the international authority of the distinguished alim. ¹³ The official thus found a doctrinal solution to the problem of radicalization, the traditional Islam presented as that of the Prophet, interpreted in a perspective of concord between Muslims and non-Muslims. As Di Puppo wrote (2019: 326), Tatar Muslim officials invite some foreign Muslim scholars to give talks as well. Still, in comparison with Tatarstan, the invitation of foreign scholars in Dagestan is highly advertised and constructed as a true event.

In the academic field in Dagestan, experts are more critical towards the term traditional Islam. As my fieldwork in Dagestan showed, the Arabist Dmitrii Makarov who worked as a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow proposed his vision of the distinction between traditional and non-traditional Islam published in his book ‘Official and non-official Islam in Dagestan’ (Makarov, 2000). According to this research, the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ was essentially the question of loyalty towards the state. This book has become a reference in local academic and religious circles, in which this vision of the situation is shared, among Dagestani Salafists in particular. Indeed, Makarov’s book proposes a political interpretation of this division of Muslims on ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ grounds which is presented as religious in the public discourse. Many Salafists agree with this idea that the binary division between Muslims is used for political reasons and does not reflect any religious reality. ¹⁴

Those intellectuals who perpetuate the tradition of scientific atheism in the post-Soviet period and express their atheist convictions take up the argument on the religious roots of violence. At the same time, these experts always defend secularism understood more or less as a strong separation of the state from the religious field (i.e. the laïcité of separation as Baubérot and Milot, 2011, put it). However, unlike pro-Orthodox experts who are attentive to a particular affiliation of believers, these experts see the evil in religiosity in general. An openly atheist sociologist considers that even though ‘moderate Salafism still exists in Dagestan, […] Salafism is found to be a suitable base for organized forms [of crime]’. He criticizes the abandonment of the term ‘religious extremism’ under the pressure of the Muslim Spiritual Board, convinced of its relevance to the extent that extremism results, in his eyes, in an increase of religiosity.

Muslims may also oppose this transfer of secular notions into the religious field. It happens when the relationship to the religious norm is manifested in the debate over the causes of what is termed ‘religious extremism’. This last term is not accepted by all actors in this field. For example, several Muslim representatives propose to omit the word ‘religious’ to retain exclusively the term ‘extremism’ as used in Russian anti-extremist legislation. This notion remains though very frequent in the official discourse.

Despite the domination of the essentialist interpretation of extremism, a number of actors consider that radicalization is a social problem and that the ‘moderate’ forms of religious fundamentalism do not pose a danger to society. For sociologists from the Gaidar Institute, Irina Starodubrovskaia and Konstantin Kazenin, these facts stem from social phenomena rather than from doctrinal religious production. This point concerns, in particular, the rationality of moderate Salafists in their choice of the strategy to adopt in their economic and social behavior. The general message of the report of Starodubrovskaia and Kazenin is a recognition of the presumption of innocence of Salafists, who do not participate in physical violence and, if possible, to re-direct those involved in this violence towards a non-violent path. The internal causes of the radicalization of Muslims (especially the socio-economic situation) are presented as more important than ideological borrowing. This approach is radically opposed to the dominant interpretation, taken by the administration, that the main reasons for radicalization are, first and foremost, related to belonging to specific religious movements, reinforced by the impact of foreign missionaries.

Conclusion: Experts, space and the secular

If we go beyond the purely legal framework of secularism in Russia, we observe the shifting borders between the secular and the religious spaces. In this context, secular experts on Islam are not neutral actors: everyone reports their engagement during their work. Thus, some of the experts on Islam actively participate in the lobbying of the desecularizing tendencies, strongly inspired by the activity of the Orthodox Church. Muslim Spiritual Boards are concerned as well when these initiatives are favorable to them. This passing from the secular to the religious is carried out either by the post-Soviet generation of professional experts or by the bureaucratized expertise of administrators of cults who ‘exploit religion’ by transforming themselves into a pro-confessional secular mainstream.

The activity of experts on religion contributes directly, as in the case of the North Caucasus, to the construction of a religious normality. This normality, in accordance with the official understanding of a ‘national Islam’ promoted by the administration, is formulated by agents of the Russian state, researchers or Muslim representatives who are themselves often civil servants, if not paid by a government, federal or federated. This standard has a metropolitan version, disseminated throughout the Federation via the network of Cult Committees and by a number of experts.

Regional or local versions are also being developed by officials and Muslim representatives passing on expert knowledge. However, in regions such as Dagestan, we observe a certain autonomy from the federal centre where a local understanding of ‘good’ Islam is constructed. ¹⁵

The link between the academic contribution and religious interpretation of this mostly political conception of ‘national Islam’ is ambiguous. Religious representatives can be rather hostile towards secular experts’ conceptions of ‘traditional Islam’. And, at the same time, we observe the use of certain references to the academic community during our interviews. Apart from their interest in academic knowledge of religion and, in particular, the linguistic competence of Arabists, it also can be explained by them perceiving me as academic and therefore using academic terms when conversing with me.

The debate about the causes of violence associated with Islam, justified by religious argumentation, can be analysed from two angles. It reveals, on the one hand, contrary poles in the approach of the normative discourse. If an essentialist pole informs the problem of violence justified by religious constructions, a more constructivist pole designates this problem as social and secular. The experts of essentialist tendencies who dominate the landscape of politicized expertise act in the logic of exclusion based on religious or even doctrinal principles. Those experts who offer social explanations for violence seek to standardize ‘non-traditional’ actors to include them into the majority of citizens. Islam is thus completely dependent on the securitization of society, where ‘safe’ Islam is paradoxically less ‘religious’ (Di Puppo, 2019) and more secularized. In this strand, it is significant that the new rector of the Islamic Academy of Bolghar in Tatarstan Daniiar Abdrakhmanov is the former director of the Ufa-based Institute of religious security and religious education.

The coexistence of these opposing types of expertise oscillating between a secular and religious argumentation allows for a certain balance, a social space where the various actors contribute to opposite goals.

The comparison between Tatarstan and Dagestan shows us that this official discourse on what Islam should be has been rather differently implemented in the regions. Tatarstan seems to be closer to the federal version of ‘good’ Islam, taking into account the understanding of what national Islam should be, according to Orthodox Church circles. This version of ‘good’ Islam is directly linked to the idea of Tatar Islam and a localized Tatar cultural heritage. The Dagestani religious landscape gives us another perspective on the relationship between a local interpretation of Islam and the federal one. An explicit reference to transnational Islam is more welcome in Dagestan and becomes almost a necessity to legitimize a non-violent version of Islam among local youth. No link to any Orthodox Church categories is present in the discourse of local experts on Islam even if some Soviet categories are still being actively used (cf. Bobrovnikov, 2011).