The article presents a historical analysis of the formation and development of the early Hanafi school (‘aqida) from the 8th century to the early 14th century. It analyzes the evolution of methodological principles regarding doctrine established by Abu Ḥanifa and continued by al-Māturīdī. This work introduces a periodization of the main stages in the development of Ḥanafi doctrine. The study is based on the analysis of the key doctrinal texts from the previously mentioned period and contemporary historiography.

The article is devoted to the study of the Catherine’s Qur’ans in Russian and foreign historiography of the 18^th–20^th centuries. The sources for the study were Oriental, reference and academic literature, represented by the works of I. D. Michaelis (1717–1791), J. von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), I. G. Georgi (1729–1802), Ch. Ph. von Schnurrer (1742–1822), J.-Ch. Brunet (1780–1867), F. A. Ebert (1791–1834), L.-M. Langlés (1763–1824), L. Wachler (1767–1838), F. Rehm (1792–1847), G. Weil (1808–1889), J.Th. Zenker (1811–1884), S. de Sacy (1758–1838), L.-P.-E.-A. Sedillot (1808–1875), J. A. Muehleisen (1817–1881), T. Nöldeke (1836–1930), and-G.-T. Gresse (1814–1885), B. A. Dorn (1805–1881), A. E. Krymsky (1871–1942), I. Y. Krachkovsky (1883–1951) and others. This study is based on a chronological principle. Based on a comparative analysis, the author identifies reviews, research, and expert assessments of the St. Petersburg editions of the Qur’ans. This approach allows for a retrospective examination of the development of the Catherine’s Qur’ans as a research object, demonstrating the depth and aspects of their study in Western and Russian Oriental Studies. In his conclusions, the author notes that the St. Petersburg editions of the Qur’an serve as a central component in the interests of Western and Russian Orientalists as a scientific source. Additionally, the editions themselves have a multidisciplinary scope of study and a wide readership. Also, being a bibliographic rarity and a work of high publishing art, the involvement in which is determined by the role of the Russian mullah and calligrapher ‘Usman Ismail, the St. Petersburg editions of the Qur’an contain a double value. The fi rst value gives them the quality of a religious (Muslim) book monument, and the second value is special cultural artefact.

The article is based on newly discovered archival fi les and informs on attempts of believers to obtain the permission of the authorities to teach Muslim doctrine in Moscow mosques – Zamoskvoretskaya mosque and 2^nd mosque in Vypolzov Lane during 1928–1929, as well as, the reaction of governing institutions to these appeals. The issue of the Muslim religious education and its state in Moscow before the Russian Revolution of 1917 is considered. In addition, the author provides biography facts of the spiritual leaders of the 2^nd mosque in Vypolzov Lane, who were subjected to repressions in 1928–1931, and reports on the 1929 elections, that were held to elect new leaders of the mosque instead of repressed heads. The copies of archival data likewise accompany the study as an appendix and allow the author to judge the progress and nature of these elections.

The article is devoted to an analysis of the formation and evolution of the centers of Russian Muslims within the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European Part of the USSR and Siberia) during the 20th century. A significant part of the primary sources was obtained during the work on the series of encyclopedic dictionaries «Islam in the Russian Federation», published by the publishing house «Medina». It is concluded that throughout the 20th century, including the Soviet period, the old centers of Muslims within the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly (the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European Part of the USSR and Siberia) developed, while new centers were formed. Some Islamic centers in Russia, such as Orenburg, lost their importance during the 20th century. Some Muslim centers such as Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Troitsk or Tomsk had the potential to develop into full-fledged centers but were unable to achieve this. It is noted that in addition to generally recognized centers of Islam in Russia, such as Kazan and Ufa, new centers emerged, with Moscow being the main one of these centers. For the first time since the mid-16^th century, one of the centers of Islam in the country has emerged in the capital.

Attempts to create a relevant methodology for understanding the spiritual heritage of the Prophet Muhammad under the umbrella of tawhid (monotheism) within the framework of the renewal movement in Islam (known as «tajdid» or «islah») since the activities of Musa Bigiev (1875–1949) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938) have been and continue to be acutely polemical. The issues of convergence (adaptation) of the heritage of traditional Islamic orthodoxy with modern (sometimes with the prefix «ultra») approaches to its comprehension are in the center of attention of many prominent reformist scholars associated with the academic environment of European countries and the USA. This article attempts to outline the horizons of this discursive practice in the scholarly works of such wellknown Muslim scholars of Arab origin as Tawfiq Ibrahim (b. 1947) and Muhammad Arkoun (1928–2010), whose work has long been influenced by the Russian/European intellectual milieu. Their scholarly credo impresses with the diversity of their research approaches, the depth of their analyses of medieval Arabic sources and their latest interpretations on the basis of Islamic epistemology as a kind of modern theory of scientific cognition that emerged at the turn of the 20^th–21^st centuries.

The article examines the dynamics of religious and linguistic identity among Muslims of the Republic of Bashkortostan under conditions of cultural transformation. Based on comparison of the results of these two sociological surveys of 2013 and 2020, the author revealed trends in the nature of Islamic identity and the role of mother tongue in religious socialization. Islam is increasingly acting in a symbolic, cultural form as an ethnic marker, and not as a system of ritual practice and spiritual knowledge. At the same time, the mother tongue loses its role as a tool for transmitting sacred knowledge, which leads to the Russian language becoming the dominant language in the religious sphere. Against this backdrop, stable types of double identity are formed, combining Islamic and linguistic affiliation in various proportions. The article proposes a typology of four models: synthetic (high significance of language and religious practice), Russified Islam (retention of religious identity with loss of mother tongue), cultural linguistic (language preservation with weakened religiosity), and nominal (formal affiliation with both systems). The author interprets the identified changes with the support on the concept of post-traditional and ethnic Islam, post-secular publicity and fragmented identity. The theoretical novelty of the article lies in the synthesis of the ethno- sociological and religious approaches via the prism of the language factor. The empirical significance of the article is the use of two complete field data set with a dynamic interpretation. The findings highlight that contemporary Muslim self-identification in a multiethnic and Russified environment is shaped as a flexible and adaptive system of symbolic identifications, where religion and language are increasingly acting independently of each other.

The study examines the issues of the functioning of Muslim educational institutions in Kabardino-Balkaria in the first Soviet decade. A characteristic is given of the system of institutions of this type, operating before the 1917 frontier. It is concluded that the primary (lower) mosquerun schools-mektebe were the main type of these institutions and precisely via training in them the indigenous peoples of the subregion, for the most part, received education. Furthermore, the article focuses on the penetration of Jadidism into Kabarda and Balkaria and its embodiment in the activities of the Baksan Muslim Educational Center. It is noted that during the first Soviet decade, religious (Muslim) educational institutions have gone from free functioning, to coexistence with a growing and strengthening network of folk Soviet schools, and, as a result, to their full liquidation. The government’s struggle against the religious educational institutions is considered as one of the consequences of the implementation in the subregion of comprehensive modernization transformations, which were sometimes carried out by breaking the old system of organizing socio- economic and cultural spaces. The liquidation of religious (Muslim) educational institutions is associated with the mass peasant unrest, permanently taking place in Kabardino-Balkaria in 1928–1932, which led to persecution of clergy. As a result, most of the clergy were arrested, received prison terms, or publicly announced the termination of their activities. Thus, in Kabardino-Balkaria, there were almost no people who could conduct training in religious schools, which led, as a result, to their liquidation.

The article presents a brief overview of Musa Bigiev’s translation work «Al- Luzumiyyāt», in which he introduced readers to the work of the medieval Arab philosopher al-Ma‘arri, making a selective translation of his poems «Luzum mā lā yalzam» to the eighth letter of the Arab alphabet inclusive. Russian historiography was investigated, associated with the name of the poet in which the Tatar authors M. Bigiev (1907) and R. Fakhretdinov (1908) are the first representatives of the domestic scientifi c community to draw attention to the biography and work of Al-Ma‘arri, ahead of I. Krachkovsky (1910) and A. Krymsky (1911). The main points of Bigievʼs criticism of the traditions and methodology of Muslim biographical literature are shown, where he draws attention to its bias, prejudgment and distortions when describing the biographies of prominent fi gures of Muslim history. In his opinion, this approach was sharply negative on the spiritual and intellectual state of Muslims, directing them to false tasks and goals. The article reveals Bigievʼs innovative understanding, methodology and extraordinary approaches to biography as a historical and literary genre, his desire to give such research spiritual, intellectual and scientific significance. Bigiev focuses on the description of the social benefit brought by one person or another, and offers to refuse to describe his religious zeal and piety, as qualities that have a deeply personal nature and not representing value from the point of view of historical science. Thus, Bigiev denotes new value guidelines for himself and for the biographers of the future. The conclusion talks about a number of methodological and, in general, the scientific  phenomena of our time, about which Bigiev announced more than a hundred years ago, having acted as a researcher who ahead of scientific progress for the century. We are talking about his study of the subjectivity of Muslims and his instance of public identity, which are research areas that have arisen in recent decades of the development of science.

The article examines aspects of the biography, as well as the preservation of scientific works of one of the outstanding Muslim scholars of the Middle Ages. Particular attention is paid to new data obtained during the study, which clearly show the need for a modern revision of biographical data. The article presents approaches to the study of the biography of Al-Nasafi, which gave new names of Al-Nasafi’s teachers, who were not previously known, as well as a whole layer of scientific and theological works associated with Al-Nasafi, which were considered lost. The relevance of the proposed information increases due to its absence in the entire galaxy of medieval Muslim biographers. The article demonstrates the relevance of new approaches to the study of the issues of medieval Islam, as well as the high potential of manuscript repositories of Muslim scientific centres of the past.

This paper provides a review of the book of the Moldovan and Russian statesman, orientalist, scientist-polymat, ally and adviser to Peter the Great (1672–1725) on Dmitry Konstantinovich Cantemir (1673–1723) «Kniga Sistima, ili Opisaniie musulʼmanskoi religii» («The Book of Sistima, or the Description of the Muslim Religion»). This work is the first translation of the «Book of Sistima…» into modern Russian language. Cantemir D. K. Kniga Sistima, ili Opisaniie musulʼmanskoi religii / Mosk. islam. in-t; vstup. st., nauch. red. D. V. Mukhetdinov. M.: ID «Medina», 2025. 536 s. Seriia: «Nasledie rossiiskogo islamovedeniia». ISBN: 978-5-9756-0342-5.