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Sonja Luehrmann explores the Soviet atheist effort to build a society without gods or spirits and its afterlife in post-Soviet religious revival. Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia's Volga region, Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations. One of the most palpable legacies of atheist propaganda is a widespread didactic orientation among the population and a faith in standardized programs of personal transformation as solutions to wider social problems. This didactic trend has parallels in globalized forms of Protestantism and Islam but differs from older uses of religious knowledge in rural Russia. At a time when the secularist modernization projects of the 20th century are widely perceived to have failed, Secularism Soviet Style emphasizes the affinities and shared histories of religious and atheist mobilizations.

The renewed interest for Sufism, in the form of the celebration of a Sufi past, and the presence of Naqshbandi Sufi brotherhoods in the Volga and Urals ask the question of the place of Sufism in the region’s broader Islamic revival. In particular, how is Sufism related to the concept of “traditional Islam” as a central official category that seeks to define a local Islam? In order to understand how the place of Sufism is negotiated in relation to the notion of a local Islam, we analyse both how Sufism is integrated into the concept of traditional Islam on a more official level and how Sufi murids view their place in the Islamic revival. We refer to the literature on Sufism and its critiques and to new interpretations of the Volga-Ural Muslim history to highlight how negative images of the phenomenon and previous theological disputes form the background against which the Sufi revival takes place. Drawing on the idea of Sufism’s “disappearance” from a historical narrative in Soviet times and on the importance of anti-Sufi critiques in fashioning this narrative, we aim to understand how a new narrative on Sufism emerges on an official level and how it connects or not with the way Sufi murids perceive their beliefs and practices. By analysing convergences and divergences in official perceptions of Sufism and the perceptions of Sufi murids, we examine how the question of Sufism sheds light on the paradoxes in the concept of traditional Islam. Hence, Sufism challenges the image of a unified theological heritage as a foundation for traditional Islam, as it brings to the fore the anti-Sufi critique of previous Jadids. While official views and the views of Sufi murids converge on a more theological definition of traditional Islam understood as the three dimensions of Islam (islam, iman and ihsan), Sufism also raises the question of religious authority. Indeed, the spiritual hierarchies represented by Sufi tariqas may not be easy to reconcile with an official Muslim representation. Finally, Sufi murids refer to the notion of a local sacred geography, but also emphasise the transnational and transregional connections established by Sufi tariqas, thus pointing to another understanding of locality.

This article seeks to recover the financial rights of separated women living in the Muslim communities of Russia’s Volga-Ural region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It argues that by the 1780s–1820s, separated Muslim women were guaranteed certain rights and powers over their marital finances and personal property. These rights emerged out of a complex plural legal landscape created by the Volga-Ural region’s complicated religious and political history in the late medieval and early modern periods. By the end of the eighteenth century, separated Muslim women could claim certain financial rights under both Islamic law and Russian civil law, but had to pursue different kinds of claims through different legal systems. The legal landscape and practices that evolved in relation to separated women’s rights during the early modern period became formalized and institutionalized in the nineteenth century and persisted until the collapse of the Russian empire.

A diverse assemblage of Kazanian nautiloids and ammonoids from two localities in the Kirov Region and the Mari El Republic is studied and described for the first time. The biostratigraphic potential of the cephalopod assemblage, and its ecological and taphonomic affinities, are analyzed. Twenty nautiloid species (of which 18 are new) and eight ammonoid species are described. Thirty-seven text-figures and 16 plates are provided.

Since the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Islamic history of the Volga-Ural region has been based, for the most part, on a modernist narrative in which the dominant frame of reference for understanding these Muslim communities has been an ethno-national framework, focused, above all, on the role of the Tatar bourgeoisie in promoting Islamic reformism and Islamic modernism. The main sources for this framework have been the political writings of the Jadids, Islamic reformists and modernists who later became engaged the mass-movement politics, beginning in 1905 and continuing through the Russian civil war and the first decade of Soviet power. A central feature of the Jadid narrative, which has carried over into the historiography, has been that Muslim society, particularly in Russia's Volga-Ural region, was facing a crisis brought about by the supposed failure of its traditional Islamic institutions in the face of a modernizing Russia. An examination of non-Jadid Islamic sources from this era, however, brings the \"crisis\" narrative into question.