Т. 1. «Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность»

336 Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность. Т. 1 Секция IX scholarly attention — they did not join the ranks of the first class ‘ulamā’ circles and stayed aloof from biographical dictionaries. But this is not to say that individuals in question did not enjoy the respect of their coreligionists, but to drawattention to themiddle classMuslim intellectuals, their interests and ideas about their life in late Imperial Russia. My first observation deals with the Muftiate in Ufa, established by the Tsarist government in 1788. The many letters that I have read so far keep silence about the Muftiate. It seems that in the second half of the 19 th century affairs in the Muftiate were of little interest to most of the people who exchanged letters. Hence, this disinterest in the state-formed institution of governance testifies to the fact that one needs to de-emphasize the institutional history of Islam in Russia that reduces the whole variety of social activities to the state and Muslim relations. Another observation is linked with it: right up to the fall of the Russian Empire Muslims did not trust the state postal system and rather preferred to use the established network of personal contacts that guaranteed the exchange of goods and news. Such hesitation, in my opinion, tells us something about the degree of isolation that still characterized Islamic affairs in the early 20 th century despite all the processes of integration. Generally speaking, Muslim letter writing appears to be a quite conservative endeavor in terms of language use as well as the formal structuring of the text. Many letters, especially those composed by the young madrasa students, had been simply composed on the basis of given examples. In any case, the production of letters became a stable tradition with its formal rules and prescriptions, rarely avoided or violated. One of them was the role of the Qur’an and the Sunna: citations of the holy texts were seen as a normative practice that did not require much comment or translation and was regarded as part of the pious ethics and respect towards the esteemed reader. This is not an exhaustive list of observations that I made during my journey through the manuscript letters at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg and the Institute of Language, Literature and Art in Kazan. All in all, I suggest that historians of Islam in Russia have to treat letter writing seriously and look at the ways how social relations were being represented in those short (or otherwise extensive!) narratives. In other words, the ocean of Islamic literature in Russia is ready to open its new dimensions, inviting its explorers deeper into the past of Islamicate societies of the Russian Empire and even the Soviet Union, since the letter writing tradition survived at least until the 1980s. Гараев Д. М. (Амстердамский университет, Амстердам) Вопросы изучения джихадистской проблематики: международный и российский контекст Проблема джихадизма в международной науке имеет довольно большую традицию изучения. Эту тему рассматривают и как глобальное явление, и в ее