ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with three influential accounts of women and Islam/Islamic revival in Tatarstan, which are subsequently juxtaposed with accounts from young Muslim women. Islam got framed not merely as a religious but also as an Oriental other, and the density of this articulation ascribed Islam with a radical otherness to modernity. In a study about Islamic revival in Tatar society Rozalinda Musina reveals that women are prominently present in the mosques, medresses and revival movements. During a long conversation, Raifa Urazmanova and Rozalinda Musina, researchers at the Academy of Sciences of Tatarstan, asserted that women were the dominant force of Islamic revival. Kazan State University (KSU), as a centre of intellectual production in Tatarstan, was one of the places where such tales of modernity and secularization were sustained and reproduced. Renat's account of Islamic revival in Tatarstan was marked by an articulation that transgresses the tradition-modern binary.
