Islam and the search for identity

For the Russian Federation, the collapse of the Soviet Union signified the dawn of a post-atheist era. The beginning of this new age was marked by a fundamental change in the importance attached to religion by the state and a rapid growth in public interest in religion. By the end of the 1990s, survey research indicated that 39 per cent of the ethnic Russian population of the Russian Federation considered themselves to be ‘believers’ while a further 30 per cent declared themselves ‘waverers’ (Kaariainen and Furman 2000: 216). The renaissance of Islam in the Russian Federation can also be documented statistically: by 1994, 67 per cent of Tatars in Tatarstan declared themselves ‘believers’ and a further 12 per cent considered themselves ‘waverers’ ( Drobizheva 1998: 200). ¹ In Dagestan, by 1997, 95 per cent of the surveyed population declared their belonging to Islam, and half of these said they observed all the required Islamic rituals (Bobrovnikov 2001: 2).