ABSTRACT
In his books on Islam in Russia, Alexandre Bennigsen says that Sufism, which he describes as ‘parallel Islam’, seemingly disappeared among the Muslims of the European part of Russia after 1924. Another famous scholar, Hamid Algar, states, however, that the five-centuries-old tradition could not have totally disappeared within the seventy-year period of Soviet rule. He refers to a number of Soviet publications on the history of Sufism in Russia as showing that the issue of Sufism within mainstream Russian Islam still retains its relevance.
