ABSTRACT
Weakened by fragmentation, official Islam in Russia is struggling to reaffirm its identity while at the same time being forced to follow in the footsteps of the dominant Christian confession and, to allay anxieties about the growing prominence of Islam in the public sphere. A Russian text full of Arabic loanwords speaks to other audiences than a text written in plain Russian, where Islamic terms are systematically replaced by Russian equivalents; as these equivalents are of necessity of Church-Slavonic origin, they carry Orthodox connotations. Yet while the Orthodox language is characterized by vertically organized styles depending on social settings, the Islamic sociolect is shaped by the mentioned complementary distribution of ‘styles’ defined by lexical choices and connected to particular messages In imperial and Soviet times, the Muftiate in Ufa was already administered by Tatars and, during the twentieth century, most mosques in Russia used the Tatar language for sermons and communication.
