The article is devoted to the history of the origins and development of Iranian Freemasonry and the Shiite clergy participation in Masonic structures. Since Freemasonry itself has historically been the conductor of liberal ideas in Europe, it would seem that religious figures in Iran, who are in the position of traditionalism, should have been extremely hostile to this trend. However, Iranian experience has shown that this is not so, and a large group of Shiite ulama, including even the most authoritative, at various times entered the local Masonic lodges. The clergy were especially active during the era of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, when they used Masonic lodges and quasi-Masonic structures to fight the absolutist monarchy. Most of its representatives held a leadership positions in these structures and influenced the course of specific historical events and the decisions made. In the second half of the twentieth century the participation of religious leaders in the Masonic lodges of Iran began to weaken. The author also analyzes the rumors about Ayatollah Khomeini’s belonging to Freemasonry in order to determine the degree of their reliability.

The article is devoted to a poorly studied problem of an ethnic shape of Muslims of the island of Sakhalin on materials of the First General Population Census of the Russian Empire in 1897. The island was the place of penal servitude where criminals from all the Russian Empire served their penalties. It resulted in a motley ethno-confessional structure of its population significantly differing from the other regions of the Russian Far East. The number of Muslims was rather considerable and exceeded the number of brothers in faith in the other Far East regions. Based on the census data analysis their gender, age and social structure is reconstructed.

The paper under consideration, based on the Tatar-speaking pre-revolutionary sources, analyzes the life and theological heritage of one of the most prominent and prolific representatives of Tatar cadimism of the early twentieth century Muhammad-Sadyk Imankuly (1870-1932). Particular attention is paid to his seminal work «Taskһil al-byan fi tafsir alKuran» (Facilitating clarification in Quran interpretation), which comes as an example of Tatarspeaking exegetical literature reflecting the main points of Hanafi-Maturidi traditions.

This paper focuses on the evolution of Tatar Muslims search for identity and bases on a pre-revolutionary Tatar press analysis. Produced by such newspapers as «Kazan muhbire», «Yulduz», «Tarjuman» the forms of social antagonisms reflect the group and communal connections’ dynamics of the early period of Islamic modernization (‘jadidism’). Media is a reflection of the ideas circulating in a society. The idea of ‘jadidism’ was a creation of Ismail Gasprinski. However, through the course of several decades new social forces were born. They made his like-minded people ‘from Volga’ define real, social face of the so-called ‘New Method’, define deeper and situational. This publication is one of the attempts to trace the continuity of the ideology and practice of reformation processes, free from straight administrative practice, but dependent from linguistic, routine, socio-political, educational and other spheres of daily routine.

The well-known Tatar historian and theologian Shihab al-Din al-Marjani (18181889), who worked as an imam and teacher of religious disciplines in Kazan, left behind more than 30 scientific and didactic written works. Some of his works were published in Kazan, Istanbul and Cairo. The subjects of the treatises of Marjani touch upon the Islamic faith, law, ethics, Quranic sciences and the history of Islam and Muslim peoples.

The most important contribution to Islamic science is his books on Islamic scholastic theology and Sunni dogma. There are seven works on the abovementioned topics from Shihabuddin Marjani’s heritage on Islamic sciences: “al-Hikma al-baligha”, “al-‘Adhb al-furat”, “al-Mathal al-a‘la”, “Haqq al-bayan”, “at-Tariqa al-muthla”, “Haqq al-‘aqida” and “Sharh mukaddimat ar-risalya al-shamsiyya”.

This article provides an overview of these works, gives a brief description of them, discusses the prints. It also sheds the light on their issues and points out the inaccessibility of some of them to researchers. Particular attention is paid to the work “al-Hikma al-baligha” (“Mature Wisdom”), which is a commentary on the well-known text in Sunni world, al-‘Aqida al-nasafiyya.

The study uses descriptive and historical scientific methods with elements of theological analysis. Accessible sources in Arabic were directly investigated, and the works of contemporaries of the Tatar scholar were also used.

This article provides brief analysis of modern research on the basis of which theoretical interpretation of the concepts of soulfulness and spirituality in an interdisciplinary way comes. The phenomena of mercy and compassion, patience and humility are analyzed from the angle of soulfulness and spirituality. The paper contains the analysis of the links of mercy-patience and compassion-humility in the context of external and internal being. Understanding of the phenomena of empathy and reflection in the context of soulfulness/ spirituality, external / internal is carried out. Thus, the dialectical unity of the concepts of soulfulness and spirituality are revealed. All in all it leads to understanding of the dialectical unity of the external and internal sides of a human soul.

The article introduces the content of one of the little-known lifetime published works of an outstanding Tatar religious thinker Musa Jarullah Bigiev (1875-1949), which is devoted, in particular, to the study and disclosure of the meaning of the Quranic concept of Yajuj-Majuj. The facts from the biography of the scientist introduced into the scientific circulation provide a full disclosure of particular reasons for the appearance of the work under consideration. The research by M. Bigiev is based on a deep source study, on the results of comparative linguistics and cultural-historical analysis including religious books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The author considers the inadmissibility of introducing the pre-Islamic ideas about the concept of Yajuj-Majuj into Islamic exegetics, and a number of other concepts that are accepted to be among the common heritage of Abrahamic religions; the paper emphasizes extreme importance of free thought; it draws attention to the role of Turks in the world history in its past, present and future; it makes a number of interesting inferences into the hidden meaning of a Quranic story about Yajuj-Majuj.

According to the theory of A.V. Smirnov, a conceptual invariant based on a religious belief system of relationships of God and World underlies ‘processual logic’. The conceptual invariant has fractal features (B. Mandelbrot) which are as follows: self-similarity, iteration, recursiveness and scale invariance. The paper presents the results of a psychological research on the meaning forming process on the basis of namaz (obligatory prayer in Islam). The research methodology included psychological and linguistic theories, which link the meaning-making process to consistent patterns of human behavior. Comparison of the “external” (related to the action) with the “internal” (relevant to the meaning) aspects of namaz showed that spatial orientations, such as “up and down”, “right and left”, “front and back”, are determined by the hierarchical structure relationship between God and World. The application of fractal theory in psychological research of religious awareness contribute to better understanding of the unity of the Arab-Islamic culture based on the meaning forming process.

The article analyzes the multicultural approach in psychological counseling, which takes into account ethnic and religious specifics of the client, using the example of a specific case of an adult daughter’s relationship with her father. The positive dynamics of psychological work based on Ingush culture and values of Islam is shown. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that the multicultural competence of the psychologist provides the consultant, on the one hand, a high level of trust on the part of the client, and a professional approach based on the use of ethno-religious resources in counseling on the other.

The article is devoted to the description of an urgent psychological problem of involving a person into terroristic activity. Applied psychological researches and different types of the other literature analyzes the materials revealing different aspects of the processes connected to forming a terroristic environment and involving a person into it. The conclusions of the research show what kind of people are at risk of being recruited to a terroristic organization. The psychological roots of terrorism and terrorist behavior are analyzed. The role of the narcissistic defenses in the formation of extremist behavior and involvement in the terrorist environment is shown. Terrorist behavior is explained via the terms of theories on the conflict of cultures, stigma and the theory of subcultures. The work discloses the characteristics of an important stage in the formation of any terrorist group and the entire environment as a whole that is the formation and creation of the enemy image. Various stages of involvement in terrorist groups are presented and the main features of the individuals involved are highlighted within the article. Concluding up the ideas, it can be noted that entering into a terrorist network or a terroristic group a man loses their personality and individuality. This process leads to the fact of interests, objectives and goals narrowing. And the doctrines of the group that are the willingness to sacrifice, to break all previous social bonds contradicting the terroristic world-view come true. Here are the recommendations on the socio-psychological counteraction to the involvement of a person into a terroristic surrounding.