The article reveals the reasons and prerequisites of 1905 Additional Petition by the Taurian mufti A. Karashaysky on behalf of Muslims of the Crimean Peninsula that was addressed to the Chairman of the Minsters’ Committee and where he wrote about the expansion of the Taurian Mohammedan Spiritual Board’s competence and about the necessity of increasing the status of Islamic institutes. Providing comparative analysis between the Additional Petition and the Public Petition from Crimean Tatars the author allocates the general and specifi c matters of their contents. Thus, the research paper concludes that the Public Petition, via the values of liberal social movement, mostly declared the social, religious and spiritual needs of Crimean Tatars, while the petition prepared by the group of Muslims and clergy under the leadership of the Taurian mufti A. Karashaysky had strictly corporate, confessional orientation.

The article examines confessional politics in one of the most diffi cult periods for religious organizations that are the 20–30s of the XX century. At this time, active anti-religious work was carried out, so there were created some special organizations supposed to get rid of any manifestations of religious consciousness among the Soviet citizens. All the diversity of this policy is discussed on the example of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The policy that revealed the relation to the Orthodox and Muslim populations and took into account the national specifi cs of the region varied from relatively loyal attitude towards religious organizations in the 1920s to the events of the Great Terror of 1937–1938.
 The Crimean ASSR was multi-confessional. The authorities faced the need to compromise between the fi ght against religion and the desire not to aggravate confl icts with national minorities. The anti-religious policy was not supposed to confl ict with the policy of indigenousization. Throughout the pre-war twenty years, anti-religious work in the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was not fully implemented and was poorly organized. The slowdown in the implementation of the anti-religious line was caused by both unsuccessful selections of the personnel and insuffi cient funding of the anti-religious activities carried out.

This article is devoted to the imams’ prison service of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Nizhny Novgorod Region (DUMNO) in the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in 2007-2021. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that the imams’ work comes as a contribution to the observance of the convicts’ rights for the freedom of conscience and to the help in practicing their religion. This article describes the evolution of the imams’ prison service as a form of social service in the period from 2007 to 2021 in institutions of to the Offi ce of Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Nizhny Novgorod Region. The source base of the study includes materials of the offi cial websites of the DUMNO, the Offi ce of Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Nizhny Novgorod Region, the media content, Russian legislation and regulations, interviews with imams, offi cials of Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia and convicts. The study results a vision of the evolution of relations between DUMNO and the Offi ce of Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Nizhny Novgorod Region. The paper demonstrates a gradual increase in the number of imams’ contacts, forms of work with convicts to improve the situation in the fi eld of rights of convicts. Moreover, the research exposes the fact of growing numbers of imams having gained experience in prison service. According to the results of the study Islamic education for convicts comes as the important part of imams’ prison service.

The Constitutional and Legal Institute of Religious Freedom in the Penitentiary System is subordinated to and regulated by the rules established by the Federal Executive Body exercising law enforcement functions in the fi eld of execution of sentences (FSIN of Russia). Finding themselves isolated from society, ethnic and practising Muslims, sentenced to imprisonment, feel forced restrictions on the religious freedom. The time and place of Muslims who perform religious rites and rituals are regulated by the documents issued by the Ministry of Justice of Russia were outlined the internal regulations for correctional institutions. The state is entrusted with the duty to provide in prisons a special environment, which would enable the spiritual nourishment of Muslims, whose rights to freedom of religious life are supported by centralized Islamic religious organizations. The civil institutions exercise public control over this implementation. At the same time, the Russian State is increasingly interested in interacting with the main subjects of the religious and penitentiary space. Among them there are offi cial structures of the Islamic Ummah, sending educated imams and Islamic theologians for religious service in prisons, representatives of the Islamic expert community, also there are Public Councils on the problems of the penitentiary system under the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia. The present author considers the activities of Muslim spiritual departments to provide prison libraries with religious literature (the Holy Quran and semantic translations, the Hadith of Prophet Muhammad, His biography, books on Islamic law) as well as the best examples of religious literature, which manifest the traditional values of Russian Islam and the imperatives of a positive socio-cultural environment to be the signifi cant means of communication in the religious-penitentiary environment.

 In the presented work, the author examines the situation with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, where they were forced to settle down after 1948. The article examines international and Lebanese documents, which made it possible to understand the status of the Palestinians. The work carried out by scientists in the fi eld is of interest, since they had the opportunity to conduct surveys and interviews. The author relied on a systematic approach in the presented study. The paper examines the social problems Palestinians face while living in refugee camps. The problems of access to basic needs, employment, marriage unions are noted. It also focuses on the issue of security for ordinary Palestinians, since the Lebanese security forces are unable to provide it, and Palestinian groups periodically feud with each other, which sometimes infl icts irreparable blow to the people. From the author's point of view, the problem of Palestinian refugees persists due to the complex confessional balance in Lebanon and is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future, which endangers stability not only in the camps, but also in Lebanon itself.

 The article is related to “the theory of lights” which belongs to the Moroccan sheikh ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ad-Dabbagh (d. 1720/1). His concept resembles Illuminationism Philosophy and describes all the Divine Revelation granted to the Prophet Muhammad within the hierarchy of the “lights”. The main objective of the article is to defi ne the position of Hadith Qudsi in the framework of the abovementioned concept and to reveal the place of these texts in the Sufi ’s system of knowledge in general

In this paper, we will try to give a dynamic characterization of the object and the subject of Modern theology among the Tatar Muslims on the exemplar of the theological views of ‘Abdunnasīr Qursavi (1776–1812), Shihabutdin Marjani (1818–1889) and Murad Ramzi (1854–1934) (and partly of their contemporaries). The incognizability of the Creator and the faith as “a thing-in-itself” transformed Tatar Religious Epistemology into the cognition of more defi nite realities. Agnosticism in the question of God’s attributes led to the anthropocentric features of theological worldviews. The above-mentioned chain of theologians demonstrates not only the continuity of the Tatar Theology, but also refl ects the dynamics of the evolution of the attitude towards the madhhabs and towards the role of an individual, the specifi cs of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidiya Sufi brotherhood, as well as the Ottoman ‘usul fi qh’ in the modernization period of the early XVIII century. In general, the works of Qursavi constitute a certain system of views that can be considered as a certain cornerstone, the so-called ‘starting point’ of Tatar School of Theology.

The present article deals with the work of an Indonesian scholar and a public intellectual Muhammad Quraish Shihab. The paper reveals the main principles of Quraish Shihab's Quranic Hermeneutics, which include pragmatism (orienting towards the joint interest), thematic approach and methodological holism. Among the objects of the research there are his innovative approach to Quran exegesis, his links with Egyptian modernist schools of M. Abduh and M.R. Ridah, his ideas, where Islam comes as a “middle way”. Moreover, the article demonstrates the connection between his hermeneutical theory and his social activism, especially in the fi eld of media. The author concludes the paper with a brief explanation of the main points of Quraish Shihab's hermeneutical theory.

The article describes the most important stages of creating an ecosystem of electronic religious education. It also presents one of the possible models for the formation of an electronic informational and educational environment. At the present stage with all the technical prerequisites having been created there is already a widespread basis for the formation of electronic educational ecosystem at almost all levels of religious education. Moreover, there is a lag in the use of new technologies in teaching. Forming electronic educational environment will create additional tools and conditions for analyzing the indicators referred to the educational process, it also will provide a holistic view on the state of the educational system, will reveal qualitative and quantitative changes in it.

The article is devoted to the study of the Islamic concept of happiness from the standpoint of psychological science. Two approaches to the understanding of happiness, originating in Antiquity, are considered: hedonistic and eudemonistic; the cultural specifi city of happiness is investigated through the prism of ethnocultural values. It outlines the views on psychological health and well-being in Islam, as well as the views on social and individual predictors of happiness of medieval and modern Muslim scholars.
 The author concludes that the concept of happiness and the idea of it has its own specifi city in diff erent cultures. The concept of happiness among Muslims is directly related to their religious values and worldview, as well as to the peculiarities of ethnic culture. Since Muslim communities are collectivist, the happiness of an individual is seen as closely related to the public good. For a Muslim, the path to happiness is associated with improving his character and the formation of moral values and behavior. Modern Psychology and Psychotherapy are developing the ideas about moral psychology and the ways of its formation as the basis for the psychological wellbeing of an individual.

The multiplicity of new challenges facing society actualizes interest in religious sources, which become the object of research for specialists in various fi elds of knowledge. In this regard, the Quran contains valuable information that expands the understanding of intrapersonal confl ict in terms of the study of the state of doubt “shakk” and suspicion “reib”, as well as factors contributing to the emergence and overcoming of these states. The study of “shakk” and “raib” was carried out as part of the case study of the Quran, which takes into account both the scientifi c and theological methodological basis, developed on the analysis of the Tafsirs by Tabari (839–923), by Zamakhshari (1075–1144), by Razi (1149–1209), by Tantawi (1928–2010). The article is intended to contribute to the development of the Quranbased Confl ictological Studies, as well as to emphasize the relevance of integrating scientifi c and theological knowledge into the fi eld of searching answers to pressing questions of our time.

This paper presents the results of analyzing the psychological patterns of the development of ethnic identity and interethnic relations in the multinational Levant Region, where interethnic confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis has been noted in recent years. The main aim of the research is to reveal the relationship between the characteristics of Ethnic Identity and the Experience (“perezhivanie”) of Interethnic Relations of Palestinian Muslims in the multicultural Levant Region. In the process of investigating into ethnic self-awareness the authors used the Leary Test, the Semantic Diff erential of “Perezhivanie” ‘Experiencing’ Questionnaire by L.R. Fakhrutdinova aimed at studying the psychosemantic characteristics of the “perezhivanie” ‘experiencing’. The research has displayed that Ethnic Identity is a self-developing phenomenon, basically infl uenced by both the infrastructural relations and positions of ethnic self-awareness, and the processes associated with the relations of ethnic self-awareness with the external environment, with other ethnic groups. The most active points of development have been identifi ed. So, in intrastructural relations, they are active as ratios of I-real and I-mirror with a stronger position of I-ideal, since practically all dimensions of I-real and I-ideal (dominance, egoism, suspicion, etc.) have shown signifi cant diff erences that testify to the points and directions of development of ethnic self-awareness; positions in the relationship between the real self and the mirror self also exerted an active infl uence. The points of confl ict of the structures of ethnic self-consciousness were found, where, when the points of development coincided, the direction of development was diff erent. Thus, suspicion, obedience, dependence, friendliness, integrative indicators of dominance and friendliness have shown themselves to be confl ict points refl ecting confl ict zones between the infl uence of an external ethnic group (mirror self) and self-development processes manifested through the ideal self. In the situation of relations with the external environment, the most active was shown by the self-mirror, which infl uences the development of the subjectivity of the ethnic group through the components of the experience of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis. The infl uence of the real self on the characteristics of the “perezhivanie” ‘experiencing’ of the PalestinianIsraeli crisis was also manifested, and therefore, through the components of the “perezhivanie” ‘experiencing’ of this impression on the development of the self-awareness of the ethnic group.