Pax Islamica-The World of Islam, Moscow: Marjani Publishing House. 2012. N1 - 2 (8 - 9). - 508 with.

The growth of Islamic studies has reached Russia, although the real "boom" may still be ahead. There is fertile ground here, fueled by a religious revival in several traditionally ethno-Muslim regions, as well as, as in the West, the effects of recent migrations. This revival of recent decades is bearing fruit in various social and cultural spheres, from politics to cuisine. And now, among other things, there is a new generation of scientists and a new generation of benefactors, and at the point of their intersection - the "Marjani Foundation", a non-profit charitable organization established in 2006 and named after the Tatar theologian - educator Shihabutdin Marjani (1818-1889). Pax Islamica is just one of the Foundation's projects. It also finances other publishing projects, exhibitions, public lectures, and much more-everything related to Islam and Tatar culture.

Pax Islamica is a purely academic magazine, the first issue of which was published in 2008. It is surprising that this is actually the first Islamic studies journal in Russia after a short period of study.-

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There was no existing " World of Islam "(later - "Muslim World"), founded by V. Barthold before the revolution. It took twenty years of "perestroika" and post-Soviet fermentation to finally produce a high-quality Russian journal, which, along with dozens of specialized or related world journals, reflects the flourishing of Islamic studies in recent times.

We expect quality from a publication run by the people who founded the journal and make up its editorial core. These are the key figures of modern Russian Islamic studies: Igor Alekseev, Pavel Basharin, Vladimir Bobrobnikov and others. The editor - in-chief is Aidar Khabutdinov, author of books about the formation of the Tatar nation and modern Islamic communities in the Volga-Ural region.

Pax Islamica is, of course, an allusion to Pax Romana, but also to dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam, Mip of Islam) - a concept that has always lived in the Islamic political and legal tradition. The magazine brings together people from different disciplines to cover the Mip of Islam in its entirety - with its multi-layered memory, incredible ethnic diversity and political acuteness.

Isn't the goal too ambitious? The task of such a journal is to compress different disciplines and many different texts, while maintaining some structural elegance. The 2012 issue is a 500-page almanac with a lot of interesting things and discoveries, but in general it is too difficult for a complete perception. Perhaps it would be worth splitting the issue in half (making two issues a year) and giving each of the halves more "grip".

In its current form, the list of categories also seems somewhat chaotic. These categories are: Muslim philosophy and mysticism; historical and ethnographic studies of Islam in the European East and the Eurasian space; Islam in the Middle East and North Africa in Modern times; Islam and Eastern Christianity; Arabic philology; Islam and politics in the modern Middle East. Some illogical nature of the overall structure is explained by the fact that, apparently, the entire issue is the materials of the conference with the same title "The World of Islam" (Moscow, October 2010), although the introductory explanation that suggests itself at the beginning is from the editorial board, to the co-

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sorry, missing. Note, by the way, that there are no summaries in the magazine - this element of good publishing tone would not hurt at all.

Well, everyone chooses according to their taste. Let us also make this choice from a long list of articles.

Eighteen relatively short reports on Islam in Russian and post-Soviet Eurasia make up about a third of the issue. Most of the reports dealing with the history of the 18th and 20th centuries and the modern ethnography of Islam are well documented by authors who rely on archives or field materials. The first is the text by D. Arapov on the attitude of Peter the Great to Muslims; then - several interesting and carefully crafted texts: G. Sayfullina on the tradition of book singing among the Tatars; S. Shadmanova on the "women's question" among Muslims in the periodicals of the late XIX-early XX centuries; T. Kotyukova on the "Muslim question" in the documents of the Turkestan " Okhrana"and others. Further, in the modern (anthropological and sociological) part, I would highlight an interesting article by E. Larina about the new "pilgrimage entrepreneurs" (my term) of the Islamic revival in Kazakhstan; an article by D. Makarov comparing conflicting archives and ethnography-reports of Soviet officials and recent interviews of the author in several regions of Central Russia; A. and I. Seleznev on the parameters and methods of ethnography of Islam on the example of the Tobolsk-Irtysh Tatars. This also includes two good articles (L. Mikova and G. Lozanova) about Bulgarian Muslims (Bektashs and Pomaks).

In addition to the "Eurasian" themes, one should certainly highlight Pavel Basharin's deep exegesis of the famous Quranic idiom qaba qawsayn ("at a distance between two bows"), which means mystical proximity to God; Basharin proves his skill and knowledge of mystical Arabic and Persian traditions. In the section "Islam in modern times" we can recommend a very interesting article by V. Orlov about how the Wahhabi doctrine, which claims to be a strict traditionalism, was perceived and finally rejected in Morocco at the beginning of the XIX century. how criminally innovative: an excellent clarification for the current view of Wahhabis and an interesting example of the cultural variability of Islam. P. Shlykov's article on the crisis and renewal of the Waqf institute in the Ottoman Empire is also good.

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empire before the beginning of the XX century, containing a brief but voluminous analysis of this interesting phenomenon in its dynamics.

The section "Islam and Eastern Christianity" contains articles (two in English, two in French and one in Arabic, i.e. without translation into Russian) by five Arab historians from Egypt and Tunisia, devoted to various aspects of the relationship and mutual vision of early/medieval Islam and Christianity during the Byzantine period and after it. The articles are interesting, although not all of them are clearly structured. In addition, along the way, I must say that a language version would be useful: this is especially true for English-language texts (by the way, the above-mentioned article by Basharin, published in English, would not hurt some language editing).

In the modern Middle Eastern section, an excellent article by G. Kosacha on al-Qassam, the famous Palestinian martyr-shahid who died in 1935 and became an axis of political memory and the subject of discursive conflicts in modern Palestine , is an article that offers a "rich description" of the current perception of history, but not without assessments that are fraught with discussion. Article 11.

Kudryashova's article on the change of political models in Iran during the XX century is not without a clear chronology, but it looks somewhat reviewable, without adding fundamentally new material. The rest of the texts in this category don't seem to be very well-documented essays.

The philological section seems generally less convincing than the rest: one text simply sets out, without serious analysis, the content of the novel by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz; another gives dry information about the experience of teaching Arabic; the third - a set of rather incoherent arguments about the importance of philology in general and individual interpretations of individual Islamic texts in particular. The lack of genre differentiation in the journal - when research articles are juxtaposed with reference-type texts-is somewhat confusing.

What can you say if you flip through the log and try to read it in detail, although not exhaustive? Texts are uneven in level. Such a spread is present in any publication, it is inevitable. Perhaps, in this case, this drawback could be partially overcome by the efforts of the compilers, if they gave the following advantages:

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the structure has more integrity, we would add strictness in the rubrication and design, and finally, in the selection of the texts themselves. But, expecting further positive dynamics, we can already, without a doubt, consider Pax Islamica a significant phenomenon in the field of Oriental studies and academic research of religion.

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