Neopaganism in Tatarstan: A Path to Islam?

• In Event: Allah, Tengri, Science, or Something Else?: Alternative Spirituality, Religion, and Nation-building in Perestroika and the Post-Soviet Era

Abstract

With the liberalization of the USSR in the late 1980s, Soviet intellectuals, including the Tatar literary and cultural elite, began adopting and promoting novel religious and philosophical ideas. Although scholars have focused primarily on the rapid flowering of Islamic institutions in the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the marketplace of ideas was highly diverse and included elements of Western esotericism, New Age thought, and neopaganism. Rather than completely rejecting such controversial ideas, some Muslim thinkers embraced them and incorporated them into innovative post-Soviet Islamic theologies designed to attract religious seekers. This paper traces the development of neopagan trends in Tatarstan from the 1990s to 2015.

Author

• Agnes Neylufer Kefeli, Arizona State U