Valiulla Iakupov’s Tatar Islamic Traditionalism

In this article we analyze the concept of “traditional Islam” in the writings of the Tatar scholar Valiulla Iakupov (1963–2012). We discuss Iakupov’s interpretation of the history of Tatar Islam, his views on “Wahhabism” (which he condemned in strongest terms), and on state-Islam relations in contemporary Russia, as well as his ideas about the relation between Islamic authority and secular science. Against the background of this content analysis, we then proceed to analyze Iakupov’s religious language, especially his use of Arabic-origin loanwords and their Russian equivalents of Church Slavonic origin, and also his creative coinage of new religious terms. While Iakupov was above all known as a proponent of the use of Tatar as Russia’s major language for Islam, we argue that Iakupov also made a significant contribution to the development of “Islamo-Russian” as the new religious idiom of Muslims in the Russian-speaking world.