UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Liberal Islamic Theology in Conservative Russia: Taufik Ibragim’s “Qurʾānic Humanism”

This article studies the work of the Moscow-based Syrian academic scholar Taufik Ibragim. Originally a Marxist historian of Islamic philosophy and kalām , after the end of the ussr Ibragim became one of Russia’s most authoritative scholars also of the Qurʾān and the Islamic tradition more broadly. Since the mid-2000s, Ibragim has publicly propagated the concept of “Qurʾānic humanism”, which is meant to demonstrate the tolerance of the Qurʾān and the humanist character of Islam in general, against Islamic extremism and stagnation in Muslim thought. In his opposition to the dominant political “traditionalism” in Russia’s Islamic landscape, Ibragim links back to the heritage of the Tatar Muslim educational and religious reformers (Jadids) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without reference to any other contemporary Islamic thinker, Ibragim advocates a reform of Islam to adapt it to the conditions of modern Russia. His interpretations appeal to Russia’s academic elite, as well as to the Jadid-oriented muftiate of the Russian Federation (dumrf) in Moscow, which until recently propagated Ibragim’s concepts against the vague “traditionalism” that other muftiates in the Russian Federation claim to follow. But his insistence on a rational approach to the Qurʾān and his challenging of the authority of ḥadīth have brought Ibragim the enmity of many conservative muftis and Muslim theologians in Russia, and Islamic reformism is under increasing attack.


Introduction
Most of Russia's officially recognized Islamic administrations (muftiates) present themselves as followers of "traditionalism".1 Developed in line with the model of the Russian Orthodox Church,2 Russia's state-supported Islamic traditionalism is based on the differentiation between a "nontraditional" Islam that is foreign (imported), unregistered, "dangerous," and therefore "bad", on the one hand, and a "traditional" (homegrown), patriotic, officially registered, and therefore "good" Islam, on the other.3 "Traditionalism" is a political paradigm that expresses conservative values and loyalty to the existing authorities. Adherence to it is rewarded by the state, through public funds and recognition, while failure to follow the official line can be punished by marginalization, obstruction, or outright bans.
The first programmatic statements on a specific "Islamic traditionalism" in Russia came from Valiulla Iakupov, a major personality in the muftiate of the Republic of Tatarstan. Iakupov attempted to balance the popular heritage of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Tatar Jadidism -the broad movement of Muslim cultural and educational modernism, with strong elements of Islamic reformism -by calling for a renewed attention to the works of the Ḥanafī madhhab, as a defense against what has been labelled "Wahhabism" and radicalism. After Iakupov's assassination in 2012, other Tatar authors contributed to the further development of the idea that there is a specific "Russian Islam" (in the sense of rossiiskii islam, "an Islamic that is specific to the Russian 1 Our sincere gratitude goes to the four peer reviewers, who made very valuable suggestions and corrections. Federation"); this Islam is supposed to stand closer to the Russian Orthodox heritage than to "foreign" brands of Islam. Yet any attempt to define what "Russia's Islam" is (and what it is not) is difficult, in particular given the ethnic and religious diversity of Russia's Muslims, and the transnational Islamic networks in which they have operated since well before the eighteenth century. Russia's Islamic establishment is divided over various competing muftiates (state-registered Islamic administrations), the biggest players in the European part of Russia being dumrf in Moscow, dumrt in Kazan, and TsDUM in Ufa.4 They all try to define the "traditionalism" paradigm by taking the Ḥanafī school of law as their model and publish medieval Ḥanafī textbooks in Russian translation for use at their Islamic universities, colleges, and madrasas.5 In the North Caucasus republics of Daghestan and Chechnya, the same is done with textbooks from the Shāfiʿī tradition. All muftiates in Russia profess adherence to the Māturīdī and Ashʿarī schools of kalām, the mainstream of Sunnī theology. However, translating classical Arabic legal and theological literature into Russian or Tatar does not necessarily provide a strong foundation for a "Russian Islam"; in many issues, such translations promote stances and values that are far removed from Russian realities. Besides, several muftiates (especially in the North Caucasus, but also in Kazan) publish Sufi literature of their regional Naqshbandiyya, Shādhiliyya, or Qādiriyya traditions. While these are meant to provide ethical orientation in the fight against extremism,6 the exclusivism of  the ṭarīqas and their strong insistence on the disciple's unquestioning obedience towards his/her master will not convince intellectual Muslims. It is against this background that we discuss the niche of Muslim reformist thought in contemporary Russia. At the center of our analysis is the Syrian-Russian academic scholar Dr. Taufik Ibragim (Tawfīq Ibrāhīm), whose defense of "Qurʾānic humanism" (koranicheskii gumanizm) challenges many of the dominant tenets of "traditionalism". The present contribution is, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive study of Taufik Ibragim's work in a Western language. In the first part, we trace Ibragim's early publications in Russia, which centered on medieval kalām, and which were influenced by Marxist positions. We argue that, in his works on kalām, Ibragim already developed the basic conceptual framework that he would later transfer to the study of the Qurʾān. In the following section, we analyze how, in the mid-1990s, Ibragim turned to the study of the Islamic revelation, and we trace the genesis of his "Qurʾānic humanism" concept, which culminated in a book with the same title in 2015.
In the last part, we analyze how Ibragim's ideas were adopted by what is today Russia's most prominent muftiate, the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Russian Federation (dumrf) in Moscow. dumrf (whose mufti, Ravil Gainutdin, was in the 1990s regarded as being close to Salafi ideas)7 is the only major Islamic umbrella that openly makes room for reformist thinking, thereby nuancing the anti-reformist "traditionalism" paradigm. Eventually, a public conflict between adherents of reformism and of "traditionalism" on issues of praying and fasting in 2018 prompted dumrf to drop references to Ibragim, and led to his disciples being discredited as "sectarians".

Kalām from a Marxist Perspective
Taufik Kamil' Ibragim was born in 1947 in the Syrian coastal town of Jableh (Latakia district). As Ibragim reported himself, his father was a religious man In his work on kalām, Taufik Ibragim emphasized the medieval kalām scholars' uncompromising quest for rationality, their allegorical interpretation of the narratives provided by the revelation, and their rejection of religious authority (taqlīd).11 By demanding logical arguments for all religious convictions, the mutakallimūn challenged the ḥadīth scholars, literalists, and jurists, as well as the Islamic mystics (Sufis) whose approach is based on intuition. Ibragim thus contributed to a trend in Soviet academic scholarship that aimed at identifying a tradition of rationalism and enlightenment in Islamic cultural history. Similar programs were developed in other parts of the ussr and Russia with regard to the domestic history of Islamic thinking; in many cases, these interpretations were based on the equation of ijtihād with "enlightenment" and progressive philosophy.12 Ibragim singled out the kalām debates on atomism to demonstrate how Muʿtazilī and Ashʿarī kalām scholars of the eighth to twelfth centuries built on the heritage of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus. His central argument was that their various conceptions of atoms (as the smallest matter that cannot further be divided) moved the mutakallimūn beyond theology into the realm of natural philosophy. With this proposition, he challenged the widespread assumption that Islamic speculative theology simply turned to atomism to identify the core particles that God created, and thereby to preserve the concept of creation from the dimension of infinity (which would contradict the consensus, among theologians, that God's creation is finite and different from the Creator himself, who is infinite, eternal, and not created).
Ibragim also pointed out that defenders and opponents of atomistic conceptions could be found in both the Muʿtazila and Ashʿariyya. With this observation, he tried to reject the widespread assumption that the Ashʿarī school (with its elevation of atomism to the status of theological dogma) must be seen as a conservative reaction to the Muʿtazila (which produced various conflicting positions on atomism). For Ibragim, the Ashʿarīs were not enemies of the Muʿtazila but their natural successors, under new historical circumstances that were less favorable to philosophy.13 The scholar thereby highlighted the longevity of dialectical and materialistic thinking among the mutakallimūn, in defiance of the rise of traditionalists who followed the views of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 855).
While several Western historians of kalām came to similar interpretations,14 Ibragim claimed that Orientalists in the West used references to Muslim defenders of atomism to explain the "stagnation of Muslim society after the tenth century".15 More correct would be to argue, he suggested, that those Sagadeev's concept of "Muslim humanism" earned him pressure from the Communist Party.22 It is from Sagadeev's idea of a humanistic medieval Muslim civilization that Ibragim began to describe Islam as a tolerant religion that highly valued secular education.23 Sagadeev also regularly published on contemporary intellectual debates in the Arab world and might equally have inspired Ibragim to engage with the scholarly edifices of Arab intellectuals like Muḥammad ʿAmāra, Mohammed Arkoun, Ḥasan Ḥanafī, Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī, Zakī Najīb Maḥmūd, and Ṭayyib Tīzīnī. In the aftermath of the Arab defeat of 1967 and the failure of secularist Nasserism, these philosophers were preoccupied with the recovery of the Islamic turāth (historical heritage) and with "proving" the harmony of reason and revelation, often with a heavy dose of Marxism.24 In 1988, Ibragim (using the pseudonym "Tawfīq Sallūm") contributed to this debate by publishing a work in Arabic, entitled "Towards a Marxist Perspective on the Arabic Heritage".25 In this book, he praised the new Marxist philosophers, in particular the Syrian Ṭayyib Tīzīnī  and the Lebanese Ḥusayn Muruwwa (1910-87).26 At (4) a specific type of education. Basing themselves on one or several of these definitions, modern academic scholars of Islam have detected "Islamic humanism" in a whole variety of personalities, epochs, genres, and attitudes. See Marco Schöller, "Zum Begriff des 'islamischen Humanismus'", ZDMG 151 (2001), 275-320. Schöller draws attention to the observation that in Europe, humanism defeated scholasticism, while in the Muslim world humanism (adab, Hellenistic philosophy) was defeated by scholasticism (Ash'arism) and traditionalism (ḥadīthocentrism). Taufiq Ibrahim's interpretation draws on several of the established approximations to humanism in Islam (including in philosophy and sciences), but puts the chronology on its head by identifying humanism in the origins of Islam (the revelation itself) -thereby reaffirming the paradigm of decline after the revelation, and the need for reform. the same time, he criticized them for their, as he believed, simplistic Marxist straitjacket, which understood Arab cultural history as torn between idealism and materialism, and between reactionary feudal forces and progressive capitalist tendencies. Ibragim rejected the association of religion with feudalism and opposed the widespread leftist interpretation that certain minority movements in Islam (like the Qarmāṭians) were "quasi-socialist", and therefore progressive in nature and deserving of particular sympathy. 27 We understand this line of arguments as an expression of Ibragim's wish to demonstrate that also the works of the kalām thinkers need to be seen as valuable achievements of human intellectual inquiry, and not, from hindsight, as an obscurantist idealism that led to the stultification and enslavement of the masses -which is how many Soviet works treated Islamic "scholasticism". Ibragim's line of argumentation is similar when it comes to Sufism. In his opinion, the sophisticated elaborations on the unity of existence (waḥdat al-wujūd) in the writings of Ibn ʿArabī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, and other famous medieval authors belong to philosophy, not to the field of mysticism, which most socialist historians looked upon with disdain. Against Tīzīnī, he argued that Sufi pantheism is an expression not of idealism but of materialism: "In the philosophy of Sufism, God […] is just a symbol for the integrity (tselostnost') of the world, for its unity",28 and thus for the unity of matter and idea.

A Liberal Reformist Reading of the Islamic Revelation
After the end of the ussr, Ibragim emerged as one of Russia's major experts on medieval Arabic Islamic literature, and he wrote the entries on Islamic theology in the most prominent Russian-language academic encyclopedias.29 Yet by the mid-1990s, he started to go beyond the academic field of kalām by also publishing popular and popular-academic books on the central texts of early Islam. This led to a stream of Russian-language monographs and textbooks In the 1990s, there was a considerable demand for popular literature on Islam, and several Russian specialists dropped their atheist pathos and started to produce overview books also targeting religious readers. Ibragim did not belong to this category. The motivation for writing about Islam came from himself, and the development of his engagement with the primary sources testifies to his seriousness of purpose: he writes not as a mere provider of factual knowledge but with a clear agenda to reveal the "true nature" of Islam to the Russian, predominantly non-Muslim public.
This approach drew him closer to the post-Soviet Islamic establishment in Russia, which was in need of attracting academic expertise. Ibragim started to teach on Islam and Muslim history in various universities, as well as at the Moscow Islamic Institute of dumrf;33 his books on the revelation texts might have grown out of his teaching materials.
While now dropping any reference to Marxism, Ibragim preserved the dialectical style of exposition that already characterized his kalām works. Yet if in earlier works he used to enter into polemical debates with prominent Western and Muslim colleagues, he now largely refrained from mentioning any opponent by name. In Ibragim's post-Soviet Russian books, the reader is directly confronted with excerpts from the sacred texts, around which the author structures his argumentation. As he once stated, this was a conscious decision. His goal was to take into account the full range of early Islamic sources, to be able to identify, for instance, where the sīra (the traditional works on the life of the Prophet) are consistent with ḥadīth reports about Muḥammad, and where they provide diverging information.34 Ibragim emphasizes that religious knowledge is no longer a monopoly of ʿulamāʾ, the experts in theology and jurisprudence; rather, every Muslim has the right to read the Qurʾān and to develop a dynamic approach that takes account of the historical contexts of the revelation period and of the present day.35 Ibragim believes that "the negative aspects of tradition can be overcome only with the help of the tradition",36 and therefore started to quote from Muslim authorities with clear orthodox credentials, including al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya. In Ibragim's words: "If you want your words to reach people in whose minds there are wrong interpretations of religion, then you must find quotes and interpretations by those thinkers who are authoritative for them."37 With this choice to argue from within the Islamic tradition, Ibragim demonstrates that the Prophet was "tolerant" and forgiving, and that "he never fought against people because they were unbelievers, in order to spread Islam". Muḥammad propagated not fanaticism but a "middle way" (sredinnost') in religious affairs.38 This goal reveals another continuity with Ibragim's earlier work on kalām, namely his insistence on the universality of the Islamic tradition: he points out the commonalities between Islam and the other two monotheistic religions, as well as the internal diversity of early Islam. By debunking the widespread assumption that Islam emerged as a complete set of rules and dogmas to which a believer would simply need to return, Ibragim claims to open up Islamic thinking for further development -that is, for reform.39 What equally remains from his kalām studies is Ibragim's insistence on the place of human reason. In Ibragim's conviction, Islam brought the monotheistic tradition to a new level by transforming it in ways that emphasized rationality, without any need for miracles. Ibragim argued that, with the advent of Islam, the childhood of monotheism came to an end, and religion became mature. The Qurʾān urged people to "solve their earthly problems with the help of their reason".40 To be sure, also blind literalism continued in Muslim societies, as did mystical movements; Ibragim now explained these countertrends to Qurʾānic rationality as remnants of the childhood phase that Islam was supposed to end. What was needed was a continuing reformation of Islam that took account of the general civilizational progress of human society. This insistence on human progress, achieved through reason, remains central in Ibragim's thinking. Russian specialists in the field of philosophy have therefore characterized him as a "liberal",41 which in the contemporary Russian context means that Ibragim's values and intellectual premises are thoroughly European. Also senior Russian Orientalists who witnessed the development of Ibragim's conversion from an academic philosopher to a theological "enlightener" (prosvetitel') hold him in the highest esteem.

Integrating Tatar Jadidism
Ibragim puts his quest for an Islamic reform into the context of the reformist movements that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries swept the Arab world as well as India, Indonesia, and Russia. It is not without admiration that he wrote the following about Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905), the influential Egyptian mufti and reformer: [ʿAbduh's] works were characterized by a liberal and rationalistic spirit. In these books, he insisted on the need to interpret the Qurʾān and the Sunna in congruence with the demands of the time; he rejected taqlīd (the uncritical following of authorities), demanding instead the personal creative judgment by ijtihād; he substantiated the idea of harmony between revelation and reason, between Islam and science; he offered a critique of fatalism, and defended the freedom of will; he called for a reform of fiqh, by emphasizing the principles of maṣlaḥa (understood as common will, popular interest) and talfīq (the synthesis of judgments from the four schools [of law], madhhabs); he emphasized the importance of education for achieving social and political reforms; and he unmasked the despotic rulers, and demanded from them the institutionalization of a shūrā, as consultation with the people, in the form of a permanent parliament.42  (Fakhreddinov, d. 1936)several of whom were deeply influenced by ʿAbduh and the latter's mentor, Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī (d. 1897). As Ibragim phrased it, after reading the Tatar Jadids, he understood that the Islam he abandoned in his Syrian youth "was not the genuine Islam, not the one formulated in the Qurʾān and the authentic Sunna of the Prophet".43 Again, it was his supervisor, Artur Sagadeev, who acquainted him with the Tatar theological heritage; himself an ethnic Tatar, Sagadeev had once held a position in the Oriental manuscript section of Kazan State University, and at some point in the 1970s or 1980s he took Ibragim to Kazan to jointly read the works of Tatar Jadids. Ibragim understood that, in the late nineteenth century, the Tatar scholars were in many respects ahead of their time; Marjānī, for instance, "rehabilitated" the Muʿtazilīs a hundred years before Western researchers like Josef van Ess and W. Montgomery Watt dealt with the matter.44

Historicizing the Qurʾān
Central to Ibragim's argumentation is now the idea that Islam makes a clear distinction between the secular and religious realms. He thus confronts the fundamental claim of Islamists who argue that dīn and dunyā are united in Islam. In his view, neither the Qurʾān nor the Sunna provide arguments for a theocracy or a religious state.45 As he argues, Muḥammad saw himself primarily as a prophet, and only circumstances forced him to temporarily take on political functions. Ibragim claims that it is on purpose that the Qurʾān often offers only general guidelines, even when it comes to the five pillars of Islam (for instance, the Qurʾān does not specify a fixed number of daily prayers or detail the scope of the zakāt tax). God purposefully limited the number 43 Batyr, "Taufik Ibragim: 'Vy lish' prazdnuete iubilei Mardzhani'". 44 Taufik Ibragim, "O Mardzhani -istorike i reformatore", paper presented at a conference celebrating the 180th anniversary of Marjānī (Kazan, January 1998 of regulations, the scholar asserts, in order to make it easier for the believers to accept and follow Islam; and this "simplification" Ibragim understands as an essential principle of Islam. However, the Medinan Muslims kept asking Muḥammad for more concrete rules, so, after the Prophet's death, Muslim traditionalists brought thousands of ḥadīth traditions into circulation in order to fill what they perceived as gaps in the revelation. But by doing so, they contradicted the original message of the Qurʾān, which was to leave worldly affairs to the discretion of the believers, whom God bestowed with the intellect to find the best solutions for their time.46 Ibragim often rejects certain ḥadīth reports because they apparently lack a consistent chain of transmitters (which is the principal criterion of ḥadīth critique that the traditional ʿulamāʾ also apply).47 However, he also makes no secret of his conviction that the Sunna, in general, has only relative and historical value, and does not contain absolute and eternal principles.48 These are exclusively preserved in the Qurʾān.49 At times, Ibragim goes a significant step further. In an interview in 2017, he asserted that the original message is preserved in full and timeless purity only in the Meccan parts of the Qurʾān: What was sent down in Mecca is the essence of the Qurʾānic message. It was in Mecca that the general human principles were formulated. Bluntly spoken, the Meccan Qurʾān is the Qurʾān for the entire humankind, whereas the Medinan Qurʾān is its application to Medinan circumstances. This is the historical character (istorichnost') [of the Qurʾān] that one has to understand.50 46 Batyr, "Taufik Ibragim: 'Musul'manin ne mozhet ne byt' salafitom'". Ibragim also relativizes the so-called "Constitution of Medina", a document through which Muḥammad is reported to have regulated his relations with the factions in Medina;51 many Islamists use this text to justify their struggle for an Islamic state.52 Ibragim challenges its authenticity by using arguments from within the Islamic tradition -namely, by stressing that the document itself is not even mentioned in any of the vast canonical ḥadīth collections.53 With Muḥammad as a political leader by default only, Islam becomes fully compatible with secularism, thanks to its trust in the rationality of the believers.

Qurʾānic Pluralism and Humanism
Especially with his book Qurʾānic Humanism (2015), Ibragim's declared goal became to reveal the humanistic aspects of the Qurʾān that were "darkened by the medieval interpretations". Debunking "the widespread stereotypes about the cruelty and intolerance of the Qurʾān" would help to "ideologically disarm rigorists, fanatics and obscurantists" who base their teachings on the Book.54 In other words, Ibragim's work is of an educational nature, addressing both Muslims and non-Muslims.
For Ibragim and other contextualizing scholars, the Qurʾān is primarily a work of ethics, intended as a guide rather than as a rigid law book. In this respect, Ibragim's ideas echo Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd's "humanistic hermeneutics of the Qurʾān". For the Egyptian Abū Zayd (d. 2010), the Qurʾān is not a closed text but "the outcome of dialoguing, debating, augmenting, accepting and rejecting, not only with pre-Islamic norms, practice, and culture but with its own previous assessments, presuppositions, assertions, etc."55 He emphasized the dialogical nature of the Qurʾānic narratives (with not only God but 51 Cf. also Muḥammad and various other persons speaking in the first person),56 and thus presented the Qurʾān as a protocol of God's unfolding communication with humankind, in which conflicting messages can stand next to each otheranother argument that the Qurʾān was not at all presented as a fixed law book. In a similar fashion, Taufik Ibragim also admonishes Muslims to identify the universal moral values contained in the Qurʾān; these values should then allow Muslims to develop a comprehensive theory of social ethics. "Unlike the Bible", Ibragim accentuates, "the narrations about the past in the Qurʾān do not pursue a narrative-historiographical purpose, but [they are] didactic and educational on moral values. Such narrations should not be approached in a literal way", but must be considered as allegories.57 The regulations contained in the Qurʾān (and, to a lesser extent, in the Sunna) must be generalized to distill ethical guidelines; and these generalizations, not the particular regulations that the Qurʾān brought to the Arabs of the seventh century, should then be the basis for deriving the concrete rules that we must apply to the contemporary situation.58 Ibragim believes that modern times require further development of "the reformist potential" for continuing "the emancipatory tendency" (emansipiruiushchaia tendentsiia) that characterizes the Qurʾān and the Sunna.59 In this rethinking of the Qurʾān, Ibragim emphasizes individual moral responsibility and rational faculty. For him, God knows about the erring nature of the human being, but "these mistakes and corrections provide a constant approach to the truth". The Almighty, Ibragim reasons, does not want us to follow instructions blindly, but He created us with the gift of reason, which will eventually bring a Muslim to Paradise.60 In a broader context, Ibragim contributes to the discussion on the conceptual compatibility between Islam and the notion of human rights in international legal thought. For him, the "anthropocentricity" of Islam can be derived 56 Ibid In Ibragim's reading, the Holy Book acknowledges that there is more than one path to God and salvation, and Islam recognizes and confirms the validity of them all. With respect to Q 49:13,64 the scholar asserts that plurality is the universal message of indeed all Abrahamic religions. According to this idea, the Other is a positive necessity and not a threat. The Qurʾān embraces the unity of humankind in its diversity: "Universal human unity implies respect for the dignity of all 'children of Adam' , for the human being as such, regardless of social origin, color, sex, language or belief".65 Therefore, the Qurʾānic revelations warn against attempts to abolish diversity by forcibly uniting people under the banner of one single religion.66 In the words of Ibragim: "Confessional exclusivism runs counter to the basic precepts of the Qurʾān and the Sunna".67 This argumentation is based on the claim that, according to the Qurʾān, eternal salvation is available to everyone (Q 2:112, 4:123-24) and that being a Muslim does not mean following the religion of Muḥammad but means instead "believing in God" (based on an inclusive interpretation of Q 3:19, 3:85). There is no coercion in matters of faith (Q 2:256),68 and everybody is free to choose his or her path to God . 1949), who, in a Tatar-language book published in 1911, advanced the thesis of "God's universal mercy".70 Bigiev argued that Allah's mercy must entail that, sooner or later, He will forgive all people, believers and nonbelievers alike. Grounding his reasoning in the Qurʾān and adducing certain ḥadīths, Bigiev argued that punishment in Hell cannot possibly be eternal, because this would stand in no relation to the short life span during which a person can commit sins, and in which one has the opportunity to comprehend the veracity of Islam; in the end, God will acquit all sinners, including Christians and unbelievers. Bigiev emphasized that the truth must be established not through fear of Hell, but through the rational proof expounded in the Qurʾān.71 For Ibragim, this soteriological pluralism of the Qurʾān supplements the otherwise "pragmatic" pluralism of Islam -that is, its generous tolerance of non-Muslims living under Muslim rule.72 In this context, Ibragim refers to the classical concept of Islamic apologetics that all human beings are born with an intrinsic faculty (fiṭra) enabling them to understand and pursue upright moral goals and ideals.
Ibragim's philosophy of pluralism resonates with ideas promoted by other contemporary Islamic reformists, such as the Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), though Ibragim does not make direct references to him.73 Ramadan argues that since the ethical message of Islam is entirely focused on justice (because of the fundamental dignity of each person by virtue of creation), the democratic nature of Western states -with their protection of human rights and the rule of law -is intrinsically congenial to the Muslim mindset.74 And although Ramadan and Ibragim define their goals somewhat 70 Mūsā Jārullāh Bīgī, Raḥmat-i ilāhiyya burhānnarï (Orenburg, 1911 Parallels between Ibragim's and Ramadan's programs can also be found in their interpretation of Islamic law. Alongside the pluralistic ethics of the Qurʾān, Ramadan suggests developing the ethical imperatives in Islamic jurisprudence, which are based on paying "respect to the canonical interpretations of the law in a non-binding manner, while also providing creative interpretations to the sources of the law".75 But Ibragim goes further: one gets the impression that he radically reduces the core of Islam to faith in God and belief in retribution (vozdaianie) in the afterlife, making all other issues open to allegorical interpretation. Among these secondary issues, he counts not only the items that kalām scholars quarreled about (like conceptions of Paradise/Hell and the attributes of God) but also Islam's ritual and legal provisions -that is, the issues that legal scholars (fuqahā') regard as their prerogative. All of these items are, Ibragim insists, subject to change.
For Ibragim, ḥadīth reports are nothing more than examples of ijtihād -that is, of personal, human interpretation.76 Examples would be the death penalty for apostasy or adultery, neither of which is mentioned in the Qurʾān, and both of which, for Ibragim, contradict the spirit of the Holy Book. He categorically rejects capital punishment for apostasy (irtidād) and argues that, initially, it came from a provision of the Old Testament that the Qurʾān, in fact, abolished. As the Qurʾān strongly favors freedom of religion and implies that there is no coercion to embrace Islam, no punishment should be imposed for the change of faith. And the "grievous punishment" (mentioned in Q 16:106 for those Muslims who "open their hearts to disbelief") actually means punishment in the afterlife, on the Day of Judgment.77

Politics of Islam in Russia
It was at an Islamic conference organized by the muftiate of Nizhnii Novgorod in 2005 that Ibragim, for the first time, formulated his ideas on Qurʾānic 75 Johnston, "Maqāṣid Al-Sharī'a", 179. 76 Ibragim, "Osnovnye tsennosti i instituty klassicheskogo islama", 10. 77 Ibragim, Koranicheskii gumanizm, 324. Also Frank Griffel argues that the persecution for apostasy was "generally neglected and even disregarded by the early generation of modern Muslim writers" such as Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā: "No worldly penalty is prescribed for them [i.e., for apostates] so long as they refrain from rebellion, but harsh punishments await them in the afterlife". Frank Griffel, "Apostasy", in EI THREE, Mukhetdinov embraced Taufik Ibragim's "Qurʾānic humanism" as another essential building block for a new Islamic ideology that, in his mind, would enable Russia's Muslim community to overcome the challenges that it is facing today. As Mukhetdinov argued in 2016, "Qurʾānic humanism" is a way to "revive the national school of Islamic theology", to galvanize the Islamic tradition that Russia's Muslims "have carefully preserved and transferred through decades of atheistic persecution of religion".84 As a result, dumrf promoted the officially ordained Ḥanafī "traditionalism" paradigm but also its critique, in the form of Tatar Jadidism and Taufik Ibragim's humanist hermeneutics.
As Ibragim's work is in conformity with the concept of God's "all-encompassing mercy" that the Tatar Jadid Mūsā Bigiev had designed in the 1910s,85 Mukhetdinov could argue that "Qurʾānic humanism" is firmly rooted (ukorenen) in Russia's past. In particular, Mukhetdinov praised the ethics of pluralism as outlined by Ibragim, arguing that "Qurʾānic humanism" has secured the harmonious coexistence of Russia's various faiths and nationalities over many centuries.86 This declared tolerance towards other faiths is, of course, a necessity, since all of Russia's muftiates are confronted with the powerful Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoys better access to the political elites, resources, and the media. In an effort to embrace the general political zeitgeist, Mukhetdinov also flirts with Eurasianism, and quotes from well-known Russian national-conservative writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.87 In Mukhetdinov's design, Ibragim's work clearly has the function to convince Russian readers that Islam poses no threat to the Russian nation; even more, Ibragim's secular 84 Damir Mukhetdinov, "Koranicheskii gumanizm kak kontseptual'naia osnova islamskogo prosveshcheniia", LiveJournal,

Opposition to Reformism
After a period of energetic collaboration between dumrf and Ibragim in 2015-17, in 2018 the "Qurʾānic humanism" notion suddenly completely disappeared from dumrf's public rhetoric. The reason for silently abandoning Ibragim's conceptual edifice was the unfolding of two scandals around self-proclaimed disciples of Taufik Ibragim, who held positions in dumrf (Moscow) and dumrt (in Kazan, Tatarstan), respectively. The agents provocateurs were two young Muslim officials who had studied under Ibragim's supervision (especially at the Moscow Islamic Institute). One of them was Rustam Batyr (Batrov, b. 1978), who presented himself as a candidate for the election of a new mufti of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the Republic of Tatarstan (dumrt) in 2013.90 In Tatarstan, the mufti is elected by delegates from the mosque communities; however, the leadership of the muftiate -and probably Tatarstan's political leadership in the background -prevented Batyr from being nominated as a candidate, perhaps to avoid a reformist axis between Moscow (dumrf) and Kazan (dumrt). Eventually, the congregation elected the young Kamil' Samigullin (b. 1985), a scholar until then associated with the Istanbul-based Ismail-Ağa network of 88 Idem, "Rossiiskoe musul'manstvo". 89 Idem, "Intellektual'nyi dialog kak sredstvo preodoleniia radikalizma", IslamRF.  93 In the subsequent months, Batyr continued to defend his arguments and began to link them strongly to Taufik Ibragim and the Tatar heritage of ijtihād. In one internet article, Batyr quoted Ibragim reproaching the Kazan Tatar scholarly elites with the words: "You just celebrate Marjānī's anniversaries, but you are not able to publish his works!"94 This provocation has a certain foundation: while Tatar academic and Islamic scholars regard the Kazan theologian Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī (1818-89) as a founding father of Tatar religious thought and even Tatar identity (the Institute of History of the Tatarstani Academy of Sciences is named after Marjānī), Tatar academic historians and religious scholars so far have edited, studied, and published only Marjānī's Tatar-language historical works,95 neglecting most of his many theological and juridical works in Arabic. 96 The official removal of Batyr from his function in dumrt shows that independent statements by Islamic functionaries are punished in particular when they demand flexibility in questions of the Islamic ritual (here, Batyr's suggestion that the prayer can be conducted in Tatar instead of Arabic -a suggestion that, to the best of our knowledge, does not go back to Taufik Ibragim's published works). The conservative ritual, it seems, is still the building block of "Ḥanafī traditionalism", and orthopraxy remains the public symbol for loyalty to the madhhab.
A similar case soon unfolded in Moscow around one of dumrf's second-tier functionaries, Arslan Sadriev (b. 1973), also recognized as Ibragim's disciple.97 Sadriev served as dumrf's mufti of the Central Federal district (Tsentral'nyi Federal'nyi okrug), a huge chunk of European Russia that includes Moscow area. In an interview with Batyr in 2017, Sadriev argued that the traditional rules for establishing the time slots for the five daily prayers, as well as for the fasting times in Ramadan, had been designed for the Arabs of Muḥammad's time, to whose daily life rhythm they made perfect sense. But for Russia's Muslims, in the northern hemisphere, they bring unreasonable difficulties: Sadriev pointed out that Russia's Muslims often have to conduct several prayers during one and the same night. Similarly, Russia's long summer days make the Ramadan fasting (when eating is allowed only after the advent of darkness) much more difficult than it is the case in the Arab world. Basing himself on the conviction that God's intention was to make Islam "easy", Sadriev suggested leaving the determination of prayer and fasting times to the discretion of the individual believer.98 While Sadriev did not refer to Ibragim, it is clear that his argument is in congruence with the latter's insistence on God's intention to make Islam demonstrated, for several of them the rejection of the ḥadīth body appears as a way to rid society from the increasing power of the orthodox scholars, from patriarchalism, misogyny, and repression109 -goals that Taufik Ibragim would certainly support. But there is no indication that Ibragim or his disciples were in contact with any of the self-proclaimed "Qurʾānists" in the Muslim world or in their various places of exile, or that he would share their interpretation of the Qurʾān as the sole source of Islam. The 2018 Russian fatwā against the "Qurʾānists" did not mention any names (thereby avoiding the takfir ["excommunication"] of any living person), but it was evident that the document targeted Ibragim and the group around him. Marietta Stepaniants, Ibragim's philosopher colleague at the Russian Academy of Sciences, denounced the backlash against the philosopher and his disciples, urging that a safe space be created for Islamic theological debate. Rightfully, she pointed to the two conflicting profiles that contemporary Muslim public figures have to maintain: that of an actor in the political arena, and that of a participant in theological polemics. 110 The two dimensions -political and religious -are inherently intertwined in the very "traditionalism" paradigm; therefore, challenging established Islamic rituals (in the case of Ibragim's disciples, the rules regarding prayer and fasting) becomes as risky as criticizing the Islamic authorities.

Conclusion
In many Muslim-majority countries, reformist scholars of the Qurʾān find themselves under enormous pressure from the state and society. The Egyptian Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd, to take just one prominent example, was declared an apostate and forcibly divorced from his wife; death threats forced him to take refuge in Europe. The case of Taufik Ibragim, a Syrian scholar operating in Muslim-minority Russia, is different. His liberal approach has enjoyed the support not only of Russia's academic Islamic studies elite but also, for many years, of Russia's major Islamic establishment in Moscow, dumrf. Ibragim's "Qurʾānic humanism" is not just a hermeneutical exercise of Qurʾān interpretation but an educational endeavor against radical Islam, and also a plea for the acceptance of Islam by Russian society. But Russia's political doctrine of "traditionalism" -equally meant to combat radicalization, albeit on the opposite approach to the Islamic heritage -has made Ibragim's work subject to political games.
His conservative opponents criticize Ibragim for embracing the "fundamentalist" method of the Salafis -namely, by rejecting the centuries of ḥadīth studies in favor of direct access to the Qurʾān. In response, and almost jokingly, Ibragim challenges the reigning logic, which portrays "traditionalism" as the only viable alternative to Salafism: In reality, all reformers were Salafis, in the sense that all called for a return to the original period when the religion was founded […]. This is the aim of all reform, and the only possible one, the only one that promises success. This is why both Muḥammad ʿAbduh and [Jamāl al-Dīn] al-Afghānī were Salafis, but also [the Tatar theologian Shihāb al-Dīn] al-Marjānī.
[…] This is why we should not allow the Wahhābīs to usurp this term. What is more, any Muslim has to be a Salafi. What else? Would any normal person who believes in Islam not pay respect to the first Muslims, not follow their path?111 Ibragim's thought not only feeds from ʿAbduh's reformism but is also firmly rooted in the Russian/Soviet tradition of Orientology. We have argued that the genesis of his ideas needs to be seen in the context of late Soviet scholarly attempts to overcome the anti-Islamic clichés that dominated Stalinist historiography. While Ibragim's intellectual trajectory started with Marxist Arabic philosophy, his "Qurʾānic humanism" also absorbed Tatar Jadid concepts, and can thus also be presented as a home-grown, Russian product.
Taufik Ibragim's shield against open takfīr charges is a secular academic institution -namely, the Institute of Oriental Studies, to which he continues to be affiliated. As we have shown, this academic standing goes back to the reputation he earned for his early work on kalām. His "Qurʾānic humanism" is difficult to attack directly as long as it is in congruence with Russia's policies against "Islamic radicalism", and as long as it does not directly reject what believers think are fundamental tenets of Islam.
This red line was crossed by his two maverick disciples. Batyr's and Sadriev's assertive reflections on the conditionality of prayer and fasting times led to a public witch hunt against them as "Qurʾānists" -in Russia, a new rhetorical foil to discredit critics of "traditionalism", often with the allegation that Ibragim is their mastermind. The recent vitriolic attacks on reformist voices in Moscow and Kazan are meant to discredit not only Ibragim but also the historical heritage of the Tatar Jadids, many of whom equally advocated a renewed, reason-based approach to the Qurʾān, and who have so far been part and parcel of Tatar historical heritage.112 As the pendulum of mainstream Islam swings back from moderate liberalization to denouncing perceived enemies, the public space for religious debate in Russia is being narrowed down.