Varieties of Tatar Esotericism in Post‐Soviet Russia

After the collapse of the USSR, intellectuals from traditionally Soviet Muslim ethnicities began the complicated process of rethinking their religious identities, political philosophies, and worldviews. Although Western scholars often present this process as an unproblematic “return to Islam,” the newly religious thinkers of the 1990s and 2000s engaged the rich philosophical universe of their time, incorporating, rejecting, and transforming elements of Russian and Western esotericism in their efforts to formulate answers for the contemporary world. This article focuses on the Tatars (the largest ethnic minority in Russia), whose writers sought not only to recover religion but to remake it in a form suitable for their post‐Soviet society.