01/07/2026 17:20 - 19:30

HALL: Pola - A204

Contact: Murastova K.(.

Chair: Ataeva G., Shahsavari M.

The panel illuminates how religions and religious discourses evolved during times of transformations, with a specific context on illiberal political frameworks. Across diverse contexts—from Early Islamic to the late Soviet—the papers examine religion not as a static institution but as a dynamic field of negotiation, adaptation, and contestation. Our contributors analyze order-based networks and repertoires of action and representation in short- and long-term historical perspectives. Some look at specific regions within the longue durée framework—for example, the North Caucasus across Tsarist and Soviet state-building projects. Others interrogate short-term church-state bargains as they were shaped by shifts in religious politics and by the context of transregional and global reconfigurations—such as the case of Russian Orthodoxy producing discourses of exclusion in ecumenical and Cold War contexts. We explore intellectual exchange and engagement among different communities—including ethnic, gender, and others—with religious texts and traditions, as seen in studies of Qur'an translations and women's learning circles during 'perestroika,' or of religious debates in Early Islamic Greater Khurasan, where theology, law, and politics intersected amid changing regimes. What were the moral and "material" costs of institutional survival? How did interconnected yet distinct contexts and practices reshape religious authority? Taken together, the panel argues that periods of political transformation generate not only constraints on religious life but also new spaces for mediation, and the re-articulation of authority. By examining gendered practices, courtly debates, institutional compromises, the contributions reveal how the religious field becomes deeply interwoven with social and political transformations, offering a comparative perspective on religion's capacity for resilience and adaptation in times of upheaval.