Shaykh Ahmetjan Mustafi n. Social Elements of Islam and the Spirit of the Epoch

This is a commented translation into Russian of the only publication of Ahmetjan Mustafi n (1902–1964) — the Muhtasib of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of the European part of the USSR and Siberia (DUMES) for the Moscow and Gorky regions, the Chuvash and Mordovian ASSR, imam-khatib of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque in 1964–1986. The publication, published in Arabic in issue 3–4 of the magazine “Al-muslimūn fī ash-sharq as-sufi ā tiy” (“Muslims of the Soviet East”) for 1970, is a transcript of the author’s speech at the International Conference “For the Unity of Muslims in the Struggle for Peace, against Imperialist Aggression”, which took place in the same year in Tashkent. The speech is mainly an apologetics of the socialist system and the foreign policy of the USSR from the point of view of Islam in it’s modernist understanding, expressed both in direct reference to the sacred primary sources and through quoting the main representatives of this movement of the late XIX — early XX centuries — ‘Abdo, Afghani, Marjani and Bigiev.