Aspects of Study of Religious (Islamic) Discourse in Multilingual Space

The article studies the results of the interdisciplinary (theological & linguistic) project “Islamic Discourse: Theological Thought and Communication in the Russian-Speaking Environment”, aimed at solving the general problem of forming an original general theory of Islamic discourse (with its theoretical and experimental verification) by establishing linguistic-cultural, cognitive-semantic, communicative-pragmatic and sociolinguistic mechanisms for the implementation of religious thought and communication of Muslims in the linguistic space. The author notes that the language of Muslim believers is an independent microsystem marked by specific characteristics and provides multidimensional opportunities of operation. A comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, which was due to the multidimensional and diverse nature of the studied subject, uncovered new theoretical knowledge that fits the overall picture of both domestic and foreign theolinguistics. The research was carried out in several areas: 1) linguistic & cultural (research of language and religion from the viewpoint of the religious code of the national linguistics and culture, i.e. features of the content and operation of concepts in both Russian-speaking and multilingual Islamic discourse); 2) cognitive & semantic (establishment of mechanisms for semantic-cognitive modeling of key conceptual areas relevant to the religious and linguistic consciousness of Muslims); 3) communicative & pragmatic (study of the linguistic manifestation of religious communication in various genres of Islamic discourse: sermon, fatwa, etc.); 4) comprehensive development of the problems of adequate translation of Muslim spiritual texts into Russian. The description of religious discourse as an interdisciplinary field of knowledge highlights the need to use specific methods and techniques for studying the material. One of them is a synthesis of linguosemiotic, linguacultural and theoconceptual methods, which allows to describe the content of a concept not only at the linguistic and cultural-historical levels, but also at the spiritual-worldview level, resulting in revea­ling the “spiritual meanings” of doctrine represented at the language level.