On this point, I have a comment:
"It is thoroughly modern, even if in some places and times it impacts upon populations that might, with some justice, be considered pre- or non-modern. If one wanted any pointer to this, one need look no further than to notice that the present wave started out very much in the towns and, indeed, in the international centres where international students gather, and went from there to the villages; initially, villagers took great offence at being told by their urban-educated young that they were not sufficiently Muslim!"
kj khoo ---
Something similar occured here, but different in detail. Soviet Muslims tended to be highly secularized, for the obvious reason that it was an officially atheist country. This is not to say that religion was not important to them, but that they adapted to a secular way of life and adopted secular values (otherwise they couldn't have functioned in society).
There was a religious Islamic revival movement beginning during Glasnost, and at that time Muslims in Russia begab sending their children abroad to study, most prominently in Saudi. They would come back to their homes in Dagestan and elsewhere deriding the local variant of Islam as fake Islam and calling the village imam a fool.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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