The following interviews are another attempt to get answers to questions about what is happening in Islam and the Islamic world in modern conditions. Variants of answers were presented by the authors of articles in this issue, and similar problems were discussed at a round table. The peculiarity of these interviews is that they were conducted not just with people who study Islam in one way or another and are trying to understand what is happening. Our interlocutors are Muslims, and Muslims whose religious beliefs differ to a certain extent. That is, it is a view of the problem not from the outside, but from the inside, and from different ideological positions. To make it easier for the reader to compare these positions, the interviews were conducted in approximately the same way, with a similar set of questions. But at the same time, we did not force our interlocutors into a rigid format, they had the opportunity to deviate from the topic, to dwell in more detail on what seemed to them the most important and interesting. Our interlocutors were: Tawfiq Ibrahim - Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Chief Researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is engaged in the history of Muslim thought, a supporter of the reformist trend in Islam. Orhan Cemal is a journalist, one of the founders of the Muslim Union of Journalists of Russia, and a supporter of political Islam. page 300 In his interview Taufik Ibrahim argues that the main problem for Muslims is that the traditional, medieval understanding of religion has not yet been overcome. This traditional understanding is connected with the loss of the initial creative impulse of early Islam, with the so-called closure of the gate of ijtihad. Both the fundamentalists and the reformist typically reference the early Islamic period. But the question is, why do they do so? Is it in order to find ready-made answers or to find the inner sense of this or that statement, to liberate them from ... Читать далее