Gender equality debates in modern Islam

The thesis focuses on the phenomenon of Islamic Feminism and answer the question about existence of Russian Islamic feminism. The research draws on qualitative interviews; semi-structured, in-depth which were conducted in Almaty and Shymkent, cities in Kazakhstan, and Ankara, the capital of Turkey, in 2020. Autoethnographic methodology has also been utilized by the authors as well; this combination of methods will attempt to explain the identity crisis in Muslim culture of the post-Soviet world. Valeria Porokhova is the only scholar expanding feminist interpretations of Islam in Post-Soviet countries. This study also is an attempt to explain why educated women from former Soviet countries warmly welcomed Turkish patriarchy, some of them even radical Islam. This study review the impact of "Sovietization" on Muslim women, "double burden" of women, revival of Islamic and national pre-Islamic traditions after collapsing of USSR. In this study authors analyze these gender contradicting challenges by classifying them into opposing groups. The first group is religious women with an ideology of traditional Islam in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, second group women who follow Islam-nomadic traditions with ethnocentric worldview, and third group is modern women who live a secular life, Russified and reject İslamic and ethno-national traditions. Each group of women in a conflict with each other and have different issues of gender problems. This study attempts to outline and explain main problems such as xenophobia, Islamophobia, polygyny, bride kidnapping and other gender issues of post-Soviet women. The patriarchy rooted in revived nomadic traditions, literal Islamic interpretation, confusion between radical wing and liberal-reformist wing of feminism, and the reaction to Sovietization are all together occur as an obstacle to achieve gender equality in Post-Soviet Muslim countries.