Khutbah presented in russian in the context of a modern linguocultural situation

A muslim sermon is a religious genre that attracts the attention of specialists in various fields of knowledge: theologians, religious scholars, historians, sociologists, political scientists, and linguists. Having emerged simultaneously with the emergence of Islam, the khutbah has come a long way and has retained its ritual side unchanged. In the 20th – 21st centuries in the Russian Empire, in the Soviet Union, and later in the Russian Federation, it adapted to local conditions and catered to the political and ethnocultural needs of the time, one of which was the question of the language of its presentation. The orientation towards the canonical Arabic language or the ethnic language of the majority of the parishioners was explained by the requirements to preserve the doctrine in its original purity, or by the need to bring believers to closer understanding of the pastoral word. Today, this issue still remains controversial due to the fact that the Russian language, which has acquired the status of the state language, displaces bilingualism from many spheres of life, and small peoples lose their national identity because of this. The strengthening of the role of the Russian language occurs also due to the fact that now it performs the function of the language of inter-confessional and intra-confessional communication. The state policy in the sphere of religion and the change in the social conditions of people’s life affected the expansion of the reasons for reading the khutbahs and the conditions for their conduct, which gave rise to certain genre transformations. In the context of the pandemic, not only the format of sermons (on-line khutbahs) has changed but also the level of creativity has increased, which is based on the collective activity of the imam-khatib and the team of his associates and students.