Introduction

This volume hones into the growing gap between top-down ethno-national categories of state-organized religious fields and believers' diversified personal experiences, discoveries and formulations of faith. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing and empirically exploring the emerging mosaic of Islamic religiosity, defined here as the way an individual believer experiences his or her relation to religion and faith. Hence, we seek conceptually grounded and empirically informed analysis to the revival of faith in the post-communist era. The underlining questions of this book are: What are the new encounters of faith in the post-communist era? How do believers navigate the spaces between organized religion and new-found alternatives to faith? How do they choose what is to be a good Muslim? What importance it gains in their post-communist lives and how do they pursue it in practice? And finally, where are we heading in this reconfigured relation between state-organized religion and believers' faith