Accommodation of Islamic Religious Practices and Democracy in the Post- Communist Muslim Republics Renat Shaykhutdinov Florida Atlantic University Abstract: The literature on state accommodation of Muslim religious practices has focused on the regional context of Western Europe and North America. In this project, I identify and compare state policies toward Islamic religious practices using a sample of 22 former communist Muslim republics of Eurasia. For this purpose, I construct an original dataset collected from a variety of sources. Employing the number of mosques functioning in each post-communist Muslim republic as the measure of state accommodation of religious practices I find that among all factors the level of democracy is the single most important variable in explaining variation in accommodation of Islamic religious practices. To further demonstrate significance of these results I trace the process of democratic influence on state accommodation of religious policies examining in-depth the case of Tatars both in the pre- communist Imperial and revolutionary Russia and the contemporary republic of Tatarstan. INTRODUCTION Toleration or endorsement by the state of diverse ethno-religious and cul- tural practices is seen as an effective mechanism for stability and accord in multi-cultural settings; such policies protect ethnic and religious group identities while forging groups’ allegiance to the state (Lapidoth 1997; Rothchild and Hartzell 2000; Keyder 1997, 30). Research on the origins of the institutional mechanisms for managing cultural diversity has focused on secular institutions, such as territorial autonomy (Riker 1964; Shaykhutdinov 2010; van Cott 2001). Systematic empirical study Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Renat Shaykhutdinov, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431. E-mail: rshaykhu@fau.edu 1 Politics and Religion, page 1 of 25, 2013. © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, 2013 doi:10.1017/S1755048312000764 1755-0483/13 $25.00