The Sovietological approach to the study of Islam has deeply affected scholarship in the West after 1991, producing a body of literature that reproduced uncritically the secularist language as well as the interpretive templates of atheist publications coming from the Soviet Union. While the fall of the USSR paved the way in the 1990s for pioneering work on little-known aspects of Muslim religiosity during the Cold War, only recently have scholars paused to reflect on the existence in the USSR of what Eren Tasar has termed a “religious sphere,” i.e., an institutional space allowing Muslims to perform their religiosity on account of their “constitutional rights to freedom of conscience.” Capitalizing on the interpretive possibilities opened up by the work of Tasar, several recent studies have shown the dynamic and far-from-predictable interactions between an atheist state and citizens who regarded and indeed fashioned themselves as Muslim believers. This research track will be devoted to probe further this interpretive dimension and examine how Soviet Muslims deployed an Islamic episteme to make sense of their everyday life. To achieve this goal, the third research track will pursue a hermeneutics of the documentary apparatus produced by atheistic bureaucracies. In addition, it will support the exploration of the scholarship on Islam produced by Soviet historians and ethnographers by reflecting on the interpretive categories that informed their debates.