"Praying Youth" as a Subculture of the Kabardino-Balkar Society

Abstract

The paper deals with а social group of the Kabardino-Balkarian society - the so-called «praying youth", which emerged during the post-Soviet religious revival. The paper shows some distinctive features of this group - their social base, their world outlook, and their behavioral patterns and markers. A special attention is paid to the analysis of the reasons of emergence of the religious conflict that divided the society into those professing a “popular" form of Islam and those “praying", with their fundamentalist agenda. The field materials illustrate how the “popular" and/or “traditional" culture vanishes within the subculture of the “praying youth".