Gulnaz Sibgatullina

Gulnaz Sibgatullina is an Assistant Professor for Illiberal Regimes in the Department of History, European Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the intersection of religious studies, political science, and cultural history, with a particular focus on Islam in Europe, contemporary Islamic thought, and state–church relations in Russia. She is especially interested in how religious traditions interact with political systems, and how minority communities navigate questions of identity, language, and belonging in illiberal and post-imperial contexts.

She is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project Illiberal Religious Internationalism in Africa, which explores how transnational religious institutions—both Orthodox Christian and Muslim—seek to expand their influence on the African continent. The project situates these initiatives within broader histories of colonialism, postcolonial statehood, and religious pluralism, while examining how local actors in Africa respond to and reshape these encounters.

Sibgatullina earned an MA in Linguistics from Moscow State Linguistic University and a PhD in Sociolinguistics from Leiden University, where her doctoral work investigated the role of language in shaping Muslim–Christian encounters. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, she was a visiting scholar at institutions in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Recent publications:

Sibgatullina, G. (2024). Illiberalism and Islam. In Marlene Laruelle (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism, Oxford Handbooks (2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Nov. 2023).

Sibgatullina, G. (2024). Russia’s conservative religious consensus: forging an illiberal global solidarity. Religion, State & Society, 52(4), 420-422.

Sibgatullina, G. (2024). On Translating the Qur’an into Turkic Vernaculars: Texts, Ties, and Traditions. In G. Sibgatullina, & G. Wiegers (Eds.), European Muslims and the Qur’an: Practices of Translation, Interpretation, and Commodification (pp. 189-218). (The European Qur'an; Vol. 5). De Gruyter.