Sabirova Gusel To be Muslim in Russia: culture, identity, and faith
Brief summary Islam, the second religion in Russia, is deeply rooted in the Russian history, having rich experience in inter-confessional coexistence and forming a multicultural social space. Below is a summary of a research team project on the Muslims in Tatarstan and Daghestan??Islam, ethnicity and nationalism in post-Soviet Russia?. There is also a prospect for research which will be realized in January?August 2001 in Moscow. The independent variables conditioning local diversity of Islamic practices and knowledge comprise the following: the interior and exterior social and cultural environment of the territory, its confessional composition and distance from or closeness to traditional Islamic centers; conflation of Islamic practices and local ethnic traditions; existence of natural, social, cultural?communicative?barriers between villages; former atheistic experience of decentralizing and privatizing general Islamic practices; pluralism in religiosity patterns; interpretation of holy texts and 'legitimation' of the 'true' ritual forms (caused by weakness of the official Islam and clerical authority, low level of religious knowledge); the secularized character of Islam in Russia (particularly among the Tartars); the use of Islam for nationalism and political separatism; a conflict between the 'new' and the 'old' clergy; and cultural and historical specificities in Islamic conversion. Currently, I am involved in another research project: 'City mosque and modern Islamic practices', which aims to survey the Moscow mosques as social and cultural phenomena in a modern urban environment. In Moscow, capital of an Orthodox state, the mosque is a social and cultural component of a rapidly modernizing city. It is a constituting body of the Muslim community of both the city and the region. The planned project is aimed first of all to describe the images of the functioning city mosques and to research the social and cultural composition of parishioners, the patterns of forming a community around the mosque, and the images and social characteristics of the clergy leaders in the community.
To be Muslim in Russia: culture, identity, faith Nowadays some 16 to 22 million ethnic Muslims live in the Urals, in the Volga River region, in Siberia and the Northern Caucasus; the most numerous being the Tartars.1 Nine Muslim Republics form part of the Russian Federation. Islam, the second religion in Russia, is deeply rooted in the Russian history, having rich experience in inter-confessional coexistence and forming a multicultural social space. Islam of the Soviet period saw religious practices moved from the public to the private sphere and become socially localized, so any unified system of Muslim identification and observance of Islamic rituals was destroyed. These factors have had a decisive influence on current processes of re-Islamization2. Although an overwhelming majority of Muslims in Russia are Sunnites, Russian Islam is very diversified. The Islam of the 'Northern Muslims' (Tartars) is known for its jadidistic modernizing trends3, in contrast to the Northern Caucasus where fundamentalist and radical traditions are strong. Furthermore, forms and reproductive mechanisms of the Islamic practices and knowledge in different republics and even in adjacent villages are diversified. Muslims, who are indigenous to Russian territory and live inside the Orthodox environment, form specific huge social and cultural enclaves. Contemporary positive attitudes towards religion are being encouraged by the following: the current spiritual-moral crisis; the inclusion of Islamic values in an ethno-cultural renaissance; and the increase in social prestige attached to faith and religion. However, mass adoption of religion and the scandals surrounding religious figures have meant that attitudes towards Islam remain cautious. The recent academic and public discussions are focused on the roles of the Orthodoxy and Islam and new religious movements in the state and ethnic self-identification of Russia, and on the current religiosity of the people. It is often pointed out that the hot interest in religion of the 1980s cooled down by the end of the 1990s.4 Any attempt to conceptualize current religious dynamics in the terms of post-modernist, secularist or rational choice theories or schemes can be provocative in grasping some phenomenology of the social transformation in Russia. The 'positioning' of Islam in the all-Russian social and cultural, officially supported context of the Orthodoxy is stressed. Here below is a summary of a research team project on the Muslims in Tatarstan and Daghestan??Islam, ethnicity and nationalism in post-Soviet Russia?.5 There is also a prospect for research which will be realized in January?August 2001 in Moscow. The sociological element of the project draws primarily on 300 family and individual interviews conducted in the two republics of Tatarstan and Daghestan over the period from September 1997 to August 1998. A significant proportion of the populations of both these republics belongs to traditionally Islam-oriented ethnic groups,6 and thus the republics provide a good starting point to compare and contrast the different developmental paths of the ?religious renaissance? within the Russian Federation. The qualitative strategy explores the diversity in personal religious involvement and attitudes forming configurations among Tartars (as relatively secularized and culturally assimilated) and people of the Caucasus (as traditional Muslims). The aim was to reconstruct individual perceptive and reflexive patterns concerning Islam as a cultural, social, political and moral system. Collected data do demonstrate the conflation of secular and traditionalist frames in Islamic images and, at the same time, the absolute consensus on the positive and stabilizing moral potential of Islam as a whole and its modernized versions. Both republics are characterized by the absence of generally accepted criteria of religiosity and the level of religiosity in both republics varies from a superficial, instrumental attitude towards religion, to fanatical belief and observance of all rituals and ceremonies (some kind of 'diffused religion'7). Islamic identity in Tatarstan and Daghestan is characterized by a close interaction with local ethnic traditions and widely accepted social values. In Tatarstan, this ethnicization of religiosity is expressed in the close link between Tatar and Muslim identity.8 In both republics the non-aggressive nature of 'their' Islam is emphasized as is opposition to religious extremism and fundamentalism. Islam today is attractive primarily in terms of its psychological, moral and cultural wealth and thus, although Islam is gradually entering more and more spheres of everyday life, it remains largely detached from broader social and political issues in the minds of the republics' populations. Public opinion in both Tatarstan and Daghestan considers it important to provide basic education about Islam and thus approves the introduction of the teaching of the foundations of Islam into the school syllabus. Whether Islamic education is taken further depends largely on the individual children and their families, and the choice to study in an Islamic institution may be motivated by non-spiritual factors, especially in Daghestan, where the opportunity to receive an education and possibly thereafter housing, is extremely valuable. The weak development of teaching institutions in the republics and the dubious quality of the teachers there lead many to seek study opportunities abroad: in Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. A religious career does not yet enjoy the same status or desirability as other professional domains such as economics, law or medicine. This is not helped by the status and reputation of Islamic figures; in both republics mullahs and Imams are often characterized as ?dishonest? and as abusing their positions for their own enrichment. Thus newly qualified mullahs and Imams do not always enjoy authority. In Daghestan the position of women varies widely according to social background and status, the most pronounced difference being between the cities and the religious villages. In the latter, girls are expected to wear headscarves and long dresses from around the age of 7 to 10 and are often withdrawn from school between the ages of 12 and14. Public spaces (school, the home, the table) are divided into strictly male and female zones. The majority of Daghestani families do not consciously conform to any Islamic model of a woman?s role, however, and given current levels of unemployment, women often become the family breadwinners. Respondents noted how families put on a public show of ?respect for the man? but that this often did not reflect relations within the family in private. Indeed, Daghestani women are very active, commercially adept and effective in developing networks and acquaintances in order to help their husbands or relatives to move up the social ladder. In Tatarstan there is no such ?public? demonstration of traditional, Islamic gender relations and it is Islamically oriented young people who are most keen to preserve the traditional Islamic patriarchy. In Tatarstan, as in Daghestan, many respondents noted that parents did not ?interfere? in their choice of marriage partner. However, respondents agreed that it was most important that Muslims married Muslims and that it was better to marry someone of your own ethnic group, better still someone from your village and, best of all, someone from your own kinship group. The preference for mono-ethnic and, still more, mono-confessional marriages was manifest in Tatarstan as well, although in both republics the number of mixed marriages remains high. In both republics, respondents?with the exception of a few male respondents?were against the Islamic tradition of male polygamy. The following generational cohorts can be discerned in terms of their attitudes towards Islam9: (1) 75-80 years and older (?born with the revolution?): This group includes those who have retained their faith all along as well as those who have turned to Islam in the last few years. There are relatively few atheists in this group since they were brought up with strict Muslim traditions; (2) 55 (60)-75 years old (?the first pioneers and Komsomol members?): There is a high proportion of people sympathetic to communism and atheism among this group and those who are actively educating themselves in religion have to radically review their own values since they were brought up either with semi-Muslim traditions or amidst aggressively atheist and materialist values; (3) 45-55 (60) years old (pre-pension age): This group was brought up in the Soviet spirit and whilst having religious sympathies, they are currently more concerned with material, everyday and social status issues; (4) 30-40 (45) years (maturity): This group experienced Soviet upbringing and is largely indifferent towards religion, observing ceremonies only on a ritualistic level; (5) 22-30 years (determining one?s position): This is an amorphous group ranging from active believers at one end of the spectrum to the totally indifferent at the other; (6) 10-22 years (growing up): This group is being brought up during an ethno-cultural revival and many are beginning to show a strong interest in Islam. Modern Islam in Russia is regionally and socially localized. Even adjacent Muslim villages of the same (small in number) ethnicity in the mountainous Daghestan show different rituals and different scales of religiosity. For example, inhabitants of the villages of Gubden, Kubachi and Madshalis reveal the full continuum from rationalized agnosticism to fanaticism. Another example concerns the different pronunciation of the Holy Text of the Koran, conditioned not only by various ethnic accents but also by different sources of religious education of modern believers (religious youth taught by Arabian natives, the old people taught by their fathers, and neophytes learning texts from Cyrillic or Latin transcriptions). The break up of the USSR started centrifugal processes in the Central Muslim Administration of Russia, which forms various local administrative bodies, duplicating and even competitive with each other.10 The independent variables conditioning local diversity of Islamic practices and knowledge comprise the following: the interior and exterior social and cultural environment of the territory, its confessional composition and distance from or closeness to traditional Islamic centers; conflation of Islamic practices and local ethnic traditions; existence of natural, social, cultural?communicative?barriers between villages; former atheistic experience of decentralizing and privatizing general Islamic practices; pluralism in religiosity patterns; interpretation of holy texts and 'legitimation' of the 'true' ritual forms (caused by weakness of the official Islam and clerical authority, low level of religious knowledge); the secularized character of Islam in Russia (particularly among the Tartars); the use of Islam for nationalism and political separatism; a conflict between the 'new' and the 'old' clergy; and cultural and historical specificities in Islamic conversion. Currently, I am involved in another research project, 'City mosque and modern Islamic practices', which aims to survey the Moscow mosques as social and cultural phenomena in a modern urban environment. Nowadays there are four mosques in Moscow. The Moscow Cathedral Mosque was opened to believers even under the Soviet regime. The Historical Mosque was reopened in 1994, and the third, the Memorial Mosque, was built up by the Moscow Government. The fourth mosque, named 'Yardyam', was erected under the patronage of Tatar sponsors. Both the latter and the Memorial Mosque have been open since 1997. But beyond these four mosques there are more than 25 communities and parishes in Moscow. According to different sources, the total number of ethnic Muslims ranges from 600,000 to 1,600,000 inhabitants of the city and region of Moscow. The overwhelming majority consists of Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan Tartars, Bashkirs and Azerbaijanis. During the last decade, immigrants from the Northern Caucasus made a considerable contribution to the Moscow multi-ethnic Muslim diaspora. Although the religious boom of the early 1990s has definitely declined, the Friday prayers at the Cathedral Mosque, according to the experts, unites some 2,000 believers, and up to 16,000 Muslims gather on the main Saint Days. The Moscow Cathedral Mosque is a symbolic bastion of Islam in Russia, not only for the Muslims but also for the city's political establishment. In Moscow, capital of an Orthodox state, the mosque is a social and cultural component of a rapidly modernizing city. It is a constituting body of the Muslim community of both the city and the region. The planned project is aimed first of all to describe the images of the functioning city mosques and to research the social and cultural composition of parishioners, the patterns of forming a community around the mosque, and the images and social characteristics of the clergy leaders in the community. It aims to study the functions of the modern mosque in Russia as a core Islam-reproducing agency in a multi-cultural urban environment, and the process of the structuring of its inner social space. Qualitative methodology will be used, including case studies, non-structured interviews, and observation. Being obliged to contribute, legitimate and reproduce a unified Islamic ideology, the sacred leaders are in trouble. This is mainly due to a considerable secular character and ethnic diversity: modern Islam in Russia has a great number of competing conceptions of 'the true Islam'. One of the basic distinctions is drawn between the more or less sound religious and political elitist version and the broad popular Islamic movement; the Muslim majority is alienated from the matters performed and presented by their clergy. The mosque, as a religious institution, functions as a principle channel of indoctrinating various ideologies to the core of the Islamic community?the habitués, who then translate and diffuse doctrines among the 'non-goers' to the mosque. The mosques serve as public places where the official and the rank-and-file, public and private versions of Islam, the Muslim Umma and ethnic specificities, ideas, traditionalism and reformism, pathos and ethos combine in the modern Muslim discourse in Moscow. The space within the Mosque is differed with sex, age, and ethnicity, and frequency of prayer attendance. The main group to be analysed is women. That is, mainly due to their religious conservative attitudes, women were active keepers and translators of the Islamic traditions through the Soviet age, and are promoters of the modern ritualized Islamic practices of everyday life. Women constitute a considerable part of those learning the Arabic graphics and basic Islam. They have even managed to conquer a space to assist the Friday prayers in the Cathedral Mosque, where they constitute about one third of the audience. Briefly, 'women?s Islam' in Moscow gives clear evidence of the actual redefining of Islamic practices, and in a sense may be used as a model example of Islamic modernization.