>From: Tom Waters <tomfromthebx at yahoo.com>
>
>Is that a transliteration of the same thing as wahhabism? Any significance
>to the choice of this term?
It is the same term. It is used to refer to the strains of Islamic fundamentalism that have been imported to the Muslim regions of the fSU, mostly from the Gulf. See the snippets below from an interview with Akhmad Kadyrov, now president of Chechnya, in the run-up to the elections. By "people of other nationalities" Kadyrov means non-Chechen mercenaries and mujaheedin, presumably.
How do you estimate your opponents' chances in this respect? Can they be serious competition for you at the election?
I am saying this again - time will tell. I do not want to be philosophical about the seriousness of my competitors; I do not want to discuss that. One can see it with the naked eye, what they have done and contributed to the Chechen republic to avoid the war. Where were they in 1997-1999, and what were they doing when I was fighting Wahhabism? What were they doing to prevent the war? I have been living in Chechnya all the time and I have always been against Wahhabis; that is why they constantly had me in their sights. The attempted assassinations against me were not accidental. Who prepared them and what for? I always said that Wahhabism is unacceptable for the Chechen nation. We are Muslims, and we did not convert to Sufi Islam just a couple of days ago. They tried to thrust an idea upon us that had been originally invented against Islam, albeit allegedly under the banner of Islam.
Do you see the Chechen republic as a Muslim, an Islamic one?
I was strongly against the introduction of the Sharia government in the republic. It was not because I did not want such a thing; I am striving for it, actually. But I know that we are not ready for it. One has to raise a new generation, to raise children in the spirit of Islam. The Sharia regulations that they gave us were simply an interpretation of the Sudanese ones. They were approved by Yandarbiyev, and he did not ask anyone. When Aslan Maskhadov and I visited Saudi Arabia and met with the government of Sudan, Sudanese officials told us that it had taken them 11 years to institute a Sharia government. Did we want to have everything done in one day? Things do not work like that. Furthermore, who dictated Islam to us? Movladi Udugov, who does not have a notion of Islam? Or Maskhadov and Yandarbiyev? Who are they? They do not know the bases of Islam, they do not understand it. All these people deliberately ran a separatist policy
Why is it all happening in Chechnya? Because the Chechens are warriors, first and foremost. Secondly, they are very trusting people - I am saying this to you as a Chechen man. We trust everyone else, but we do not trust each other. We believe people of other nationalities more than we believe each other. All the wars that have happened in Chechnya since the era of tsarist Russia were unleashed by people of other nationalities. Unfortunately, our nation has never had a leader who would stand up for his nation.
Military troops were withdrawn from Chechnya on Dec. 31, 1996. But what did "free Chechnya" do? It opened the door to criminals from the entire territory of Russia, the former USSR and its outskirts. Criminals were coming to Chechnya from all over the world - they did not have a place in their own countries. All of them could live perfectly well in Chechnya. Non-Muslims allegedly converted to Islam. It is ridiculous to talk about such a thing . Becoming a Muslim for them implied growing a beard and learning how to pronounce "salam aleykum." What kind of a Muslim is that?
I grew up in a very religious family. I could read the Quran easily at the age of five. Do you think I can stay calm when such people try to teach me what Islam is, how to pronounce it and what to do with it?!
If Yeltsin and Maskhadov signed a peace treaty between Russia and Chechnya, why did the incursion into Dagestan take place? If we, as a separate state that concluded a peace treaty with Russia, attack a neighboring republic, a unit of the Russian Federation, is it called Jihad? No, it is not. It is a provocation to unleash a war in Chechnya.
But you declared Jihad on Russia in 1995. You were waging war on Shamil Basayev and Aslan Maskhadov's side.
Yes, I was on that side, and I am proud that I was able to choose the right way to go. There are certain reasons for why I declared Jihad and why I changed my position. That was a time when people were gripped with the idea of liberation. They thought that people like Dudayev or Yandarbiyev wanted freedom and an Islamic state organization for Chechnya.
And what happened next?
There is a rule of Sharia: If the enemy wants to suppress you, you are supposed to show strong resistance. But the enemy did not come on its own: We brought it to us. We went to Dagestan, arranged a massacre there and then returned. This means, as they say, that Russia is our enemy that came to the borders and demanded that the bandits should be delivered - Basayev, Khattab - everyone who had been in Dagestan. But instead of delivering the bandits, Aslan Maskhadov appointed them commanders. He accepted the war, and that was the time that I stood up against them. I appeared on television and called upon people to bring their sons, their brothers back - everyone who was going to Dagestan. I said that it was the war between neighbors, between Muslims. But it did not work. I personally told Maskhadov not to let Basayev go there. Aslan assured me that Basayev was not coming back to Chechnya, because he had a plan: To first conquer Dagestan and then attack Azerbaijan and spread the ideas of Islam.
I objected to that. I said that Russia would not surrender Dagestan, because it is a border territory, an entrance to the sea and abroad. I addressed Ruslan Ali-Hajiyev, chairman of parliament, asking him to dismiss Maskhadov, to take power: Otherwise, a war would be inevitable. He answered that, if Maskhadov were dismissed, Arsan Alakhov would have become the head of the republic according to the Constitution. That would be even worse. I asked him to tell Arsan's people that Aslan was leading the republic to war. They did not do it, they decided not to do it, and so we had the second Chechen campaign.
Full text here: http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7274-15.cfm
See also the address of the Grand Mufti of Russia and the European Part of the CIS on wahhibism at the 2001 conference Islamic Threat or Threat to Islam here:
Theses of the address of Sheikh-ul-Islam TALGHAT TAJUDDIN Supreme Mufti, Representative of the Central Spiritual Board of Muslims for Russia and the East-European countries of CIS
Snip: 2. Contemporary extremism with the islamic face Also in the contemporary world there is such contribution of heresies to Islam, which contradict our belief both in the letter and in spirit, both in theory and in practice. It is difficult to distinguish at first sight this fabrication from Islam. It satanically enters the ranks of Islam, it makes use of its symbols. But in spirit it has nothing in common with the true divine Islam. Such radical doctrines are concretely the doctrine of the “Muslim Brother” Hasan al-Banni, Wahhabism, Salafyism, the Pakistani Tabliq sect, originating the Talibani movement, and other similar phenomena. These phenomena are doctrinal heresies, they introduce into traditional Islam no lesser innovations than the so-called “islamic modernists” do. They affirm that all present forms of Islam are false, and only their doctrine, insisting on the literal execution of the orders of their leaders, is true in the last resort. Spirit of reasonable choice, personal dignity of man, spontaneity of belief, respect for the peoples of the “Scriptures” and all the others – all this is simply absent from these movements, which might be called as totalitarian sects of pseudo-islamic kind. They also change the social meaning of the Islamic world-view. This is not simple “politicised Islam”, it would be wrong to consider it so – it is “politicised heresy”. Islam does not insist that all Muslims compulsory follow definite rules of moral, ethics, conduct, being guided in private and public life by the religious establishing of traditional Islam. Extremist Fanatics change this quite traditional setting into compulsory godliness, into a completely different pattern: they require literal observance to their own rules, invented by them, and call violence on everyone who does not obey them,. Every Islamic term is exposed by them to a distortion. In Islam there is the concept of “jihad”, of “holy war”. First of all it means “al-jihad-ul-kabir”, the Great War, which each Muslim believer must wage inside himself against defects, ignorance and evil. The “Small holy war” (“al-jihad-ul-sagir”) is led against those who brings violence and anger into the world, who deny belief and truth, who introduce lie, cruelty and intolerance, who aim at oppressing the peoples, at depriving them of their freedom. An example of real jihad was for the Muslims the Great Patriotic War, the war against the Nazi occupiers. And the first to set the banner of “Victory” above the Reichstag were the Muslim-Russians from Bashkortostan, and this despite of the 14,5 thousand mosques destroyed during the Stalin years. So in the course of the centuries the devout Muslims shared joys and sorrows of the Great Russia Homeland with their Orthodox brothers-countrymen. Jihad is always war against evil and violence. The sectarians-fanatics completely overturn this concept, proclaiming the so-called “jihad” against everyone who disagrees with them, so against the whole world. This has no more relation at all to Islam. Islam allows to use violence only as a means of last resort, and only against those who clearly showed their evil intents, and this means aggressors, rapists, killers. In all the remaining cases, the shariah calls for indulgence and exhortation. This is not at all the case of the extremists. Violence here becomes the fundamental law, violence against their own, against the others, against practically everybody. Without noticing it, the so-called “islamists” invoke on their own head the true jihad. Challenging all the peoples of the Earth, and first of all traditional Islam, professed by the overwhelming majority of the Islamic world, these forces put themselves in opposition to Islam. And reacting against them is a religious, moral, social and political duty of each Muslim. Alas, in some Islamic countries – particularly in Saudi Arabia – there is a tolerant attitude (to say the least) towards the representatives of this tendency. Thus there is a precedent of indulgence and even connivance to these regimes which – in the unstable, crisis-bound regions of the Islamic world – results in criminal consequences: surging terrorism and violence, large scale war and even genocide. The departing from the traditions of true Islam in theoretical questions necessarily results in such destructive consequences. It is necessary to affirm unequivocally: the deviation from traditional Islam, from the bases of our belief, the aspiration to reinterpretate in one’s own way the provisions of the Koran and the Sunna, to distort the sense of the shariah laws to the benefit of an aggressive extremist minority – this is even more dangerous than the process of modernisation of Islam. Aiming at defending Islam from the entry of non-islamic factors, islamists themselves quit Islam, break away with tradition, follow the fire of arrogance which has always been the main instrument of Ibliz-devil. The Talibans have blown up the ancient Buddha statues. In this way not only they profaned a relic of many Buddhist nations of the world, not only they deprived mankind of unique monuments of ancient culture; they also put themselves above their own ancestors and the million Muslims which lived in the territory of Afghanistan for centuries and whose spiritual exploits and achievement are by no means comparable with such aggressive half-learned maniacally ambitious rabble, forming the core of Talibani. But the also broke the prohibition of Allah, so that their adoration will offend the Most High God Allah and sin will fall on those who – on a sacred land, where the envoy of Allah and his forerunners stepped – became the reason of this blasphemy. And are they not – under the slogan of “protecting” Islam – sending tons and tons of narcotics to Russia, the CIS, and even farther, pretending, in this way, to be corrupting the enemy? But you see, for Islam all people since the beginning of the Koran envoy are “Ummatut-da’va” – the community of the invoking, even those did not believe.
http://utenti.lycos.it/ArchivEurasia/islconf_tajuddin.html
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