Russia Profile May 15, 2006 Russia’s Islamic Face Two Areas, Each With Its Own Local Characteristics By Rafik Mukhametshin Rafik Mukhametshin is a professor of political science and deputy head of the Islamic Studies department at the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences.
At first glance, the last 15 years of Islamic revival appear to provide grounds for hope. Russia is home to over 7,000 mosques, more than 50 registered Islamic spiritual centers, about 120 educational centers, and the religion is second only to Orthodox Christianity in its numbers of adherents. Some experts put the number of Muslims in Russia at between 15 and 17 million, or over 10 percent of the population. And this number appears to be growing, both as a result of current birth rates - particularly in the North Caucasus - and immigration from primarily Muslim countries in Central Asia. The number of Muslims in Russia is expected to reach 25 million to 30 million by 2020, raising the share of the population to from 17 to 19 percent.
Although their numbers are increasing, Russian Muslims today still face the problem of defining an individual identity based on ethno-national, Russian (in the sense of citizenship) and clearly religious components. It’s easy to understand why the question of identity is one of the major issues behind the split in the Muslim Umma (community) in Russia.
The return of Islam as a socio-cultural phenomenon in Russia has demonstrated very graphically the absence of unity within the Muslim community itself. This was the case, first of all, because the followers of Islam in Russia live in virtually all of its regions and are split among 40 different ethnic groups. The largest Muslim concentrations are found in the North Caucasus, the Volga basin, the Urals and Western Siberia.
Despite an Islamic presence in virtually all of the country’s regions, most Russian Muslims can be divided into two geographic groupings: North Caucasus and “interior” Russian, both with their own distinctive cultural and religious traditions and practices for resolving problems, including sensitive political questions.
Neither of these groupings is monolithic and both are far from unified, although the interior Russian Muslim society is based on Tatar heritage. Recent years have seen the development of entirely independent Islamic centers with their own regional leaders in Kazan (Gusman Iskhakov), Nizhny Novgorod (Umar Idrisov), Saratov (Mukaddas Bibarsov), Siberia (Nafigulla Ashirov), and Moscow (Ravil Gainutdin), each of whom has been interested, most of all, in strengthening his own position and, as a result, has strongly underlined his autonomy and independence from Ufa, whose chief mufti inherited the symbolic mantle of the Islamic spiritual directorate created in 1789 under Catherine the Great. Even the organizational schism that, many believe, has gone too far, is already too little for these leaders, who are looking for a form of integration that will preserve their independence. The Russian Council of Muftis (RCM), formed in 1995 under Ravil Gainutdin, fills that role at present. The tightening of the “power vertical” in Russia in recent years has meant a greater interest in a unified center of Islamic opinion to deal with certain issues. But such a unified center has never existed. Even in the Russian Empire, the state created two bodies - the Orenburg and Tauride spiritual directorates. Stalin increased the number to four. So there has constantly been an official unwillingness to unite Islam, which was always feared as a possible source of separatism. As a result, the appearance of a single organization speaking for Russia’s Muslims is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
It is unclear if there is really a desire on the part of Muslims for such unity. A spiritual directorate is not a necessary attribute of the Islamic Umma, so such a figure exists only to serve as a liaison between Muslims and the state. At the grassroots level, such a body can only expect to be accepted as an organ with local authority if it offers real help to the community in the form of financing or providing personnel and religious literature. If this help isn’t provided, such a body, which is not legitimate according to the Islamic canon, is hardly of any interest to the average Muslim.
Today, the spiritual directorate is working both to carve out a niche in the socio-cultural sphere and, at the same time, to win trust at the grass-roots level. This, in turn, is done while keeping one eye on those Muslim countries and international charitable funds that have become its main source of funding. Foreign aid surged into Russia at the beginning of the 1990s, and the money went to the opening of mosques and madrassas and the publication of religious literature. Nobody thought much about what the results of such aggressive religious expansion might be at the time.
At the end of the 1990s, the involvement of international organizations in Muslim affairs within Russia fell to virtually nil. Although this meant that the Arab teachers left the regional educational institutions, their followers remained. Like their teachers, they continued to persuade Muslims that only they were preaching the “true” religion.
But a different mood was developing among Russian Muslims. The older generation of Tatar Muslims, in particular, has reacted negatively to the arrogance of the younger imams that was mixed with a disdain for the traditions the Tatars had followed since accepting Islam in the 10th century. The teachings that were introduced from the Arab world were unacceptable both in relation to many of the Tatars’ religious traditions and because they were aimed at the creation of a closed confessional territory that would be home to Muslims only. The Tatar intelligentsia and a certain segment of Muslim clergy were alarmed that the religious revival was abandoning the centuries-old tradition of a flexible and reasonable “Tatar Islam” that had promoted both tolerance and devotion. In the final analysis, the Islam of the “interior” Russian Muslim community is still searching for a consolidating spiritual factor. Instead, at present, there is a polarization of attitudes between the intelligentsia and older generation, on one side, and the young imams, who have a significant segment of young followers, on the other. So the spiritual directorate of “interior” Russia is forced to try to maneuver a difficult path between the two sides. The attitudes of the younger imams have much in common with the ideological aims of their international sponsors, while the older generation of Muslims constitutes a group of believers regularly attending mosques. Ignoring their position is also out of the question. The intelligentsia is struggling for the revival of Tatar religious traditions, without which, it argues, there is no hope of a rebirth of Tatar culture in general.
Visible Divisions
While Islam in “interior” Russia exhibits at least an external calm, that of the North Caucasus is visibly more strained. The revival of Islam in this region evolved in the same direction as in the rest of Russia, but there were also essential differences that determined the nature of the development of Islam here, the most important of which was the political environment in the region in the 1990s. With the state of permanent tension associated with, among other factors, the conflict in Chechnya, Islam became an instrument both in internal conflicts and in confrontations with the center.
The most “Islamicized” republic in the region is Dagestan, where the role of Islam in politics has been, and remains, relatively high. It was here in 1997 that the “Wahhabi” Jamaat [Islamic association] was created. Islamic Jamaats then appeared in Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Adygeya, and North Ossetia.
As for Chechnya, the radical idea of the general introduction of Sharia law and creation of an Islamic state didn’t enjoy broad support. Dzhokar Dudayev, the first president of the independent Chechen republic, stressed repeatedly that his goal was the creation of a secular, democratic state. He only appealed to Islam as a result of the emergence of military conflict in Chechnya, in the sense of a jihad against Moscow.
Islam has failed to become a factor for both internal and inter-ethnic consolidation in the North Caucasus. Its use as a political instrument, on the contrary, has led and continues to lead to divisions within the community. Most characteristic of this relationship is the confrontation between the traditional Sufi orientation in the Northern Caucasus and the “Wahhabis.” The spiritual administration of Islam in all of the North Caucasus republics has concentrated its full strength on preventing the penetration and spread of Wahhabism. The solidarity of the anti-Wahhabi powers has led to an unprecedented growth in the power of Sufi sheiks, including secular politicians. As a result, in recent years Wahhabism has lost its attractiveness as a political instrument, and the principal power in the Northern Caucasus has been aimed at the revival of the region’s traditional Islamic values.
But Wahhabism hasn’t vanished entirely as a political current. As long as dissatisfaction at low standards of living and widespread corruption remains in the region, these attitudes can once again take a religious form. Despite serious pressure, Islamic radicals have been partially able to maintain their organizational structures, which survive deep underground.
At the federal level, the government promotes the country’s status as a multi-faith state while, at the same time, the leadership takes every opportunity to increase Russia’s stature on the basis of its location on the border between Christianity and Islam. Its geographic proximity to, and ties with, Muslim countries go back a long way and make it possible to talk not only about the special nature of Russian-Muslim relations, but even about whether Russia can be considered a specific part of the Islamic world. Russia’s appearance as an observer nation at the Organization of the Islamic Conference bears witness to this.
Of course, this is an external political aspect of Russia’s Islamic face. Perhaps it can serve as a stimulus for working out an effective relationship between the state and Islam. In the meantime, Islam continues its resurgence on the Russian socio-cultural landscape, something unknown from which we still might expect many surprises.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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