Islam in Russia
By Dr. Rizwana Rahim
TCCI, Chicago, IL
On “Islam in Russia,”
I had published the following three-part article
in ‘Pakistan Link’:
1. http://www.pakistanlink.com/Commentary/2005/July/08/07.HTM
[July 8, ‘Commentary’]
2: http://www.pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2005/July05/22/03.HTM
[July 22, ‘Opinion’]
3. http://www.pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2005/Sep05/16/05.HTM
[September 15, ‘Opinion’]
This, I believe, would serve as a useful background
to an article published in ‘The New York
Times’ “Growth of Islam in Russia
Brings Soviet Response,” by Steven Lee Myers
on 22 November, 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/international/europe/22russia.html.
The NYT article is datelined Cherkessk, capital
of Karachayevo-Cherkessia (K-C), an Autonomous
Republic of Russia (population less than half-a-million,
91% Muslim), north of the Caucasus mountain range.
This is part of the south Russian Republics that
are predominantly Muslim, and lie between the
Caspian Sea to the east and the Black Sea to the
west: From east to west (with estimated Muslim
population in parentheses): Dagestan, on the Caspian
shores, ( 85%), Chechnya (91%), Ingushetia (63%),
Kabaradino-Balkariya (78%) and K-C (92%) to the
Black sea.
The NYT article is based on the increased government
scrutiny and surveillance of Muslims and their
activities, and the resulting resentment and violence
that is on the rise in an otherwise trouble-free
Republic. I summarize the article and quote the
salient points, with comments as needed:
1. K-C security officials reportedly maintain
“a secret list of people” and the
list includes those who “have committed
no crimes, but are considered suspect because
they are Muslims who practice Islam outside of
the state’s sanctioned mosques.” The
government “has recreated the Soviet-era
system of control over religion with the Muslim
Spiritual Department, which oversees the appointment
of Islamic leaders.”
2. “In the northern Caucasus, and across
all of Russia, Islamic faith is on the rise. So
is Islamic militancy, and fear of such militancy.”
This has created a lot of conflict in some European
countries, but unlike other European and other
countries where Muslim have come as immigrants,
Muslims in Russia have lived there for centuries,
and are indigenous to various regions in Russia.
President Putin acknowledged this when he told
this in August 2005 to King Abdullah of Jordan:
“These are Russian citizens, and they have
no other motherland.”
3. “The separatist conflict in Chechnya,
more than a decade old, has taken on an Islamic
hue. And it is spilling beyond Chechnya’s
borders in the Caucasus, where Islam has become
a rallying force against corruption, brutality
and poverty.”
The distinction is crucial to the understanding
of the conflicts.
4. “On the morning of Oct. 13, scores of
men took up arms in Nalchik, the capital of the
neighboring republic, Kabardino-Balkariya. They
were mostly driven, relatives said, by harassment
against men with beards and women with head scarves,
and by the closing of six mosques in the city.
In two days at least 138 people were killed. In
Dagestan and Ingushetia, militants have been blamed
for unending bombings and killings.”
5. “Followers of a Chechen terrorist leader,
Shamil Basayev, have claimed responsibility for
the deadliest attacks, including the one in Nalchik,
and before that a similar raid in Ingushetia and
the school siege in Beslan in September 2004.
In Beslan, 331 people were killed, 186 of them
children.”
6. The separatist activities in Chechnya has been
an old Russian problem, but Russia’s non-selective
reaction toward Muslim in general may actually
be spreading the problem rather than containing
it and addressing it effectively.
7. “More and more [people in K-C and elsewhere]
oppose the hard-line stands that the Kremlin takes
against anyone who challenges its central authority.”
8. “In places like Nalchik and in Karachayevo-Cherkessia,
‘official’ muftis and imams have themselves
been accused of acting to preserve their own status
by tolerating the Kremlin’s efforts to repress
anyone practicing a ‘purer’ form of
Islam.”
9. “Mr. Putin linked the Nalchik uprising
to international terrorists, whom he called ‘animals
in human guise’. But in the Caucasus, where
Islamic-inspired violence has killed far more
people than terrorists have in Western Europe,
the prevailing view is quite different.”
10. “The paradox of Islam in today’s
Russia is that Muslims have never been freer.”
This is largely due to the demise of USSR and
the restrictions it had on ALL religions, including
Islam.
11. “Islam is officially recognized as one
of Russia’s four principal religions”
(other being Orthodox Christianity, Judaism and
Buddhism). In further recognition of this, Russia
has also “applied to join the Organization
of Islamic States.”
12. “The number of Muslims is estimated
at 14 million to 23 million, 10 percent to 16
percent of Russia’s population. They are
spread across the country but congregate in several
Muslim-majority republics.” The figures
seem even higher than noted in my article.
13. “Thousands of mosques have been rebuilt
and reopened, as have madrassas, including one
here in Cherkessk, where 66 young men and women
learn the fundamentals of their faith. Among their
teachers are four Egyptians. ‘We could pray
on Red Square and no one would care’, the
imam of Cherkessk’s mosque, Kazim Katchiyev,
said after evening prayers recently.”
14. “Believers outside of the state’s
Muslim departments are increasingly viewed with
suspicion because of the radicalization of Chechnya
and other republics. They are denounced as Wahhabis.”
15. “On Oct. 14, for example, a group of
young men ransacked a prayer house in Sergiyev
Posad, near Moscow, badly beating an imam. They
shouted, ‘There is no place for Muslims
in Russia’, according to the Council of
Muftis, which represents the spiritual departments
in Russia.”
Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, the council’s chairman,
complained about the image of Muslims portrayed
by the media: “Routinely depicted Muslims
collectively as radicals waging holy war against
Russia, rather than as members of Russian society.”
He warned against such a characterization and
suggested that it is this and the government policies
are pushing people “to seek refuge in what
he considers improperly radicalize forms of Islam.”
16. “In Nalchik, many Muslims blamed the
republic’s former president, Valery Kokov”
and the harsh reaction of his Interior Ministry
toward Muslims observing their daily rituals.
“Arbitrary arrests and beatings were common.
Many of those killed in Nalchik were not hardened
fighters, but local residents acting out of what
appeared to be desperation. Many were not armed,
according to officials, but were hoping to seize
weapons from police stations.” “It
was not a terrorist act,” Betal Kerefov
said in an interview in the family’s apartment.
“It was a revolt.”
“Ali Pshigotyzhev, 55, worked as an announcer
on state radio for 30 years until he was dismissed,
he said, for praying. ….Mr. Pshigotyzhev
accused the local imams in effect of endorsing
the repressions, for fear of losing their status.”
“People were patient in this republic, but
patience has its limits,” he said in Nalchik’s
only mosque. “And a tragedy occurred. And
it is only the beginning of the tragedy. Such
sentiments are what the authorities fear most.”
17. “Mustafa Batdiyev, the president of
Karachayevo-Cherkessia, said his region openly
supported Islam. A businessman, he paid for the
construction of a mosque in his native village.
The republic pays for people to make pilgrimages
to Mecca. The last day of Ramadan is a holiday
in the republic.”
“But Chechnya’s separatists, he said,
had hijacked Islam to wrest control of the Caucasus
from Russia, instilling an insidious version that
is not widely accepted among the region’s
comparatively secular Muslims.”
“The people on the list ‘have not
yet broken any Russian laws, so no measures, no
force have been used against them’, he said.
‘But we have talked and are talking to the
population and explaining about them, so as to
warn any of their possible supporters and to deny
them the opportunity to attract more of our young
people to their ranks’.
18. “Mr. Batdiyev said the raid had disrupted
a plan to seize a school, as happened in Beslan,
but evidence was never detailed. A similar case
happened in February, in Karachayevsk, the city
in the foothills where Mr. Golayev lives under
scrutiny and suspicion. He adopted Islam after
serving in the Soviet Army in East Germany.”
“The authorities, he said, fear Islam because
they fear the discipline it demands, the defiance
it offers in a corrupted society. ‘Who needs
a person who does not drink, who does not smoke,
who has freedom?’ he said of the official
attitude. ‘If I am lying drunk on the ground,
I am easier to control’.
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