From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/6/2007 11:41 PM
Thursday, December 6, 2007

Kadyrov Uses 'Folk Islam' For Political Gain

By Liz Fuller and Aslan Doukaev

Russia -- Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov at a midday prayer in Yaroslavl’s mosque, 16May2007
Ramzan Kadyrov prays at a mosque in the western Russian city of Yaroslavl
(ITAR-TASS)
December 6, 2007 -- Since his appointment as pro-Moscow Chechen Republic head in early March 2007, Ramzan Kadyrov has energetically promulgated a revival of Chechen popular or "folk" Islam. Some observers see that campaign as a bid to pit the Chechen strain of Sufism against the Salafi Islam espoused by the North Caucasus resistance. The Russian authorities routinely denigrate Salafi Islam as "Wahhabism," a term that is routinely applied to any Muslims whose political loyalties are considered suspect.



A closer analysis, however, suggests that the term "Sufism," like “Wahhabism,” is being used in this context as a political marker rather than a doctrinal one. Kadyrov, the son of a former chief mufti, is apparently promoting a brand of ethno-territorial nationalism that is based largely on popular Islam, but that also selectively borrows -- and sometimes grotesquely distorts -- the symbols and rituals of Chechen Sufism, even as it ignores its essence.

In this respect, Kadyrov and his advisers may have been inspired by the argument espoused by the Tatar Jadidists -- reformist Muslims who sought in the late 19th and early 20th century to reconcile faith with political thought -- that "love for the fatherland derives from faith."

Chechnya's Islamic Spectrum

Besides Salafism, which is a relatively new and still-marginal phenomenon in the area, Islam in Chechnya is practiced in two forms. Dogmatic or canonical Sunni Islam, represented by the Shafii school of religious law, is followed primarily by the so-called official clergy -- imams and leaders of officially registered congregations. There are reportedly 72 such congregations, all overseen by Chechnya's Spiritual Board of Muslims. This is an age-old religious tradition looked upon more or less favorably by the Russian government.

But Sufism, which is a more esoteric and internalized expression of Islamic teaching, has increasingly been receiving approving nods from the Russian state as well. This is surprising given the harshness with which tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet authorities, treated Sufi brotherhoods in the past. Beginning in the second half of the 18th century, practically all those leading the resistance to Russia's expansion in the North Caucasus -- from Sheikh Mansur and Imam Shamil to Najmuttin of Hotso and Sheikh Uzun Haji -- were inspired by Sufism, primarily of the Naqshbandi brand. Hence the suspicion the Russian authorities always harbored against the Sufi orders.

Even the more pacifist Qadiriya tariqat, or brotherhood, which spread in the mid-19th century under the influence of the Chechen preacher Kunta Haji and which advocated the acceptance of infidel domination for the sake of self-preservation, drew the ire of the tsarist administration.

In 1864, the Russian authorities, wary of the growing popularity of the Qadiriya tariqat in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and parts of Daghestan, arrested and deported Kunta Haji to central Russia. Kunta Haji's followers, of whom Kadyrov counts himself one, have never been able to come to terms with the collective trauma of losing their spiritual leader. To this day they await the return of their sheikh.

Repression, Assimilation

Other Sufi orders suffered a similar plight. Between the 1860s and the mid-1920s, first the tsarist government and then the Bolsheviks wiped out the entire spiritual leadership of all Sufi brotherhoods in Chechnya and Ingushetia. But despite those reprisals, such groups in the Caucasus survived underground and continued to practice Sufi rituals out of sight of the authorities until the collapse of the atheist regime in the early 1990s.

The war in Chechnya that began in late 1994 served as the catalyst for the emergence of various Islamist groups, both in Chechnya and elsewhere in the North Caucasus. Russian leaders, their barely concealed distaste for Islam notwithstanding, by the late 1990s became so concerned about the spread of radical interpretations of Islam that they considered it expedient to co-opt official Muslim clergy and even some Sufi sheikhs into the struggle against burgeoning Islamic radicalism.

The end result was an artificial dichotomy between "traditional Islam" and “Wahhabism.” Because those efforts often lacked subtlety and relied to a great extent on the use of force, they frequently proved counterproductive, driving many of those groups to take up arms against the authorities.
 
The publicly touted rationale for the Russian punitive intervention in Chechnya in the fall of 1999 was the incursion, launched in August of that year, into neighboring Daghestan by just such a group of Chechen and Daghestani Islamic radicals.

Headed by field commander Shamil Basayev and ideologue Movladi Udugov, the incursion's stated aim was declaring a North Caucasus Islamic republic. The Russian and pro-Russian Chechen authorities continued to identify Wahhabism as the primary force that impelled young Chechens to join the ranks of the resistance even after full-scale hostilities peaked. And it was the resistance that was identified as responsible for the killing, during the early years of this decade, of at least 17 and possibly as many as 50 Muslim clergymen. They are also blamed for the murders of an elderly relative and the son of Akhmed-hadji Shamayev, who stepped down in the summer of 2005 after serving for five years as Chechnya's head mufti.