From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 12/2/2005 1:01 AM

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’.
http://pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2005/Dec05/02/03.HTM