Paul Goble
Key West, February 9 – Russia’s three largest Muslim Spiritual Directorates are now actively discussing discuss the possible formation of a single Muslim hierarchy, but neither they nor the Russian powers that be appear to be paying much attention to one group of Muslims there – the more than 2.1 million followers of Shiia Islam.
All of the Russian MSDs are Sunni in orientation, a reflection of both the past in which until the 1990s, there were few Shiia Muslims in the Russian Federation, and those few could look to the Transcaucasian MSD based in Baku, whose head, the sheikh ul-Islam, was responsible for all Shiia in the USSR.
But the collapse of the Soviet Union had two consequences. On the one hand, it unleashed powerful migration flows, as a result of which some two million Azerbaijanis, almost all of whom are traditionally Shiia, came to Russia. And on the other, ...
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