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Russia and its radicalising Muslims

Dec 17,2015 - Last updated at Dec 17,2015

Russia stands at a major crossroads as it works out how exactly to deal with the 14.5 million ethnic Muslims that live within its borders.

If added to this are the migrant workers from Central Asia and Azerbaijan, the total is around 20 million.

By comparison, Germany has 5 million and France has 6 million Muslims.

The Kremlin has struggled for decades to deal with Muslims’ demands. When communism collapsed, it was relatively easy to restore the Orthodox Church to its traditional preeminence. But dealing with the Muslims is much less straightforward. Besides being a religion, they are a political force.

The relationship between the power of the Kremlin and the developing power of Islam was seriously put to the test in the 1990s by the wars for independence in the southern Muslim states of Chechnya and Daghestan.

Today, stability is threatened by Daesh’s growing appeal among disaffected Muslim youth.

If Chechyna (now pacified) was the catalyst for the initial spread of militant Islamism, Daesh is now the threat that can spear the soft underbelly of southern Russia.

This threat is galvanised by Daesh’s belief system.

According to President Vladimir Putin, over 2,000 Russian citizens have gone to fight with Daesh, a ruthless organisation that recently blew up a Russian airliner in midair.

Most of the world thinks only of the fall of the Iron Curtain on Russia’s European borders. But it also fell in the south.

Six million immigrant workers mixed with evangelical Wahabist imams are gradually becoming a potent fifth column inside Russia.

Shooting itself in the foot, Russia has dealt too often with the bubbles of incipient disaffection by using the heavy hand rather than dialogue. Inevitably, this has led to further radicalism.

Nevertheless, a poll of Muslims conducted in 2010 by the Media-Orient agency in the north Caucasus found that 73 per cent rejected political and religious extremism.

But that still leaves a quarter, which is attracted to radicalism to varying degrees.

Surprisingly, the highest totals of rejection were in Chechnya and Daghestan: 97 per cent and 85 per cent, respectively. Perhaps that is because they have both experienced the horror of Islamic extremist-led war.

In public, the Russian leadership welcomes the Islamic religion as a moral force. In private there are grave doubts.

It is obvious that over the last two decades Islam, quiescent in Soviet times, increasingly serves as a forum for social and political protests which in some areas have been hijacked by separatists.

To complicate things, Islam is split into competing factions. There is old-time traditional Islam, on the one hand, and fundamentalism, on the other.

Three years ago, the mufti of Tatarstan, a traditionalist, was seriously wounded in an attack and Valiulla Yakupov, a prominent ideologist of Islamic traditionalism, was assassinated.

The Kremlin demands unconditional loyalty to “mother Russia”. Many Muslims do not give it and look towards the global Ummah. Their numbers are growing fast.

Not even Tatarstan, which has existed peacefully in a Christian environment for half a millennium, is isolated from the tendency towards radicalism and militancy.

According to Alexei Malashenko, co-chair of Carnegie Moscow Centre’s Religion, Society and Security Programme, writing in the quarterly “Russia in Global Affairs”, “the Kremlin simplifies the situation by focusing on the political aspects. It combats extremism and separatism but evades the question of how people in a secular state can live by religious laws. It ignores the fact that the trend in the development of Russia’s civic identity does not always coincide with, and sometimes is even opposed to that of religious identity.”

Malashenko also makes the point that many Muslim scholars, imams, theologians and even local politicians today seek to move away from a simplified dichotomy between traditional and radical.

They see that it splits society and that some sort of mix is necessary, not to be violent or brutally puritanical, but to recognise the value of the social and political protest. And that even in a modern society, Sharia Law can be observed as long as one is not fundamentalist about it.

There needs to be both a state-Islamic dialogue and an Islamic-Islamic one.

Two thousand Muslims going to fight at the side of Daesh is many, but it is not a lot. The response to the call of violence is still limited to a very small minority.

The time for dialogue and mending grievances has by no means run out.

Putin said in an important speech on Islam: “Although religion is constitutionally separated from the state, the state itself is not separated from believers.”

 

Clearly he has a grasp of the problem. But there is a way to go from words to action.

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