Political Islam in the Early Post-Soviet Years
In the early 1990s, the question of self-determination and choice of the future model of republican statehood was at the forefront of political discourse; Tatarstan and Bashkortostan were the most active in the alleged “parade of sovereignties.” As historian Aidar Habutdinov noted, “Despite the fact that in 1989 there was mass celebration of the anniversary of the acceptance of Islam by the State of the Volga Bulgaria [the historic Islamic Bulgar state], it was considered more as a tribute to the ancestors and their statehood.”22The program documents of the Tatar movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, largely tailored in accordance to Baltic standards, made practically no men-tion of religion. O_cial authorities did not use any religious rhetoric or arguments. The concept of a “special political path” for Tatarstan was related at that time to the proclamation of civil sover-eignty, to the revival of ethno-national culture and language and, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, to the restoration of independence.23
In fact, in the first platform of the nationalist All-Tatar Public Center (ATPC), as well as in the materials of the constituent congress of the 1991 Sovereignty Committee, the concept of Islam was simply absent. In the second ATPC program there was a special section entitled “Islam in the Tatar society,” but at that point the role of the ethno-national factor was dominant in comparison with
20. “Rafael Khakimov o Evroislame” [Rafael Khakimov on Euro-Islam], http://www.islampeace. ru/?parent_id=784 (undated).
21. “Russia and Islam,” The Economist.
22. Aidar Habutdinov, “Islam v Tatarstane v pervyie gody novogo tysyacheletiya” [Islam in Tatarstan in the early millennium years], May 20, 2008, http://www.islamrf.ru/news/islam-world/culture/2940/. Volga Bulgaria (Volga–Kama Bolghar) was a medieval state that existed between the seventh and thirteenth centuries around the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, in what is now European Russia. The population was mostly Bulgars (an ethnically Turkic group) who had conquered the Finno-Ugrics and Turkic speakers of the region. They adopted Islam as their state religion in the early tenth century.
23. Ibid.
8 |the rise of radical and nonofficial islamic groups in russia’s volga region
any religious issue. Incidentally, in the second ATPC program, Islamic fundamentalism was criti-cized and assessed as “unacceptable” for the future of Tatarstan as it was opposed to moderate and pro-European Jadidism.24At that time there were only loose attempts, if any, to establish Islamic political structures in the Volga region. According to sociological polls from the mid-1990s in the Republic of Tatarstan, 44.6 percent of the rural Tatars and 33.5 percent of the urban population perceived religion as both a connection with ethnic origins and as one factor of ethnic self-identi-fication; 41 percent of the urban Tatars believed that Islamic holidays were traditional ethnic ones as well.25
Still, the first manifestations of politicized Islam—initially timid—took place in the Volga region in the early 1990s. In 1990 Astrakhan hosted the first congress of the Islamic Revival Party (IRP), during which Akhmadkadi Akhtayev was elected leader. 26This Salafi, a professional physi-cian and ethnic Avar born in Kudali in Dagestan, was rather moderate in supporting dialogue between Salafi and Sufi Muslims as well as between Islam and Orthodox Christianity. The IRP as an organization, however, desired to consolidate all of the Muslims of the Soviet Union in pursuit of the right to live in accordance with the rules of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. As Rashid Khalikov, an IRP activist in Astrakhan, said: “We are labeled extremists. But this is not true; we simply sup-port the purity of Islam and its precepts. We will have to revive our own religion throughout the whole world. We do not believe in the o_cial mullahs because they are bureaucrats and far from our faith.”27Akhtayev himself believed that the alleged “new world order” targeted Islam as a victim.28Within the IRP at that time, popular democratic discourse was strongly criticized. The organizers of the forum appealed to Soviet Muslims, asking them to find their own way not as-sociated either with the Communist Party, which was rapidly losing its power, or with the anti-Communist movement. Still, the IRP as a whole did not exist for a long time. The dissolution of the USSR placed too many different tasks in front of the Muslim communities of what had once been a common country.29
24. The ATPC, also known as the Tatar Public Center, is an organization with a Tatar nationalist agenda founded in 1989. For more detailed observations, see http://tatar-centr.blogspot.com/2012/07/blog-post_14. html.
25. Rozalinda Musina, “Musulmanskays identichnost’ kak forma ‘religioznogo natsionalizma’ tatar v kontexte etnosotsial’nyh protsessov v etnopoliticheskoi situatsii v Tatarstane [The Muslim identity as a
form of alleged Tatar “religious nationalism” in the context of ethno-socia processes in the Tatarstan ethno-political situation], in Islam v Evrazii [Islam in Eurasia] (Moscow: Progress-Tradition Publishing House, 2001), p. 301.
26. Geographically, Astrakhan is in the lower Volga; although today the Astrakhan region is a part of the Southern Federal District, it is culturally and historically connected with regions of the VFD.
27. Cited in Victor Viktorin, Islam v Astrakhanskom regione [Islam in the Astrakhan region] (Moscow: Logos Publishing House, 2008), p. 57. This book contains copies of original documents issued by the IRP Congress.
28. Mikhail Roshchin, Sled Islamskogo fundamentalisma na Severnom Kavkaze [The Islamic fundamentalist trace in the North Caucasus] (Moscow: Craft+ Publishing House, 2003), p. 5.
29. The IRP was actively engaged in the Tajikistan Civil War of 1992–1997. Dushanbe banned it in 1993, as it fought alongside the United Tajik Opposition against the governmental forces. During the Peace Agreement of 1997, IRP was legalized and then participated in the parliamentary elections. It boycotted the presidential elections of 2006.
Akhmadkadi Akhtayev in 1992 was elected as a deputy of the republican Parliament of Dagestan and on the eve of his death was going to participate in the elections of the Gunib district administration head. He criticized the concept of “armed jihad” in Dagestan and followed moderate line. In contrast, one of the IRP’s Astrakhan Congress organizers, Bagautdin Kebedov, became the leader of radical wing of the
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