The Post-Soviet Islamic Revival

 

At the same time, the end of the Soviet Union also brought with it the end of the o_cial state policy of atheism; Islam, like Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism, gained legitimacy with the social and cultural space of Russia. Across the country thousands of mosques opened, overcoming the artificial isolation of the Soviet believers. Owing to newly opened borders, Russian Muslims were able not only to perform the hajj (pilgrimage) to the holy places of Mecca and Me-dina but also to study at foreign religious schools and access religious literature and periodicals.30Over twenty years, stable contacts with foreign co-religionists have been established and the space for communication with Russia’s Muslims has been greatly expanded. However, all these achieve-ments represent only one side of the coin.

 

With the resurgence of Muslim identity in Russia came the acquaintance of Russian Muslims with the theories and practices of radical Islamism. According to Zagir Arukhov, a distinguished Dagestani expert on Islam who was killed by terrorists in 2005, “It was expected that the totality of the Islamic system of regulation, the organic character of Islam as a socio-cultural system, and the flexible interaction with the state would give this religion important advantages in the socio-political transformation of society.”31But the transformation of Islam into a unifying and stabiliz-ing force did not occur. Unlike Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Volga Muslim landscape had been more homogenous prior to the Soviet dissolution. The overwhelming majority of Muslims in the VFD were followers of the Hanafi Madh’hab, a juridical school of Sunni Islam in which the ev-eryday life of adherents combined a mixture of Islamic religious norms and local ethnic traditions and customs. After 1991, however, religious liberalization resulted in the interference of external Islamic movements of different origins—Arabic, Turkish and South Asian—as well as domestic nontraditional groups.

 

Being a patchwork of various trends and groups, Islam could not play a consolidating role. Rather, many schisms that rocked the community of Russian Muslims, especially in the early 1990s, facilitated the emergence of various radical forces within Russia. Although most Russian Muslims are loyal citizens of their country, those influenced by radical Islam aimed to effect a full and complete victory of their ideological and political worldview. This consequence of the Islamic revival poses a potential threat to the unity of Russia and an increasingly significant risk for Euro-pean security. It is fraught with interethnic conflicts as well as clashes not only between Christians and Muslims, but also between different groups of Muslims. As Roman Silantyev, a Russian expert on post-Soviet Islam, notes, the last two decades in the history of Russia’s Islamic community have been filled with numerous confrontations—personal, business, and political—and radicals with their religious fervor and intolerance have played a significant role. 2The Russian state has been faced with an Islamist threat both inside the country in the North Caucasus and, to a lesser

 

North Caucasus Islamists. He is considered the spiritual father of Salafi Islam in Dagestan; now he is wanted by Russian law enforcement. Bagautdin’s step-brother, Abbas Kebedov, has since 2010 been a member of a Dagestani commission for the social rehabilitation of former militants.

30. The USSR restored diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in 1991; a year earlier, then–Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev decided to permit Soviet citizens to travel through third countries to perform the hajj.

31. Zagier Arukhov, “Poiski etnicheskoi I religioznou identichnosti v Dagestane [In search of ethnic and religious identity in Dagestan], in Religiya I identichnost’ v Rossii [Religion and identity in Russia], ed. M. T. Stepanyants (Moscow: Vostochnaya Literatura, 2003), p. 185.

32. Roman Silantyev, Noveishaya Istoriya Islamskogo soobshchestva v Rossii [The contemporary history of the Islamic community in Russia] (Moscow: Ihtos Publishing House, 2005), p. 6.

 

 

10 |the rise of radical and nonofficial islamic groups in russia’s volga region


 

 

extent, in the Volga region, and outside, as it was involved in the five-year civil war in Tajikistan (1992–1997). In many ways, the creation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in May 2002 was a response to the growing destabilization in Central Asia, where Islamists boasted

a greatly strengthened position barely ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 3These same issues have also determined Russia’s interest in closer cooperation with the United States and NATO on Afghanistan.