Salafi Activity in the Volga Region
Wahhabi or Salafi?
Salafi Muslims became increasingly active in the Volga region after the fall of Communism. As noted earlier, the Russian media usually label these Muslims as Wahhabis, but a thorough exami-nation of Islam in general, and Caucasian Islam in particular, reveals that as applied to Islam in the Volga region, the term “Wahhabism” is simply incorrect in both the academic and the applied sense of the term. Those who advocate Salafism have never defined themselves as Wahhabis, and they consider the term a pejorative nickname or a label imposed by the intelligence services.44The word “al-Wahhabiya” derives from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of a conserva-tive branch of Islam. His teachings later became the o_cial ideology of the Saudi state. It is worth noting that even the followers of al-Wahhab never called themselves Wahhabis, because identify-ing with the name of a single person would fall under the sin of idol worship. Rather, his follow-ers called themselves muwahhidun (“monotheists”) and adherents of the original, pure Islam, or salafiyeen (“those who follow the way of the predecessors”)—that is, Salafis. Wahhabi was the term used by the group’s adversaries, even during the life of Abd al-Wahhab.45As ethnologist Ahmet Yarlykapov notes,
Not all radical fundamentalist ideas spread today in the Muslim world should be ascribed to classical Wahhabism. This term defines a wide range of radical-fundamentalist approach-es to interpreting the teachings of Islam. These approaches receive their fullest and most systematic treatment in the works of Ibn Taymiyah and al-Wahhab himself.46
In the opinion of the orientalist Galina Yemelianova, “Strictly speaking, the use of the term Wahhabism in relation to the Salafi movement in the Islamic regions of the former Soviet Union is incorrect because the latter is based on a wider doctrinal foundation than the teaching of Abd al-Wahhab.”47
The most accurate definition would consider contemporary Volga Salafis a regional variant of Salafism that is not identified with o_cial clergy. In the context of the Volga republics, Salafis
demonstrate disrespect towards their elders, considering them “ignorant” and “backward” in mat-ters related to the profession of Islam. From their point of view, the “virus” of national Islam has infected the older generations, who practice a faith associated with Tatar and Bashkir traditions. Salafis are sharply critical of mingling Islam with folk traditions, protesting against such popular holidays as Sabantuy, which they interpret as a manifestation of paganism.48More generally, Salafis are strongly critical of the traditional folk cultures of the Volga ethnic groups. They are also op-
44. Aleksei Malashenko, Islamskie orientiry Severnogo Kavkaza [The Islamic landmarks of the North Caucasus] (Moscow: Gendalf Publishing House, 2001).
45. Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) was an Arab Islamic theologian. His pact with Muhammad bin Saud helped to establish the first Saudi state.
46. Akhmet Yarlykapov, “Wahhabism na Severnom Kavkaze” [Wahhabism in the North Caucasus], in Social’no politicheckaya situatsiua na Kavkaze [Social-political situation on the Caucasus] (Moscow: Institut Politicheskogo I Voennogo Analiza, 2001), p. 156.
47. Galina M. Yemelianova, “The Rise of Islam in Muslim Eurasia: Internal Determinants and Potential Consequences,” China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 5, no. 2 (2007): 79.
48. Sabantuy is a holiday celebrated by Tatars and other Turkic peoples living along the Volga River. In Bashkir, it is known as Habantuy; in Chuvash, as Akatuy. The holiday’s origin goes back to the pre-Islamic
14 |the rise of radical and nonofficial islamic groups in russia’s volga region
posed to visiting Bolghar, a city located 130 kilometers from present-day Kazan that is supposed to have been the capital of the Volga Bulgaria and was the site of the “little hajj” during the Soviet era.49
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Salafi Muslims also targeted the nationwide New Year celebration that is widely accepted in Russia; on the eve of both 2012 and 2013 in Kazan, numerous leaflets emerged calling for the cel-ebration of New Year to be abandoned. In these materials, the New Year holiday was called “evil” and was characterized as a non-Muslim celebration. “To celebrate the New Year is to follow shirk [the sin of idolatry or polytheism or the worship of anyone or anything other than Allah]. Take care of yourself!” radicals stated.53Salafis, on their web forums, websites, and social networks, proposed the abandonment of other Russian holidays such as Victory Day, Women’s Day, the Day of the Defenders of the Motherland, and the Spring/Labor Day. In these materials, Santa Claus or “Father Frost” is depicted as shaitan, the Islamic equivalent of the devil, or as a pagan symbol that is incompatible with “pure Islam.”54
Salafis Take Root
Although only a few years earlier the Volga region had looked from the outside like a region with entrenched secular traditions, by the mid-1990s Salafi Muslims had strengthened their position. In contrast to the Caucasus, the Volga region is much more urbanized (70.8 percent of the people liv-ing in the VFD live in the urban areas). And unlike the situation in European countries, cities and towns in the Volga region have not seen the creation of special “Islamic quarters” or any insular religious ghettos. Islamists initially had few chances to gain a foothold in the VFD, but for several reasons they did manage to take root to a significant degree.
period, when it was celebrated before the sowing season (its name means “plough’s feast”). In the post-Soviet era it is celebrated as a national holiday.
49. Under Soviet rule, Muslims from Tatarstan and other parts of the USSR who had no opportunity to make the pilgrimage to Mecca would instead travel to Bolghar for a “little hajj.”
50. Originally, abystay referred to the mullah’s wife, who taught girls basic religious rules. Later this term was applied to the women who teach the reading of the Qu’ran and the rules of Namaz.
51. Technically, the term takfir implies declaring someone an apostate. Among Salafis, it has taken on the meaning of considering anyone insu_ciently observant to be a non-Muslim. Because in Islamic law apostasy is punishable by death, the takfir doctrine has become the basis for political assassinations.
52. Rustam Shayhevaliev, “Problema sem’i ostaetsya samoi aktual’noi v nashi dni” [The family issue is extremely topical these days], January, 20, 2012, http://islamio.ru/news/society/ problema_semi_ostaetsya_samoy_aktualnoy_v_nashi_dni.
53. “V Tatarstane Wahhabity vystupayut protiv Novogo goda” [The Tatarstan Wahhabis oppose the New Year celebrations], December 28, 2012, http://www.rosbalt.ru/federal/2012/12/28/1077286.html.
54. Ibid.
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The first reason they succeeded was the negative impact of divisions within the o_cial Islamic institutions in Russia that actively cooperated with Moscow and adjusted their activities to lo-
cal customs. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, splits arose within the Spiritual Board of Muslims of European Russia and Siberia, known as the DUMES, beginning with the desire of
some imams to “be liberated from the Soviet legacy” and to create an independent spiritual board. Instead of one Spiritual Board that previously united the Volga region’s Muslims, two competitive structures arose. One of them, the CSBM, considers itself the successor to the DUMES and, before that, the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly. The second o_cially recognized structure was the Russian Council of Muftis (RCM), founded in 1996. Both of them have competed over the access to the authorities of different levels of social and religious influence.
An incident surrounding the opening of the Tauba Mosque in early 1990s in Naberezhnye Chelny triggered a scandal within the CSBM. In this conflict, Talgat Tadzuddin, the supreme muf-ti, and Idris Galyautdinov, imam-khatib (chief imam) of the mosque, discredited one another and the o_cial Islamic clergy as a whole. Different regional and local administrations took sides in this quarrel, as they all tried to ensure their influence through linkages with loyal groups within the Muslim structures that were being revived at that time. As for the Russian authorities and special services, they were focused on more pressing topics, such as the crisis in Chechnya; ethno-political conflicts; incongruities between the presidential administration and the Supreme Soviet; and the question of how to divide the Soviet legacy, including the concentration of nuclear weaponry in Russia. Therefore they were not actively engaged in the religious quarrels in the Volga Region
and failed to intervene properly. As the Russian scholar Roman Silantyev observed, “During the split, emissaries from foreign extremist centers used this situation to their advantage, as they were interested in the destruction of the main stronghold of traditional Islam associated with loyalty to the state.”55
Some muftis involved in the religious conflict began accepting financial aid from a variety of religious foundations and centers, with little concern for the origins of that aid. In addition to tar-geted support for the construction and renovation of mosques, a number of educational programs began that were meant to teach young Russian Muslims, both abroad and within Russia. Activity at the grassroots level was equally vigorous. Salafi emissaries, both domestic and foreign, visited numerous communities, offering their imams and chairmen “disinterested” aid in exchange for the promotion of their missionary programs. Parallel to this, they founded their own communi-ties, deliberately stoking conflicts between different generations of imams, pitting older pro-Soviet imams against younger ones. Their propaganda was most successful and effective in those cities where a majority of the population was Orthodox and in which Muslim communities were ethni-cally diverse and lacked ingrained Islamic traditions.
Second, the Salafis received a “head start” because the o_cial Muslim clergy lacked a devel-oped system of religious education and a dearth of personnel qualified to teach. According to Aislu Yunusova, a historian and political scientist from Bashkortostan,
The weakest link in today’s Russian Islam is the system of knowledge transfer. While there was a powerful impetus for the construction of Muslim education, press, and culture in general, from the early 20th century forward it did not develop further. In the 1920s and 1930s it was brutally suppressed by the policy of militant atheism. By the early 1990s
55. Silantyev, Noveishaya Istoriya Islamskogo soobshchestva v Rossii, p. 150.
16 |the rise of radical and nonofficial islamic groups in russia’s volga region
knowledge about Islam had survived but was primarily kept by Russia’s “ethnic” Muslims in the form of fragmented ideas prevailing at the level of family traditions. There was a com-plete absence of religious knowledge, literature, and the skills gained through Qu’ran study in Russian Islam before the current era of religious freedom and pluralism, which began with the proclamation of the law “On Freedom of Conscience” in 1991.56
In this intellectual vacuum, the radicals, who benefitted from significant financial resources and utilized attractive slogans such as social justice, anti-corruption, criticism of ethnic nationalism, and calls to rally around the “true faith,” were able to win a preeminent position for themselves.
Third, it is impossible to ignore domestic political factors. “Traditional Islam,” which had been associated with loyalty to the state in the early 1990s, greatly discredited itself as a result of numerous intrigues, public quarrels, instances of corruption, and the redistribution of property.
The Russian scholar Aleksei Malashenko noted, “Speaking about the Islamic revival, we should not overlook that this process was also realized through efforts of the post-Soviet intellectuals, politi-cians who cynically calculated and used Islam to improve their own images and popularity.”57In many cases, former Communist Party o_cials and others who had engaged in atheist propaganda during the Soviet period altered their previous views and began to encourage Muslims to follow Russia’s o_cial Islamic clergy. All of these facts reduced the credibility of the o_cial clergy and increased the impetus for the Russian Muslim community to search for alternatives.
Fourth, attempts by the authorities at various levels to oppose nationalism and religious radi-calism through state-controlled political Islam were ineffective. One example was the creation of the all-Russian political movement Nur (Light), which extended its activities to 56 federal districts and was one of the first Muslim political organizations o_cially registered, in May 1995. Nur was considered the “religious internationalist” opposition to ethnic nationalist trends in Russia’s re-publics, but in the parliamentary elections of 1995, figures such as the leader of the Tatar national movement, Aidar Halim, whose philosophy was far from “internationalist,” were opportunistically included on the list of Nur candidates. But the movement’s electoral results were very modest; it took 22nd place out of the 43 parties and blocks that participated in the elections. In Tatarstan the movement gained 5 percent and in Bashkortostan it gained 1.5 percent. Some other efforts to in-corporate Muslim activists into Russian politics were similarly unsuccessful, such as the Union of Muslims of Russia, the Eurasian Party of Russia, and the Refah (Welfare) movement. According to sociologist Jean Toshchenko, “The last round of political activity in which the Muslim ethnocrats took part was the electoral cycle of 1998–2000.”58In the parliamentary elections of 1999, acting
in alliance with the Unity movement (consequently transformed to the United Russia party), five members of Refah became deputies of the state Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian parlia-ment. But efforts to promote “civilized political Islam” parties that would be loyal to—and con-trolled by—the government fell by the wayside when Russia’s legislation on elections was changed to prohibit the creation of parties on ethnic, regional, and religious lines. The Russian federal government, as well as the republican and regional administrations, focused their policy on the “Islamic direction,” cooperating with the Spiritual Boards of Muslims that had been accepted as of-
56. Aislu Yunusova, “Radikal’nye ideologii I musul’manskaya molodezh’ v Rossii” [Radical ideologies and Muslim youth in Russia], http://www.muslims-volga.ru/?id=376&query_id=6637.
57. Aleksei Malashenko, Islam dlya Rossii [Islam for Russia] (Moscow: ROSSPEN Publishing House, 2007), p. 14.
58. Jean Toshchenko, Entokratiya: Istoriya I sovremennost’ [Ethnocracy: history and contemporary times] (Moscow: ROSSPEN Publishing House, 2003), p. 353.
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ficial and legitimate structures. Thus, a huge segment of nono_cial Muslims who are not necessar-ily radicals or terrorists has remained outside of the governmental focus and has not experienced serious cooperation or engagement with the government.