Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 11 – Russian and
Western writers commonly present Salafi Islam as “a monolithic,” even
totalitarian “organism,” but in fact, as the history of Daghestan over the past
two decades proves, it is deeply split internally reflecting differences in
personalities, policies, recruitment, and funding.
In an article on the Evrazia.org
portal on Friday, Khanzhan Kurbanov surveys the split in the Salafi movement in
Daghestan during the first ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and
shows that there emerged three distinct trends within this trend, one radical,
one moderate, and one almost entirely hermetic (evrazia.org/article/2137).
The first and radical trend was led by
Mukhammed Bagaudin and had as many as 2000 followers. Its adepts were committed to the use of force
to overthrow the existing order and to impose their point of view. They were often well versed in Islamic
doctrine, as Bagaudin was an Arabist who opened a large number of schools in
Kizilyurt and neighboring areas.
These radical Salafis, or “neo-Wahhabis”
as they were often called, gained supporters among the young who wanted a “pure”
Islam but equally offended older people who were told that their traditional
practices such as the cult of the dead and visits to the graves of sufi sheikhs
were anathema to Islam.
The “Bagaudinovtsy” besides assuming a larger
role in the mosques also organized “military-sports camps where the Daghestani
young were provided with physical training and the strengthening of ‘the
Islamic spirit.’” This sub-trend’s leaders knew they would have to fight
because the regime and traditional Muslim leaders would seek to suppress them.
As a result, these radical Salafis
advanced the ideal of jihad as fundamental and defined it most often as “the
jihad of the sword,” despite the many meanings of that concept within Islam.
This
idea caught on with Dahestani intellectuals, and that development frightened
the authorities in Makhachkala.
The second trend within Salafi Islam
in Daghestan consisted of the moderates led by Akhmad-Kadi Akhtayev, who also
had approximately 2000 followers in the 1990s. This group pressed for
modernization and reforms far beyond what classical Salafis had called for, and
its leaders presented themselves as “Islamist pragmatists” capable of working
with others.
Unlike
the radicals, the moderates did not call for unrestricted struggle against the
current situation. They believed that it was necessary to promote the
improvement of this society rather than its overthrow, to follow an
evolutionary path and not engage in anti-constitutional or anti-societal
activities.
Indeed,
the Evrazia.org writer says, “the moderate Salafis considered the resturn to
the pre-revolutionary status of Islam, when there was a certain parity of
ideologies combined with legal pluralism as completely acceptable,” a position
anathema to the radicals and also to the civil authorities.
The
third trend, “hermetic” Salafism, was headed by Angutayev Anguta, who was more
well-known as Ayub Astrakkhansky because he lived in that southern Russian city
and issued his homilies from there. He
and his followers focused on the self-improvement of the individual rather than
the transformation or improvement of society as a whole.
Despite
these clear differences, Kurbanov continues, “the split in the Salafi movement
was not conceptual.” He suggests that “a
not unimportant role” was played by finances. Those who received money from
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE tended toward the radical, even though the
leaders of all three trends had been part of the Islamic Rebirth Party in 1990.
In
addition to these financial considerations, the movement was split on the basis
of the social groups on which each of the three drew. The moderate Salafis, Kurbanov says, mostly
consisted of students and the intelligentsia. The radicals included peasants
and unemployed urban workers lacking higher education. And the hermetics
included those in between.
But
perhaps equally important in the split were the personalities of the leaders
and the absence of any system to impose the views of one or the other. This split within the Salafis, Kurbanov writes,
was “completely predictable and natural given the polarity and social gradations”
which is reflected.
Unfortunately,
he concludes, those who have to deal with the Salafis in Daghestan and
elsewhere do not appear to understand this reality “entirely adequately,” and
that lack of understanding limits their ability to respond to the challenges
these different aspects of Salafism present.
No comments:
Post a Comment