Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 25 – The
intellectual “stagnation” of Russia’s Muslims, the product of the Soviet past
and the chaos of the 1990s, has opened the way for the rise of radicalism among
them and must be overcome if the radicals are to be defeated, according to a
leading Russian specialist on Islam.
That will require, Rinat Pateyev, an
instructor at the Southern Federal University, the revival of ideas like those
of the modernist jadids who set the intellectual tone for Islam at the end of
the Russian Empire but whose work was almost completely destroyed during the
Soviet period (expert.ru/south/2013/12/islamu-pridyotsya-idti-po-puti-modernizatsii/).
And the stagnation that induced in
the Muslim community, he continues, was exacerbated by the chaos of the 1990s
when radicals from abroad or with foreign training rushed in and promoted
populist visions of Islam that led to its politicization and radicalization
rather than to the modernization it very much needed and needs.
The author of
two highly-regarded books, “Islam in Rostov Oblast” and “Political Aspects of
Muslim Education in Russia” (in Russian) as well as numerous articles in
scholarly journals, Pateyev makes these and a wide variety of other observations
and arguments in the course of a lengthy interview given to journalists from
the Expert.ru/South portal.
Pateyev
notes that “the politicized part of Russia’s Muslims actively support” the Arab
Spring, “but a significant part of the Muslim community is in no way focused on
it,” instead concentrating on and living by “its own personal problems.”
The
specialist says that radical Islamic ideas “completely delegitimize any
government system because they are utopian” and that in Russia, those who have
adopted them resemble those who “a century ago” followed the Bolsheviks and “built
communism.”
The
Islamization of ethnic Russians, he continues, is not likely to proceed very
far, but those Russians who do choose Islam will inevitably be among the most
radical because they are making “a double protect,” first by “breaking
completely all ties with Russian society” and then by demonstrating this to
their new co-religionists.
Talks
between official and unofficial Islam like those the Muslim Spiritual
Directorate (MSD) of Daghestan is pushing are unlikely to work, Pateyev argues,
because they involve “only a small slice of the religious community” of that
republic and because neither the MSD nor the radicals is in control of their
supposed supporters.
The
MSD “does not control its imams,” the imams “don’t control what is taking place
in their mosques,” and the radicals do not control their followers who are
constantly splitting and recombining. This
“chaotic” situation at the very least cannot by successfully addressed by
conversations alone.
The
situation in the Daghestani umma, Pateyev continues, reflect the divides that
arose in the 1990s. During that decade, the MSDs were subdivided frequently,
Muslim religious schools multiplied, and mosques grew geometrically across
Muslim regions.
In
Daghestan alone, he says, “there are “now more than 2,000 mosques” and 15 religious
schools “which pretend to be Islamic higher educational institutions. As a
result, there are now far more Muslim hierarchies and far more Muslim religious
leaders of various levels than there are among the Russian Orthodox Christians.
Because “in Islam there is no such thing as a
church as such and no strictly centralized structure of administration,” this
flowering of Islamic institutions has contributed to “very complicated
relations” among those that do exist.
But more important, Pateyev argues, “these disintegrative processes
serve as a serious basis for the formation of radical circles.”
Asked
if this diversity could lead to a Muslim Reformation, Pateyev said absolutely
not and for the following reason: The Protestant Reformation reflected
developments “outside of a [purely] religious context,” while in the Islamic
world “all processes take place under religious slogans,” even when there is
criticism of senior Muslim leaders.
Many
Muslims, including those in Russia, have a very negative view of the West and
believe that its recent behavior has deprived it of the right to dominate the
world as it has in the past. For example, Pateyev says, “in Europe, on the one
hand, they ban the wearing of the hijab, but on the other, they legalize
single-sex marriage.”
“How
will Muslims in fact view this?” he asks rhetorically. For most of them, the West is now “a barbaric
world, and present-day terrorism is in many respects a reaction to the diktat
of Western values.” There is no dialogue
of civilizations, however much some on each side of this divide talk about it.
Asked
if Russia’s “official” Muslim establishment could wipe out the extremists much
as the Jesuits did the mafia in some parts of Italy, Pateyev argues that “this
could happen if the Islamic religious leaders were able to overcome all their
internal conflicts, consolidate, and begin to communicate to people simple
truths.”
“Unfortunately,”
he says, “the official religious leaders are not always able to seize the
initiative from the radicals, including because of internal competition in
Muslim circles.” Indeed, he adds, there is not even any possibility that the
MSDs could provide the necessary teachers for Muslim studies classes in Russian
schools.
The
future of Islam in the Russian Federation, he says, largely depends “on the level
of socio-cultural integration” of a given region. Tatarstan is “tightly
integrated in the socio-cultural space of Russia, much more strongly than is
the North Caucasus.” When you are in
Kazan, “you feel that the process of the historical joint life of Russians and
Tatars have had an impact and introduced much that is useful.”
But
and with this he concludes, because the Islamic community is expanding and
Muslims are moving into parts of Russia where they never were before, “everything
could blow up at any moment.” All that
is necessary is a video on the Internet, and suddenly, a conflict between two individuals
could be presented in the media “as a clash of civilizations.”
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