Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 25 – As recently
as 1991, 75 percent of the Ajars in Georgia were Muslims, but now 75 percent of
them reportedly are members of the Georgian Orthodox Church, a shift that a
Catholic newspaper has labeled “a unique trend” and one that appears to be part
of the continuing sorting out of ethnicities and peoples in the southern
Caucasus.
This development, one that Raffaele Guerra of the “Vatican Insider” characterizes as “unexpected
and surprising, is the latest twist in the complicated history of a group many
of whose members consider to be a separate nation but whom Georgians have
insisted is subgroup of theirs (vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/nel-mondo/dettaglio-articolo/articolo/georgia-islam-cristianesmo-27983/)
Because of that
Georgian insistence, the Adjars have not been counted separately in any census
since 1926. At that time, they numbered
71,000. Today, the population of their
region is more than 380,000, of whom a sizeable but uncertain share consists of
Ajars. And that in turn makes any exact figures on their religious affiliation
somewhat problematic.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the
Ajars, who have sometimes been called but do not call themselves “Muslim
Georgians,” do appear to be returning to Christianity. Most of them were forcibly converted to Islam
after the Ottoman Empire occupied the area in 1614 and retained their Islamic
faith after Russia annexed it in 1878.
After the 1917 revolution, Adjaria
became part of the Georgian SSR as an autonomous territory even though the
Georgians did not view them as a separate nationality. After 1991, Ajaria remained part of the
independent Republic of Georgia but was effectively separate under the
authoritarian rule of Alan Abashidze.
In 2004, Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili forced Abashidze out and into Russian exile and severely restricted
Ajaria’s independence. But like his predecessor Edvard Shevardnadze, he
promoted Georgian Orthodoxy among the Ajars and restricted the activities of
Muslims.
Guerra cites the comments at the end
of last year of Metropolitan Dmitry of Batumi, the capital of Ajaria. “In 1991,” the hierarch said, “5,000 people
among whom were Muslims and atheists came over to Orthodoxy. In that same year,
we opened a higher theological school in Khulo, the first religious school
opened in the USSR.”
According
to the metropolitan, many of the Ajars who were forced to convert to Islam by
the Ottomans in fact remained in secret Christians, wearing crosses under their
clothese, coloring eggs before Eastern, and putting up icons in their homes.
Today, the Vatican journalist says, many
of the Orthodox priests in Ajaria come from Islamic families, and the rector of
the Batumi Seminary is even “the grandson of a mullah who received his
education in Istanbul.”
Tbilisi and the Georgian Orthodox
Church have promoted this development even when it has created conflicts with
local Muslims Indeed, Georgian efforts against Islam almost led to an open
conflict with Muslims there when officials took down a mosque’s minaret over
claimed non-payment of taxes.
That conflict appears to be easing,
the “Vatican Insider” reported, but the Georgian church is involved in another,
this time with the Armenians. Georgian
priests have been organizing pilgrimages to a monastery that the ethnic
Armenians of Georgia claim as theirs and have asked Yerevan to intervene.
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