Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 30 –With a
Russian court having now declared the Koran to be “extremist,” Moscow has finally
done what it says only Wahhabist and other Islamist radicals and hostile foreign
intelligence services want: it has provoked not just the leadership of Russia’s
20plus million Muslims but this community as a whole.
Muslims in Moscow and in cities
across the country have put up banners denouncing the Novorossiisk court’s September
17 decision to declare a translation of the Koran “extremist” – the one on the
Moscow ring road reads “Russia Against Islam: the Koran is Banned” – staged demonstrations,
and begun petition drives to have the Kremlin overturn this declaration.
In some places, the police moved
quickly to take the signs down, but in others, including the Russian capital,
these signs have remained up. The number
of demonstrations appears to be increasing, and the number of Muslims signing
petitions is growing as well. (For a sampling of reports, see islamrf.ru/news/russia/rusnews/29325/, tatar-centr.blogspot.com/2013/09/blog-post_4575.html, rafis-kashapov.livejournal.com/61563.html, .ansar.ru/society/2013/09/28/43672, ansar.ru/society/013/09/27/43661
and ansar.ru/rfsng/2013/09/26/43618).
The
demonstrators and petitions are calling the Novorossiisk decision “an absurdity”
and “a beastial error,” one that in the words of the petition circulating in
Krasnoyarsk kray “demonstrates the incompetence of the organs who are taking
such decisions” (islamsib.ru/news/759-edinoe-dukhovnoe-upravlenie-musulman-krasnoyarskogo-kraya-prinyalo-ofitsialnoe-zayavlenie-v-svyazi-s-zapretom-perevoda-svyashchennogo-korana).
According
to Krasnoyarsk Mufti Gayaz-khazrat Faatkullin, what has happened to the Koran
in Russia could easily happen to the holy books of other faiths, a dangerous
development in which is “evident the shadow of the era which ended in the 1990s”
and one that all believers must therefore oppose.
How
far this effort by Muslims will go is unclear: their anger at the Russian state
may dissipate more or less quickly because that state, however oppressive it
may be in particular cases, is not capable of enforcing a ban on the Koran
across the entire country. But it is
clear that Russia’s Muslims are angry about this action, and that poses two challenges
for the Kremlin.
In
the short term, President Vladimir Putin will have to choose between two
unpalatable outcomes: overturning the declaration of the court about the “extremism”
of the basic text of Islam, something that will infuriate many Orthodox Russian
nationalists, or enforcing the decree which will only further alienate Russia’s
Muslims and the Muslim world abroad.
And
in the longer term, Putin’s regime and its successors will have to deal with a
problem they have helped create: a growing sense of Muslim identification among
various peoples of the Russian Federation and a willingness of Muslims to
organize politically against the regime.
That
danger is already present. According to
recent surveys, ever more Muslims in the Russian Federation are prepared to
support Muslim political parties, with an absolute majority in many
predominantly Muslim republics saying they would (ng.ru/faith/2013-09-20/1_islam.html).
Whatever Putin decides to do, this
latest case of overreaching by a Russian court, apparently animated more by
anti-Islamic attitudes among many Russians than by any legal standard Russia or
otherwise, has made the situation far worse for the Kremlin than have any
earlier actions by any Muslim group in the Russian Federation.
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