Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 22 – Rafael Khakimov,
vice president of Tatarstan’s Academy of Sciences, former advisor to that
republic’s first president Mintimir Shaimiyev, and a leading advocate of
Euro-Islam, is being attacked for his latest comments about Islam, with the
explicit claim that he has departed from the world of the faithful altogether.
But it isn’t so much that Khakimov
has changed -- his ideas about society and religion remain the same – but rather
that the new spokesman for Islam in the Middle Volga and more generally have
adopted a harder and one might say Islamist line that does not allow for the
diversity of opinion which had been characteristic of Islam in Tatarstan in the
past.
And consequently, the attack on the
noted historian deserves attention not for its intellectual contribution but
rather for what it says about the ways in which Islamic discourse have been
changing and about how those changes are likely to exacerbate the divide
between Muslims and others in the Russian Federation now and in the future.
In an article in Kazan’s “Biznes-Online”
portal yesterday, Khakimov argues as he has many times that “culture is more
important than economics and politics” because it shapes both of these spheres
of human activity and that the Tatars should draw on their own national
traditions rather than “imitate” those of the Arabs (business-gazeta.ru/article/128416/).
“The extent to which culture
influences business,” he writes, “can be seen by examining the development of various
countries and regions: the Protestant north of Europe is the most developed,
the least harmed by corruption, the least wasteful, and the most supportive of
the norms of social justice.”
“The Catholic south of Europe lags”
in each of these “although it is distinguished by a high artistic taste and the
best services sphere in the world. The Orthodox countries compete among
themselves in terms of backwardness, corruption and internal divisions, but
Muslim countries … not only are backward but consider this a good thing.”
“For them,” Khakimov writes, “the
symbol of success has become luxury, inactivity,and military victories over
their fellow Muslims.”
According to the Kazan scholar, “Islam
in no way restrains corruption, does not support the obtaining of education,
the development of science and the successful conduct of business … In the Islamic
world, there is not one normal university. Kazan with its higher education
institutions is in comparison with Muslim countries the greatest of
civilizations.”
Islam teaches people not to rely on
their own abilities but on the will of Allah, he continues, even though Muslims
in fact seem ready to take certain things into their own hands. “In recent
decades, not one war and not one conflict has occurred without the
participation of Muslims.”
But they have not taken action in
the economy, Khakimov says, in sharp contrast to the Tatars before 1917. “If the Tatars were successful entrepreneurs
before the revolution, then the unique cause of this was the reformation of
Islam and the rejection of the shariat in favor of secular laws.”
Again today, “the more quickly we
get out from the shackles of the Hanafi rite, which the clericals seek to
impose on us, the more quickly will develop the economy,” the historian says.
“It is indicative that from the
beginning of ‘perestroika’ when the rebirth of religion was declared, not a
single work of Tatar theologians was published at the initiative of the Muslim
Spiritual Directorate of the Republic of Tatarstan.” Instead, that body
published Tatar translations of Arab works, some of which are banned in Russia
as extremist.
The message was and is clear,
Khakimov says. From the point of view of the Islamic clericals, “Russia is an
incorrect country because it does not follow the shariat and it must follow the
canons of the Hanafi rite.” Moreover, those people “gave the impression” that
the Tatars do not have their own proud national traditions in Islam.
“Today
in Kazan the Arab Middle Ages is being introduced,” but those who are doing so
forget that “even in the Middle Ages there existed a ‘Tatar fashion’ as an
element of the highest civilization at that time.” It wasn’t the hijab or the burqa
but rather women’s boots, which were then borrowed first by the Russians, then
by the French and then by the world.
“Any flowering begins with respect
for oneself, for one’s history, culture and traditions. Stop imitating the
Arabs,” Khakimov says. “For the successful conduct of business and the
flourishing of the republic, it must return to the traditions of jadidism
having turned away any influence of Muslim theologians who call for a militant
Medievalism instead.”
On the very same day Khakimov’s
article appeared, attacks on him began and from the usual sector: Muslims who
remain Arab-centric and believe that the Arab understanding of Islam is the only
possible one, the result of the influx of Arab money, Arab missionaries and
Arab-trained mullahs and imams into the Middle Volga.
In
the words of one, the Kazan historian’s latest article shows that his “ideological
evolution as ‘a religious intellectual’” has ended with “open attacks on Islam,”
the inevitable result of Khakimov’s attachment to Euro-Islam rather than to the
true Arabic Islam of the Prophet (dauletzhan.livejournal.com/720885.html).
What is
especially tragic about all this is that some of the best allies the Arabic
Islamists have are secular figures in the Russian Federation and the West who
have not been willing to support the republication of the works of the jadids
out of the mistaken belief that any greater attention to Islam necessarily will
lead to extremism.
As Khakimov
shows, in fact, familiarity with the works of Tatar theologians of the 19th
and early 20th century provide the very best form of immunity to
precisely that danger.
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