Paul Goble
Staunton,
April 4 – Most Muslims see the basic division in Islam as being between the
Sunnis who form approximately 90 percent of the umma and the Shiia who form
much of the remaining 10 percent. But in Russia, for reasons rooted in both the
Soviet experience and Moscow’s current policies, Muslims divide the faithful in
a very different way.
Lacking
much knowledge about the tenets of their faith because of Soviet anti-religious
efforts and conforming to Moscow’s view that Islam is one of the four “traditional”
faiths in Russia, a large share of Muslims within the borders of Russia divide the
umma in national rather than theological terms, although the two can in some
cases correspond.
Thus, many
Muslims identify particular approaches not as Sunni or Shiia but as either
foreign – Turkish, Saudi or Iranian depending on where particular Muslim
leaders were trained or have received financial help – or “Russian” and thus “traditional”
if they were trained inside the Russian Federation and have all their funds
from domestic sources.
(The
identification of Muslim parishes or leaders with particular foreign countries
is not unique to Russia. In Azerbaijan, for example, many people have long
spoken of “Turkish” or “Iranian” mosques depending on who paid to build them or
where the mullahs and imams were trained.)
That has
two significant consequences. On the one hand, it means that the defense of “traditional”
Islam often means the defense of non-Islamic accretions such as ancestor
worship that arose largely in Soviet times. And on the other, it gives the
Russian government and its allies in the Muslim establishment a useful lever to
control Muslim parishes.
All of
these things are highlighted by events that have been working out in a village
in Mordvinia over the last month and that are underscored in an article which
appeared yesterday in “Vecherny Saransk” entitled “The Muslims of Mordvinia
Choose Traditional Islam” (vsar.ru/11460_Musulmane_Mordovii_vybirayut_tradicionnyj_islam).
According to
the paper, the Muslims in village of Cheremishevo in the Lyambirsk district
have long been upset by what they see as “the Saudi version” of Islam being
pushed by the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Mordvinia and have voted
for “traditional Islam” by transferring to an alternative republic MSD subordinate
to the Central MSD of Talgat Tajuddin.
Apparently
what triggered their action, the paper says, was the position the MSD of
Mordvinia’s leader, who was trained in Saudi Arabia, regarding ancestor worship. Such practices had been the norm in “traditional”
Islam in Mordvinia for decades, the paper says, and his challenge of them was
thus “Wahhabist” in its insistence on religious purity.
The
pro-Saudi mufti apparently has his supporters as well. Some of them threatened
those who wanted to break away from the first MSD. But their influence was
undercut, the paper says, by the fact that some of them had provided financial
assistance to or even gone to fight for ISIS in the Middle East and were
convicted of crimes on their return.
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