Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 21 – Aleksey Grishin,
head of the Religion and Society Center, says that 40 percent of all of Russia’s
Muslims are “infected with radicalism” and that in some reasons what he calls
their “Wahhabization” affects 80 percent of their number because Wahhabi
organizations have been established in “all regions of Russia except Chukotka.”
Grishin suggests that there are four
reasons for the current upsurge in radicalization: the formation of the Islamic
State, mistakes by poorly trained Russian officials, a new focus by radicals
abroad on Russia, and the impact of radicalized gastarbeiters from Central Asia
on Muslim institutions in Russia (blagovest-info.ru/index.php?ss=2&s=4&id=64335).
The process of radicalization of Russia’s
Muslims has been going on for some time, Grishin says, noting that over the
last seven or eight years, many Muslim leaders who have opposed it have been
killed but their deaths have not deterred the radicals from pursuing their “goal”
of “establishing complete control via the existing Muslim Spiritual
Directorates (MSDs).”
The radicals’ task has been easier by the
proliferation of MSDs: there are now 81 “and possibly there will be even more.”
The situation is disturbing: there are five in Sverdlovsk and two in a single
village in Tatarstan. And that means that if the radicals cannot win one place,
they can do so in another.
Moreover, the Muslim affairs specialist
says, the MSDs have opened the way for this radicalization because in many
cases they have become “’commercial enterprises’” which compete among
themselves, not to mention the fact that the two “oldest” structures, the
Council of Muftis of Russia and the Central MSD fight with one another.
The
Russian government is not capable of controlling “such a quantity of MSDs,” he
says. But the government’s problem is not limited to quantity: “there is in
fact no one who can control them.” There is a lack of expertise at all levels
of the Russian government, including in the Presidential Administration because
Moscow has not promoted the necessary training.
Muslim educational
institutions are corrupt, engage in commercial activities, and are thus easy
prey for the radicals, who benefit even when the secular authorities contest
them. That is because the failure of Muslim schools in Russia allows the
radicals to promote the idea that “a quality Islamic education can be received
only abroad.”
Grishin
says that the situation with regard to Islamist media is especially troubling.
According to Russian law enforcement agencies, there are now some 57,000
websites directed at Russia’s Muslims. 50,000 of them are supposed to be
blocked but “a significant part of them,” he says, hasn’t even been identified
let alone blocked.
In recent times, Grishin continues,
Islamist radicals have adopted two new tactics against which the Russian
authorities seem powerless: They have been recruiting among the staff of Russia’s
special services and law enforcement organs; and they have been themselves
arrested so that they can propagandize radical Islam in Russian prisons.
Moscow needs to respond to this upsurge of
radicalism by training better government specialists on Islam, “unifying” the approach
of all regions so that the radicals cannot play one off against another,
develop better criteria of what constitutes radicalism, block the efforts of
Islamists to recruit siloviki, and “clean the Augean stables of the MSDs.”
To oversee this effort, Grishin says,
Russia must establish “a single state organ for relations with religious
organizations, a ministry ‘for religious affairs’ or a special subdivision of
the Presidential Administration” with real powers to act. Otherwise, he
suggests, radicalization of Russia’s Muslims is likely to continue to expand.
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