Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 29 – Just over
half of all Daghestani university students would prefer to live in a theocratic
Islamic state, and almost a third of them are ready to take to the streets to
protest if the existing Russian state imposes laws that “contradict their
faith,” according to a new study.
That study, by Sergey Murtuzaliyev (“The
North Caucasus in Search of Identity and the National Identity of Russia,” in The Russian Caucasus: Problems, Searches,
Decisions (1915, pp. 406-417, in Russian) available at kavkazoved.info/news/2015/11/29/severnyj-kavkaz-v-pole-poiska-identichnosti-i-nacionalnoj-idei-rossii.html),
reflects the coming together of three factors.
First, with the collapse of the Soviet
Union, people in the North Caucasus like those elsewhere in the Russian
Federation have been trying to find a new national identity or national idea
and have been trying on many things for size, including some ideas introduced
by people from abroad.
Second, and not surprisingly, many
of them are looking to religion, seeing it as a definer of their national
cultures -- even if they did not begin as believers and even if as a result of
Soviet anti-religious efforts, they did not know much about their faith and
thus had to depend on various sources to decide what they meant.
And third, many of them who viewed
religion as a national marker have been affected by the pretensions of the leadership
of the Russian Orthodox Church to define how the state will behave toward the
population have turned to Muslim leaders as a way of defending their own
national identities.
Twice in the last century, the
peoples of Russia have lost their sense of identity, first after 1917 and then
after 1991. Over the last two decades, they have been struggling to come up
with one; and many have turned to religion as a basis for this, Russians to
Orthodoxy and the traditionally Muslim nations to Islam.
Murtuzaliyev suggests this is
natural given that many Russians view Orthodoxy as a cultural marker rather
than a matter of faith just as many traditionally Muslim peoples view Islam in
much the same way. But the problem
arises, he argues, because religious leaders are not prepared to sit still for
that and because the actions of the dominant faith generate a backlash.
As new Muslim leaders have emerged
in the post-Soviet Caucasus, they have argued that identity isn’t enough:
people must believe. And in this, they
have had an unexpected and unintended ally: the leadership of the Russian
Orthodox Church which thinks the same thing and is prepared to use the power of
the state to impose its views.
Indeed, by pushing for religious
instruction in the schools, the Russian Orthodox Church has laid the foundation
for a genuine “clash of civilizations” inside of the Russian Federation because
“the ethnic Orthodox” and “the ethnic Muslims” move from that status to that of
sincere believers.
And Muslims, having the experience
of faith “imposed” by the Russian Orthodox, are thus ever more willing to
listen to Muslim leaders, including Salafite ones who say that it is entirely
proper for Muslims to “impose” their faith and by means of the same structures
and organizations.
As a result, he continues, “national
feelings have begun to combine with confessional ones, creating a common
psychological platform in the spiritual world and in the decisions and actions
of the individual.”
Murtuzaliyev concludes with a
warning: “In poly-ethnic and multi-confessional Russia which is seeking a
national ideal by striving to the achievement of an all-Russian civic identity
requires well-thought-out and significantly more precise mechanisms than those
practiced and proposed by the Russian Orthodox Church.”
What is needed, he says, is “an
approach which considers the entire spectrum of the regional characteristics of
the North Caucasus. The peoples [of that region] and other subjects of Russia
must not experience the syndrome of imposed confession and ethnicity.”
Otherwise there will be troubles ahead.
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