Paul Goble
Staunton, August 26 – Even though 60
percent of the population of Mordvinia is ethnically Russian, according to the
last census and even though only about two percent of the population identifies
as Muslim, that Finno-Ugric republic has three Muslim Spiritual Directorates
(MSDs) and may soon have a fourth.
MSDs have no basis in Islam but
rather are an outgrowth of the Russian government’s desire to have an
institution representing both state and believers to manage the situation. In
Soviet times, there were four for the entire USSR. But since 1991, they have
multiplied in the Russian Federation to the point it is unclear what role they
still have.
Additional confusion is introduced
by two factors. On the one hand, the status of mufti – someone able to issue
fetwas – and that of head of a MSD are unrelated. One can be either without
being both. And on the other, the differences among the MSDs are typically less about theology or even politics than
about the personal views and ambitions of their leaders.
Some, like the heads of the three or
four largest super-MSDs now in existence, have advocated creating a single
super-MSD that would be analogous to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian
Orthodox Church. Other Muslims argue that the MSDs be done away with as an
unnecessary “survival of the past.”
In the Russian Federation, there are
more than 80 MSDs. Many but far from all have declared themselves subordinate
to all-Russian MSDs like the Central MSD in Ufa and the Union of Muftis of
Russia (SMR) or allied themselves with large and powerful regional ones such as
the MSDs in Tatarstan and Daghestan.
(Adding to this complexity is the
fact that many of the Shiite communities in the Russian Federation still declare
their loyalty to the MSD in Baku, the descendant of the only join Sunni-Shiia
muftiate from Soviet times that then by general agreement and now by some
supervises Shiite groups across the entire region.)
In some republics, where the MSD has landed in difficulties with the Moscow-appointed government, the Muslim community functions perfectly well without an MSD as such. The umma there does have a mufti who issues fetwas but the parishes aren't subordinate to any mixed state-religious body.
Often, there is more than one MSD
involved in even regions and republics with small Muslim populations. In
Mordvinia, less than three percent of whose people are Muslim, there are three
MSDs represented, and now, it appears there may be a fourth, a situation that
means adjoining mosques are at least nominally subordinate to different MSDs.
With so many MSDs for so few
mosques, the Directorates appear to spend more time competing for attention
with each other than they do on administering anything, Rais Suleymenov, an ROC
MP specialist on Islam notorious for his attacks on most Muslim leaders and
advocacy of imposing tight controls on them (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=38510).
He would like to see the Muslim
community of the Russian Federation organized under a single super-MSD which
would control regional MSDs which would in turn control who serves as an imam
or mullah. That might be attractive on paper but it is highly offensive to the
profoundly democratic character of most Muslim parishes.
In his latest article, cast in the
form of an attack on the diversity of MSDs in Mordvinia, Suleymanov concludes
that “the centrifugal line remains quite clear in relations between regional
and federal muftiates,” making “organizational unity of the Islamic umma of
Russia” only “a sweet fantasy of naïve romantics.”
Changing that would require a
fundamentally different and far more interventionist approach by the Russian
state and would impose radical changes on Islam itself, changes so extreme that
any matrix the Kremlin might impose would lead some, perhaps a majority of
parishes, to refuse to have anything to do with it.
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